July 24, 2004

Paddling Youngs Bay

There is a large bay down the hill from my house with a meager pair of channels fishboats use now and then to get to a boat yard and a couple minor ramps and mooring spots. Three drawbridges gird it, one a major barrier to highway commerce when it goes up, and the other two just small inconveniences for a byway to the main road.

In the grand scheme of things it is not much of a bay: shallow for the most part, surrounded with diked swampland on two sides and buttressed with riprap on my side for the benefit of a main arterial. Abandoned pilings show where a railway paralleled the shore and locate an old cannery or two. It's all sand and mud and has no "attractions" except it once was a part of the marine scene here: many gill net boats were built in yards now defunct; nice runs of silvers and chinooks have been netted off it; gillnetters raced in August during the Regatta; and, before the causeway went in, kids skinny-dipped at Bare Butt Beach.

The causeway has silted it in and morphed the bay. It is mostly a discarded commercial waterway. And it has been mostly neglected by me, also, these ten years of paddling, except for the obligatory christening of a new stitch and glue boat or a test run for other necessaries.

But, I have been hitting it at high water half a dozen times this summer, and I'm beginning to understand it better. It has moods. It has color. It has flavor. It is never the same twice.

Some days it shines and preens and I slide smoothly under the drawbridges, relaxed and lost in thought. The water is kind and soothing. I am in a reverie and the bay is just a vehicle for private thoughts.

Other days it bucks and snorts, running a sharp sea off the main river, demanding the occasional slap brace and good for a few yards of surfing when I work at it. Those days the itty bitty tide rips show their dander and strut under my keel. I ride over and through, but hear the bay playing little slaptunes against me, as if to say, "Wait a while and we'll get you down here!"

The local coffee shop is at one end, where defunct shipways strike shore on a plot a carpenter owns. He has plans for it: a motel maybe; condos to buy; a paddle place. But now there is a car rental in an old home, a stockbroker next door, a rough ramp, and the latte crowd.

I break my runs with a double espresso, slopping my wetness inside, exchanging damp bills for stimulation. The throng is puzzled by it: "Where did you come from?" "Why are you wet?" "Where's your boat?" (The reeds hide it.) They never quite say it, but it is plain they think I'm a little goofy.

The bay is a different element. It makes me into a different person. And within sight of thousands of others, who may look, but do not feel its thrust and slide, its ooze and chop.

It looks kinda boring.

It's not.
---
Dave Kruger
Astoria, OR

Copyright 2003 by Dave Kruger.
May not be reproduced or redistributed without author's permission.
Originally posted on Paddlewise mailing list on 7/24/2004.
Republished here with permission.