3 Kayakers Pointedly Ignored Me

Posted by Charlie43 on
URL: http://riverswest-forums.266.s1.nabble.com/3-Kayakers-Pointedly-Ignored-Me-tp366.html

Anytime I have a boat on the roof racks --or am launching/landing-- I get one of two reactions. Some people walk over, admire the boat, and ask if I built it.  Others make a point of ignoring me. They don't say “Hello” when I look their way and subsequently refuse to make eye contact. It happened again at Smith and Bybee this morning.  

I was coming off the water with a good looking, vee-bottomed, double-knuckled pram on the dolly and wheeled right past three kayakers getting ready to put in. Their boats weren't bottom-of-the-line. But they were plastic, which meant my boat trumped theirs in terms of tradition and prestige, and not a one of them would make eye contact.

This what I think is the underlying dynamic. If someone has spent a lot of money on a plastic boat, they don't want to be upstaged by a homemade wooden one, no matter how pretty the wooden boat might be. This is too bad, because there's room in the world --or on the water-- for both.