A kayaking adventure

Our shoes barely escaped the adventure with their lives. 

My dear J turned 25 this month, so we decided to celebrate by doing things we had never done before.

First on the list: tandem kayaking.

The local university wellness center offers inexpensive equipment rentals and happens to be very near a coulee, meaning we wouldn't have to strap the surprisingly large kayak on our compact car.

Instead, we could easily carry it about 50 yards, drop it in the water and row around on a pleasant little stream, right?

Wrong.

We had no idea what we were doing, and the poor college students trying to help us had no idea either.

Where do you lift a kayak? Why is something made almost entirely of plastic so heavy? Why are there so many trees in the way? How far will we have to walk to find an access point?

Finally, we wrestled the kayak onto the bank of the "water."

I have been in some very disgusting water in my life -- Stock tanks, cattle troughs, mud puddles, etc. But I never experienced anything quite like this. The weirdly green algae on the top of the water didn't bother me, neither did the suspiciously tar-like mud on the banks.

It was the smell. ...and the garbage.

I got in first.

I'm glad no one was watching as I tried to crab walk into the front seat of the boat. Balance has never ever been my strong suit.

Finally, I got situated and J pushed the boat into the water thinking he could easily hop in where the water was shallow enough to barely cover his shoes.

Wrong again.

The mud on the edge of coulee is actually a stinky tar monster looking to devour limbs and shoes -- especially shoes.

I was facing forward and focused on shifting my weight to keep the kayak from flipping, so I'm not sure what exactly happened. My understanding is that J fought the tar monster with all his might to first retrieve his left leg. Once that foot was safely in the kayak, he rescued the other. His shoes barely escaped with their lives.

By the time he got in the boat, the tar monster had coated his legs in mud to the knees and he was soaked nearly to his waist. He took quite a bit of the monster with him, coating the bottom of the kayak in smelly, black tar/mud.

He smelled like a warrior  ...who fights in the sewer. 

We decided to go to right and paddle as far as we felt like. Surely the water will get clearer and nicer as we go, right?

Wrong again.

Within a few minutes we saw a giant, dead fish (or maybe it was a baby whale), a bicycle, a hubcab, a 99-pack worth of empty beer cans and countless other forms of trash.

There was a low point where the bottom of the kayak scraped on something. I'm pretty sure it was the rest of the car that belonged to that hubcap. Most likely the tar monster stole it out of someone's driveway for a midnight snack.

Then we came to a tunnel with three possible points of entry. It was low and scary, and I couldn't see well what was on the other side. From what I could see, two of the three routes were blocked with something big, brown and scary. A bear? A rock monster? A refrigerator box?

I'll never know, because we elected to turn around, instead of braving door number three.

To the right of the tunnel was a fairly large drainage pipe.

As novice kayakers? kayakis? kayakians? people who paddle a kayak, our steering left much to be desired.

I think you know where this is going...

We narrowly escaped paddling right into the drainage pipe.

The list of things we crashed into is fairly short, but I feel bad for the poor cattails that are probably still leaning over at a 45-degree angle.

After we turned around we went quite a ways in the other direction. The water got clearer, smelled slightly better and there were live animals including a turtle and several ugly ducks. I imagine the pretty ducks banish the ugly ducks to the polluted stream so they can keep the nice river for themselves. They are such snobs! The poor ugly ducks are probably forced to become minions of the tar monster and scout out cars, bikes and dumpsters for him to steal and snack on. 

I was happy to be in water that could sustain life again, so I gladly embraced the sight of ugly ducks and turtles as we paddled along.

It was a little overcast and still. So we decided to just coast a little while and rest our incredibly out of shape arms.

During our brush with death at the drainage pipe, I was so focused on maneuvering the boat I hadn't realized how hard my arms were working.

Update: Three days later I am still quite sore. 

Finally, we decided we were hungry for lunch and headed back.

This time we found a path through the trees we had overlooked before that would be a shorter walk to the building.

We paddled the boat as far onto the bank as we could. Now it was my turn to fight the stinky tar monster.

I braced myself.

The mud I stepped on after I awkwardly crawled out of the boat had no water standing over it.

But it didn't matter.

The tar monster is not limited to locations with standing water.

I sank fast, my left shoe, ankle and most of my calf disappeared like lightening. I took a big step away from the water with my right foot and used the hard ground to leverage my leg free.

But I still had to pull the boat out of the water.

Stepped toward the boat, just close enough to reach it.

It was too close. The tar monster grabbed both of my ankles.

On the bright side, being so well anchored in the mud, made it easy to pull the boat forward.

I fought free, stepped back and pulled again.

J hopped out lightly escaping the tar monster almost completely this time.

We navigated the path of least resistance through the brush, and, swarmed  by mosquitoes, we drug the boat toward the building.

Then, having finally discovered the best place to lift the boat, by the very ends where it's narrow in case you were wondering, we carried it through the clearing back the the building.

Needless to say everything was covered in mud, us, the boat, the paddles -- even the life jackets didn't come out completely unscathed.

It took a while to get it all cleaned up and, three loads of laundry later, I'm still waging the final battles with the tar monster.

But, I would do it again in a heartbeat.

Over lunch at a restaurant we had never tried we laughed and laughed about how ridiculous our adventure was.

I'm pretty sure we'll talk about this day on J's 50th birthday, too.

Happy birthday, dear!