ready to protect
nature from those who destroy
we’re always looking
-a haiku by Capt. Jas. Cox, Field Station 11N
Exploration not Exploitation™
Pigeon Creek Safari
Pigeon Creek Safari
Pigeon Creek Safari
Pigeon Creek Safari
In the barrens of Southern California, near the movie production City of Los Angeles, lies a massive geological feature collectively referred to as ‘Vasquez Rocks”. It was here, in 1874 Tiburcio Vasquez, one of California’s most notorious bandits, used these rocks to elude capture by law enforcement.
Long, long before that, the area was occupied by the Tataviam Indians. One of their sacred sites at Vasquez Rocks is decorated with pictographs upon the stone walls. The area supposedly contains few red, white, and black pictographs depicting humans, spirits, animals and the sun and stars. According to scholars, the pictographs date back as far as 450 A.D. It was our mission to witness and document these features for our illustrious journals.
We had no guide nor compass, but we had a map, and a general idea, plus pistols for the snakes and cougars, if they were to give us trouble.
As always, we started with cocktails. Pictured: A.E. Sable, Cole Haley-Burton, B.W. Becker
Imagine all the deadly snakes sleeping in the pitted rocks!
Doubt Sets in.
Is it peril or is it a clue? Is it both? We’re always on edge.
I see something!
A cave!
Dissent!
Frustrated by lack of progress, Haley-Burton snaps. “Come down from there! I’m not going. Your map is a lot of malarkey! There’s nothing out here but certain and lingering death!”
We appeased Haley-Burton’s vexation with some shade, two cans of corned beef, and a cup of Kentucky bourbon. Becker was still on guard, however.
This is what we were hoping to see.
Failure
Despite our failure, we will perhaps mount a second attempt to find the ritual site and learn more about the Tataviam people.
My brother Duncan urged that I travel to Orion, Alberta, Canada, to see a striking landscape.
What must’ve happened here?!
He understated that entirely. It was more than striking. It was incredible!
Giant red stone balls sunken into the earth, some smashed open!
There were many cacti in the area. A place to watch your step!
It was apparent this was also a place favoured by rattlesnakes. I heard them, but didn’t see them.
Can you feel the power of the mighty, god hewn balls?
There are so many! And scattered so far!
Clearly, this must’ve been the remnants of an ancient Bacci Ball match played by the gods in ancient times. These gods must’ve fought violently by throwing the balls at each other, causing some to shatter. The balls were so eroded, the game must’ve been played deep in pre-history, by forgotten gods perhaps never to be identified.
That is my scientific opinion.
I heard the contant rumble of distant thunder.
A serious tripping hazard.
Light broke through the threatening storm clouds
I left before the storm came, in awe. And in reverence.
Report by Captain A.E. Sable, September, 1922
I haven’t deliberately done any DGS excursions this summer, so far, but I try to be prepared for incidental adventures. Pith and kit in the trunk, just in case*.
I met up with my brother just past the Saskatchewan border, in Maple Creek (a place I’d never been; halfway between where we each live), and we did a whiskey shot at the oldest public house in the Province.
The Sable Brothers in the Oldest Public House in Saskatchewan
The Jasper Hotel opened in 1903 and has been continuously open since then. Maple Creek is a hub central to three borders, including Montana’s. The current owner of the Jasper was very proud of his bar’s history and told us about it and the artifacts within the bar. He even had us carded because the server wouldn’t.
Inside the bar
The bar within the bar was from an earlier business, an 1890s hardware store.
The bar is older than the bar! It was from a hardward store built in the 1890s.
The safe was a specialty, state of the art item shipped to the bank in 1912 and later donated to the Jasper.
Safe Cracker
There’s a 100+ year old photo of the hotel on the wall.
119 years ago, maybe
The saddle was owned by the first owner of the bar, who broke her back on her first horse ride and never rode again. It’s been on the wall for over 100 years.
The Jasper Hotel Bar, Maple Creek, Saskatchewan
Quite a joy to visit, but we barely spent 15 minutes there.
*I did throw on the gear for the Red Rock Coulee side trip my brother convinced me to go on. Post coming soon.
OUT and ABOUT The Collected Quasi Non-fictional Recollections Of the Occasional R.J. OLDCASTLE, Part One
PREFACE
The following are the hazy anecdotal memoirs of some of the adventures of Robert John Oldcastle. They have been assembled with illustrations taken by the author. They are quasi non-fictional (or fictional). All of the events happened in the locations described, but not necessarily in the larger context of the story as a whole. Some names have been changed to protect the actual identities, with no innocence or guilt implied.
The author occasionally digresses into observations and advice for travellers and explorers gleaned from his experiences. These are offered in the hope that his readers may learn from his hard knocks rather than suffer them themselves.
So, in that context, I hope you enjoy them. -R.J.O.
Chapter One
TRINIDAD – ‘69
It was the summer of ’69 that started my life of travel and adventure. I was really too young in June of that year to apply for the job that was advertised one evening in the Toronto Globe newspaper:
Wanted: Earnest, intelligent, young man that is willing to travel. Must be available immediately for 2-month commitment. Must be comfortable with outdoor work and be conversant with survey fundamentals. Apply in person.
And they listed a room number at the Queen’s Hotel on Front Street.
As well as my regular schooling, I had been active in the local “Drill Association” for two years and was quite conversant with basic military map & compass work. I had been fortunate to be able to advance quickly through my studies and passed my Junior Matriculation exams at a young age. Now school was out and I was free for the summer.
At 8:00 am the next morning I presented myself to the address indicated in the newspaper and was met by two gentlemen. I presented my Junior Matriculation certificate and military identification and somehow convinced them that I was older than I appeared. They asked me a series of questions on the Mercator projection, magnetic variation and the like. They were surprised at my accurate answers and asked for a sample of my handwriting. They then asked if I was able to leave in three days’ time. I gulped and said, “Yes”. “You’re hired”, they replied. Then I remembered to ask, “Where are we going and how long?” They replied, “Trinidad, and you will be gone for at least six weeks. Be at Union Station by 9:00 a.m. We leave for New York from Track 9.”
They gave me a list of personal equipment I would need, a train ticket and an advance of $20.00 cash! Only then did I think to ask what we would be doing. They had a contract to instruct surveyor’s assistants for an upcoming large scale topographic survey of the island. I was to be their peon!
That night there was an animated conversation with my family. They finally relented and supported me in my first real adventure. I spent the next two days in madcap shopping and packing the necessary tropical kit.
There were many memorable moments, but I’ll mention only a few. The northwest corner of Trinidad is only a few miles from the South American coast of Venezuela. There is a region of jungle covered highlands along the northern part of the island. We were based north of Port of Spain in that hill country. The government had assigned us a building, however shortly before we arrived it had been burned down by monkey hunters. We ended up living in a warehouse-like structure that was open on both ends. We slept on cots, listening to the jungle noises including the eerie sound of Red Howler monkeys. That was my first experience living with snails the size of golf-balls and two-inch cockroaches.
We were warned about poisonous snakes in the area and told not to walk into the jungle (and even be careful on the tracks and roads). I wondered whether we were being teased until I saw a dead Fer-de-Lance that had been run over on the road into our camp. The snake was over three feet long and with a dull colouring that would effectively camouflage it in that terrain. The Fer-de-Lance is a pit viper whose bite is fatal. Our new friends were not joking – thus I learned to always listen to the local experts when they offer advice. I bought a walking stick with a snake carved around it as a memento of that day.
An amusing episode happened on one of our visits to Port of Spain. The three of us were wandering along a side street on a hot afternoon. Summer is the rainy season and the daily afternoon rain torrent opened up on us. We spotted a sign that said “Recreational Club”. It was at the top of a set of stairs leading to a roofed balcony overlooking the street. Up we went. We sat down at a large table and ordered rum punches. The price the waiter asked was exorbitant, but we paid. Then a parade of rather rough looking “ladies” began to walk past with enticing smiles, making rather provocative comments. It was at that point we realised what kind of “recreation” the sign referred to. We downed our drinks and escaped into the warm rain.
We took time to make trips around the island which allowed for a couple of interesting swims. Macqueripe Bay on the north coast has a beautiful beach. While swimming we saw giant manta rays offshore just below the surface that must have had an eight-foot wingspan. Closer to shore, we saw Goliath Groupers below us that we were told were between two and four hundred pounds.
The scariest event I experienced was when we visited the small island of Gaspar Grande. I ventured away from the group and went for a swim in a small bay amongst myriad small colourful fish. When I was about one hundred feet from shore and in about ten feet of water, a long thin fish swam between me and shore. He was at least five feet long! Barracuda! I was out of the water as fast as I could make it. Our local friends laughed at me and assured me that barracuda never attack anything larger than themselves.
That summer, I learned a lot about how wide the world was and how I so much wanted to see more of it.
End of Chapter One.
The Waihee area was inhabited long ago. A fertile valley along the Waihee river was extensively planted and supported a large village.
The village overlooked the ocean.
Recent pilgrims to the area have used the abundant driftwood to construct crude shelters.
The remains of Kealaka’ihonua Heiau, a temple dedicated to Ku, the god of war, politics, and fishing.
Kealaka’ihonua Heiau includes a platform surrounded by a paved area. There would have been thatched buildings and carved images on the platform when it was in use. Missionary zeal has destroyed all evidence of these.
Surprisingly little evidence of the Battle of Kepaniwai remains. 120 years of the tropical climate have returned the area to a natural state of tranquil beauty with no sign of the carnage that once occurred here.
Nothing remains of the great battle that took place here.
Following the Iao stream into the Iao valley.
Banyan roots provide easy access to the higher levels of the valley.
This ancient figure is known to the native Hawaiians.
Offerings of rocks wrapped in ti leaves are piled at the base of the rock.
Working my way through. the dense jungle wasn’t always easy.
Feral cats prowl the wilderness.
The webs of cane spiders are a constant hazard, clinging to the faces of the unwary.
Abundant moisture in the jungle creates massive foliage.
This tiki now stands near the entrance to an estate outside Paia. It may once have stood atop a heiau.
Native fauna.
The Waihee area was inhabited long ago. A fertile valley along the Waihee river was extensively planted and supported a large village.
Lady Eleanor Reinholt, photographer for the expedition. All other photographs in this report were taken by Lady Reinholt.
Having lost my sailing companion from The S.S. Eldritch, Carleton, amidst a street brawl, I’d occupied some of my time by laying low and hoping for his return away from the City of Havana proper by lingering about the Malecón sea wall and eventually the windy beach and attempting to collect lizards from the hot rocks. The curly tailed ones ate the small brown anoles and beat up the larger green ones until I separated them in large jars inside my satchel. It occurred that I didn’t know what they ate and I’d have no one to deliver the jars to in any case, so I’d just let them loose and observed their skittery and odd behaviours until they left my sight.
I’d never seen lizards outside of a photographic plate in a book before.
After thinking absently on the dunes, staring out to sea, I considered perhaps someone at one of the military fortresses around the harbour might know where my troop ship would be docked and I could rejoin the Frontiersmen Expeditionary Forces and not be shot for accidental desertion back in Halifax.
After talking to many cinammon hued beach goers, and me not knowing a word of Spanish, I finally found a young man who could speak heavily accented English, fishing on the beach. He directed me to Fortaleza de San Carlos de la Cabaña, adding in a few tidbits of local pride by saying it had never been attacked because of how formidible it was. It has 120 cannons and housed between 1.300 and 6,000 men, in times of war, and those times looked like they may be coming. Surely someone here, perhaps the Fortress General, could wire my ship and regiment before my situation fell even more out of hand. The lad also explained to me that his compatriots casually called it La Cabaña. and anglos wrongly called it Fort Charles. It was just overland from where we spoke.
“Just overland” turned out to be over an hour and this Canadian felt the heat despite the cool linens of my suit and my white sun helmet. Once I’d arrived, I’d found it curiously unguarded. I walked across the drawbridge without challenge!
It seemed very quiet for a military fort housing over a thousand souls.
They easily had 120 cannons, perhaps more. But no one manning them.
Another curly tail lizard with a straight tail. At least there was some life here!
It did seem ridiculous that there was no one here. Perhaps the fort was so imposing, the mere existence of it was threat enough for potential invaders to steer clear of the harbour. The barracks were all locked, but silent. Not a movement anywhere, save the lizards.
I’d found the Officers Building and eventually found the General’s Office, but it was as vacant as the rest of the fort.
The General’s Desk
It was a mystery never solved. I’d have to ignore my plight and seek a meal and room in the city across the harbour. I sat in a cool courtyard overgrown with tree roots until the sun felt less harsh and more managable. A walk at night in a foreign land is more of an adventure, anyway.
Tree roots in the Fort
A recent Instagram post I saw about rafts and canoes set me to reminiscing about bygone days, and reminded me of a precursor, if you will, to The Dominion Geographic Society: that is, The Jacques Abagada Society.
I had a good friend all through junior high, high school, and subsequent years, with whom I’d been acquainted since kindergarten. When I say “subsequent years,” I mean until May 2020, when he suddenly, but not entirely surprisingly, passed away… the bastard… from causes completely unrelated to the modern ongoing coronavirus pandemic. He escaped, leaving the rest of us to slog through COVID, fighting for survival in a world that makes a zombie apocalypse look appealing by contrast. At least with the Zombie Apocalypse there’s an end in sight: either the zombies kill you as you sleep and eat your brain, or you kill all of the zombies using a sawed-off shotgun and restore order to the world. But with COVID, it’s just gonna be a slow, lingering descent in to hopelessness, despair, poverty, and finally death. The ones who have managed to bail out early, like my friend, and my mom six weeks later, and my brother a year earlier, had the right idea, missing out on all the “fun” of a trans-global pandemic.
As you can see, hopelessness and despair have a firm grip on my psyche at this point. But for now I’m gonna write about boats. You’ll just have to wade through some other stuff first.
Anyway, back in our long-ago high-school days, my pal and I played a lot of pool. My mom had a pool table at her house, so it’s not like we were out hanging with the cool kids, drinking beer and smoking cigarettes and picking up chicks while playing pool. No, we were social misfits, playing pool in my mom’s garage while dreaming about “some day” having great and grand adventures.
During one late night game, my buddy made a particularly egregious shot. The kind where the cue stick flails spaztastically and several balls leap off the table. His verbal response to such a graceful move: Uh! Buh! Guh! Duh!
From that point on, our standard response when either of us did anything especially stupid, which was uncomfortably often, became: Uh! Buh! Guh! Duh!
Over time, while the two of us squandered evening after evening of what should have been among the best years of our lives shooting pool in my mom’s garage, we continued to discuss The Adventures We Shall Someday Have, and amid those discussions, a fictional… no, a mythical character began to evolve, of whom we patterned ourselves as followers. Essentially, we adopted as our “leader” the undersea explorer and all around cool guy, Captain Jacques Cousteau. Because, c’mon, nobody was having better adventures when we were kids than Jacques Cousteau! He travelled the world on his own floating laboratory, and he had his own helicopter and submarine and hot air balloon and Zodiac boats and cool underwater gear, and he invented stuff and discovered stuff and he was on TV. Only, the version of Cousteau who emerged from our countless late-night discussions was… less competent than Cousteau. He was prone to mistakes, but he would cover up those mistakes with bravado and bluster. He was an Uh! Buh! Guh! Duh!, shrug it off and move on kind of guy.
Hence his name: Jacques Uh Buh Guh Duh – later stylized as Jacques Abagada of The Abagada Society.
In retrospect, this Cousteau parody Abagada thing was a good idea. Some decades after my friend – his name was Mickey, by the way, and he was named after Mantle the baseball legend, not the mouse – and I had come up with the cool but under-competent explorer Jacques Abagada, those pretentious ass-hats Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach took the exact same idea and turned it in to a hit feature film: The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.
Have you ever seen half-assed ideas that you toyed with in your younger youth capitalized on by people with more… I dunno, money, mostly; and influence and drive and charisma and luck? When that Zissou movie came out, I recall shouting at the TV screen within the first few seconds of first seeing the promo trailer, “THAT’S JACQUES ABAGADA! THEY STOLE OUR CHARACTER!”
I… actually like the movie. I like it a lot. It’s droll and deadpan and witty and clever. Except, Ned shouldn’t have died. That was a bummer. But Anderson and Baumbach had to kill him off, I suppose, because in real life Cousteau’s son was tragically killed in the crash of an amphibious aircraft.
And yeah, the film-makers fleshed out the story a lot more than we had with our character, and gave it a plot, and inserted a hundred and one little inside references for Cousteau fans and others.
It irritated me when pretty much the only thing the reviews for the film talked about was “David Bowie songs in Portuguese.” There are a thousand other “Easter eggs” in The Life Aquatic besides the David Bowie songs. Film critics today are too young and too shallow and too ignorant of history and pop culture to recognize the really good stuff. In fact, I’m pretty sure… I keep meaning to write a letter to Anderson and Baumbach to see if I’m correct, but I know I am… I’m pretty sure I might be the only person in the world who gets one of the lines in the film:
I could tell you what I think… what I know… this is a reference to, but then I wouldn’t be the only one who knows, would I?
It would probably be pointless to write to Baumbach and Anderson today – if they’re even still alive [note: yes, they are, and they continue to produce successful projects both independently and jointly] – because The Life Aquatic was released in 2004, which may as well be a million jillion years ago in the world of pop culture, and they’ve certainly moved on to other things, and likely have little recall of much of what went in to that film.
I’ve had several ideas in my lifetime that I have later seen developed in to successful media. When I was a kid, going through my “Titanic obsession phase,” in those gloriously exciting years before Ballard actually found the wreck, when it was still a romantic and mysterious “lost” shipwreck, I had two fantasy stories running through my mind, sometimes to the point where they would keep me awake at night: in one, the ship actually ended up frozen inside the iceberg. Clive Cussler later used the idea of a lost ship frozen inside an iceberg for his novel, Iceberg. My other mental story was that in the far future, a team of scientists discover the wreck and, working secretly at the bottom of the sea, convert the ship in to an inter-stellar spacecraft. Cussler, prior to Iceberg, had written Raise the Titanic (which later became an abysmal film). Japanese film-makers ended up doing this story one better, by converting the sunken WWII battleship Yamato in to a space battleship in the aptly named anime series Space Battleship Yamato, initially titled Star Blazers when first released in North America.
The Japanese animators brought another of my youthful ideas to life in the early 2000s. At one point, I went through a phase during which I was taking photos of small doll-like figures called Pinky Street dolls. I bought a model tank for the dolls to ride around in, because I thought the idea of cute girls driving a big scary German panzer tank was funny. A few years after I’d been posting my Pinky Street pictures on Flickr, a Japanese anime series was released called Girls und Panzer, about… cute high school girls who drive tanks as their school sport, battling tank teams from other schools.
Recently I saw a promo teaser somewhere for a TV game show called The Floor is Lava.
I’m sure every kid has played some version of The Floor is Lava, usually when mom and dad aren’t home, because mom and dad rarely approve of the kids jumping across the room from one piece of furniture to the next. And if you touch the floor you die, because… the floor is lava! Somebody actually turned this concept in to a game show that is currently airing on one of the streaming services. From what I saw, it looks like adult contestants have to make their way through obstacle courses by leaping across furniture… without touching the floor… because the floor is lava!
It seems that a formula for media success is to take our childhood games and the goofiest make-believe fantasies we had when we were kids and turn them in to books, movies, or TV shows.
I should have done that with Jacques Abagada. But what was that thing I said earlier? Something about money, influence, drive, charisma, and luck? Yeah, I’ve always been lacking in all those departments.
Instead, my pal and I had our little Abagada Society for several years in late high school and the college years afterward. He went away to an out of town university, but we’d still get together during breaks for occasional Abagada Expeditions. Usually this meant driving to the Oregon coast to climb on rocks and look through tide pools and take pictures of lighthouses. Mostly the “expeditions” were about the driving around and hanging out and shooting the breeze… and talking about The Adventures We Shall Someday Have.
A sometimes component of the Abagada Expeditions was rafting.
See, I’m actually going to get around to talking about boats. Usually circling around to the point takes me longer than this. I’m feeling uncharacteristically concise as I compose this retrospective.
As you may remember from those TV nature documentaries, Cousteau and his team (or “Cousteau and his cronies,” to quote The Life Aquatic) usually motored out to their dive sites in inflatable “Zodiac” boats. For years it was one of my goals, never realized of course, to have my own Zodiac boat, and to head out in to the ocean loaded with dive gear, or to just head out in to the ocean to motor around. Because Zodiac inflatables were cool. They still are cool.
Anyway, we never had a Zodiac, but we had my dad’s old “rubber boat,” as they were called back in the day. Rubberized canvas, more accurately.
We had previously purchased a “two man” inflatable boat at the sporting goods store or discount department store. Two man, yeah, right! You can barely fit one small person in one of those department store “two man” rafts. “Two person,” I suppose they’re called now. “Man” used to be a generic term meaning “person,” and nobody got insulted, because the word could also refer to a female person, because back in my day we wuz smart enough to know the difference through context, dag-nabbit!
There was a river on the outskirts of town, and we wanted to go rafting, but obviously the “two man” boat was not even going to work for one of us, so I asked my mom if I could pull my dad’s old “rubber boats” out of the garage.
The boats were large “six man” size, meaning you could fit four people on board and still function, or it gave two people… two men… room to stretch out or mess around with fishing poles or have a couple of snack pails on board. And you could flail around with the oars or paddles without hitting each other.
There were two of those old boats out in the garage. Neither had been out of storage in over ten years. I could remember my dad taking those boats out for some lake fishing when I was scarcely more than a toddler. I don’t think they’d been used since. And he didn’t buy them new. I think they may have been military surplus. One was yellow, that was my dad’s boat, and one was olive green, that one my dad got from his dad. The boats each had a pair of aluminum oars – not paddles, but oars, that fit through oar locks on the sides of the boat – and we had a couple of cylindrical metal hand pumps.
Our first time out, we pumped up the boats by hand. That… took… a… while. Later we figured out we could use my buddy’s dad’s air compressor.
Initially, the air did not leak out of the inflatable boats… much… despite their age. We found a patch kit in the garage, probably as old as the boats, and patched a couple of spots on the old green boat, and that was the first one we took to the river. My mom and grandma were kind enough to let us load the boat in to the back of my grandparents’ old pickup truck, and my mom drove us to a boat launch ramp several miles upstream. And down the river we went. It was mostly a slow moving river, low and sluggish in mid-summer, with the sun shining overhead.
We quickly figured out why my grandpa had given the old green boat to my dad, and why my dad never used the old green boat. It still mostly held air – or not; the metal cylinder hand pumps would attach to the brass filler valves with a cumbersome screw-in method, and it was difficult to get the pump nozzle threaded properly. The cold river water caused the air in the boat to contract. Plus, of course, it was an old rubberized canvas boat, so despite all the patches, it still leaked here and there – air out, water in. When we unscrewed the brass plugs over the valves to add air, additional air would rush out while we awkwardly tried to screw the pumps in to the valve openings. We eventually figured out we could just leave the pumps permanently screwed in to the valves and then give the handle a few pumps every few minutes.
But it wasn’t the air leaks that were the issue. The bottom of the boat leaked. After years of scraping through shallow streams, and probably being dragged along river banks, and the rubber flaking away from the canvas from years in storage, the bottom of the boat was basically little more than a piece of canvas cloth. Nothing waterproof about it. It was a cloth-bottomed boat. So everything we had with us got wet. The boat wasn’t going to sink, but it became a floating wading pool.
No wonder my grandpa had given this boat to my dad.
The aluminum oars were worthless. The blades snapped off as soon as we tried to use them. I guess aluminum doesn’t age well or something. We didn’t really need the oars for propulsion, though, as the lazy current of the river moved us along; except when we found ourselves in a stagnant backwater and had to paddle out by holding the broken aluminum paddle blades and leaning over the sides of the boat.
As I said, the sun was shining… and the sun was shining… and the sun was reflecting up off the water… and after four and a half hours, with our first glorious Jacques Abagada Expedition winding down at a city park, where we hobbled to a pay phone and called my mom who drove down and picked us up… we ended up with second degree burns and huge, weeping blisters and were burnt red through and through and it hurt like holy hell and I never want to go through anything like that again!
It took us weeks to recover from that sunburn.
Lessons learned: lay down a good base tan before going anywhere near the water. Don’t wear shorts if you’re as white and pale as a Pilsbury dough boy who has lived in a cave all his life. Don’t take off your shirt. Wear a WIDE brimmed hat.
If I someday end up with melanoma, it will not be from having lived in Hawaii for fifteen years. It will not be from now living in the Utah desert. It will be a result of that raft trip.
Eventually we made another trip in the old green boat. We purchased paddles, not oars, at a sporting goods store, really cool ones, bright orange, made from some kind of high density plastic. We had learned that paddling, one person on each side of the raft, was much more maneuverable than trying to use oars in the canvas oar locks. I liked those paddles. I miss those paddles. They were good paddles.
We tried lining the floor of the boat with… I don’t remember. A tarp or something. Whatever it was did not even come close to limiting the leaks. It was just one more thing to get wet. By the end of the second trip one of the side seams had begun to separate – years of canvas rot – and one of the air chambers was almost completely flat by the time we Michaels dragged our bedraggled boat ashore, hallelujah! Pretty fun times, one guy madly pumping away on the hand pump while another holds wet t-shirts or whatever over an expanding split in the side of the boat.
We were going to cut up the old green boat and save some of the material for patches, but we eventually realized that… Uh! Buh! Guh! Duh!… if it’s not holding air now, it’s not going to hold air as a patch. So we chopped up the boat and hauled it to the dump.
And moved on to my dad’s other “rubber boat,” the yellow one.
The yellow boat held air much better than the green one had. We still kept the air pumps attached to the valves, but it was mostly to compensate for the contraction of the air chilled by the river water. The bottom leaked a lot less, at least initially. The bottoms of boats get a lot of wear and tear. The rubber begins to separate from the canvas, especially on an older boat, due to flexing and abrasion and what have you. We never poked a hole in the bottom… through luck more than anything else, but by the end of its tenure the bottom of the yellow boat was well on its way to having the same floating wading pool effect as had that of the other boat.
We had also found a use for our “two man” boat. We wedged our beverage cooler in it and towed it behind on a short rope. That worked out very nicely… until the end.
We’d figured out the sun thing. We had good paddles. We became skilled enough to take our SLR film cameras on our rafting adventures without ruining them. It was always the same river, sometimes running a longer stretch, sometimes a shorter stretch. We got to know the river: which side we should be on to avoid getting caught in eddies and backwashes, or being pulled under the overhanging brush on the banks. There were a few rocks that, depending on the level of the water, could create short sections of rapids, and a wrong move could pull the boat into and under the lip of a rock and upset things. We got pretty good at estimating the time it would take: depending on the flow of the river, it would take anywhere from 2-1/2 to 4-1/2 hours to make our standard trip.
I think we must have rafted that stretch of river for three or four seasons.
One time, some pretentious jerks in a fancy wooden “McKenzie River Drift Boat” went rowing by us at a brisk pace. “Hey, guys,” we called, “you don’t want to be that close to the bank going around the next bend! There’s a snag there that will pull you under!” They brushed us off like we were piss-ant kids. Hey, we were piss-ant kids, but we knew where to piss! As we rounded the bend in our raft, well out in the center of the river as was prudent, we saw the McKenzie River Drift Boat (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McKenzie_River_dory ) ((nobody calls ’em “dories”)) get caught in the fast-moving current and slam pointy-end-first in to a partly submerged log. Wedged tight, the current pushed the low tail-end of the boat (the “transom” in boat-speak) under the water, flooding the interior within seconds. The two guys on board fell out, along with all their gear. One of the guys, an older guy, was caught in the current and pulled downstream. A lady on shore started screaming: “He can’t swim! He can’t swim!”
We tried to paddle toward him in our raft, but the current had our raft and was pushing it down stream.
Good thing to know: you CANNOT paddle a rubber raft against a river current. Rubber rafts are made for lakes, and for downstream floating. They are rafts, not boats. Even the best of them, those big Colorado River jobs with the rowing cages and all that jazz, can be maneuvered in the current, but they cannot go against the current.
We couldn’t get to the old guy, because we couldn’t paddle against the current, but fortunately there was a youthful “stud boy,” as we used to dismissively refer to the athletic types we envied, on shore. He peeled off his shirt, just like on Baywatch on TV, and dived in to the river and swam out and grabbed the old guy and guided him to shore. As we were swept around the next bend we looked back and saw everyone climbing out of the water, all okay.
Since nobody was hurt… but their fancy-ass boat got sunk because they brushed off the warning from the dumb kids… we were able to laugh about that for years.
Of course, then we’d always end up saying we wished we could get in shape like the guy who swam out to rescue the old geezer. Yeah, one of these days.
Lessons learned:
KNOW HOW TO SWIM if you’re going out in a boat or raft. Any boat. Any raft. At least be able to dog-paddle and keep your head above water. That’s all you need to do.
LISTEN TO PEOPLE WHO GIVE YOU RIVER SAFETY TIPS, even if you think they’re just dumb kids in a leaky rubber raft.
Our last trip ended, ironically, in the same place where the drift boat went down. It was a new spring season. Must have been spring break from university. My buddy was home, and the spring weather was gloriously sunny and unseasonably warm. Perfect weather for a raft run on the river. By that time in our illustrious history we had figured out we could leave one of our cars at the end point at the city park, then haul the partially inflated raft in another car to the upstream boat ramp, so we didn’t have to trouble anyone about a ride.
It didn’t take us long after we launched that early afternoon to realize that the river was running very fast. Most of our raft trips had been in the summer, and while there was occasional variation in current and water height, it was usually a pretty mellow float. Definitely not a “Class Whatever Rapids” section of river, more like a kids-go-tubing-in section of river.
Of course, quiet and relatively safe or not, it was still a river, and on most of our trips we usually fell silent when we passed the infamous point where a kid had drowned during our elementary school days. He was a few years older than we were, and he was in high school when we were in elementary school. His sister was in our grade. And he was a prick, who picked on younger kids. He hit me in the back of the head with a Frisbee once, and laughed. At the time of the accident, he and his high school buddies had been partying and drinking, and he tried to dive to a rumored “underwater cave” under a rock ledge and had drowned. Rivers are not Disneyland. They can kill you.
But if you weren’t drunk it was pretty safe, as rivers go.
On this day, though, we were flying down the stream. We calculated we’d make our usual run in under two hours.
Then we approached… the bend. “We need to be in the middle! Or even on the left!”
“I know, I know!”
“Paddle!”
“I am paddling! You paddle!”
“I am paddling! You paddle!”
“We’re on the wrong side!”
“WE’RE ON THE WRONG SIDE!”
“WE’RE GONNA HIT THE TREEEEE!!!!!”
We didn’t have the strength to get the raft out of the current. The high-speed current was hugging the right bank of the river, carrying us directly toward the huge old snag that had taken out the drift boat in a previous season.
We hit the snag like it was a ramp. The raft shot up the trunk of the snag… and… stopped… and hung there. With air gushing out from multiple tears in the canvas, our yellow raft was hanging in a tree, the green-brown river rocketing past a couple of feet underneath our dangling feet.
We started to laugh like a couple of lunatics. I don’t know if it was because the situation was funny, or if we were terrified to the point of panic, but we were each in one end of the now-limp boat, draped across a tree stump like an old wet sack, cackling like a couple of loonies.
Gasping for breath, we managed to climb up on to the log, then work our way along it to a point very close to shore. A short jump and splash and we were crawling up the boat ramp… somehow managing to drag our totally destroyed rubber raft behind us.
It was only a couple of miles from this spot to my mom’s house, so we walked, dragging the remains of our boat behind us.
Our “two man” trailer raft with the cooler disappeared downstream. Who knows, maybe it floated all the way to the ocean. More likely, it was destroyed by the next whirlpool.
Lesson learned: unless you have a real “river raft,” do not go river rafting during the spring melt.
We often talked about getting another boat, but college, and jobs, and relationships… yeah. The sinking of the yellow rubber raft marked, for all practical purposes, the end of The Abagada Expeditions.
And we lived to tell the tale.
Up until relatively recently, when one of us died… the bastard… of causes unrelated to either Adventure or COVID.
Field Station 24 needed a surface to lay out maps and plans as well as to eat and drink upon, so rather than wait 18 months for a table ordered from the Sears & Roebuck Catalogue, we built one out of empty expedition crates.
the full table top
Over time, all the Founders of the Dominion Geographic Society have left their mark upon the table… as well as all sorts of other marks. Tobacco and lantern kerosene burns included.
Cole Halley-Burton’s signature and expedition notes.
Professor Davis P. Beache’s plank
Professor Beache’s name appears on the edge of a plank which includes a coin and boasts a few bullet holes from some action at his Field Station.
Another of Beache’s planks containing two more bullet holes and evidence of a fire.
Some famous and infamous guests have left a records of meetings with the DGS, including this braggart and his young daughter.
Essential Equipment
Icebox Bob sent us a stamped brass plaquette to adorn our table.
Those who have been unable to meet at Field Station 24 have sent mementos of their expedition participations and Society membership.
The table also has its secrets.
Any and all visitors to Field Station 24, in Calgary, are welcome to add their mark to The DGS Founders Table. Consider it an invitation.
Vandal!
The Full Expedition
