The Blue Banana

The Blue Banana

There it was, a great, huge, massive eighteen foot long fifteen hundred dollar banana sitting on the brown winter grass of the front lawn in the afternoon sunshine and cool frosty winter air. At least it looked like a banana, the way the bow and stern both bent one way making a sweeping yet subtle arc appear along both sides of the hull. Perhaps I should say it was kind of a banana shaped boat. The only problem with it being bananalike was that it was a pretty blue color, not a very appetizing color for that particular fruit. Nonetheless, the plastic hull of this lovely ocean kayak on the lawn was obviously ever so slightly bent in a sideways arc like a banana—not a healthy quality for an expensive eighteen foot sea kayak that was meant to be straight and true as it sliced through the pristine waters upon which it was designed to travel.

Steve, my exasperated roommate who had just drained his entire savings, and some of his winter’s rent, on this delicious boat was standing in the yard with both hands on his head, mouth agape in frustrated astonishment, looking like he was about to pull out his hair.

“I can’t believe it! They sent me a bent boat!”

I had to concur, it was indeed slightly bent, sitting there all shiny and new on the lawn, it’s rudder still taped up protectively in cardboard and its price sticker and instruction manual still dangling from the bow handle. Steve started making several huffing sounds, expelling his frustration in indecipherable exhalations. For a moment I thought he was going to blow, like an overfilled tea kettle. There was even steam coming from his mouth in the cold, crisp winter air.

"Steam, breath," I thought to myself, "I can see his breath!"

Suddenly a thought occurred to me, and I walked up to the beautiful bent boat and put my hand on the hull. Then I reached over and put my other hand on the opposite side of the hull and thought about air temperature. Sure enough, the hand in the sun was very warm, but on the shady side my other hand almost froze to the frigid plastic surface.

We turned the boat around, Steve mumbling questions about getting a lemon and feeling ripped off. “I paid over a hundred bucks just to ship this kayak! What am I gonna do???” I almost joked that it was more a banana than a boat, but refrained.

“Steve,” I interjected as we finished turning the boat 180, “watch carefully for a few minutes.”

Puzzled, he looked at me. I pointed to the boat, and sure enough, before our eyes the banana straightened out perfectly, then almost imperceptibly it bananaed the other way! It later stayed straight when we faced it directly into the sun—that is with no direct sunlight on either side of the hull. That day, the warm sun was unimpeded and shining brightly, but the air temperature was four below (ten degrees Fahrenheit). The sunny side of the plastic boat warmed and stretched, albeit slightly, and the frozen side contracted, thus bending the boat.

Years later Steve reported that his beloved boat never warps in the water, and it paddles straight and true blue unlike the banana he thought he had at first. He also mentioned that he’s never seen anything like it since, except for the boat that went sideways into a rock, but that’s more like a banana peel story, and it’s another story altogether.

Extremes like Steve’s anger and relief are commonplace to the winter desert. It doesn’t take a bent boat to learn how oven-like a sunny alcove can be even on the Winter Solstice. Much of the desert’s erosion takes place during the winter with the freezing and thawing of water in rock. Steve’s blue kayak nearly became a squished banana a year or two later when a winter rock fall narrowly missed one of his camps. Turning the boat around might not have helped that one. I asked Steve if he had a bad luck boat, first it was bent, then nearly squashed. He said the only bad luck was that the boat broke him that winter, and he had to work so hard the next summer to get out of debt that he didn’t get to use it much. I was still paddling my old inflatable kayak named Flipper that cost me twenty bucks. The friend that sold it to me almost paid me to take it off his hands, so many times had he turned over in it paddling rapids. But despite being upside down a bit, I still paddled more than Steve that summer. It made me realize that one needs to calculate the time factor when deciding on buying expensive toys. I knew it would certainly drive me “bananas” to have a nice boat in the garage and rarely be able to paddle it.

Later in life I was finally able to afford an ocean kayak. My kayak, however, is made of kevlar—not a prone to bending in the sun.