Truly an absurd (and, by the end, surreal) experience. I called the day before, was asked a quick…read morebarrage of questions (Kayaks, canoes, or tubes? What time? You know where it's at?), and found myself wondering why the person answering the phone had not asked for my name or phone number. It turns out that these details are trivial to a man with so much on his mind.
Cut to the next day. My girlfriend and I are excited (we'd been looking forward to this for a month) as we hurriedly assemble our waterproofed supplies, sunscreen, bathing suits, etc. We make it to Fran's Country Grill (that is the address found above; the official address is a P.O. Box) at 12 P.M. sharp and... nothing. 20 minutes pass, so I give the number another call. "Oh, yep, I'll be there in 10 minutes." Still no inquiry regarding my name or phone number, which still had me scratching my head. I was still scratching my head 35 minutes later (don't overscratch those heads, kids), when we finally see a truck with the company name pull up. By this time we were both pretty steamed, and had been almost ready to cut our losses and spend our day off doing something else. If only he had taken 5 minutes longer, the rest of this... event could have been avoided.
We have a bewildering 10 minute talk with a man who did not seem to introduce himself (and who did not ask my name), but who would later turn out to be named Will. This part is kind of a blur, but he apologizes for being late (he had, apparently, been left waiting by another group... understandable, though a phone call would have been nice), gives us directions to a parking area near the Perdido River, and tells us that he will meet us there in ten minutes. 25 minutes later (it is now nearing 1:30 P.M.), he shows up with a canoe, and this part is kind of a blur too.
Let me explain: he seems like a personable fellow, but he talks. And talks. He told us about this particular landing, and then about the landing a mile down the river, about the nature trail leading there, and then about the local government agency which was cleaning things up, and then about how there is a place that we can reserve for up to 25 people at the landing down the river, and how we can make these reservations online, all the while occasionally veering back to the issue at hand: the river, how long the trip will take, etc. Imagine all of this delivered very rapidly, with 5 discrete ideas touched upon each minute. Dizzying and time consuming. I think that about 15 minutes passed.
We finally get into the car, and something a bit traumatic happened. Will, upon getting a captive audience, becomes part bible scholar and part conspiracy theorist. Ignoring all social cues, he started in on a rich, savory stew of the following topics: the dead sea scrolls; how Jews influenced Google to replace "Yahweh" with "The Name" (these two topics took up much of our time); how the Jews prefer Elohim to YHWH, the former referring to many gods (Ra was one example), which Christians think refers to the trinity (but apparently doesn't); something about how Muslims consider Christians infidels for believing in a trinity, and how Jews consider both groups infidels... I'm going to stop here. I want to emphasize that I showed no interest whatsoever in any of these topics, except that I thought it was interesting that Google had indexed the dead sea scrolls. All he got from me otherwise were a variety of guttural sounds along the lines of "hm."
Moving forward (my apologies, gentle reader, but I want you to be prepared): the Mayan calendar, 2012, and how it's going to be a catastrophe. This was all said with a gleam of zealotry that was not present in any of his previous intimations, as I believe that he was genuinely trying to keep us from harm. That did not stop this part from making me feel slightly used and trod upon. Apparently my girlfriend and I were just as "in the dark" as the last couple, as we did not know about the following: that the planets will line up in 2012, and that it will do "all sorts of stuff" to the tides; that not only the planets will lines up, but the SUN will line up, causing who knows what calamity; that astronomers are either ignoring or covering these phenomena up (look up 2012 on wikipedia... there's nothing to cover up, of course); interspersed with these grave admonitions was something about the Antikythera mechanism, an archaeological find that...
I'm going to stop again, just because I'm tired, and you must be too. Suffice it to say that we didn't get in the water until about 2:15, and that all we could talk about was Will. We both felt uneasy, slightly disturbed, and more than a little upset. It's no fun to be held captive to social niceties (which I have since discarded, being on the internet) in a moving car with a stranger. We didn't know what, exactly, to be offended about, as his hour of speaking seemed to have no central thesis or upshot. We left the experience feeling drained.
The river was nice.
