by C. McGee
Fifteen hours into the trip, I felt as though my sanity was in jeopardy. Right paddle, left paddle, right paddle, left paddle, over and over and over. It was almost too much. The brief respites that I took to eat and drink and check the GPS did nothing to assuage the tedium. Indeed, they may have made it worse; acting as little taunts, fifteen-minute breaks that reminded my mind and muscles of what it felt like to do something else. At my lowest point, I even entertained the possibility that I might not make it to Oahu. Although I was fine from a physical standpoint, the thought of stopping for stopping’s sake seemed incredibly appealing. Sure I would die, but I wouldn’t have to paddle anymore. It struck me as a fair trade.
Thankfully, I possessed the mental fortitude to push on. I continued paddling despite my inclinations to do otherwise, and eventually I broke through. Well, perhaps “broke through” is too bold of a statement. In reality my mind just kind of turned off, entering a unique realm of consciousness that I had never experienced before. The best point of comparison that I can come up with is the mental state that accompanies the reception of a proper massage: detached and calm and void of thought. Of course, when you are getting a massage it takes roughly five minute to reach this blissful oblivion, whereas when you are paddling a sea kayak across the ocean it takes about thirty hours. Better late than never I suppose.
Once my mind checked out, the rest of the trip was a breeze. I arrived on the shores of Oahu two days after departing its Kauaian counterpart. Still operating on autopilot, I pulled Ace up onto the beach, set up my tent, got into my sleeping bag, and passed out. I proceeded to sleep for the next eighteen hours.
The sun was halfway over the horizon when I unzipped my tent. The morning light revealed my solitude, the coast clear for as far as I could see in both directions. It was perfect, just as I had planned, a tranquil setting to recruit my chicken assassins.
Feeling rejuvenated following my marathon sleep session, I quickly got to work. It took me less than thirty minutes to unload and assemble the traps. Thirty minutes after that I had them set up in a random assortment of places.
According to a number of “Life in Hawaii” Internet message boards, mongooses run rampant all over the island of Oahu. As such, I didn’t put a great deal of thought into the placement of my traps; I just set down the collapsible metal cages in spots that looked mongoose-friendly. As to what constituted mongoose-friendly I am unsure, possibly any location that reminded me of The Jungle Book. (Could I imagine Rikki-Tikki-Tavi living here? If yes, than I should put a trap down; if no, than I should keep moving.)
Having baited the last metal cage with a handful of sardines, I headed back to the kayak. Once there I grabbed my shovel and got to work digging a pit. Having paddled for two days straight, digging did not sound like a particularly appealing pursuit but it had to be done. I needed a place to store my assassins.
Due to weight limitations, I had brought only six animal traps with me. Since each of the traps captures only one animal at a time, I had to devise a way to store the first round of detainees somewhere other than the cages themselves. A pit was the solution I devised. On paper it seemed like a good idea. In reality it was not.
The moment that I plunged my shovel into the ground, it became clear that a substantial hole was an impossibility. The soil was far too sandy. At best, I would be able to dig something that resembled a shallow bowl with gently sloping sides. Useless. It doesn’t take a wildlife expert to know that the mongooses would be unfazed by gently sloping sides. Obviously, such a pit could not contain them. It would have been like a woman in need of spanx opting for a thong.
Dismayed but not defeated, I decided to mull over my options while en route to the first trap. It had only been up for two, maybe three, hours and was unlikely to have captured anything, but I went to check it anyway. I wanted to stay in motion. Movement helps me think, and it gives me the illusion of being productive even when I’m not.
A number of ideas struck me as I made my way over to the trap. Unfortunately, all of them were completely implausible. Everything that I came up with required time and resources that I did not have and as the failed ideas mounted so too did my anxiety. My palms and the underside of my boobs started sweating as my mind began wandering into worst-case scenario mode: “What if I can only capture six mongooses? Is that enough? What if I don’t even capture that many? What if I capture none? What if I paddled sixty some miles to come up empty handed? What if this entire trip is nothing more than a huge waste of time? I mean how deluded am I? I can’t take down an entire island of feral chickens by sneaking in a handful mongooses. Goddamn, what a foolish idea. What a stupi—”
My mind ceased the naysaying the minute that I laid eyes on the trap. A small mongoose sat inside, feasting on the salty fish that had lured him into the cage. He had yet to realize that he was caught, absorbed in devouring the delicacy in his paws.
Shit, I thought. This trapping business is cake.
Excited by the speed with which the first chicken assassin was captured, I immediately headed off to check the other cages. Much to my delight, the second, third, and fifth also contained mongooses; the fourth was sprung but empty, the sixth was still open and baited. Four hours into the hunt and I already had four mongooses.
At this rate I will be done by the end of the day, I thought. I was right.
It was as if the mongooses wanted to be caught; as if they knew that I wanted to help them, not hurt them; as if they understood that they were being offered a once in a lifetime opportunity, a chance to be brought to a new land where prey existed in abundance and competitors were in short supply; a place where they could grow fat and happy and old; a land of opportunity. One after another the tiny carnivores scrambled into the traps and sealed their fates as immigrants to a new land.
The elation over the successful captures temporarily pushed the mongoose storage problem from my mind. Thankfully, when it returned to the forefront of my thoughts, it was accompanied by a solution. It was an obnoxiously simple solution but most good ones are.
Consolidation. That was the chosen course of action. The mongooses were small, very small, a pound and a half on average, and this meant that two of them could easily fit into one cage. Thus, if I put them two to a cage then my six traps would be able to capture a grand total of eleven mongooses. (Yes, eleven. I wouldn’t be able to get two mongooses into the sixth trap because I would have to use said trap in order to capture the twelfth mongoose, but I could not use said trap to capture the twelfth mongoose because there would be no place to store the eleventh mongoose already residing within it. Women can do math and think logically. Don’t be a sexist d-bag.) Although eleven mongooses wasn’t as many as I had hoped to get, it was a hell of a lot better than six, and given the fact that the storage pit was an impossibility, it was a number to which I was amenable.
As soon as the eleventh mongoose was captured, I brought all the cages back to camp, fed the mongooses, fed myself, and went to bed. It was early, the sun still in the process of setting, yet sleep came upon me swiftly. A sense of achievement combined with exhaustion resulted in a restful night of slumber.
The following morning I woke before the sun. It was only a few minutes before but that’s still pretty early, especially for me. Mornings just aren’t my thing, no matter how much I want them to be. In college I avoided the nine a.m. time slot the same way that I avoided the cute Aussie exchange student with scabies—by constantly reminding myself that, despite its undeniable allure, it was bad for me.
Despite the earliness of the hour, I felt pretty good as I climbed out of my tent. Possibly, I felt good because I woke up of my own volition. Probably, I felt good because I had gone to bed at seven the previous night and gotten eighteen hours of sleep the night before that. Even people that despise waking up early can stomach it if they have spent the bulk of the previous two days snoozing.
After taking a couple minutes to stretch and enjoy the sunrise, I got to work packing the tent. The mongooses wa
tched carefully as I unceremoniously shoved pegs, poles, and strings into the stuff sack.
“Don’t look so anxious,” I said to my onlookers. “You’ll be fine.”
I didn’t know it at the time but I was lying to them. Fortunately, mongooses have tiny pea brains so they remained ignorant of my duplicity until the day they died, which, as it turned out, was that day.
The beginning of the return trip went well. My shoulders were a bit stiff and it took a little while to figure out where to put the potato sack of tranquilized mongooses, but both of those proved to be minor problems with simple solutions. The pain in my shoulders abated once I started incorporating more of my torso into my stroke, and the bag of chicken assassins proved less burdensome once I moved them from the cockpit to the rear bulkhead. Although putting the mongooses in a different compartment than myself made the task of updating their tranquilizers far more difficult, it also gave my legs far more room. I decided that it was worth it.
Much to my delight, after I sorted out the shoulder and the storage problems, my mind quickly navigated its way back to the tranquil state of consciousness that it had found on the way to Oahu. This time it took less than an hour to reach the same blissfully disconnected frame of mind that it had taken me over a day and a half to achieve on the previous leg of the journey. Without effort or thought the tedium of left paddle, right paddle, left paddle, right paddle smoothly transitioned into a five-hour meditation. I remained in that detached realm of consciousness until a beep from my watch brought me back to reality.
I had set the alarm in order to remind myself to give the mongooses more tranquilizers. It was an inconvenience but none of the drugs that I had acquired could put them safely under for more than eight hours, so there was no other option.
Proceeding as I had planned, I carefully shifted my body around and accessed the kayak’s rear hatch. I moved with deliberate calm, knowing that one wrong step could result in disaster. The rear hatch gives access to the rear bulkhead, which is essential to the buoyancy of the boat. If water gets in there, you’re fucked. The decision to access the rear hatch while on the water was admittedly foolish, but I did it anyway. My work-hard-and-don’t-worry-about-anything-else mentality had made me cocky and my cockiness had made me careless. Fortunately, that carelessness didn’t bite me in the ass—at least not that time. Indeed, the entire process went remarkably smooth. One by one I pulled the mongooses from their sack, re-tranquilized them, denoted their treatment by delivering a shot of orange spray paint to their torsos, returned them to their sack, and then returned their sack to the rear bulkhead. The whole procedure took less than fifteen minutes.
Having ensured the mongooses’ continued sedation, I pulled out the GPS and checked my progress. I was not disappointed. Working in tandem, the kayak sail and the trade winds were moving me along at an impressive clip. Six hours in and I was nearly a third of the way back to Kauai. Everything was going well.
Emboldened even further by my accelerated pace and my success with the mongooses, I recommenced paddling feeling carefree and happy.
“The trip is a success,” I thought, while dipping my paddle into the water.
Another six hours passed without incident and without thought, then my watch started beeping again. At first I didn’t even notice the alarm, so divorced was my mind from its immediate surroundings. After five minutes of incessant repetition, however, my attention was finally captured. Aware of the present once more, I took notice of the fact that the water had become a bit choppier.
Should I be concerned, I thought. Then I thought, Nah.
Proceeding in a cavalier fashion, I turned around, popped open the hatch, pulled out the bag-o-mongooses, and went about updating their anesthesia. One by one I took the little carnivores out of their sack, injected them with the sedative, marked them with a spot of orange paint (which I was dismayed to see was not the temporary spray I thought I had purchased—those poor mongooses were going to be marked for life), and then returned them to their bag. The rough water slowed the process a bit, but it still took less than twenty minutes to attend to the whole lot. The job complete, I turned around and went about placing the mongooses back in their compartment.
I had settled the bag of small, sedated mammals into the rear bulkhead but had not yet closed the hatch when I caught sight of something moving out of the corner of my eye. Shifting my gaze away from the open bulkhead and toward the movement, I quickly figured out what had drawn my attention: a wave. It was not a tremendously large wave, but it was big enough. Big enough to take down a kayak with an open bulkhead just begging to be filled with water.
“Fuck,” I said, as I began frantically messing with the hatch cover. Repeatedly I attempted to force it shut, and repeatedly I failed. The sides not properly aligned, the cover refused to snap into place. All it needed was a little finesse but I had no time for finesse. The arrival of the wave was imminent and brute force was the only timely course of action, or, at least, the only course of action that my frazzled brain could come up with. The cover still not shut, I felt the front of my boat begin to rise as it met the base of the wave. Putting in a last ditch effort, I lined up the cover as well as I could and then attempted to seal the gaps with my forearms. It was far from watertight, and I knew it, but it was the best that I could do. Certain that disaster was imminent, I closed my eyes and held my breath as the boat made its way up the incline. With every inch that the bow raised my anxiety increased. From face cheeks to butt cheeks everything that could be clinched, was clinched, until finally … nothing.
The kayak breached the crest of the wave, the nose plopped down onto the water on the other side, and all was calm. Both the hatch cover and my forearms had been sprayed with a few dots of water, but other than that nothing had happened. Moving the hatch to the side, I looked into the bulkhead onto a potato sack of mongooses untouched by the ocean. With a sigh of relief, I snapped the cover back on, checked my GPS, and got back to paddling.
Well that was anti-climactic. I thought.
Obviously, my brush with disaster should have brought me back down to earth; it should have served as a reminder that I was on a perilous journey; it should have resulted in my becoming mindful and hyper-vigilant, but it didn’t. Actually, it ended up having the exact opposite effect. Following the narrow escape from the wave, I became even more insouciant. The success of the journey up until that point, combined with my recently acquired ability to enter a mentally vacant state, on top of my work-hard-and-don’t-worry-about-anything-else mentality, resulted in my becoming thoroughly careless. The journey now seemed passé and blasé and a whole bunch of other snooty French words that roughly translate as “whatever.” And that’s truly how I felt about it—whatever. I was still excited about the release of the mongooses and the impending attack on the chickens, but the remainder of the kayak journey struck me as a tedious chore.
Sweet Jesus, I couldn’t have been more off on that one.
Things started to go awry around the time that my third alarm went off. Rather than immediately turning around and tending to the mongooses as I had done the two times before, I decided to check the GPS. The contents of the display made me smile. I was less than an hour out.
Excited by the prospect of reaching my destination, I immediately picked up my paddle and got back to work. With less than an hour to go, there was no need to give the mongooses another round of sedatives. Their previous dose would keep them under for another two and by that time I would be onshore ready to introduce them into their new habitat, or at least that’s what I thought.
As I paddled the last couple of miles home, I contemplated potential names for a group of mongooses. A myriad of possibilities ran through my mind.
• An Assassination? No. That name went down the toilet with my original to-do list.
• A Poultrycide? No. It’s clever but a little too much of a downer. All the -cide’s are serious issues. Homicide, genocide, patricide, infanticide, I don’t want to associate the m
ongooses with such bleak affairs.
• An Einsatzgrupen? Oh god, no. I feel bad for even thinking of it.
• A Silence? Hmm … yeah, a silence of mongooses, that sounds good. Understated. Dignified. And that’s what they’ll bring to the island: silence, peace and quiet, an end to the infernal clucking and crowing of the feral rat-birds. A silence of mongooses to bring tranquility back to the Garden Isle.
“Silence it is,” I said to myself.
Then I heard a noise.
Choppy water slamming into the underside of the kayak—that was my initial conclusion about the noise. Then I realized that the sound that had captured my attention was not coming from outside the kayak but rather emanating from within. Like the babysitter in a horror story who realizes the threatening calls are coming from inside the house, I instantly lapsed into sheer terror.
Oh fuck! I thought. They’re awake. I shouldn’t have pushed it. Shouldn’t have skipped that last round of sedatives?
Consciously repressing the urge to scream and panic, I spoke out loud to myself, “Ingrid, don’t be a helpless fucking damsel. Fix the goddamn problem.”
After a couple of slow, deliberate breaths, I began searching my mind for solutions.
• Solution #1: I could open the hatch and throw the sack of mongooses into the water.
— Critique of Solution #1: But what if they already gnawed their way out of the bag? Then they would swarm out of the bulkhead and onto me. Surrounded by the ocean they would cling to the kayak as well as the kayak’s primary occupant. I would be torn to shreds. Bad idea.
• Solution #2: I could drown them in the bulkhead.
— Critique of Solution #2: Unfortunately, by filling the mongooses’ compartment with water, I would likely be condemning myself as well as them. Suffocating in saltwater doesn’t sound like fun. Pass.