I was in the garage over the weekend and stepped around my kayak, which, sadly, hasn’t been wet in at least three years.
Looking at the kayak and remembering the fish I’d caught in it and the fun in the water, I was seized again by an old-time jones.
Maybe it was reading The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as a fifth-grader.
Or maybe it was daydreaming about the dots and names on the maps on my wall. Or maybe both.
Or maybe both.
Whatever the cause, for more than half a century I’ve wanted to take a float trip down a river.
I used to think a Huck-style raft was the way to go, but I have eyed the kayak before and thought it could carry everything needed for a week or three on the water.
My notion has been to shove into a river at some convenient point and keep going until the jones was left swirling in the wake behind me. Then hit the bank near a bridge and call someone to come get me.
The North Canadian would be the obvious choice, since it’s less than a mile from my house. Maybe drift it until I hit Lake Eufaula.
Two problems exist.
A., I once mentioned my float trip jones to a friend, who advised that her brother had floated a stretch of the North Canadian and wouldn’t do it again. He was armed, she said, but encountered some characters along the river that made him wonder if he was armed heavily enough. Cue the banjos.
B., there’s this whole expectation of putting out a newspaper every week. Kind of hard to do that while you’re floating a river. However: I think it would be possible to scratch the itch in twoday floats. Drift a couple of days, hit the shore and then put back in at the same spot a couple of weeks later and float another segment.
Alternatively, there would be the option to floatcamp a week or two on a lake, say, one like Broken Bow, which has a lot of islands.
Kindra doesn’t know about any of this, so I would appreciate you keeping it between us until we have a chance to conversate, as a friend used to say. She has said she would like to try kayaking, so
She has said she would like to try kayaking, so maybe we’ll get her one, give her some time on the water and they see how she feels about floating a river or a lake.
In the meantime, I think it best to avoid any mentions of snapping turtles or alligator gars or those squiggly things that sometimes live in and around water.
You know, just in case she has a thing about them.