If you’ve ever walked barefoot across the deck of a dark-hued powerboat on a bright mid-summer day, you’ll never forget it. The nerves in the smoldering soles of your feet send one very clear message to your brain:
Jump into the water.
But you can’t do that because there’s a whole lot of people watching, so you do the fire-dance. From a distance, it looks as if you’re either having a grand mal seizure or you’re just a really bad dancer. An eruption of profanity spews from your mouth and gathers force.
In desperation, you sit and lift your feet. Bad idea, as neither board-shorts nor bikinis provide adequate skin protection from a boat-deck that could double as a large pancake griddle.
Now you have matching burns on your butt to go with the ones on the bottoms of your feet.
Noticing your distress, a friend tosses a towel your way. It’s a thoughtful gesture, for sure, but your friend’s aim sucks and the towel doesn’t land close enough. You have to figure out how to reach it and the spread it out with the seared balls of your feet.
You finally get situated and you’ve found some relief. Now you have another problem.
You’re stranded on an island of cotton in the middle of a searing-hot boat-deck.
You can either stand there until dark (not recommended) or use the towel underneath your feet to shuffle down the deck and back to the cockpit. So you choose the latter and begin your retreat, swearing all the way.
Quick but relevant side note: There are two primary types of cursing from people in pain. Some pick a word, likely one that rimes with duck, and go rapid-fire with increasing speed. Others go with the same word slowly while increasing volume as the pain increases. There is a hybrid version of fast and loud swearing, but it’s a special talent not everyone has.
This situation will teach you and everyone within earshot exactly which kind or curser you are.
One final challenge remains—getting back into the boat. At some point, your feet, and maybe even your hands, must touch the deck or a gunwale top, and if that surface is dark your tootsies and digits will go from rare to charred-rare.
But it’s either that or jump in the water, so you execute your final move into the cockpit. One last singe or two and you’re home.
This public service message has been brought to you by a reporter who did all of the above during last weekend’s Performance Boat Center Spring Fun Run at the Lake of the Ozarks. And it’s not even summer.
You’ve been warned.—Matt Trulio