Post 2: Skating Away

 

     I wait a week to open the Red Paddle crate. 

     The heavy box had sat upright just inside the garage, a sentinel to the coming boating season on the Greenbrier. Each passing of this picket brought images of sliding in at Spring Creek Depot, skirting the riffles at Capsize Rock, or dropping over the ledge below Anthony Creek. I saw myself bouncing past Naked Rock, upright on the long pool at Camp Allegheny, or gliding onto the Caldwell ramp. It was six days of nodding to the English writer Sylvia Townsend Warner:  "Anticipation of a pleasure is a pleasure in itself."

     Then a spare hour arrives and I unpack to find a bewildering array of straps, hooks, wires, patches, and tubes. A huge hand pump rolls out as the flattened boat unfurls. There are stays to insert if over one-hundred-sixty-five pounds, but only after inflation to one PSI. Other instructions are nowhere in sight, and there also goes my imagined simplicity of paddling downstream and walking back. 

     It takes a half hour of fumbling before I notice the QR codes on cardboard notes hanging from each component. A quick scan and up pops a dreaded list of instruction videos. If a picture is worth a thousand words, a video is supposed to be worth a thousand pictures. Indeed, a clip is at least a thousand sequential photos, but I dislike them because of being slower than reading. Directions on videos also involve the whole room unless a set of headphones are handy, which they're not. After two minutes of nothing much in Set Up And Launching and with no fast-forward button in sight, I'm back to trial and error.

     Another couple of minutes pass and it's a relief to have the board pumped up and ready for a first attempt at going from prone to kneeling to standing. Afterwards, I step on a bathroom scale and it settles at one-hundred-sixty-four. That one less step for setup, no stays needed, steers me back to the river. There, drifting downstream on my new SUP,  comes the Jethro Tull song:

                            So as you push off from the shore
                            Won't you turn your head once more
                            And make your peace with everyone
                            For those who choose to stay
                            Will live just one more day
                            To do the things they should've done
                            And as you cross the wilderness
                            Spinning in your emptiness
                            If you have to, pray
                            Looking for a sign, that the universal minds
                            Has written you into the passion play