I Slipped On A Kayak And Can't Get Up!
Reading your own geriatric meter
Denny Murawska
Had there been someone present with a camera during my most recent outdoor outing, I am certain the segment would have gone viral on YouTube. It had nothing to do with a vicious battle against a musky. I did not single-handedly go head-to-head with a large boar armed only with a Bowie knife. No, I faced the daunting task of extricating my fat rear end out of a miniature kayak.
Most would not view this as the equivalent of scaling Mount Everest. I suppose many would scoff at this as irrelevant. Maybe I have low T. I don’t know. If you are over the age of 50 and tip the scale beyond the 200 mark, try this exercise. (You might wish to employ the efforts of a spotter.) Sit on the floor, legs straight out in front, and use your massive power of will to stand up. Did I forget to say one of the rules is you must do this without using your arms or hands?
It is said the first thing to go on a boxer is his legs. At age 60, I rely on my upper body to pull me out of the bathtub with one of those geriatric handles. Unfortunately, after a successful crappie fishing trip, I began to wonder more and more about how to get out of my restrictive, floating coffin.
It was easy enough to get into the tiny flotation device. (I hesitate to call it a boat.) Gravity does most of the work, and a massive amount of butt-scooting will eventually get you and the craft launched and floating. After two hours of fun panfishing, the old legs were starting to cramp up. I wanted to stand and stretch, but it was out of the question. My kiddie kayak was a tippy little thing and not the kind you see guys fly fishing from on television. In spite of this, it carried a minnow bucket, a fly rod and spinning rod, a container of crawlers, and my tackle box. All of these remained wedged nicely between my legs. Accessing them was a feat in itself.
Time to paddle to shore and remove my stiffened carcass from the plastic wedge. It seemed prudent to grab all items and toss them onto the shore, since I could not move at all with them in the kayak. Then came logistics. There was no pier to hang onto. Push on the left side of the boat, you capsize. Ditto for the right. I could not use my upper body. This was trouble indeed. The shallow water looked inviting on this hot day, and I was about to get wet. With a deft shoulder roll, I managed to get part of my aged torso into the shallows and slowly drag myself through the wet sand onto the beach. I prayed nobody was watching this.
Finally, in a slow, grunting, grimacing fashion, I stood. What blessed relief! It took a few minutes of allowing blood to flow back into the right body parts, but I did regain equilibrium. I breathed a sigh of relief, loaded my gear into my truck, and turned the plastic chamber of horrors over to flush out the many minnows I dumped into it.
“Never again, little boat,” I vowed. I eyed the nearby rowboat with envy. I could have taken it out as well....
Denny Murawska has been a contributor to the wacky UP Magazine, Wishigan, Verse Wisconsin, and The Pulse. His church is the pine cathedral that surrounds him at his home near Black River Falls.