 |
Baja Babes: To Yield or Not to Yield Appalachia, December 2002 That night we slept without incident, and the next morning, while we were still in our sleeping bags rubbing our eyes awake, the dolphins reappeared, jumping up in the water to greet us good morning. As everyone oohed and aaahed, I went to the kitchen, eager to try out my newly learned skill. The first stove lit without a hitch. Confident, I set up the second stove for eggs. Feeling as though I'd just won an Olympic gold, I lit the third stove for coffee. We had no coffeepot and were using a lidless pot with the coffee in a sock to filter the grounds. It came out too weak, so Chris suggested we try "cowboy coffee," which is made by dumping the grounds directly into the water, then swinging the pot in a circle using centrifugal force to keep in the liquid. No one else volunteered to swing it, so reminding myself, to serve, to strive, and not to yield, I figured this shouldn't be such a big deal. I counted to three, took a deep breath, and swung the pot in a perfect 360-degree arc, not losing a drop. The other Baja Babes, as we now called ourselves, screamed and applauded. As we sipped our coffee, Terry pointed toward the sea and asked, "What's the Beaufort?" No one knew. She explained that back when there were sailing ships, seamen estimated wind force by the sea's appearance, but there was no consistency in the language in ship logs. In the mid-1800s, a young British naval officer, Francis Beaufort, invented the idea of numbers to describe the wind, and in 1853 his system was adopted worldwide and is still used today. "Zero" denotes glass calm, or "butt calm," as Terry put it. "One" is little scalelike riffles; "two" is waves, "three" white caps, on up to "twelve," which is hurricane conditions and certain death on the water. That morning when we shoved our kayaks into the sea, Terry asked, "What Beaufort is it?" And we called out, "Beaufort one." It never got any rougher. We developed a routine: Wake up. I'd light the stove and make the coffee, as no one else wanted to try. This exonerated me from any other cooking duties, which was just fine. We'd eat, and during breakfast Terry and Tina would teach us about navigation or about tides or about the kayaks of the Eskimos. Then we'd pack and paddle off. We kayaked side by side, using our newly learned knowledge, joking that we were sophisticated New York women, and then cracking up over the silliest things. By the time we pulled into our final campsite, we were old friends and old salts. Our last evening we went for a night paddle with neon glow sticks as our only source of light in the pitch blackness. "Look at your paddles in the water," said Terry. "It's phosphorescence." It looked as though hundreds of miniature sparklers glittered right beneath the surface where our paddles stirred up the water. We made figure-eights with our hands and paddles, creating our own dazzling underwater light show. And when we headed back toward camp, Tina stood at the edge of the water guiding us back to shore like an airplane controller, a glow stick in each hand.
|
|||
 |
