Archive for January, 2005

Blogs are a great reminder that we love to talk. Well, that’s not quite right. Many of us love to write or type but are fairly quiet in the “real” world. So with all this talking going I get thinking about the dangers of opening my mouth at all. Each day when I sit down to write or talk to folks about kayaking or computers or whatever else I am supposed to know a little about I can feel a bit under the gun. First I am always very aware that there are a couple billion people who know much more about any given subject than I do. Then there is just the fluidity of human opinion. Anything is up for debate in a world with no absolute truths. Thing is, I really enjoy teaching things that I have learned over the years. But then there is always someone out there to tell you why what you teach is totally wrong. And sooner or later someone will come up to you and say, “Hey remember that thing you said about . . . .. “, ” Well my buddy’s uncle said that . . . .” Well, you get the picture. So either you try to offer all the special circumstances to that situation, go through pains to clarify your point or just say, “Oh, really?” and move on. The problem I feel with just “moving on” and not addressing the issue, is that you make a decision that the student is not worth the time or effort. So invariably I get sucked into the clarification and specification routine. For good or bad.

Whenever I am asked to share information or teach others I try to refer to the common mis-interpretation of the Hippocratic Oath. “First, do no harm”. Certainly the sentiment is correct even if the direct translation is not. I think this a good starting point in instruction. If I can remember “Do No Harm”, I will be more apt to be sure of my information. I will be aware that my perspective is tainted by my experience. I will not take friends paddling in conditions where they do not feel safe or push them beyond their skill level. I will not suggest to someone that it’s easy to put a new CD-ROM in their computer.

The older we get naturally the more experience we gain. Thus it’s a given that we will share our knowledge and teach others what little bit we have learned over time. But if we are going to walk people into walls with bad information we should probably just bow out. Teaching always holds risk. Your character, your knowledge, your value as a person are always on the line. You do NOT want to tell someone how easy it is to upgrade their computer and have them call you when they push the power button and nothing happens. . . . They will never trust your opinion again.

It’s too bad none of us are perfect. It would sure make life easier. But that being as it may, if I can just keep thinking to myself “do no harm” hopefully I will be a better teacher, father, you name it. Finger’s crossed!!!

Tonight as I write this I am glad to be sitting here in a warm little house. Last night’s snowstorm just buried us in a blanket of white.

Our small cinder block home is anchored in the middle of a large farm field. From here you can never tell how much snow actually fell as the wind drives drifts across the yard in long, wrinkled ridges resembling the Himalayas in miniature. When I get around to turning on the TV, I’m sure the weather guy will tell me how many inches we actually received. I will have to trust him to be right. I have no other point of reference.

Occasionally my wife and I stay up late into the night chatting about life, the universe, and the price of peaches in Norway. Often our conversations turn to kayaking. No big surprise there. At some point during our latest midnight ramble I found myself digging into my addiction to sensual kayaking.

Sensual kayaking is a label I threw on the days when I have to fight the wind and rain to load my boat on the car. These are the days when the wind is trying to turn my kayak into a kite as I lift it off the ground and rain is falling so hard I can only occasionally sneak a glance between the drops to secure the boat to the car. On these days I know I am going to have a wonderful experience. And I am exhilarated with the thought of launching out into the sensual world. (a term I borrowed from Kate Bush, checks in the mail…)

My wife by now is very familiar with my addiction to the tactile experience of weather. Early on in our relationship I would often stop her while we were walking into some store on mindless errands just to take a moment to look up at the sky. I would want her to soak it in. Share in my world. It’s easy to miss the blazing red sunset just beyond the Wal-mart facade especially when you want to just “get in and get out”. But it’s often worth the look. Just don’t get run over by the other shoppers who may not understand why you would be standing in the parking lot staring up at the sky.

I have always been attracted to fowl weather. Many years ago when I didn’t have “2 pennies to rub together” as my grandmother says, I found my escape in walking. I would walk everywhere in any weather. In fact the more harrowing the weather, the more I walked. I always relished in the odd faces I would receive from people in the cars passing by as I strolled down the sidewalk. I know they thought I was daft as a brush, but I was having a great time! On occasion an acquaintance would pull over to offer me a ride. I would tell them that I really wanted to walk. I’m sure they thought it was false pride. But I did love it. REALLY! Sometimes I would just stop and put my face up into the storm and relish the sting of the sleet and the tickle of rain rivulets running from the back of my ears, down my neck and soaking into my shirt.

When my two oldest children were young I would often take them out to lay in the yard during a heavy summer rain. Their mom would stare with concern and disdain from the dining room window. This was one obvious sign that in the end she would be my “former” wife.

Today I don’t have to walk as much as I did back then. But many times I still do and usually it’s on days when the weather is foul. So it’s no surprise I am often tearing out of the house and loading up the kayak while the wind and rain are screaming down from churning clouds above. I can’t wait to get out there.

I truly love the wind when I am in my boat. Not when I want to get anywhere mind you, but when I am out for the experience. In harsh winds when my boat leaps over the waves I sometimes feel like a dolphin in the wake of a fishing boat. Just leaping and diving for the pure joy of it. And though I barely make any real headway, I feel like I’m flying across the water at incredible speed. A day playing in the wind can leave me physically and psychologically exhausted. I barley have enough energy load the boat and go home. But even then there is joy in exhaustion. Even coming out of the wind is in-of-itself a unique experience. I don’t know that there is such dominating silence as in the first few seconds when you come out of a screaming wind. There are only a few moments before the sound of your surroundings begin to creep into your mind, then it’s gone.

On a day without wind, when the rain is pouring down in rivers, I often feel as if I am living in an Akira Kurosawa film-scape. On these occasions I am lost in the sound of rain impacting the surface of the lake. Rising just above that midrange drone, a melody line is written by multi-pitched pings and taps as the rain strikes against the various gear assembled on my deck. A bass line is created by the beat of my rubber hatch covers. It’s truly amazing to listen to!

In early spring when the surface ice just begins to recede from the edges lake I love to paddle out to where the water is still solid. There, if you’re lucky, you can listen to a million small crystals of ice ring against the still frozen center of the lake. The sound resembles the ringing of glass crystal chimes. Often you only get a day or two before the water opens up and the music is gone. If you can catch it, it’s wonderful. It’s a truly sensual experience.

Then there are the special few days in just after the ice leaves the lake and summer is still distant. You can pinpoint the days when the air feels like a wet blanket pressed against your face. On days like these when the water is still very cold, our lake is often covered in a deep shroud of fog that rises just a few feet from the surface. In a kayak you slip into the clouds and ride the currents on glassy silence. I know no other time so peaceful.

We all paddle for many reasons. I think for many of us the common ground is the need to escape the stress of daily survival. The noise of our modern existence can drown out even thought itself. It’s downright scary if you ask me. I think Bono of U2 was onto something when he wrote that “you miss too much these days if you stop to think…” It’s a modern malady. Stillness often makes people feel like they should be doing something. If we are not moving we are falling behind. If the television is not on, we must be missing something. It goes on and on. As for me, when I am busy with life that’s the time I feel I am missing something. For quite awhile I could not pin that feeling down. But today I have defined it just a bit. I need my connection with the earth and my momentary life on this wonderful planet. I want to take it in, to really FEEL it. Kayaking is a natural extension of that need. Kayaking has opened up a world of experiences. A wet and wild sensual world.

And hey, how great is that?????

Sunday morning before the utterly dismal Packer game we spent a couple hours kayak sledding at Devil’s Lake State Park. Besides being a great beginner kayak the discontinued Current Designs Breeze makes a great toboggan. You just have to remember to reverse your edging as you careen down the hill and be aggressive when using your paddle (cheap paddle) to stay on course. Unlike a normal sled, a kayak keeps the snow out of your face. Great fun!

My boat still needs to go back down to the shop. In anticipation of taking back to Madison I left it on the car only to find out we are going to get hit by a big snow storm. So off went the boat and I will just have to reload it on the truck tomorrow.

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My favorite book is "An Autobiography" by Mahatma Gandhi. He was unlucky enough to spend enough time in prison to write it. You can actually read the book online if you are interested at http://web.mahatma.org.in/. One of the many things that has always stuck with me from his book was the constant battle with failure. I came to realize in reading the book that failure is a partner that never actually leaves you. You never escape it. In fact, every time you take on a new endeavor you take on new failures. Failure comes with you. It is your partner in learning.

Now having said that, I HATE FAILURE. Over the last summer I took my IDW and ICE and spent more time with failure than I had been used to in quite some time. One afternoon during our IDW the instructors sat at the far end of the pond and watched us (students) as we paddled toward them and they then proceeded to correct us on our paddling technique. We had all become quite conscience of hand positions and torso rotation. On this afternoon as we sat on the opposite side of the pond we were quietly griping about how we all knew how to keep a loose grip on the paddle yet we were all constantly being called on it. As you know I hate failure. . . When my time came to paddle the gauntlet as it were, I turned to the other students and said, "Now watch, I will keep my fingers pointing to the sky the whole way", and I did. I swear the paddle was resting on my thumbs and I looked like I was waving at a distant friend the whole way across the pond. I arrive open-handed right up on the nose of the instructor who had been on us all day about "grip". He looked up from the clip board and said, "Very good. . . . Remember to keep a loose grip on the paddle!" Arrrrrggg!

I was lucky enough to have a stroke blending class with Shawna Franklin when my wife and I were at the NORCAL BCU Symposium last October. Shawna is so darned excited about paddling that it’s impossible not to fall in love with kayaking all over again in her class. Most of the students on that day had very little previous experience and she had toned down the class to work on basic sweeps and braces. You can’t blend a stroke if you don’t know the stroke! We had been working on a sculling brace for quite some time and I found my mind wandering out past the break wall and watching the waves hit a small rocky out-crop in the distance. I could vaguely hear her telling the class to use nice slow, wide stokes with the blade to get more support as they leaned ever so gingerly on their paddles. But heck, I knew this already. I can easily lay my boat over and scull for support. So I was not really paying much attention. Suddenly Shawna was calling my name like Edna Krabappel to my best impersonation of Bart Simpson. When she asked if I was understanding what she had said, I did what any self-inflated, slightly indignant person would do. I laid my boat over. She looked at me for a moment and said, "Good, now use nice wide strokes to get better support" and paddled over to the next student. I really hate failure!!

I often think back to how many instructors I frustrated to no end as I tried to learn to roll. I just could not get my brain around the concept. I wanted diagrams!! I think about things too much. Rolling is NOT a thinking kind of maneuver. I failed and failed and failed. I was caught in an endless loop of wet-exits and re-entries. (Hey, I got those wet-exits down!) Looking back I know now that even though I was failing at getting up, I was gaining body and breathing control. Each of the little bits of the roll were becoming ingrained in my head even though I finished up with a failed attempt. Today I feel like I can pretty much roll out of any position. However not long ago I had another boat rolled up on me by a big wave and I had to wet-exit out from under it. Maybe I could have waited until the other boats were over me, then rolled back up. I often think about that. I hate failure.

In the end this is why I continue to take classes and look forward to BCU certifications. Without the classes setting up new bars to jump over you can tend to think you know more than you do. You can forget that you are lacking comparison and review. I think you can get jaded. Well, I could anyway. I need the alarms going off to tell me when I’m slipping while in an environment where I can fail without too much consequence.

No doubt, taking a class or certification can be a real challenge and costly for that matter. There are moments where you are pretty sure this IS NOT what you got into kayaking for. You can feel really knit-picked by an instructor and be darn sure that another quarter inch of vertical blade is just NOT going to make that much difference. But in the end you will probably leave a little more skilled than when you came in. Heck, even failing to get that certification can’t take away what you learn in the process.

One thing is for sure. I hate failure! But in the end I’ve come to learn that failure is everything.

Ok. . . . So. . .

Prologue. . .

Christmas Eve we had a family emergency and spent the night on a long drive and then in an ER late into the night. After another long drive back home we did a rush Christmas for the sake of our young son and then we were off again to Madison where our family member had been transferred to the UW hospital. The following night we again had no sleep just due to nerves I suppose. Then after a day’s rest I came down with a killer infection that had me up with extraordinary jaw pain for 48 hours! So again no sleep!

In the end Mary was able to run down to Madison to pick up my boat which was waiting to be repaired after our wild rescue in Two Rivers and I was able to paddle it for the day and will have to run it back.

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This year about 30 or so cars arrived for the paddle. We spent about 2 hours on the water and enjoyed a little rolling practice in the warm water of Lake Columbia. Then everybody went to the Cactus Club in Portage for lunch and a drink. We were surprised to see a big “WELCOME BACK KAYAKERS” sign! Cool. The community had to find it odd to see all the Kayaks and Canoes strapped on cars up and down the streets. The weather turned bad quickly this afternoon and everyone headed out into the sleet and rain to get home before it got too bad. Now it’s time for me to go take another pain pill.

. . and for Ross & Alex you can get THIS IS THE SEA from Rutabaga or you can buy it directly from Justine’s website at CackleTV.com

Happy New Year! See you at Canoecopia!

Update: Photos from New Year’s Day Paddles in Gallery.