AUTHOR’S NOTE: This column is intended to be entertaining at the expense of truth and accuracy, but I sneak in some good information as well. It is up to the reader to distinguish between entertainment and reality.
Q: What is the perfect lunch to bring on a paddling trip, and why?
A: It’s a tie between a tuna salad sandwich and any Antone’s po’ boy. The reason for these selections is that I never have brought either of these sandwiches, and every time I see someone eating one on a trip lunch break, I wish I were eating that instead of whatever I have.
Q: What is the “Winter Solstice”?
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Pasage Tomb Ireland |
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Lawrence Hall of Science-Sunstones ll |
A: Not many people know the true background of this astrological event, which, by the way, is the day I am writing this answer near the end of 2021 AD. Winter was a girl (a kayaker, by the way), in Norway about 700 years after Noah’s high-water event. Winter was one of those rare and gifted individuals – what we would label in today’s parlance an autistic savant - who had a photographic memory and could count time in her head with extreme precision. She was not very attractive and smelled bad, as was often the case in those good ol’ days, and, combined with her autistic awkwardness making everyone around her uncomfortable, she had a lot of time on her hands with nothing much to do but kayak, think, eat and get uglier. She was doing all of those things by herself with no distractions on December 20th, 21st and 22nd, and noticed that there were more minutes of sunlight on the 20th and 22nd. Of course, the world was still flat in those days, so she couldn’t explain why this happened, but she could tell that there was definitely a “shortest day / longest night” on the 21st. She was the first to publish this finding in the leading scientific journal of the day, The Nordic Observer, and so was able to name the phenomenon after herself – Winter’s (her name) Sol (sun) and stice (you have to end a word with something, why not stice?). Over time (and there has been a lot of that between then and now), Winter’s became Winter because the “s” at the end of Winter’s and the “S” at the beginning of Solstice kind of ran together, and people started associating the longest night with the actual season of Winter, which was probably also derived from Winter’s name. And there you have it.
Post Script: After publication of her discovery, Winter received the coveted Dorbel Prize, and with the money she got a facelift, and was featured on “Norway’s Got Talent”, where one of Simon Cowell’s grumpy ancestors hit the buzzer and was heard to say, “WTF, there’s nothing entertaining about that!”.
Bonus answer: It is the day dogs pick their Christmas gifts and the day people test their smoke alarms in Ireland.
Q: Who was Lake Charlotte named after?
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A: That was an atrocious grammatical construction in your question, dear reader, but I’ll forgive it and get straight to the answer. Nicholas B. Descomp’s Labadie was a French-Canadian doctor who, as luck would have it, lived on Lake Charlotte and, coincidentally, played a prominent role in the Texas Revolution. I can hear your wheels turning, as would mine - so how do we get Charlotte out of Nicholas Labadie? Well, it’s not about Labadie, it’s about the lake. The lake didn’t have a name when Labadie settled on it, which was a shame, it being such a pretty place and all. One day when he was between revolutionary activities and house calls, Labadie found hisself [sic] on the margins of that thare [sic] lake, pondering, “What the hell should I call this place”, when it suddenly hit him, and he scratched the name “Lake Charlotte” on a board, thereby naming it after his mother, Charlotte Barthe Labadie. About a century later, an unnamed cartologist from the Cartological Office of Texas was wandering the area, thinking to himself, “what the hell should I call this place?” when he fortuitously stumbled across the old board, supported in some cypress knees. He looked at it, and said to himself, “Well, good enough”, and Lake Charlotte started appearing on maps of the area from then on. Tom Douglas has personally continued to reinforce the naming of this lake with his semi-annual “Cypress Wonderland” trips and lectures to the Sierra Club and Houston Canoe Club. And here you thought it was going to be a logical puzzle, like Alice’s Restaurant, which it could have been . . .
Q: Why does Bruce make us get up so early to paddle?
The view on the way to a Bodson Marathon
A: I hear you. I have often wondered the same thing. We have to feel our way in the dark to a vague intersection of a river and an obscure Farm-to-Market Road number at 7:00 am, which means we have to leave the house at 5:15 am, which means we have to get up at 4:30 am, which means we may as well not even go to bed the night before. There are actually two good reasons for this early meeting time:
- Bruce’s plans are often optimistic in terms of miles covered and conditions encountered and have resulted in unplanned intimate overnight stays with Mother Nature. The early hour provides what he believes to be adequate margin to accommodate moderate disturbances to his plans.
- Bruce likes to condition his fellow paddlers in a Marine boot camp setting where we lose our individual identities and come out the other side with unconditional obedience and stamina so we can survive this trip as well as his next trips.
Q: What did Marcel Proust say in his In Search of Lost Time that could relate to canoeing/kayaking?
Marcel “Let Him Live” Proust
A: Translated from the original French and paraphrased, he said, “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new waters but seeing with new eyes.” Just like his name (Valentin Pierre Cardin Louis Vuitton Coco Chanel Georges Eugène Marcel Yves Saint Laurent Proust), the quote above is actually a short paraphrase of the real quote, which, translated, reads, “The only true voyage, the only bath in the Fountain of Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to see the hundred universes that each of them sees, that each of them is; and this we do, with great artists; with artists like these we do really fly from star to star.
Think about it.
NEW FEATURE: WORD OF THE MONTH
The concept here is to enhance your enjoyment of paddling by putting words to your heretofore pitifully inarticulate attempts at articulation.
WORD OF THE MONTH: SPAGHETTIFICATION
Definition: The process by which an object is stretched and ripped apart by gravitational forces upon falling into a black hole.
Used in a sentence: Alice experienced a sensation akin to spaghettification as she was sucked through the vortex of the rapid at the Rockslide in Santa Elena Canyon, after which she almost drowned when she found herself in the cold water with her PFD pinning her arms over her head.
I include the above visualization as an accommodation for those who are more oriented toward visual learning.
GOOD ONE:
MUG O’ THE MONTH:
OVERHEARD . . .
