Seaweed, Unwise

Relax:  To calm down; to become less severe or tense.

A friend of ours from The Program drove us to the airport for our Hawaii flight.  We were discussing what SuperK and I were going to do once we arrived on the island.  I was throwing out ideas about hiking and biking and snorkeling and kayaking and taking helicopter rides and digging for gold and wrestling wild boars, shit like that, when he said: "You know, you could just relax."

I paused for a couple of beats, pondering whether or not I should say what I really wanted to say, mindful of the concept of "restraint of pen and tongue," not that this ever stops me.

"Fuck relaxed," I offered.  "I don't do relaxed."

I said this in good spirits but without a trace of irony.  I wasn't being silly.  I was being honest.  My friend laughed.  He knows me and my sense of humor so he wasn't too surprised at the comment.  Lack of relax means I get a lot done.  It also means that I'm not . . . well . . . very relaxed.  Being calm is a strenuous exercise for me.  I have to work very, very hard at relaxing.  It's actually easier for me to dig ditches in sun baked Georgia clay than to sit in a chair and relax.

Type A, baby.  I'm at war with everything, all the time.  24/7 as the young people say.

The island of Kauai actually contains a pretty severe ecosystem.  There's a lot of rain which means a lot of mud and it's warm and humid which means, in conjunction with the rain, that the vegetation does not fuck around.  A wiser man might ponder all of the beautiful sand beaches and decide that heading their way was the better option.

Wise: Showing good judgment or the benefit of experience.

We have opted for several pretty tough hikes in this pretty tough ecosystem.  "Apocalyptic" is a word that I throw around too much but it sort of holds some water here.  I can hike when it's hot and when it's cold and when it's raining.  I can climb steep hills and come back down.  But slogging through slick mud lathered on sharp lava rocks has been quite the challenge.

Yesterday we opted for the Kayak ("2 miles down a gentle river") / Hike ("1 mile to a beautiful waterfall with a pool for cooling off") Experience.  A wiser man would have handed over the fifty five dollars per person, let the beefy guide punch him in the nose, then gotten brunch.  

The leisurely start to the tour featured a slog upriver (for those who aren't nautically inclined this is against the current which is not the way you want to go, generally speaking) with the flipping the kayak experience about halfway.  I had no idea it was so easy to flip a kayak.  It was a remarkably fast experience, sort of like slipping on ice.  One second you're upright and the next you're under the kayak, watching your Wet Sack float back down river.  There is nothing quite so amusing as a gangly middle aged man watching his wife paddle after the Wet Sack while simultaneously trying to reflip the kayak and then get back into the kayak.

Fair enough.  No one drowned and no shit was lost.

The trail was not muddy.  The trail was mud in standing water, slick mud in deep water that frequently reached mid calf, with tree roots and rocks obscured in the mud.  About 10 minutes into this part of the tour I heard SuperK mutter something about "just getting through this or just getting out of here alive or just gutting my husband with a fish boning knife."  Something along those lines.  I didn't quite catch what she said but the tone was venomous.  There was so much mud that we weren't able to wear our expensive, engineered hiking boots but rather water shoes that were designed for walking on sand.

We made it to the pool alive and I took a dip in the icy water after I stumbled and pitched over the rocks to get out to the middle.

It was fucking refreshing.

Anyway, we made it back alive with a great story to tell about an experience that sucked, frankly, while we were doing it.  I think this was a case of a tour company that had a full tour booked not wanting to cancel the tour.  I think they should have been more forthcoming about the conditions.  There was a nice Korean couple with two mildly overweight boys along, and they were not prepared for this experience.  The boys were the highlight of the tour as they slipped and slid in the mud in their completely inappropriate footwear, unspooling a continuous stream of Korean dialogue as they went along.

What to do today . . .