First Published in the Tri-Town Transcript Aug 12, 2016
By Esther C. Baird
It’s currently 95 as I type this, and even my Grande Iced Americano is not making a dent in the heat. But I wouldn’t trade it for anything. Summer is the land of the happy and unscheduled.
We’ve been spending much of our happy, unscheduled time at our family camp on Lake George in the Adirondacks.
One of our favorite ways to relax is on my parent’s pontoon boat, often while dragging kids on a tube behind us. Except this year we were, for a variety of reasons, without an actual tube.
My husband, took this as a personal challenge.
“I want a tube I can fit on and have fun with.” He announced while scouring the internet.
Regular Readers may recall that my husband is 6′5′′ so a traditional tube that you could inflate with a bike pump was not, I knew with an internal sigh, what he had in mind. I had visions of a military grade tank that could be towed behind a boat and braced myself for the days to come.
And oh, how they came – – in the form of the Poparazzi. That’s the tube’s name, and yes it’s spelled just wrong enough to make no sense. Perhaps the company wanted to convey that riding on the Poparazzi was so cool you’d basically, but not totally, be like a celebrity. Or else it was just so gigantic people couldn’t help but stare.
It was rectangular in shape with a climbing arc across it. I’m not sure what was wrong with the traditional circular shape. I only knew that the Poparazzi had bigger, so much bigger, aspirations. In fact, it was not a tube at all. Technically, it was a ‘towable’.
It took a few hours to deploy – – not all things inflatable are lightweight, or graceful in their land- based form. But once in the water, and attached to the boat, our girls jumped on. They were dwarfed by it.
“There is absolutely no way you will fall off this thing!” I yelled out into the crevasses and canyons of nylon covered rubber.
Naturally they had life jackets, and we double checked the lines, but it all felt overwrought. It was as if the pontoon boat was pulling another pontoon – – one that was bright red and neon yellow. There was simply nothing that could go wrong, and I settled in for an afternoon of pulling kids around the lake. Relaxing on a boat was relaxing on a boat, no matter who was secretly laughing at your oversized towable from shore.
We traded ‘ok-to- go’ hand signals and my dad started the engine. And then popafiasco.
As we picked up speed, the Poparazzi suddenly decided that what it really wanted to be was . . . a submarine. It nosedived beneath the water taking our girls with it. Lake George is around 200 ft at its deepest. So they were only limited by the length of the line and, as it turned out a second later, the inflatable part of the tube, which to be clear, was all of it.
Unable to maintain its underwater dream, the tube poparazzied back up, shooting straight into the air, springing back on the rope, and landing upright on its side affording us a clear view of nothing but a wall of towable. Meaning: zero visibility of our girls.
I ripped off my glasses and hat and scrambled to the side poised to dive into the middle of the lake. Invisible children don’t sit well in a mother’s heart, even when I knew they were surely floating behind the popamonstrosity.
Just as I took a breath to jump, my eldest swam from behind the sideways wall of rubber and our youngest emerged from the other direction. Both were in questionable moods, but otherwise fine for having momentary glimpsed of the deeper parts of the lake.
Obviously we had the weight distribution wrong – I hadn’t thought it mattered on a tube you could see from space. But once we had it all sorted, and frayed nerves calmed, it turned out the Poparazzi was a blast. (And, I’ll admit, fun for even our tallest family members.)
So until the school bells force us back to the land of schedules, we’ll be spending more time relaxing on the pontoon boat . . . celebrity style.