Inflatable Kayak Blog

(Candace Clayton is an author who’s written novels, poetry and other short stories. She was kind enough to write this fictional adventure story specifically for the Inflatable Kayak Blog about ‘The Traveling Man’, a kayaker who tells us a tale about a youthful adventure with his buddies on the river where he grew up. We hope you enjoy it!)

I’m a traveling man by nature.  I’ve been traveling for pert near my whole life. I‘ve seen some interesting places, met lots of people, and enjoyed experiences I never woulda had chance to enjoy back home. I’ve traveled by horseback across the plains of Texas. Traveled by train across half the good ol US of A. I’ve flown high above the oceans to exotic places like Japan and Egypt. Even traveled down the River Nile by steamboat. Man that was some trip!  Course by far and above, my favorite way to travel is by Kayak.

Ah, Kayaking! I can still feel the wind in my hair and the water splashing back in my face. Man against nature, or more likely, it‘s man working with nature to get past those patches of whitewater. Mother nature always put on a show; fish jumpin’ in the water, cliffs and riverbanks flowing past me as the birds sing and the frogs croak. Course, those skeeters were pesky creatures, but the places I saw were worth a bit of discomfort.

My love of the river started when I was just a youngun. My buddies and I grew up on the good ol Brazos River.  Land sakes, I can’t count the hot summer days we spent floating down the river on our patched up inner tubes, which are a far cry from the inflatable kayaks we know today. Of course, we couldn’t very well afford kayaks back then. Shoot, we didn’t even have an oar! We didn’t care though. To us, those inner tubes that carried us from one bend of the river to the next were better than them golden chariots the angels in heaven use to get around.

We sure had us some good times on those hot summer days.  Days where the heat rises from the ground in waves and there ain’t a breeze to stir the trees. On a day like that, the river is the best place to be. Shoot fire, it’s the only place you can get cooled down at all.

Like I was saying, here we boys were, riding down that river, desperate for a cool breath of air. We’d almost gotten to our favorite swimming hole, just around the next bend where the water ran deep and cool.

Just as we were gettin’ geared up to dive out of our tubes into the water, we heard a horrendous noise.

Sounded like hundreds of birds a twittering and splashing in a birdbath, but when we got closer we realized it was the high-pitched giggling and squealing of a group of folks we had no intentions of sharing our swimming hole with: girls.

Sure enough, our eyes confirmed what our ears hadn’t wanted to believe. There had to be at least ten or so of those annoying creatures splashing around. We couldn’t believe our bad luck. No matter how hard we screwed our eyes shut, those girls wouldn’t go away.

My buddies and I were getting ready to run those dad burned females right off the river; when it happened. All of a sudden, right in the middle of the river, where the water ran the deepest and coolest, emerged the most beautiful mermaid I’d ever seen.

(Is it a real mermaid? Visit the Inflatable Kayak Blog (on Tuesday, 2-23-10) for part 2 of our story. If you’d like, you can set your computer to receive our RSS feed and you’ll be informed automatically when the next part of the story will be posted.)

The author, Candace Clayton, lives in Granbury, Texas with her Husband and family, spending as much time in the outdoors as she can.