Canoe Tip

 

Here's my tip: If a kid asks you to go on a boat trip with them, and it turns out to be a canoe, pass. 

I dreamed I was standing on the veranda of a seaside hotel overlooking the harbor, when a young girl approached and began flirting with me relentlessly. She was an attractive, if slightly mousy, dishwater blonde of 15 to 20, or thereabouts, no more than 5 foot tall in heels. Because of her diminutive stature and indeterminate age, I felt it was inappropriate to respond to any of her flirtations. 

To make matters worse, she had a brother (or a sister with a shaved head, I couldn't tell which) who kept inserting him/herself in between us and trying to steal kisses Bugs Bunny style. I kept having to fend off this androgynous sibling's amorous advances in order to keep up a semi-normal conversation with the other one. 

"What do you like to do?" the little Lolita asked, looking up from her Ipad and batting her eyelashes in a comically practiced manner.

I looked up from my own Ipad and told her, "I don't know. Do you do much boating?"

"I'll see what I can arrange," she said, and she and mini-Sinead scuttled off to find a boat.

I waited there, and in a moment they showed up with a canoe. I looked down from the veranda at their pitiful vessel. It was a fifteen foot plastic Coleman, a two-seater, and it was overloaded and half-full of water, a mere 2 inches from going under completely.

"Don't you think you should empty out some of that water?" I asked. "I'm certainly not getting in that thing as it is now. I'd have to sit on the bottom of the boat, since there are only two seats."

She attempted to right the situation by tipping the canoe back, so as to drain some of the water out. This resulted in the boat going full Titanic, sinking the stern and tilting the bobbing bow skyward. The bald-headed kid abandoned ship, while the other savvy wharf scamp wrangled the teetering craft back into an upright position. She maneuvered the boat back to the boat launch area, picking up her drowning rat relative on the way.

Soon we were right back where we started, with the two of them trying to convince me to join them for a little pleasure cruise. I don't know what my dumb ass was thinking, but the next minute, I was sitting in the bottom of that soggy canoe, clutching my Ipad and gritting my teeth against the cold. 

They paddled around the harbor, and soon it became obvious that we were lost. There were inlets and outlets, islands and abandoned areas, and very little traffic of other vessels to indicate where the main port was. The two of them seemed unconcerned, but I was getting antsy. The weather was growing colder, and it looked as if it might rain. 

That's about all I can recall. I woke up soon thereafter, my audiobook Papillon still playing from the night before.