McKenzie River dory.

I’m searching for the name of a kind of boat: The McKenzie River dory, or the similar Rogue River dory. No where but Oregon? Well, no. The Skagit River is in northwestern Washington state, and I’m seeing one of these dories floating down it.

The dory is a big fat canoe with a flat bottom and a pretty intense rocker. It’s paddled with fixed oars rather than the hand-held paddles of a canoe.

I’m comparing it to a canoe, because I know canoes. If there’s one skill I learned during my childhood, it was how to maneuver a canoe. Kayaks, too. I was never all that masterful with it, but I can do it.

I was thinking back about being a little kid, on a trip down the Guadalupe River in central Texas, with my dad and I think a few other people. Probably my brother-in-law, I can’t remember who else. The Guadalupe is remarkable in that it’s quite beautiful in a git-off-my-land kinda way, and the most dangerous rapids are class III.

River rapids are rated according to difficulty and danger. V is are-you-out-of-your-fucking-mind? IV is I-dunno-man… III is you-can-probably-do-this. I think the rapids on this stretch of the Guadalupe are rated III just so the river doesn’t develop an inferiority complex. Every summer, millions of people float down it in innertubes, while stinkin’ drunk. OK, thousands, not millions. If you’re in a boat, the real danger is that you’ll pull hard around a rock and some dumbass in a tube will be right there in your way, messing up your line, and you’ll run into them, and they’ll start telling you to watch where you’re going, as if theirs is the legitimate indignity.

It’s like that.

However…

I’m with my dad and some people and probably Bill, and I’m in my brother’s kayak (the red fiberglass one he made, or maybe it was Albert that made it… I can never remember). A whitewater kayak, for those of you not familiar, is a coffin-shaped drowning machine. OK, not really. It’s a boat with a hole in the top big enough to stick your torso out of, and you wear a skirt around your waist that seals up the hole. You’re seated on your seat, and you have pegs for your feet so you can brace against the inside of the boat. Because the whole point of paddling a kayak is to turn the hull of the boat into an appendage. The boat is supposed to respond to the slightest twitch. You’ve got a long, two-bladed paddle, so you can turn yourself into a human paddlewheel. The long paddle also means you can brace yourself in extreme ways, extending your center of gravity waaay outside the boat. This gets back to the idea of the boat as appendage… You want to be able to maneuver nimbly.

I’ll start again: I’m with my dad and some other people, and probably Bill, but I’m ahead of them. I left the Devil’s Playground rapid, which is a really nice place. Standing waves to surf across, eddies to poke around in. I’m not super-ultra-duper kayaker, but I did a few ferries and dad signaled that we should move on, and so I did. Something kept them behind, though. Unfortunately, I don’t notice.

The rapid after Devil’s Playground is Big Rock Rapid. It’s a classic V shape with a boulder at the point. Not even really a rapid, more like an obstacle. Certainly not one deserving a real name, so it’s just Big Rock.

I’ll explain a ‘classic V.’ No, it’s not a Gibson electric guitar. It’s a kind of rapid where there are some shallower spots along the bank across from each other, so the current of the river bunches up in the middle. This gives the current a V shape. You deal with this by going down the middle of the V, because that’s obviously where the river is deepest and you won’t run into anything. Except in the case of Big Rock rapids, because the big rock is in the neck of the V.

I pulled into an eddie to turn around and look back for dad. Except it didn’t work. I have no idea why. But I was now pointed downstream, aground on the Texas limestone bed that made one of the shallow sides of the V. And through some fluke, the rock had been shaped by the river to be the exact shape and angle that the force of the current could push the side of the boat and cause it to rise up onto the rock.

And if it were only pushing the boat up flat, that would be fine. But the current is pushing the boat further up the side of the rock, and gravity is pulling it back down, and so basically it’s capsizing. In slow motion. While I’m trying to think.

I’m leaning up towards the shore. I’m trying to counterbalance against the force of a 500cfs river current, which is simply not going to work. All that stuff about the kayak as appendage? Forget it. You’re supposed to do all that stuff *before* you end up pinned to a rock.

I could try to brace the paddle on the bed of the river and maybe pivot the stern further into the stream, pushing me off the rock (or perhaps splintering the kayak). I could try the same thing, except to pull the nose out, which, well.. No.

The kayak continues to roll over on top of me.

And there’s always that Big Rock. It’s staring me in the face. If I pull off this thing, I’m probably going to end up pinned on the Big Rock, too. And it’s worse, because it’s in the middle of the current.

I’m pretty hazy on how all this resolved itself. It’s amazing how a stressful situation makes an impression, but the resolution fades away. I’m pretty sure that, eventually, I gave in. I took a deep breath, leaned forward across the deck of the kayak (downstream, for less knocking around), and flipped right over. I’d never mastered the roll, so the plan was to exit the boat, which I did. I missed the Big Rock completely, and came up in the deep green of the pool below the rapid.

I had faced foolish danger alone, the kind of danger that comes from lack of ability. Dad hadn’t even rounded the bend yet. But, as with most things, giving up can be the best tactic.

And that’s what I was thinking about while I was driving up the North Cascades Highway eating an ice cream cone, and I was thinking it because I saw some folks fishing from a McKenzie River dory on the Skagit River, and I was wondering if I could get a solo canoe on craigslist, so I could see the Skagit bald eagles come winter.

I should really just move back to the bay area.

Anyone going to the MakerFaire?

But for the long lines at the bookstore, I would have bought the last issue of Make magazine. It has a how-to for building a rollfilm panoramic pinhole camera.

Oh, and BLDGBLOG is going to be part of another event, this time in NYC.

There was this movie called Cube, which I’m pretty sure I wrote about here.

Cube was pretty good, for a low-budget high-concept walk through the darker reaches of existentialism. Sort of a nihilistic torture chamber version of the Twilight Zone, where each character is a stand-in for an aspect of the psyche, and how all must set aside their divergent motives, work together, and solve the puzzle. And the puzzle is a stand-in for existence. Plus it had Ezri Dax, and some other Canadian actors who went on to do well in Hollywood.

So it was a good thing, if not a happy movie to bring a date.

Hypercube takes the same basic idea, and screws it up. There’s no philosophy, it’s not an allegory for anything, it’s just a bunch of people who are loosely connected to a defense contractor, who’ve been sent in to a pan-dimensional, spacetime-bending torture chamber to die.

In both films, the titular Cube is a series of cube-shaped rooms connected by doorways on all sides. Some rooms are traps, some rooms are not. All look the same. And they might be moving, rearranging themselves. In Hypercube, there’s the added idea that some cubes move in time as well, or that some speed up time or slow it down, and that gravity works differently in different cubes. None of this is really explored, though. I can think of a couple of interesting scenarios this might yield, but apparently I’m more creative than the scriptwriters.

Anyway. Avoid.

There’s also a prequel out, called Cube Zero. I almost got it instead, but the DVD cover had more gore than I was looking for. No, just existential dread for me, thanks.