Appalachia, December 2002

By Margie Goldsmith

"Okay, now remember," said Terry, the instructor. "Once you're upside down in the water, knock, knock, knock; shimmy, shimmy, shimmy; pull your spray skirt forward first, then toward you; and out you go. Ready?"

Ready? Did she really expect me to intentionally capsize my kayak, hang upside down in the water, knock on the hull three times, shimmy with my arms, and pull myself out of the sprayskirt in a "wet exit"? What if I couldn't get out of the boat? Remember the Outward Bound motto, I reminded myself: To serve, to strive, and not to yield. I hadn't yielded to fear when they made me learn the "stingray shuffle" to enter the water. This meant moving my legs in big, sweeping circles so a stingray hiding under the sand would move aside instead of stinging me in the ankle with his long barbed tail. Don't yield, I told myself this time. But I didn't want to dump myself upside down into the water.

I was on an all-women sea-kayaking trip to Baja because, as an Outward Bound board member, I'm expected to find adventurous people who care about the wilderness and introduce them to the organization. Some people think Outward Bound is only for teens, but there are more than a hundred adult courses. Chris (my cohost) and I had chosen Baja as our destination because we could paddle to deserted islands, sleep outside under a galaxy of stars, and be silly women without a care in the world.

Four had canceled, so we were six, all of us from New York City, in our late 40s to early 50s, most with teenage children. Three of us had kayaked before and three were newbies. We arrived at the Loreto airport together, and by the time we'd been driven 40 minutes to a deserted beach, we'd already bonded.

Our instructors, Terry and Tina, told us to change into bathing suits, and then they issued gear: kayak, helmet, three dry sacks for personal belongings, sprayskirt, paddle, PFD (personal flotation device), bilge pump, tarp, pad, sleeping bag, liner, snorkel, mask and fins, one coffee mug, one plastic bowl, and one plastic spoon. I was a little taken aback. On my other Outward Bound trips, we'd only been given sleeping bags — what was all this stuff? And there was more — mountains of food for the next five days, which we had to cram into dry sacks. Thank goodness there were plenty of snacks.

"Let's do the duffel shuffle," said Tina. This meant taking our clothes from our suitcases and repacking them into dry sacks. We learned to enter, exit, and paddle a kayak. Then it was time for the wet exit.