June 17th, 2008

In an old ‘Friends’ episode years ago there was a piece of business where Chandler and Joey lose all their furniture to a thief, and end up using a canoe they find in the building’s basement for living room seating .  This is intrinsically funny because…  Because what?  Because it is absurd. Small water craft lying around the house are more than just a nuisance. They are out of their element, and only the more so in a New York City apartment, several stories above street level.

If you actually own a small boat, you’ve probably dealt with the problem of where to keep it yourself. If you  set it down anywhere, you will find yourself tripping over it sooner or later.  We have a kayak, and sitting on the floor of a garage, it will take up more parking space than Ann’s new Smart Car.  (Of course, any large recliner fully extended does that, but you take my point.)

The boat is is the way! We’ve tried setting it on the porch, in an out of the way corner, and it will project itself in front of some essential doorway or path no matter what angle you position it. If you lay it out on the grass, it will both fill with bugs and spiders AND kill the grass in a unique pattern likely to be mistaken for an alien crop circle, only much skinnier.

What to do? Well, we have found a good place for ours, and to our delight it has solved the keep-it-clean-and-dry-and-relatively-bug-free-while-not being-in-the-way aspect of kayak-ownership. We have taken it aloft! Or rather, we have suspended it. Now I know this isn’t particularly new. If you do it in your garage, it’s absolutely mundane, but WE have found a place to fly our kayak where it adds color and luster to our home. It is flying from a handy overhang on our back deck, protected from rainfall, with good head-clearance, blocking neither doors nor natural paths, and with it’s  prow pointed towards the marshes in which we use it. See?

Neat eh?