Personal Procurement

We have made our final club purchase before the spring trip.  It's something, as a shareholder in a fifty-year-old aluminum boat, you didn't know you needed but you desperately did.  There are actually a lot of things like that in the RRCC but this one is called the Panther XJ5000 Transom Saver.   A transom saver lets the trailer support the weight of the motor instead of it bouncing up and down mounted to just the stern of the boat.  This is ours, installed:

Don't laugh.  If you've ever watched your motor in the rear view mirror while driving over washboard gravel roads you'll know this is not a minor matter.  We can live with slow leaks and banging our propeller on the rocks every now and then, but if the back end of our Commissary Boat rips off we will be in trouble.  If you are saying to yourself  "Wow, this transom saver will save our ass" you might be talking about our's, the boat's, or the fact that it's The Mule but in any case you'd be right.

So as an organization we are done with acquisitions, but there are two items that everyone needs to make sure they get for themselves before April 28. 

#1 is your personal cup.   You were put on notice here, before the last trip, about getting a personal cup, and the grace period is over.   If anyone shows up with a sleeve of red solo cups and/or sings that stupid country song you will get stomped.  You will use your cup all day, every day, from coffee to port.

#2 is high quality, head-to-toe rain gear.  Including and especially a real rain hat.     If you're dressed right, the rain is genuinely fun, but the opposite is also true.  No one who went on Big Swan Creek or the Pavilion Trip in 2005 needs to be reminded of this but if you only paddled in the golden sunshine of the Duck River last fall you may need a reality check.  There are lots of styles of good rain hats, so think of it as another opportunity for personal expression.  Like your cup. 

Big drops of rain spatted down diagonally through the violent air, and the old elm on the fire hissed and spewed and stank and radiated; lightning took over the sun's work and made the early night for a time flickeringly white, and loud with thunder. 

It was a fine show.  Out, natural drama big and little sops up much of that interest that in towns we daily expend upon one another's small nobilities and bastardliness, and for me no surer proof of our unchanging animality exists than the response we give to storms.  There is nothing rational about it.  And man is a fool to welcome bluster and wet and cold, and yet he often does, and even indoors he is seldom indifferent to their coming.
. . .

I baked a slab of biscuit bread, dry and toast-tasting, beside the fire, ate it with thick slices of broiled bacon, and went to bed.  The rain thickened, then slacked, then came down in floods; the night crackled and roared with change and iron cold.  Drunk with coziness, the pup wallowed beside me and groaned, and I remember wondering, before I slept, a little more about the relation of storms to man....If, being animal, we ring like guitar strings to nature's furies, what hope can there be for our ultimate, planned peacefulness? 

But night questions don't have answers. 

Goodbye to a River, pp. 116-17.