GenePool Humor

At some point my family decided, entirely without my input, that kayaking was fun. I don't know when, or how, or why, but they did. I do know that they aren't drawing on past experience.

Two or three summers ago I acceded to an earlier request and rented two kayaks to use on the Charles River and discovered that A: it is nearly impossible to paddle against the current, B: paddling with the current pretty much sucks too, and C: the most powerful force on the water is the kayak's almost magnetic attraction to the shallows.

So I wasn't interested in trying it again, and especially not during our Cape Cod vacation, which was designed to be relaxing, as most vacations are. I employed a variety of logical arguments over the course of the week ("kayaking sucks" and "I hate kayaking" and even "shut up about it or I'll stop feeding you") but these all fell on deaf ears, and before long I found myself back in a kayak.

Thus, on a profoundly windy day, we arrived at the small bed and breakfast/kayak tour office and met Bob, our guide. Bob was a shortish, weathered man who spoke confidently about the wonders we were about to discover on our trip through the salt marshes of Barnstable Harbor. He also spoke confidently about the ease with which one might guide a kayak through said marshes provided one does what Bob says. Bob was scaring the hell out of me. Because I'd seen Barnstable Harbor. I'd seen it the day before when we left via the harbor on a 130 foot whale watching boat, and I was not at all interested in steering a small fiberglass kayak powered entirely by me and whichever child I ended up with anywhere near the path of a 130 foot boat with a powerful motor and possibly a steered by a maniacal captain whose girlfriend, coincidentally a kayak enthusiast, just broke up with him. I wasn't rational.

Forty-five minutes later we'd set off in our personal deathcrafts. Well, shared deathcrafts, actually; these were two-seaters, meaning they were longer and would require the active efforts of both occupants in order to get anywhere. This would be an issue later.

I had Becky on the first leg. Becky is now twelve years old, is in the midst of puberty, and has grown her own personal share of muscles. My wife Deb got Timmy. Timmy is ten and has only three muscles total, two of which work his jaw. So things were great at first, at least for me. We had the wind at our backs and we were heading in the same direction as the tide and, since these kayaks had actual rudders, we didn't even need to paddle all that much to get across the harbor. I was thinking those quick lessons Bob gave us about proper paddling technique-- he had said, among other things, that one uses more stomach muscles than arm muscles when paddling-- were the work of a genius. It was only later, when I remembered the size of Bob's gut, that it occurred to me he might be wrong.

Things were still going just fine when we reached the mouth of the salt marsh, and they continued to go fine up until we ran out of water, which happened rather suddenly.

Tide is a fickle thing. One can reasonably expect it to occur at certain times and plan trips accordingly such as, for example, when one is planning a trip to a salt marsh in a watercraft. Logically, one does not attempt to cross a salt marsh at low tide if low tide means that the salt marsh is no longer under water. Trouble arises when one does not take into account high winds, which accelerates tidal movement. Put another way, we were about to be up a creek without a creek.

Realizing this miscalculation, Bob quickly ordered us all to turn around before it was too late and we ended up having to drag the canoes through the mud in order to get back to the harbor. Instrumental in his realization was that of the eight kayaks on his tour (counting his own) four were stuck in various parts of the marsh.

So we paddled back out again, utlizing a lengthy technique Bob didn't show us in his training session: push with hard with the tip of the paddle. Then, Bob steered us to the left of the entrance to the marsh, to what he called a "beach."

Beaches generally are made of sand, so this was being generous, as this particular beach was more of a mud bank. Still, it was a good place to rest before our "leisurely" journey back across the harbor.

We spent a good half hour on the mud beach, enough time for Timmy to wade into the water in his life jacket and discover what it's like to step on a crab. A lot of what we were standing on was alive, actually, which was either very cool or extremely creepy, depending on how you take that sort of thing. (I cast a vote for creepy.)

Deb and I decided to switch children for the return trip. This was entirely Bob's fault. Deb had admitted that she was effectively paddling alone with Tim on board, but rather than say "why don't you have your husband go back with him?" Bob suggested Tim be put into a kayak with "one of the college students."

As I said, there were eight kayaks total. That was fourteen guests, Bob, and Bob's dog, who didn't paddle either. Other than us, the group consisted of persons in their early- to mid-twenties with perfect teeth. Bob wanted Tim to go with one of them, rather than with me, and so I of course took this personally, and insisted I take Tim back myself. (In hindsight, what Bob was really saying was "why don't we put one of those early- to mid-twenties persons with perfect teeth into the kayak with your wife.")

I developed a new appreciation of the tide as soon as it was time to return to the water. My kayak, which I'd left just far enough ashore so as to not drift away, was fifteen feet from the water thirty minutes later, and thus had to be dragged across the mud. But, once there, I was ready to go. And, ten minutes of futile paddling later, I was ready to turn around and spend the night on the mud beach, possibly to flag down the nearest 130 foot whale watch boat for a ride home.

You may recall our journey from the dock had two things going in its favor: the wind and the tide. Well, now they were paddling into the wind, and the tide was actively interested in taking us right out of the mouth of the harbor where the next time we would be seen by human eyes would be clinging to the dorsal fin of a humpback and shouting expletives prominently involving the name Bob.

This was the pattern: paddle for fifteen minutes; rest for fifteen seconds and drift halfway back to where you started fifteen minutes ago; paddle again. Oh, and shout at your son. Tim was understandably rather cold and tired, and didn't seem all that willing to paddle. This wasn't the worst thing in the world, because every time he did paddle he kicked up ocean spray into my face, but it became obvious fairly early that the only way we were getting home at all was if he helped. So I goaded, I cajoled, I threatened ("I can hit you from here with the paddle, kid") I begged. And he did paddle, but only in spurts, and only when the spirit of competition struck him. Specifically, I had to keep close to Deb and Becky's kayak, so that every time we fell behind them Tim would shout "they're winning!" and start paddling furiously.

Halfway across the harbor, we had kayaks all over the place. Bob-- and I swear to God he had a motor underneath his kayak somewhere-- paddled the length of the harbor two or three times just trying to corral all of us while his little dog laughed at our puny efforts.

Identifying things at sea can be difficult. My personal difficulty was in determining exactly where the dock to which we were headed was. Because we'd headed in what I thought was a direct line to the starting point, but every time I looked up-- and admittedly, this was difficult with all the dried sea spray on my glasses-- we were heading for an unrecognizable beach front. It could have been right around the corner from the dock. It could have also been England. I really wasn't sure.

Going entirely by the assumption that Bob had a vague sense of where we were supposed to be headed, I went in the same direction he was going. This meant nearing the beach front and skirting alongside it, a manuever that was almost entirely impossible with the tide and the wind. I had to jam the rudder so that I was more or less constantly turning left just to keep parallel with the shoreline.

Deb and Becky, meanwhile, through accident or design, were paddling ever further into the center of the harbor. As the certified Man of the Family, I initially tried to stick with them so that at the very least the whole family could end up lost at sea and I would have less explaining to do when I went back to work, but I soon realized this was foolishness: that was what Bob was there for. And so I continued on, following Bob until Bob realized my wife was going rather the long route around. He turned and set his hidden motor in their direction while I kept on going. I figured I'd be ashore long before them.

Ten minutes later Bob, my wife, and my daughter, paddled right past me. He'd tied his tow rope to their kayak to get them the rest of the way to the dock. (Deb is convinced the only reason he did this was because they were both women, and she may be on to something. On the other hand, the sun was going down pretty rapidly, and Bob probably didn't want to take that chance that he'd lose track of them in the dark, as that might affect his tip.)

By the time we'd reached the inner harbor-- the dock area-- the exiting tide had reduced the passable portion down a strip twenty feet wide. For this reason, and because we had to get out of the way of two boats (one entering and one exiting) it took another half an hour to get the kayaks to shore, despite being in sight of it the whole time.

So, absolutely exhausted, soaking wet, covered in mud from the knees on down, full of bladder and empty of stomach, in pitch darkness, we wended our way through the loose gravel parking lot to our car. And I asked my family if now, at last, they understood that kayaking is not a fun thing to do, that it is evil, that if it cannot be stopped entirely so that future families will not be forced to undergo the hell that is kayaking, then at least, at the very least, they will understand that this particular family should never ever even consider going kayaking again.

"Maybe it won't be so windy next time," my wife said.

© 2003, Gene Doucette

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