It’s hard to hold forth about zen boating in the presence of a devout Southern Baptist woman.
“Zen boating!” she sneered.
She spat the second word for emphasis, hands on her hips, with a contemptuous toss of her long blond hair. This was a major distraction, but we’ve also mastered in 26 years the zen art of staying on topic. Seeing that my son Daniel and his buddy Josh were irretrievably spellbound, she swooped into the kitchen.
The boating incident occurred Jan. 19 while fishing with Rusty Pruitt and Jay Pruitt on the White River at Buffalo Shoals. We were in a long flatbottom boat powered by a 15-horsepower Mariner outboard. It had three different depth settings, including one for extreme shallow running.
Our friends Bill Eldridge and Ed Kubler and my son Matthew were in a bigger boat powered by a 25-horse Evinrude four-stroke outboard. We caught fish like crazy in the falling water, but it finally got so low that many rocks and ridges emerged from the surface. Eldridge left while he still could, but the sound of spinning metal against stone told a story of struggle and adversity.
We continued to catch fish as the water drained. The alarm in my internal clock buzzed. We had to leave now before we were stranded. It was almost too late. There was no longer a clear channel to travel. One pile of rocks gave way to another, and yet another. Where there was water was in many places too shallow to run a motor. And without a motor, you’re stuck.
With my arms upturned, I pinched my thumbs against my index fingers and middle fingers. I channeled my inner Pat Morita as I leaned inward toward the rapt young men.
“Be as a drop of water,” I murmured. “Become one with the water and find the true path to deeper water …”
“Oh, good grief!” scoffed my better half.
“… And enlightenment,” I finished, with a raised eyebrow cocked toward the kitchen.
Daniel and Josh grinned broadly and nodded vigorously.
“Follow the path back upstream as a drop of water would follow downstream,” I said, “keeping in mind the limitations of being a 20-footlong drop of water.”
By then, Matthew had joined the conversation. He revealed that Eldridge ran aground a couple of times on the journey back upstream. Eldridge had not revealed this to us.
“He was really worried about you guys,” Matthew said. “He said, ‘If they don’t come back soon, they won’t be able to get back.’ ”
“And we almost didn’t,” I said. “As I said, there was no channel. No clear route to travel. The first thing I did was to have Rusty and Jay sit in the bow of the boat to lift the stern higher. I watched how the water rippled to know where it was deep enough.Sometimes I had to ‘crab’ the boat sideways across the river in the current, go upstream a few yards and crab back over to another little chute. I had to lift the motor out of the water to float over rocks a bunch of times. We made it all the way through that one pool without the skeg scarcely touching stone.”
Unbroken deep water awaited us in the next pool, but the only way to reach it was through a long, winding, narrow and rocky run against a high bank. We zigzagged through that obstacle course without incident, but the grade was steep and the water poured swiftly through the mouth over a shallow rock lip at the top of the pool. Getting over it appeared impossible.
“I ran straight at it,” I said. “It looked like we were going to smash right into it. Rusty and Jay glanced back at me nervously perched on the bow. The bow cleared the lip, and then I saw the rock zip past me. At that instant, I yanked the motor out of the water, and we glided over it without so much as a kiss.
“Of course, we lost momentum almost immediately. I only had a second before we’d get washed back down. I jammed the motor back in the water and gunned it. We lurched out of there into deep water, and we were home free.
“It was almost as awesome as the time I paddled my canoe over that big waterfall on the Glover River! The ultimate union of mind, boat and body, my young Grasshopp-ahs.”
I awaited a protest from the kitchen that never came. A crash of a gong at that moment would have been perfect.
Sports, Pages 22 on 01/30/2014