The Muffin Man And White Water Boogie Boarding, Baby...

I am inescapably following along the bell curve from “tot” to “boy” to “big boy” to “young buck” to “young stud” to “stud” to “stud muffin” to just plain old “muffin“...

I am becoming the muffin man.

And I suppose its OK. I’m 44 now. That’s OLD when I was young. When you are OLD, you are not supposed to be lean and fit and able to do all the sports and move with tons of power and agility and grace.

Thank goodness for that!

“If I were the muffin man... the muffin man, the muffin man...”

Nowadays, I read more, daydream more, remember more, sit in a chair in the backyard and just watch more.

The birds come in and feed. The dogs wrestle. We have our pool...

But it was not that long ago when I was still game for anything. If it were sporty and adventurous, and I was asked if I wanted to try it, I’d say “sure,” and off we’d go. The day would start early. I’d get wound up and excited and start singing blips from different songs “...the muffin man... the muffin man...” Young guys would look to me for my calmness under pressure, and we’d all have a good time.

The last one of my great stabs at a new sport where I said “sure” far too assuredly, was when I was asked by a small and wiry tile setter if I wanted to go try white water boogie boarding with him up at Chili Bar, on the American River.

I told him I had done quite a bit of cheap Tahiti running on that stretch of river, and it would be fun to try a boogie board. I figured, if this scrawny little guy could run those rapids and want to go back and do it some more, then it would be something I could do.

It sounded like a kick. It sounded right up my alley. It sounded wacky enough to be something I could really enjoy.

I hated every minute of it.

I used to do a lot of abalone diving on the Pacific coast, and so I had my own wetsuit and I brought this along. This was not a surfer’s suit but a 1/4 inch thick full jacket and matching overalls. It used to fit me just fine, but it had been left out in the sun once for a few days and this caused the wrinkles in the rubber to harden and the suit to become too tight. (Well, OK, that, and I was in my later thirties and was not quite as wispy thin as I had been when I bought the suit.)

I told the guy who had the boogie boards I had my suit, and he said good, because he didn’t have one big enough for me, anyway.

This “friend of a friend” had modified real boogie boards by attaching handles to them, and was trying to make a go of being a white water boogie board outfitter. This was his third attempt at a trip with newbies, and he still did not understand that we had needs and concerns, nor do I think he understood the dangers, and he certainly didn’t know what to do with me...

Once you get in the water and start out, you are pretty much committed to finish. There really is no getting out and giving up. There wasn’t enough road access for that. You started down the river. You had to finish the trip. Unless, of course, it was an absolute emergency. I got in my suit and immediately knew there was something wrong. My suit was all wrinkled, like I said, making it really really tight and hard to get on. I had never had that much trouble getting my wet suit on (remind me to tell you of the time my sister tried on a wetsuit in a store and got it stuck halfway on and half way off, her titties hanging out the front and the only help a lecherous looking young man who worked the counter...) I had to lay on my back and really work each leg of my over-alls on and it felt like I was being squeezed from ankle to waist once I did. The jacket took the help of a couple of people and fully suited I felt like I was already in a panic. The suit squeezed me so much my heart rate went immediately up, trying to pump blood into my arms and legs through the giant pressure bandage I had just applied.

I hoped getting in the water would help loosen up the suit, and it did, but just not enough.

I was with a group of twenty year olds I didn’t know, introduced by the tile-setter who was actually the young cousin of the man who hired me.

Now I knew the names of all the young new boogie boarders, and they knew mine. They were all little guys, with wiry frames, and lots of room in their wetsuits. I was the big guy, and the old guy, and the guy with the big, dumb ego who would not admit to being defeated before I even started.

My heart was pounding. Thump thump thump.

I imagine my blood pressure was double what it usually was.

When you panic, your heart rate jumps and your heart feels like it is about to explode in your chest. I really am not a panicker, but this is how I felt inside my suit. I didn’t let this on.

“I am not a muffin man, a muffin man, a muffin man..”

The guy leading this group got us on our boards and taught us how to paddle. Basically, you paddled across the current, and you paddled like a surfer, and you laid on your board on your belly like a performing killer whale waiting for a fish. You had flippers on your feet that you kicked while you did the crawl with your arms, and this is how you picked your lanes for running the rapids. Once you were set up to enter a set of rapids, you were committed to mostly just hanging on.

My boogie board was too small for me. There was not enough board length to rest my thighs on and so I had to use my back muscles to hold my legs up, and before we were even started down the river, my back was in cramps.

I was about to say to hell with this when the group just took off down the river, and thirty-something-getting-close-to-forty me, took off after them.

We ran the first set of rapids you encounter right after you set off. They were mild and amusing, but my heart pounding and my cramping back were already taking away my joy. This whole trip was going to be an exercise in tolerating severe pain and hoping not to have a stroke at the same time. There was also, of course, the drowning issue and the hitting your body up against big sharp rocks, issue, and so on and so forth.

I remember hating the fact that you had to hold your head back to see where you were going. This made my neck cramp and I just wanted to put my head down and float with a mai tai... If you didn’t paddle and kick in places, you fell out of line, and each time I paddled and kicked with the young guys, I felt like I was swimming in a Hurricane, and losing my last remaining strength.

“I could drown here.” I thought many times.

“This isn’t fun.” I thought a lot.

“Big rock!” I screamed inside my pounding head, as I hung on.

We weren’t even one third down and I was exhausted beyond anything I had ever experienced. The guy leading the group pulled over and wanted us all to swim over with him. He was going to give instructions on the big rapid set called “Meat Grinder”. I remembered Meat Grinder from when we used to run this river in a cheap inflatable kayak. Now THAT was fun.

The only trouble was, I had no energy left for swimming out of the current. I tried, but I failed. I mean, I really tried. I swam with every ounce of energy I had, kicking and stroking my arms, my heart rate soaring and my head turning crimson (I could feel the blood building in there, the way you feel blood in your finger if you wrap a rubber band around it for awhile). The group of twenty something year old boogie boarders all pulled over into a quiet pool, and I was pulled into Meat Grinder with just enough energy to keep me hanging on to my too small for me boogie board. I hit rocks, bumped and jostled under sprays of water, twisted, spun upside down a few times, but I hung on. At the end of the last part of Meat Grinder, I was pushed near the bank and I swam for my life and got out of the current. I crawled up onto the bank and started ripping off my suit. If I didn’t get the suit off, I would die. That’s what I thought. I don’t panic usually, but it appeared that I was. I was ripping stuff off of myself. The helmet. The life jacket. I was clawing at the wetsuit jacket and trying to get this off of me. It got stuck behind me on my arms, and I thrashed and thrashed and tried to get it hooked on a tree so I could pull against it. I was walking in flippers around trees while I thrashed, trying to find the right branch, the right hook...

A couple of the other young guys came down and pulled in and found me thrashing around half naked, trying to get the jacket off and doing the herky jerky. They thought I had lost it, and in some ways, I had. The suit around my legs was causing my feet to swell with blood, and I felt like I had little time.

“Get the fuck over here and help me!” I yelled at these poor young guys. They came over and I yelled some more.

“Help me get this goddamn jacket off. It’s killing me!”

They looked at me like maybe a jacket like this was exactly what I needed.

“Come on, man! It is cutting off my circulation!”

They sort of got it and came over and pulled on the too tight jacket and we eventually got it off and there was a relief in my hands and arms.

“Help me get my pants off!”

I may have crossed some young man code here.

I didn’t care.

“Come on, man, my feet are on fire!” I sat down and started pushing down my pants.

“Grab it here and pull!’

They pulled. The two of them stripped me down to Speedos and I rolled on my stomach and hugged the earth, my heart rate and my pressure was still loud inside me but by lying like that and taking deep and slowing breaths, I was able to get back down into normal range. But I was spent. Everything about me was worn out and done. Young dudes one by one pulled up on their boogie boards and got out to look at me.

“He’s old and out of shape.” is what I heard everyone of them think while I was lying there. “We shouldn’t have brought him.”

I wanted to tell them all about the wetsuit that was too tight, that I wasn’t old at all, that the suit had made a tourniquet on each of my limbs and that I really could keep up with all of you young bucks...

...but I was too busy gasping like a fish to say too much of anything.

You could tell this crowd wasn’t used to being patient and considerate of the well being and health of an older fella. They weren’t very good at it.

I gasped and huffed and calmed myself and tried to stand up, discovering that I had very little left in my wobbly legs.

This was all a bit embarrassing.

“Anybody have a knife? I need a knife.”

The leader of this motley bunch had a Swiss Army knife tied to his wet suit. He pulled it off and gave it to me. I cut the sleeves off my wet suit top, making it into a vest. I did the same with my over alls. They were now shorts. I kept explaining to the on-looking youth, that my suit was to blame. That it really wasn’t me. I was no muffin man. I was still on the stud-muffin section of the bell curve. I worked hard for a living. I played sports. I was just too constricted and these scissors would cure everything.

Some of the boys started to believe me and headed further down the river to go play in some rapids while they waited. Some of the others had that “we got ourselves a loony” look, and kept an eye on me.

The American River was snow melt and this was late spring, the end of May, I think. Which meant it was COLD. I got on my board and sucked it up, leaving rubber parts on the side of the river bank, feeling like a litter bug.

My back ached and my neck cramped and ached and I did very little but just hold on and try not to drown, and I made it to the bottom of the run, in one piece, my legs and arms completely numb, my pride, bruised but still intact.

Yes, I think I will have another muffin, man...