Death by nature

Opportunities abound in the Outer Banks for tours. You can take a walking tour, a hiking tour, various boating tours, a four-wheel drive tour, a Segway tour, a helicopter tour, a rocket tour, etc. These tours enable you to see the natural beauty of the island, help you get in touch with its rhythms, and allow the tour guides to support themselves through the winter months when tours are not so popular.

You can tell how exciting a particular tour or activity is expected to be by paying careful attention to the wording on the release form, which you must sign whenever you merely step out the door of wherever you are staying. This form will list various risks that you may incur when participating in the activity, such as "bodily harm," "dismemberment" "significant mental anguish and hair loss," etc. You know you are in for a thrilling time if one of the risks listed is "death." If the activity takes place on the water, implied in the risk of death is also the risk of "watery interment."

For Joe and I, however, there was an even greater risk to these activities than death and watery interment. This was the risk of coming into excessive personal contact with nature. The fear of drowning, or the fear of decapitation from an errant kayak oar, to us was not nearly so great as the fear of having the black marsh water, which in addition to smelling like sewage was thick and goopy, actually touch some area of our persons. This is why we generally, when viewing nature, endeavor to stay far away from it, preferring a view from, say, the television screen.

Unfortunately during our kayak tour, we were required to actually put our kayaks into the water, climb into them, and stay there for the entire duration of the tour -- which lasted about two weeks -- merely one fiberglass step removed from our nemesis, the water. At first we were able, by carefully keeping in the center of the kayak and dipping as little of the oar into the water as possible, to keep from splashing ourselves. But this soon proved impractical, as our guide and the other kayakers seemed to feel the need to set a more vigorous pace, and second only to our fear of the inky water was our fear of being left behind in that marshy wilderness. Our guide, a slip of a girl who moved through the water as effortlessly if she were sitting in a chair in her living room reading and eating Cheez-Its, showed a marked willingness to leave any stragglers behind, and we did not want to be two of them.

As we reluctantly began to make stronger rowing motions, we found it impossible to keep the water and muck from dripping off our oars onto us, and soon we were not only soaking but also covered in what Joe affectionately referred to as "eco tattoos." The fact that it would all undoubtedly wash off at a later time was of no comfort. All the beauty around us -- the tall marsh grasses, the quaint covered bridge, the osprey resplendently opening its wings -- was all eclipsed by one inescapable fact: that black, icky muck was sitting on our bodies. Our disgust could not have been greater had we actually fallen into the water.

Okay, yes it could have.

We were quite content, after this incident, to view nature while sitting on the beach, in a chair, letting the sand touch only our feet. And looking at the pictures in the tour brochures.