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One Hand Washes the Other
Forum: BoaterTalk
Date: Mar 24, 18:11
From: Raoul Duke

THE BURRITO BEAST

There are some things nobody needs in this world, and a bright yellow, ultra-slicey, hole-bait, edge-monster playboat is one of them -- but I want one anyway, and on some days I actually believe I need one. That is why they are dangerous.

Everybody has freestyle boats these days. Some people throw 1080 freewheels off of 40-foot waterfalls, but not often. There are too many shallow rocks and too many sticky hydraulics and too many stupid creek boaters in the way. You have to be a little crazy to paddle these super-edgy low-volume crotch pockets anywhere except a wide open stretch of easy class 3 water --and even there, they will scare the whimpering shit out of you.... There is, after all, not a pig's eye worth of difference between going head-on into a Class V+ vertical pin or upside-down into a logjam at the bottom of some nondescript riffle. On some days you get what you want, and on others, you get what you need.

When Puddler Magazine called me to ask if I would river-test the latest downriver boat design from Pretention , I got uppity and said I'd rather have a Mayhem Sport playboat. It seemed like a chic decision at the time, and my friends on the freestyle circuit got very excited. "Hot damn," they said, "We will take it to the surf this weekend and blow the bastards away."

"Balls," I said. "Never mind the ocean. The ocean is for punks. We are River People. We are White Water Playboaters."

The White Water Playboater is a different breed, and we have our own situations. Pure grace carving a 15-foot peaking wave on big water is one thing, but pure grace when caught in a three-boat-length frowning hydraulic on a creek in flood stage with whole trees churning through the froth toward you is quite another.

But we like it. A thoroughbred White Water Playboater will drive all night through a hail storm in freeway traffic to throw himself into what somebody told him was the most sinister of keeper holes since Genghis Khan invented the corkscrew.

White Water Playboating is mainly a matter of taste. It is an atavistic mentality, a peculiar mix of low style, high speed, pure dumbness, and overweening commitment to the River Life and all its dangerous pleasures.... I am a White Water Playboater myself, on some days -- and many nights for that matter – and it is one of my finest addictions....

I am not without scars on my brain and my body, but I can live with them. I still feel a shudder in my spine every time I see a Savage Scorpion, or when I walk into a public restroom and hear crippled men whispering about the terrifying Mr. Clean.... I have visions of violent shoulder dislocations and large black men in white hospital suits holding me down on a gurney while a nurse called "Bess" sews the flaps of my scalp together with a stitching drill.

Ho, ho. Thank God for these flashbacks. The brain is such a wonderful instrument (until God sinks his teeth into it). Some people hear Tiny Tim singing when they go under, and others hear the song of the Burrito Beast.

When the Mayhem Sport turned up in my garage, nobody knew what to do with it. I was in West Virginia, covering a slalom event, and people had threatened my life. My lawyer said I should give myself up and enroll in the Federal Witness Protection Program. Other people said it had something to do with the slalom crowd.

The kayak business was the last straw. It had to be the work of my enemies, or people who wanted to hurt me. It was the vilest kind of bait, and they knew I would go for it.

Of course. You want to cripple the bastard? Send him a dinky little squirt-wannabe playboat. And include some float bags, so he'll think it's a white water kayak. He's queer for anything slicey.

Which is true. I have been a connoisseur of slicey playboats all my life. I bought a brand-new Glide when it was billed as "the most terrifying kayak ever tested by Puddler magazine." I have paddled a Triple X through the highest water in three decades on Tumwater Canyon with mosquitoes eating me alive and run a Jib down the Green Truss at night with a head full of acid.... I have paddled with Sonny Barger and smoked weed in boater bars with Jack Nicholson, Grace Slick, Ron Zigler, and my infamous old friend, Ken Kesey, a legendary White Water Playboater.

Some people will tell you that displacement hulls and high volume is good -- and it may be, on some days -- but I am here to tell you that small and slicey is better. I've always believed this, in spite of the trouble it's caused me. Being tied to a windmill in a hurricane will always be better than being squeezed out of a tube. That is why God made playboats, Bubba....

So when I got back from West Virginia and found a sunshine yellow rocket-style playboat in my garage, I realized I was back in the river-testing business. The brand-new Mayhem Sport Defenestrator double-barreled magnum White Water Playboat filled me with feelings of lust every time I looked at it. Others felt the same way. My garage quickly became a magnet for drooling superboat groupies. They quarreled and bitched at each other about who would be first to help me evaluate my new toy.... And I did, of course, need a certain spectrum of opinions, besides my own, to properly judge this kayak. The Canyon Creek Perverse Environmental Testing Facility is a long way from the Gauley or even high-overhead challenge downriver sprints in California, where teams of old-schoolers in T-Canyons and Overflows are said to race head-on against each other in death-defying games of "chicken" in 50-foot freefall....

No. Not everybody who buys a molded chunk of high-dollar plastic yearns to go out in a ball of fire on a testosterone-induced plunge down a California waterfall. Some of us are decent people who want to stay out of the emergency room, but still blast through neo-gridlock eddies on overcrowded rivers whenever we feel like it.... For that we need Fine Machinery.

Which we had -- no doubt about that. The Mayhem Sport people in Nebraska had opted, for reasons of their own, to send me the general production Defenestrator for testing -- rather than their composite crazy-light, state-of-the-art superboat rodeo star shell. It was far too fragile, they said -- and prohibitively expensive-- to farm out for testing to a gang of half-mad Washington cowboys who think they're world-class White Water Playboaters.

The Defenestrator is a finely engineered machine. My neighbors called it beautiful and admired its crisp edges. The nasty little bugger looked like it throwing ends when it was sitting there in my garage. Taking it out on the river, though, was a genuinely terrifying experience. I had no sense of instability until I was catching a microeddy above a terminal log-choked falls during a sudden downpour. I went for a quick carve into the eddy, but caught an edge on the seam, and I almost went end over end. I was out of control staring down the gut of a ferocious wood-sieve, still stabbing my paddle frantically at the water for some stability, which I just couldn't find.... I am too tall for these New Age playboats; they are not built for any boater taller than five-nine, and the center of rotation was not where I thought it would be. Midsize showoff pimp-daddies who like to throw down on every crease in the river might like this, but I do not.

I was hunched over the bow like a person diving into a pool that got emptied yesterday. Whacko! Bashed into the concrete bottom, flesh ripped off, a Burrito Beast with no teeth, f-cked-up for the rest of its life.

We all love Excess, and some of us have taken it straight over the high side from time to time -- and there is always Pain in that.... But there is also Fun, in the deadly element, and Fun is what you get when you climb into this monster in the first place. BOOM! Instant takeoff, no whimpering or squawking around like a fool with your teeth clamping down on your tongue and your mind completely empty of everything but fear.

No. This bugger digs right in and shoots you straight out the top, for good or ill.

On my first double-pump, I hit my tenth end in just over two seconds on a 2-foot pile with no sweet spot and a bad right kick. By the time I went for a split, I had thrown so many wheels that my ears were ringing and my mouth was watering uncontrollably and I thought I was going to lose my latest investment in Kentucky Fried.

And that's when it got its second wind. From the split it planed out effortlessly into a horrendous clean 1440 flatspin, then blasted hard to the side, climbed the pile, and whipped into a vertebrae-shattering blunt -- and after that, Bubba, you still have the Big Waves to try it on. Ho, ho.

I never got into the meaty holes, and I didn't get to throw down over any vertical drops. This is a shameful admission for a full-bore White Water Playboater, but let me tell you something, old sport: This kayak is simply too goddamn small and edgy to throw around in or near any kind of serious hydraulic unless you're ready to go straight down the gut with your nuts on fire and a silent scream in your throat.

When aimed in the right direction in the right state of mind, though, it has unnatural capabilities. This I unwittingly discovered as I made my approach to a violent, hole-filled blind ess-turn, saw that I was going way off line and that my only chance was to veer right over this monster ledge and screw it on totally, in a desperate attempt to leapfrog the whole mess by going airborne.

It was a bold and reckless move, but it was necessary. And it worked: I felt like Evil Knievel as I soared across the sucking froth with the sweat stinging my eyes and my jaws clamped together in fear. I tried to spit down into the hole as I passed it, but my mouth was too dry.... I boofed hard on the edge of the boil line and lost my grip for a moment as the Defenestrator began fishtailing crazily across the roiling seam. For two or three seconds I came face to face with the Burrito Beast....

But somehow the brute caught some green and straightened out. I pulled off a critical rail move on a log wedged in the last slot and then got the kayak under control long enough to roll up and pull off into a large swirling eddy where I popped the skirt and climbed out onto the sandy bank. My hands had seized up like claws and the rest of my body was numb. I felt nauseous and I cried for my mama, but nobody heard, then I went into a trance for 30 or 40 seconds until I was finally able to light a cigarette and calm down enough to paddle to the takeout. I was too hysterical to take the thing through any more rapids, so I went the whole way portaging anything over a Class II.

Whoops! What am I saying? Tall stories, ho, ho.... We are kayak people; we walk tall and we laugh at whatever's funny. We shit on the chests of the Weird....

But when we paddle high-performance kayaks, we paddle with immaculate sanity. Tending the Edges is very important to us. We might abuse a substance here and there, but only when it's right. The final measure of any paddler's skill is the ratio of his preferred rapid rating to the number of bad scars on his body and mind. It is that simple: If you paddle the meat and swim, you are a bad paddler. If you paddle the pudding and swim, you are a bad paddler. And if you are a bad paddler, you should not paddle kayaks.

The emergence of the playboat has heightened this equation drastically. Kayak technology has made such a great leap forward. Take the Defenestrator. You want optimum cruising technique with this bugger? Try screaming through big water Class V after three days of heavy rain -- and just then, you see a gargantuan boil line where you never remember there being one before. WHACKO. Meet the Burrito Beast.

Or maybe not: The Defenestrator is so finely engineered and balanced and rockered that you can do eddywheels, bow-stalls, and stern squirts through a boulder-choked terminal drop and get away with it. The kayak is not fast – but it is extremely quick and responsive, and it will do amazing things....It is a little like paddling the original Vincent Black Shadow, which would outrun a jet boat on the flats between the drops, but at the end, the jet boat would skim above the madness and the Vincent would not, and there was no point in trying to brace. WHAMO! The Burrito Beast strikes again. There is a fundamental difference, however, between the old Vincents and the new breed of playboats. If you paddled the Black Shadow at the high end of its capabilities for any length of time, you would almost certainly die. That is why there are not many life members of the Vincent Black Shadow Society. The Vincent was like a bullet that went straight; the Defenestrator is like the magic bullet that went sideways and hit JFK and the Governor of Texas at the same time. It was impossible. But so was my terrifying sideways leap across 6 feet of churning reversal in the Defenestrator. The kayak did it easily with the grace of a fleeing tomcat. The landing was so easy I remember thinking, goddamnit, if I had screwed it on a little more I could have gone a lot Further.

Maybe this is the new White Water Playboater macho. My kayak is so much edgier than yours that I dare you to paddle it, you lame little turd. Do you have the balls to paddle this BOTTOMLESS PIT OF CARTWHEELING TORQUE?

That is the attitude of the New Age playboat freak, and I am one of them. On some days they are about the most fun you can have with wet clothes on. The Vincent just killed you a lot faster than a modern playboat will. A fool couldn't paddle the Vincent Black Shadow more than once, but a fool can paddle a Defenestrator many times, and it will always be bloodcurdling kind of fun. That is the Curse of Hydraulic Power that has plagued me all my life. I am a slave to it. On my tombstone they will carve, "IT NEVER GOT WET ENOUGH FOR ME."

(Modified from and with apologies to Hunter S. Thompson)

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