Pass the Butterworms

by Tim Cahill

  It seemed a good time to lean waaaaaay back in the chair.

  There were four of us out that day—four kayakers; four kayaks. Grant Thompson makes a living taking people paddling around Vancouver (Tofino Expeditions, Vancouver, Canada). Joel Rogers is a photographer who has chronicled the entire west coast of North America from a kayak (The Hidden Coast, Kayak Explorations from Alaska to Mexico: Alaska Books). Linnea Larson was a novice paddler. She had never been in a kayak before and saw no reason to test the performance capabilities of her craft.

  On my own first kayaking trip, at Glacier Bay, Alaska, I rented a big hard-shelled sea kayak at the mouth of the bay and paddled sixty miles to Muir Glacier, a great two-hundred-foot-high wall of ice that flowed down out of the mountains and into the seawater. Killer whales patrolled the waters for errant harbor seals. One pod of these black-and-white pack-hunting wolves of the sea passed so close that I could hear them breathe as they surfaced: The glottal pop and explosive expulsion of air echoed off nearby rock walls.

  I’ve paddled in company with killer whales and heard that same sound in the Sea of Cortez, off the coast of Baja California. There, along that coast, sheer sun-blasted rock and desert give way to a fertile sea. Pelicans and blue-footed boobies dive on schools of bait fish half a mile in diameter. Fishing is good. Clams are plentiful. Some of the reefs reach almost to the surface of the sea, and it is pleasant to drift along, watching a busy city full of tropical fish going about its business. A friend of mine refers to this activity as “kanorkling.” In the distance, while kanorkling the reefs of Baja, I’ve seen fifteen-hundred-pound manta rays erupt four feet out of the sea, flapping their great black batlike wings.

  Sometimes, on the water, near some remote island, Mexican fishermen working small boats will make a trade: a dozen eggs for a ten-pound yellow-fin tuna.

  The wind in Baja generally kicks up in the early afternoon, and it is a good idea to start paddling before dawn and to set up camp about noon. The white sand beaches available to kayakers are completely deserted. There are no luxury resorts on these perfect beaches, no roads to them, no access at all except by way of kayak. Set up a tent and rig a tarp for shade. Grab an iced beer from the cooler while the tuna grills. Above, vultures wheel about, bitterly confused. These scavengers and custodians of the desert are waiting for death. I like to lift a beer in their direction and toast their patience. Be a while until soup’s on, guys.

  At the southern tip of the Baja Peninsula the sere, sun-blasted land rises to a granite ridge, then gives way—at land’s end—to a series of free-standing rocks known as the Arches. South of the Arches, the full force of the Pacific Ocean explodes against glittering granite. The sea has ripped the stone heart out of these rocks, and one of the natural arches it has formed is 291 feet high. I recall kanorkling at the base of one of these arches, watching the sea consume land in a large and continuous underwater sandfall.

  There is, as one kayaking companion suggested, “a lot of geology going on” at land’s end. This elemental process is seldom so visible in time. I looked through the Arches, through rainbows of intermittent spray, out into the ocean that stretched south across the equator, vast and lonely, all the way to Antarctica. I was, I thought, at the end of the earth, and the sea was eating the land. The Arches seemed like the portals of time.

  There are comparable sea kayaking explorations to be had all up and down the coasts of the Americas. In southern Chile, for instance, there are islands where tidewater glaciers pour down out of the mountains, through the tangled greenery of dense rain forests. In these places hummingbirds and parrots share the beach with seals. Hawaii and the Caribbean are fine kayaking destinations, and people have recently begun paddling the waters of the Greek Isles, of Bali and Java, of Madagascar, of Lake Baikal in Siberia.

  I was thinking about this, about all these places I’d paddled, and would like to paddle, as my kayak cut through the shimmering reflection of another snowy peak. The wind across Esperanza Inlet had picked up to about ten miles an hour and the swells had risen to a couple of feet. Still fine paddling weather. The stability of my kayak had begun to annoy me. How far does a guy have to lean over until …

  My chair, so to speak, began to fall over backward. No problem. Just whack the flat of the paddle onto the surface of the sea. The technique is called a bracing stroke, and it brings the paddler back into an upright position. Unless, of course, the paddler in question is not very good at bracing strokes. In which case he capsizes.

  When your chair falls over backward, there is that awful jolt of disbelief—how could this possibly have happened to me?—followed by a sincere and fervent wish no one has seen you. Which were, indeed, my feelings as the kayak turned 180 degrees on the surface of the sea.

  It was embarrassing sitting upside down in this boat, with my head pointed to the bottom of the sea, blinking furiously while my nostrils filled up with seawater.

  There is, as most people know, a nifty technique called the Eskimo roll. It’s a simple twist of the hips combined with a swift swirling paddle stroke. The submerged kayaker bursts up out of the sea, shakes the water from his hair, and paddles on.

  Sadly, I have never been able to actually complete an entire Eskimo roll.

  • • •

  No one knows when the people of the Aleutian Islands first began paddling the skin boats we call kayaks. George Dyson, in his admirable history of the kayak, Baidarka, points out that “the skin boat’s biodegradable components left archaeologists with scarcely a trace.” Dyson does note that “the earliest known settlements among the Aleutian Islands date back more than eight thousand years. The skin boat might have migrated to the Aleutians from somewhere else or might have been invented there independently, perhaps in a period of post glacial isolation, as the rising sea level forced land based nomadic hunters to put their ice age-sharpened minds to building boats.”

  An Ice Age technology, then.

  On September 5, 1741, Vitus Bering, a Dane in service of the Russian crown, sailed two 80-foot vessels into a cove on Shumagin Island, in the Aleutians. There, Bering and his crew became the first Europeans to make contact with the inhabitants of the Aleutian Islands. The people they met were paddling kayaks.

  Bering’s naturalist, Georg Steller, noted that “the American boats are about two fathoms [twelve feet] long, two feet high, and two feet wide on the deck … to judge by appearances, the frame is of sticks fastened together at both ends and spread apart by crosspieces inside. On the outside, the frame is covered with skins, perhaps of seals.… The paddle consists of a stick a fathom [six feet] long, at each end provided with a shovel, a hand wide. With this he beats alternately to the right and the left into the water and thereby propels his boat with great adroitness even among large waves.”

  This might have been a description of the Feathercraft kayak I was paddling, except that the inner skeleton was made of aluminum and heavy-duty fabric had replaced seal skin. Also, the paddler inside lacked some of the adroitness attributed to the Aleutian kayakers in 1741. I suspect that the Ice Age as a whole might have been something of a trial for me.

  Not that there aren’t latter-day kayakers of some skill. In the 1980s, Ed Gillet completed a California-to-Hawaii crossing in a kayak. When he arrived on Maui, only a few weeks overdue, Gillet was distressed to discover that he had been declared lost at sea and presumed dead. When he appeared on television with Johnny Carson, the host treated Gillet with the sort of amused respect our society reserves for the remarkably insane.

  Indeed, in the 1970s and early 1980s, sea kayaking, according to John Dowd, was considered “an off the wall activity for a few eccentric individuals.” Dowd, a New Zealander famous for his own prodigious sea voyages, is the author of Sea Kayaking, a Manual for Long Distance Touring, a book that is generally considered the bible of the sport. In 1980, Dowd opened North America’s first ocean-kayaking shop, Eco-Marine, in Vancouver, British Columbia. And in 1984, he began publishing Sea Kayaker, the sport’s first sp
ecialty magazine.

  I had met Dowd at Eco-Marine in Vancouver in preparation for this trip, and we chatted for a while about the explosive growth of sea kayaking in the latter half of the 1980s. The sport, Dowd said, had previously been a “backyard industry, limited to dedicated and enthusiastic people who built their own boats.” This, Dowd supposed, is the reason so many sea-kayaking pioneers are considered cranks and weirdos. “They are,” Dowd said, “innovators.” The concept of providing a service to the public at large had no appeal.

  Enter Dowd and Eco-Marine, in 1980. About the same time, manufacturers like Necky and Valley Canoe Products introduced fiberglass and/or Kevlar kayaks, boats that were relatively inexpensive and sometimes quite literally bullet-proof.

  The sport benefited from “new products, service, and professionalism,” Dowd believes. Additionally, what Dowd calls “the technical threshold” is very low, which is to say the sport is easy to learn. I had been, for instance, able to surf my kayak over the waves thrown up by calving tidewater glaciers after a mere four days of paddling.

  “A sport like windsurfing,” Dowd said, “requires a lot of skill but not a lot of knowledge.” On the other hand, the intricacies of sea kayaking—coastal navigation, for instance—are profound, but the entry-level skills are low.

  I mentioned that I had picked up a breakdown kayak—a kayak that can be disassembled and carried in a backpack—at the Feathercraft factory, just a few blocks from Eco-Marine. There I had seen two fairly beat-up backpacks on the floor, boats that the owners had sent in to be refurbished. The names on the packs were Rick Ridgeway and Yvonne Chouinard.

  Dowd wasn’t surprised. “Initially,” he said, “we drew a lot of hard-core climbers like Rick and Yvonne. Trekkers and backpackers came next.” By the mid-nineties there were guided kayaking trips up and down both coasts of North America. I’ve met bankers, electricians, musicians, and paramedics sea kayaking. The sport is booming.

  The cockpit of a kayak is an elongated oval. It’s not much bigger around than you are, and to get in, you slip your legs into the oval and lower yourself to a sitting position. Just so. To prevent water and waves from washing into the oval cockpit, you cover it with a spray skirt. This is a kind of waterproof dress you wear snugly just above your waist. The edges of the skirt fit tightly under a cowling that projects up above the oval cockpit. There is a string to pull because you want the spray skirt very tight indeed. It needs to withstand waves crashing over the bow. It should keep you completely dry from the waist down during an Eskimo roll.

  It is, in fact, so tight that you cannot just push against the kayak to get out should you happen to capsize. You have to free the spray skirt. There is a tab stitched into the skirt, and it projects onto the deck of the boat, directly in front of the kayaker. Pull the tab back, and it pops the whole front half of the spray skirt free.

  Which is what I did there off Vancouver Island.

  And so I was swimming, involuntarily, in 55-degree water about two miles from the nearest spit of land, and only a couple of feet from my overturned kayak. It took less than thirty seconds to flip the kayak into an upright position. I prayed that no one had seen me, but no, in the distance, I could see my companions paddling furiously in my direction. They were shouting various instructions designed to get me back in my kayak so that I wouldn’t embarrass them by drowning or by dying of hypothermia or by being battered to death in the interstices of wave and rock.

  Since the day had dawned clear and warm, and because I had been paddling hard for an hour and half and was hot, the water did not feel cold. Sure there was snow on the mountaintops two and three thousand feet above, but the dazzling white peaks against the first blue sky in days was lovely and inspirational. I had read half a dozen books about sea kayaking and was aware that there were several methods of “self-rescue” in such a situation. I have even practiced these techniques. A little.

  The situation, as I saw it, was embarrassing but not at all serious. Grant, I knew, guides both novice and experienced kayakers off Canada and Baja. No one on his trips ever capsizes.

  Still, as my current predicament indicated, there’s some small element of risk in every kayaking expedition. It’s part of the experience; part of the reason some people prefer kayaks to cruise ships. Self-rescue appeals to the type of person who sees shuffleboard as a kind of death.

  Self-rescue, unlike shuffleboard, can be effected with various combinations of inflatable bags and paddles. With ropes. Alternately, if a victim feels strong, it is sometimes possible to just muscle one’s way back into the cockpit of the kayak. This is rather like crawling along the top of a large floating log. It takes a certain degree of balance.

  Joel Rogers, who reached me first, steadied my kayak against his own.

  “I’ve just about got it,” I said. The urge had come upon me to perform a self-rescue. You don’t want someone to give you a hand up after you’ve just fallen over backward in a chair.

  Grant Thompson arrived at about that time and suggested, somewhat loudly, that it would be entirely appropriate for me to accept help from Joel. I was, it seemed, being driven by the current toward a small stack of rocks about a quarter mile away. Where the gentle-seeming swells met these sea stacks, great gouts of spray exploded ten feet into the air. Getting caught just there would be like having Andre the Giant pick you up and toss you into a brick wall every thirty seconds until you died. Time, Grant felt, was of the essence.

  So I let Joel steady the kayak, then climbed back into the cockpit, and bailed the water out of my boat with a light plastic pump positioned between my knees.

  “What happened?” Grant wanted to know.

  “Tipped over,” I said.

  “We’ve been out for days,” Grant shouted. “You know how to do this. How could you capsize in the middle of a crossing?”

  In general, sea kayakers hug the coastline, and if anything happens, the beach is right there, a short swim away. Sometimes, however, it is necessary to navigate large bodies of water. A kayaker, for instance, might want to paddle from the mainland to an island three or four or ten miles away. Such open water “crossings” are dangerous and should not be taken lightly. The weather, for instance, can change—violently—in the space of only thirty minutes. Indeed, Joel Rogers was in the habit of invoking his own personal weather god before each crossing. “Don’t kill us, Earl,” he prayed. It is not clear precisely who Earl is.

  “I tipped over because I was practicing my bracing strokes,” I explained.

  Grant stared back at me.

  “Let me get this straight,” he said. He looked like someone had just smacked him in the face with a dead fish. “You were practicing your bracing strokes in the middle of a crossing?”

  It seemed the wrong time to tell Grant that his sleeping bag, which I was carrying, had come loose from my packing job and was currently sitting between my knees in a foot and a half of water. Tonight, the temperature would likely drop below freezing. There was time enough to tell him.

  Up to this point, the trip had been without substantial incident. Our first campsite was a small island connected to the mainland by a sandbar, and the only clearing there was graced by an ominous purple pile of bear scat that looked as if it had been emptied out of an upturned gallon pail. The bear, it was clear, had been eating berries.

  There are no grizzly bears on Vancouver Island, only the less aggressive black bears. As we unpacked the kayaks, a philosophical question that had surfaced during the planning stages of the trip reasserted itself. Grant had packed a 12-gauge shotgun in a rubber sheath. He and I and Linnea thought it best to have some defense against the bears. Joel thought that we were visitors in the bears’ home; he believed that guns made you overconfident and that you didn’t take ordinary care, which might result in an unpleasant interaction.

  Philosophically, I agreed with Joel. And if we had problems with a marauding bear, I decided to let Joel reason with him before I fired.

  While Grant prepared dinner,
I trekked over the sandbar to the mainland, where a small creek flowed down to the sea. The sun was setting, but it was hidden behind thin gray clouds, and the light was a delicate pink. The tide was low, and there was only a foot or two of water at the mouth of the creek. Salmon leapt every few seconds—a flash of pinkish silver—and reentered the water with a splash that caught the setting sun and turned gray water the color of the fish itself.

  About two hundred yards away, on the other side of the creek, a black bear loped along sandy banks toward the beach. The bear, a large long-legged male, ran back and forth up and down the creek, then careened off to the west. I moved up the creek, past several more purple piles of scat, and spotted two more bears—a sow and a cub—rolling around in the shallow water like children at play.

  Grant had prepared a pasta dish with a freshly made marinara sauce. He used good kitchen knives, a cutting board, fresh onions, olive oil, a dozen cloves of garlic, and canned plum tomatoes, and he sipped a good zinfandel as two pots simmered on a pair of large burners.

  Backpackers live poorly in the wilderness, surviving on freeze-dried turkey Tetrazzini, which tastes just like the chili mac, which in turn tastes like premasticated cardboard. A sea kayaker, by contrast, has the luxury of floating luggage. Wilderness and fine food are not mutually exclusive terms.

  We settled back under the trees and listened for the wolves that still roam Vancouver Island. While Joel hung our food bags from a high limb to secure them from the bears, Grant told us about the time he tried to sell breakdown kayaks to the military. “During the Second World War,” he said, “English commandos—they called them the cockleshell heroes—paddled kayaks into French ports, where they blew up a number of German ships.” The military, it seemed, still saw some advantage in kayaks. Grant, acting as an agent for a manufacturer, took an ordinary breakdown kayak to a weapons show a few years ago. “The kayak had,” he said, “a granola-type name …”

  “Like Feathercraft,” I suggested.