Use Only as Directed

Use only as directed. It’s such a sensible admonition, usually founded in a long, sad history of tragic outcomes among those who didn’t. Ignore it at your peril. The rationale is typically self-evident: water-wings should not be used as a lifesaving device; blow-dryers should not be used in the bathtub; firecrackers should not be held after being lit. Not surprisingly, the same holds true for paddles and oars; prudent boaters should use them only for their stated purpose.

Author's son using paddle "as directed."

Yeah, right. Who among us hasn’t used an oar as a pole for a tarp shelter? Show me the paddler who’s above using their ash-and-cherry-laminate bent-shaft canoe paddle to anchor a campsite clothesline? In truth – and I know this will horrify the folks who so lovingly craft these refined whitewater tools, the ones whose highly evolved brains spend countless hours calculating arcane minutiae like tensile strength and turbulent hydrodymanic flow – in truth, I’ve seen oars used as pry bars and paddles pressed into service as shovels. Because after all, improvising is half the fun of river running, right?

But I admit, sometimes improvisation can go too far. Sometimes your own stupidity catches up with you. The following story is about just that, a cautionary tale about what can happen when whitewater nitwits armed with expensive Sawyer paddles and oars ignore that hard-won wisdom, use only as directed.

We begin and end with this lesson learned: Don’t use a paddle as a snake stick. Sounds obvious enough, but I’ve seen it done. In fact, I’m the idiot who did it.

There we were alongside the Klamath River, a couple of families on a lazy overnight raft trip, enjoying a warm evening around the campfire in a sandy nook nestled among the rocks at the head of a challenging rapid. Suddenly one of our group shouted a warning to my teenage son: “There’s a rattlesnake behind you!” Sure enough, just behind his chair was a five-foot diamondback, slithering under a dry bag. We sprang into action. I grabbed my trusty Sawyer Cruiser canoe paddle, then told the kids to dump the ice and drinks out of the beer cooler and bring me the empty cooler and a six-foot cam strap. Delicately I eased the paddle’s T-grip under the rattler’s belly. The paddle was 54 inches, but right now it felt a whole lot shorter.

Adrenalin flooded my system and my mind raced. Try as I might, I couldn’t help recalling the dire warnings of Jane, my snake-phobic friend who had announced on a Grand Canyon trip that rattlesnakes can jump three times their length. At the time I knew she had her math completely wrong, and I had mocked her mercilessly -- what kind of moron, after all, would imagine a six-foot snake leaping 18 feet? But that was then. Just now, as I was plucking this royally pissed-off snake from the sand, I wasn’t quite so confident. True, this snake wasn’t a full six feet … but that might not matter. I couldn’t stop the irrational part of my brain from working Jane’s ludicrous equation to its terrifying conclusion: 3 x 5 = 15 feet. Canoe paddle = 4 feet 6 inches. Crap, what if Jane was right?

Thankfully, the instant I lifted the snake it went limp. I dropped it in the cooler, slammed the lid, wound the cam strap around and cinched it down tight. Instantly the snake was active again – and positively livid, rattling away inside the cooler like a handful of BB’s tossed into a blender. Holy crap, that sucker was seriously ticked off! Better not take any chances: I had the kids get a second cam strap and wrapped that one around too, for good measure. Any creature that could leap three times its length was not to be trifled with.

Now what? Clearly we didn’t want this enraged reptile anywhere near our camp. Across the river seemed like the minimum safe distance. It was a tough ferry, but it was probably doable. So four of us jumped in the oar boat, along with the cooler and its buzzing occupant. Don’t ask me why we needed four people to wrangle one rattler -- I have no idea. As I took the oars (Sawyers, naturally, but in this case being used for their proper purpose!) I shouted to my son to be sure to bring a paddle. We’d need a snake stick again on the far bank. I rowed across the river in utter darkness, keeping my sense of direction by the sound of the rapid just downriver. I fought the current, wondering whether we’d make it across before being swept over the lip. Where was the point of no return? Impossible to tell in the gloom, but the roar was definitely getting louder. No way I wanted to run this rapid in the dark, especially not with a venomous snake seething in a cooler – never mind the double cam straps.

We grated to a halt on the far bank just above the rapid, piled out, then gingerly brought the cooler ashore like an unexploded bomb. We set it on the cobble bar and stood back, glancing nervously at one other, our eyes silently asking the obvious question: which of us was the chump with the short straw who got to open the cooler? Nobody volunteered. The cooler, full of rattler sound and fury just minutes ago, stood eerily silent. But that only magnified the menace. We could all imagine the crafty rattler in there playing dead, lying in wait, ready to leap 15 feet and sink its fangs into the neck of whatever poor sod opened the lid.

There was no escaping it. My kids and their buddies were watching. What kind of father would I be if I refused this Mission Impossible? Sure, we could leave the cooler unopened and simply retreat to camp … but that would doom the snake, and my kids were animal lovers to the core. I was trapped like a rat -- or more precisely, like a field mouse about to receive a lethal dose of venom.

Unable to escape my manly duty, I mustered all available testosterone, undid the cam strap, tipped the cooler onto its side with my foot, then skittered back like a kid who’d just lit the fuse on a cherry bomb. The lid fell open and … nothing. No sound, no movement. We exchanged wary looks, then circled around to the front of the cooler, keeping several paces back but (I was acutely aware) still well within the 15-foot kill zone. We peered inside. Our headlamps illuminated a rattler that could only be described as … chillin’. Surely this was not the same snake? And then it dawned on me: the beer cooler had been full of crushed ice right up to the moment before we dropped the snake in, and now the hapless reptile had cooled to the point that it could barely flick its forked tongue at us. This was one seriously sedated snake.

But now how in the heck were we going to get it out of the cooler? The snake looked pretty woozy, but you never knew, that might just be a clever rattler ruse. None of us wanted to approach to the cooler, but there was nothing else for it: this impasse would clearly require a frontal assault. Keeping my eyes glued to the snake I said to my son: “Give me the paddle.” He handed it to me. It felt strange. I hazarded a quick look and … what the ____? Egads, this wasn’t my canoe paddle! It was my kayak paddle – a Sawyer Diamondback (oh, the irony!) which, although it was a precisely engineered and astoundingly beautiful whitewater tool shaped by the loving hands of third-generation Oregon craftsmen from cherry, Western red cedar and diagonally overlapping layers of carbon fiber fabric … was utterly useless as a snake stick! No freaking T-grip! Just blades! My son, in helpfully choosing the longest implement he could find, had provided me not with a snake stick, but a snake spoon!

Now I don’t suppose you’ve ever tried to coax an infuriated but hypothermic rattlesnake onto the blade of a kayak paddle, in the dark, with trembling hands and your heart racing like a hamster on meth. I have. It took forever. It was like trying to pick up an overcooked five-foot linguini with a Teflon-coated shovel. The sagging snake kept slipping and sliding like a pathetic drunk -- or some elongated deboned chicken -- oozing off first one side of the blade, then the other.

Gradually, the warm night air began reviving the comatose diamondback, which made it easier to handle but also raised the possibility that it might be alert enough to strike. Not three times its length, to be sure, not in its present state. But maybe half that? So let’s see, that would be 1.5 x 5 = 7.5 feet ... and my kayak paddle was, hmmm, just over 6 feet long … aw crap.

In the end, I sort of scooped and flicked the snake out of the cooler. It landed right in front of us, somebody screamed (probably me), and suddenly we were all running and shrieking. In an instant, our nervous little team of snake charmers was a frenzied mob, elbowing and shoving in blind panic, screaming and laughing hysterically, piling into the raft like bank robbers trying to squeeze into a getaway car all at once. There was no thought of grabbing the cooler – we’d get that tomorrow … if ever. Right now we just wanted to burn rubber outa there!

The current was strong, and I barely managed to pull back across the flow. Slowly we clawed our way up an eddy, then across the broad back of the Klamath, eventually regaining the beach at our campsite. It was only then, as we landed, that we realized the real peril of our situation. In our panic to transport the fearsome reptile to the far bank we had completely forgotten to put on our life jackets. In our overweaning fear of this poor half-frozen snake, we had just rowed to the very brink of a serious rapid, in the pitch dark, and could easily have been swept to a watery – and very embarrassing -- end.

Which brings us to the moral of our story: Never use a paddle as a snake stick -- not even a Sawyer (but if you must, make bloody well sure it has a T-grip!). Let’s all show a little respect to these beautiful hand-crafted tools of the whitewater trade, and the diligent men and women who so lovingly design them. Take it from me: to avoid unwanted side effects, use only as directed.

By Bill Cross