Parasailing first person screed

Popping for a silly-sally sail in the clouds
Parasailing is a blast - but watch the after effects
By Terrance Gavan
If you’re not a parakeet, and you’ve never flown, well this is about as close as you’re going to get.
Clicked into a huge yellow and white parachute with a happy face logo.
About 350 feet above the shimmering depths of Lake Kashagawigamog you can’t hear much at all.
You certainly can’t hear the low rumble of the Ski-Mazing Water Sports tow-boat hundreds of yards away.
After a hiatus of 14 years, Craig Bowker and Ski-Mazing Water Sports are flying high in the Highlands sky once again.
Bowker says the winch boat is an option that is 100 percent safer than the old beach launch method of parasailing.
“You used to hear crazy stories from back in the eighties when parasailing started,” smiles Bowker. Today says Bowker, the winch lets you out off the platform slowly and then reels you back in on the return.
Bowker offered two scribes from the Voice a flight and we jumped at the opportunity.
And Bowker is right. Safe, reliable and courteous, and one heck of an adventure.
But be forewarned.
Pick your flight partner with care and consideration.
Once you’re up there, well, you’re there for a while.
I found out the hard way.
It’s quite quiet up there; except for the low drone of co-rider Mark Arike, who convinced me to take him along for the ride on this tandem flight.
Two minutes into the flight, I finally convinced Arike that he didn’t have to maintain a ‘death grip’ on the hanging straps, holding us into our canvas seats.
Freaky Arike let go of the straps. But he continued to have his arms in the air, in the old “stick ‘em up” pose. You know, just in case he might need to grab hard onto the reins again.
Another minute of watching him in full rigor mortis mode, I convinced him to summon his inner Jack Nicholson.
“Mark, look at me,” I yelled from behind, on the tandem two-person set underneath the parasail.
“Do a Jack … Do a Jack!” I screamed waving my arms and flapping maniacally like a wounded ostrich on a Jonathan Livingstone Seagull Peyote trip.
“What’s a Jack? For chrissakes!” screamed Arike, who was trying to relax, but was obviously growing increasingly ambivalent about my proffered advice.
“Jack Nicholson you great feathery dolt!” I screamed.
He glanced back to stare at me, like I had just descended from Mars.
The eyes were wide as saucers, the look unyielding and non-comprehensive.
I recognized it immediately.
Altitude sickness compounded by winded thrust.
The wind at 350 feet was undoubtedly whistling through the empty spaces between those floppy ears.
He screamed at me: “Jack Nicholson, what?”
I began flapping my wings even harder, trying to jog that unfertilized noggin back to life.
“Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper and Jack!” I screamed, arms flapping willy-nilly just like Jack did on the back of that chopper sitting behind Dennis Hopper in that old sixties anthem to the road.
“Easy Rider! Easy Rider, you great disenfranchised boob!” I screamed still flapping my wings.
“Easy What?” screamed Mark, just another young whippersnapper, with no touchstone to reality or great movies borne from seminal literature.
“Easy Rider, Easy Rider the film, you clandestine moron!” I scream over the gusty wind that moves us over a sandy beach far below.
“Have you never read Jack Kerouac, you illiterate scoundrel?” I ask.
“Jack Shellack?” screams Mark. “What are you talking about?”
I gave up.
“Just flap your wings, you sullen excuse for a pundit,” I beg, over the windy, blue-tinged slipstream.
And my god!
He takes the cue.
He says: “Oh you mean like this! Wheeeeeeee!”
“By George I think she’s got it!” I exclaim.
He looks back and I see the eyes glazing over once again.
Damn literary references.
“Never mind … it’s just Shaw and Pygmalion you great goofus … forget it … keep flapping you great speckled bird,” I scream, failing to footnote Ian and Sylvia Tyson.
And we are both of us, under the smiling happy face on the large parasail flapping like Jack.
Flapping mad as we glide gently from one end of Lake Kashagawigamog to the other.
Trust me folks.
If the smile on Arike’s face is any indication, this ride is well worth the trip to Ski-Mazing Water Sports headquarters - right beside the Wigamog Inn on Wigamog Road, off County Road 21 just west of Haliburton.
As we winched safely back down to the platform – but only after the thrilling toe drag in the water – Mark was still flapping madly.
Just like Jack.
After we were back on terra firma Mark asked me about Easy Rider – and Jack Kerouac.
I pulled one of my old dog-eared copies of On the Road from my glove compartment and last weekend I gave him a DVD of Easy Rider.
I got an interesting phone call from Mark last Saturday night.
“Terry love the book,” said Mark. “Question; what’s peyote?”
I told him to Google Carlos Castaneda.
Haven’t seen hide or hair of Mark in two days.
He’s not answering his Blackberry.
I’m giving him another 24 hours.
Then I’m calling in the tracking dogs.
Just in case he’s metamorphed into a “Spirit Wolf.”
Or, worse - a Trickster Raven.