Kayaking Great Quotes

Perhaps I am here because of last night’s dream, when I stood on the frozen lake before a kayak made of sealskin. I walked on the ice toward the boat and picked up a handful of shredded hide and guts. An old Eskimo man said, “You have much to work with.” Suddenly, the kayak was stripped of its skin. It was a rib cage of willow. It was the skeleton of a fish. I want to see it for myself, wild exposure, in January, when this desert is most severe. The lake is like steel. I wrap my alpaca shawl tight around my face until only my eyes are exposed. I must keep walking to stay warm. Even the land is frozen. There is no give beneath my feet. I want to see the lake as Woman, as myself, in her refusal to be tamed. The State of Utah may try to dike her, divert her waters, build roads across her shores, but ultimately, it won’t matter. She will survive us. I recognize her as a wilderness, raw and self-defined. Great Salt Lake strips me of contrivances and conditioning, saying, “I am not what you see. Question me. Stand by your own impressions.” We are taught not to trust our own experiences. Great Salt Lake teaches me experience is all we have.

I had never been to the Amazon, my jungle experience had mostly come from Central America with some short trips to Borneo, but the Amazon undoubtedly had a mystique all of its own. Surely the trees would be much bigger, the wildlife had to be much richer and more diverse and the people would be that bit wilder and cut off from the outside world. It gave me butterflies to think of spending time in the Amazon. Not knowing the geography of the area in any detail, my dreams were restricted to what I did know. There was a ruddy great river that virtually crossed the whole continent from west to east, and…that was about it. I had heard of expeditions that had kayaked the entire river from source to sea – phenomenal endurance feats taking five-plus months – the problem was I was a rubbish kayaker. Sure, I’d done a bit on the canals in England as a Cub Scout but that cold, depressing experience had been enough to put me off for life. What a dull, miserable sport, instructed by overenthusiastic dickheads in stupid helmets.

Long ago, travel was full of risk and hard work. The English noun travel was born from the word travail, which came (by way of France) from the Latin tripalium, meaning a three-staked instrument of torture. To travel was to struggle against steep odds and have no guarantees of success. It required a lot of planning and expense and great physical endurance. By the mid-1800s people began to travel for pleasure. They took tours and came to be known as “tourists.

When it came down to it, people really didn’t need that much to survive in the world. It was the world my parents grew up in that had taught them to feel like they needed more. Bank accounts no longer mattered. Fancy cars didn’t count for anything. I guess if you were a good enough fisherman to catch your dinner, having a nice boat was a bonus, but nobody needed a luxurious yacht when a little kayak did the trick. There weren’t many things that were truly important when you counted down to man no longer inheriting the earth, which I guess is what the Great De-evolution was. Diamonds didn’t do anything for you. Gold became just another metal.

The point was the most dangerous place we would have to negotiate in the kayak. It was also a great confluence of life, and this combination of peril and substance sent the spirit spinning off into various ethereal regions, in which a man might be tempted to commit philosophy. From Baha by Kayak

Long ago travel was full of risk and hard work. The English noun “travel” was born from the word travail, which came (by way of France) from the Latin tripalium, meaning a three-staked instrument of torture. To travel was to struggle against steep odds and have no guarantees of success. It required a lot of planning and expense, and great physical endurance.

A pair of images that help clarify things here are those of the kayak and the superyacht. To be human, according to this analogy, is to occupy a little one-person kayak, borne along on the river of time towards your inevitable yet unpredictable death. It’s a thrilling situation, but also an intensely vulnerable one: you’re at the mercy of the current, and all you can really do is to stay alert, steering as best you can, reacting as wisely and gracefully as possible to whatever arises from moment to moment. The German philosopher Martin Heidegger described this state of affairs using the word Geworfenheit, or ‘thrownness,’ a suitably awkward word for an awkward predicament: merely to come into existence is to find oneself thrown into a time and place you didn’t choose, with a personality you didn’t pick, and with your time flowing away beneath you, minute by minute, whether you like it or not. That’s how life is. But it isn’t how we want it to be. We’d prefer a much greater sense of control. Rather than paddling by kayak, we’d like to feel ourselves the captain of a superyacht, calm and in charge, programming our desired route into the ship’s computers, then sitting back and watching it all unfold from the plush-leather swivel chair on the serene and silent bridge. Systems and schemes for self-improvement, and ‘long-term projects,’ all feed this fantasy: you get to spend your time daydreaming that you’re on the superyacht, master of all you survey, and imagining how great it’ll feel to reach your destination. By contrast, actually doing one meaningful thing today – just sitting down to meditate, just writing a few paragraphs of the novel, just giving your full attention to one exchange with your child – requires surrendering a sense of control. It means not knowing in advance if you’ll carry it off well (you can be certain you’ll do it imperfectly), or whether you’ll end up becoming the kind of person who does that sort of thing all the time. And so it is an act of faith. It means facing the truth that you’re always in the kayak, never the superyacht.