Jonnie D. And The Over Inflated Tahiti--

I was looking at this story from the wrong angle, it seems, which led me down the wrong google path into naked women with enormous backsides and front sides (and insides) and other unsavory sides of a culture I am adept at avoiding.

brbrbrrrbbbrrr!!!

I am glad I got out alive.

The way I SHOULD HAVE been looking at this story was from the space between the two sevlar sidetubes as in this picture, which make up the general shape of this kayak, and hold its paddlers in.

This is what we all out here in the wild west call a "Tahiti". I think it was the name of one particular inflatable kayak, but we use it for all of them now, sort of like how we mostly all call tissues "kleenex" even though we might be blowing our noses with competing brands.

So this is a Tahiti, and there are other Tahitis, some of much better quality.

I got a call from my friend Charles, (the "noticer") maybe seven years ago, asking me if I wanted to go white water kayaking with he and his son. Charles had gotten a hold of three, high-end white-water "Tahitis" and was wanting to do a simple and easy class3 run on the Upper Rogue and would I like to come?

Sure. I'll come.

Trouble was, at the last minute, an ex-girlfriend of a mutual friend of Charles' and mine had bumped into Charles, and invited herself along no kayak and no invite not withstanding...

This was Jonnie D. 5 feet tall. 3 feet wide. All of it from the waist to the knees. From the waist up, Jonnie D was a size 2 or thereabouts. Something in her make-up simply packed all the extra pounds on her backside below the waist, as if nature knew she would be sitting for long spells on cold bleacher seats and was getting prepared. I mean, Jonnie D had BACK!

Which was all fine and good. She carried it OK. She didn't throw it around too far to the left or the right which would have pulled her off her center. She didn't chafe too badly in the thighs. She could get around and teach her art and buy her groceries and swim naked in the creek and climb her stairs to her house. She was a highly functional girl with a monstrous butt. That was all. She could kayak a class 3 with the rest of us. Sure. In fact, she'd look NORMAL sitting in a kayak. And she really wanted to come.

Charles is a nice guy. He said "If Scottie thinks its alright, then you can come."

I said "If you can rent your own kayak, you are welcome to come with us."

Charles' son said "Crap," and it was decided. Jonnie D. would rent a kayak and come with us.

Now the thing about a story like this, is that YOU HAVE GOT TO SEE IT. If you don't see it in your mind's eye, then you won't really "get it". This story is for the imaginative who can make their own pictures. I am simply gonna give you the facts as they occured, and let you blow them up in your mind or die on the vine...

There is nothing else I can do.

If you take a cheap Sevlar Tahiti and you fill it up at a gas station with their air nozzles on a cold morning, and then tie this Sevlar Tahiti on to the rack of your black car and drive for an hour and then leave the kayak on your car for another couple of hours while you unpack your tent and then let the ladies make a nest in a campground while you pack the beer in ice, then the tightly inflated kayak will begin to undergo a change. The sun will strike the cold air inside the kayak and begin to warm it. The warmer air will do what warmer air does everywhere, it will begin to expand. This will cause PRESSURE on the inside walls of the kayak and it will begin to STRETCH.

This is just a basic law of nature, folks. Nothing new here. I ain't making this shit up.

Now what happens in the life cycle of a cheap inflatable rental kayak over the course of a summer, is that this proceess happens way more than it should. Ignorant tourist rent the kayak , then they fill it too full while it is cold, then they leave it in the sun and it stretches. By the end of summer, those graceful-looking tubes that give the kayak its shape that run along the sides have been stretched to the point where they are twice as big around as they once were.

Now think about that for a minute. TWICE AS BIG AROUND. What that means, is, in order to get sufficient pressure inside the kayak via air to give the kayak shape and rigidity, you have to inflate the side tubes to twice their normal diameters. OK. You can do that with air. You blow it up. It is done.

We did this to Jonnie D's rental inflatable, and it filled up and took its shape, and became rigid enough to sit in and paddle. All of it. Just fine. But...

(now the really in-tuned should have picked up on this already...)

If the side tubes are swollen to twice their diameter, then it leaves only about six inches of space between them. That is another basic law of physics. When you consume space with something, it is gone. That's just how that works.

So Charles and I had inflated the newly rented kayak (an hour down the road, mind you) and discovered the flaw. The kayak had been over-stretched all summer, and now it had two huge inflated sides and only six inches of sitting space in the middle.

Which would have been OK if Charles' son had been amenable to giving up his very expensive and well-engineered white water Tahiti and stuck his skinny teen-aged butt in the cheap rented one. But we couldn't bring ourselves to ask him to make that sacrifice. You see, we had agreed to let Jonnie D. come with us out of kindness and a shared history, but we were in no mood to be too accomodating. Jonnie D. invited herself. She had an agreement. She rented the kayak. This was her kayak.

End of discussion.

The trouble was, how do you get something 3 feet wide into a space only six inches wide? I mean, granted, it was rubber. And it was a little flexible. There was hope for Jonnie D's ass to fit in that space with a little forethought and alot of pulling and tugging.

Jonnie D. looked at the space and knew she had reached a turning point. She either tried to get in. Or she took the kayak back and went home.

"No problem!" she said enthusiastically. "You guys just help me out a bit."

We were happy to do that.

"You pull that side open. Scottie, you get the other. OK. You ready? I'm ready. Let's go."

Charles pulled on his side of the rubber tube. I pulled on mine. We were able to get the two sides apart about two feet. There was a foot to go. Jonnie D sat down in this gap and began to wiggle. She wiggled for over a minute, even pouring some mineral water out of a bottle on her sides to lubricate them. Eventually, and with Charles and I tugging and pulling like crazy, her ass fell through the fattest part of the sides and hit bottom. She was in. Great!

But she was six feet from water.

Hmmmm...

Rather than have her attempt to get back out and try again in the water, I decided that the best thing to do was to simple carry her and her kayak to the water and throw her in. The three of us did just that, too, and Jonnie D was now waterborn, floating on a calm section of the Upper Rogue with her two paddles on a single pole, and she was quite a happy woman. The cold water splashing into her very narrow crack as she practiced her strokes.

Cold Water... In her crack... Now she had to go pee...

"Hey guys. I have to go pee."

"Go in the boat." I told her.

"Sure, just pee in the boat," said Charles.

Charles' son said, "You're not gonna pee in the boat? That's gross."

"Well, we can't get her out of the boat. It took us too much effort to get her in there."

"I'm not gonna pee in the boat."

"I'm not gonna help you get in and out just to pee."

Charles was on my side with this one. "Yeah. Just pee in the boat and then wash it out with water. No big deal."

Jonnie D. peed in the boat. There was no way to wash it out. There was so little volume left on the inside of the boat to do anything. If you peed there, it stayed there. End of that discussion. On the bright side, of course, was the fact that the cold water in the crack in front of her, between her legs, was now warm. A warm crack is... well... better than a cold one, I think we can all agree.

Jonnie D was not one of the "all". She protested horribly. Charles and I set our attention on the noisy little air compressor we had that ran off the cigarette lighter of the truck. What was she saying? Hell, I have no idea. You? Not a clue...

One thing that must be mentioned here is that Charles and I had at one time spent over a month helping build the house Jonnie D. now lived in. The trouble was, we were helping her boyfriend who was a friend of ours, and when they split up Jonnie D had manipulated the situation and the math in her favor, getting the house and not accounting for the labor that was donated to our friend in the process. In other words, there was a tiny hint of payback beneath the surface of Charles' and my actions. Nothing too malicious. But we were in no mood to be too accomodating either. If Jonnie D wanted our friendship, she was going to have to earn it back incrementally, and this may or may not be a start. We would see.

But for now, deal with the pee between your legs. We're busy. We're inflating our very expensive white water kayaks and we'll be with you in a moment.

For four hours, I never knew Jonnie D had a butt or legs or feet. We never saw them. The trip was a mild ride through some very scenic country. We would stop and go for swims and find rocks to jump off of, and all the while Jonnie D. would be trapped in her kayak which was baking in the hot sun and getting tighter and tighter. She was collecting pee, too. Cold water does that to people. It makes you collect pee. Most of us collect it in a toilet or under a tree, or in rare cases, a jar, but Jonnie D collected it in the tiny space between her legs. She did her best to wash it out with splashes of fresh water, but you knew by the way she crinkled her nose...

But I'll give her this. She never complained.

I somehow think she knew this was a test for her. I think she knew whose side we were on with the whole house thing, and I think she knew there was an initiation of sorts she was to go through before we saw her like we once saw her. Small. Nutty. Funny.

If she could remain pleasant under these circumstances, then she might be allowed back "in".

I'm just guessing, since I never really asked her. But it seems to fit the situation.

It is a difficult thing to retell four joyous hours of watching someone stuck inside two swollen tubes trying to keep up and keep a cheerful disposition as you paddled down a langorous river, running mild and amusing rapids every now and then. I don't think I will even try. Suffice it to say, I was amused to the point of making a joke about the situation as often as one came to me, and Charles and his son just smiled and laughed and paddled and slowed to wait for Jonnie D.

When we arrived where we were to collect our things and get out of the water, we had one final and immense laugh. Jonnie D wanted help getting out of her boat. The three of us had already taken off our wet shoes, had deflated and rolled up our boats, and had no intention of putting our shoes back on and retrieving Jonnie D....

"Just turn over and walk over here. You'll be fine. We can't walk on that gravel without shoes, it's too sharp!"

Jonnie D. could see that she had to do what she must. She turned over and tried to put her feet down in the shallow water. The kayak clung to her backside like a banana-shaped sea shell, and her feet struggled to hit bottom as the kayak refused to immerse itself to accomodate. This forced her face in the water. Jonnie D. blew bubbles.

Finally, after much spitting out water and cursing and splashing with her arms, Jonnie D. emerged from the water and on to the rocky beach, her butt in the air and her head forced down low to the ground by the inflated kayak that refused to let go of her enormous backside. She reminded me of one of those silly creatures that comes from the silly sea in an old Godzilla movie. The way she walked. The way she waddled. The whining sound she made...

I lost it. I enjoyed over three minutes of laughing myself to tears. I rolled around. I held my cramping gut. I watched as Jonnie D started using her hands as additional legs. She was now walking with her hands and feet, four legged, toting a monstrously inflated thing on her butt and laughing all the while calling for help.

It was a sixty foot crawl that I would give anything to have had a video of. A girl with a kayak...

Coming ashore.

Now ain't that just too funny...

When Jonnie D. finally got to us, Charles and I figured we'd just pull the thing off.

We figured wrong. It took everything we both had, with help from Charles' son, to spread the swollen sides and release the ass from its captivity.

Now if you are sharp, you would ask "Why not just let out the air?"

And I would answer, "Now what fun would THAT BE?"

The ass released with a pop and Jonnie D. flew to the ground. She smelled of urine and her inner thighs were red and chafed. But she had made us all laugh.

That was the main thing.