Or maybe it's due to my lousy swimming. In my early twenties, I was in Oklahoma with a group of friends who decided to swim out to an island for some private skinny dipping. Not wanting to be dubbed a wuss, I fashioned a sort of Rube Goldberg mini-raft by tying two plastic jugs to my thumbs and sputtering along among my astounded peers. They weren't so much astounded by my means of transportation as by the size of my throbbing thumbs. When I had to turn around and sputter back to shore, the troop of Girl Scouts debarking from a station wagon at the landing didn't cloak their amusement at the large naked guy floundering toward them on plastic jugs with thumbs like blue blimps. For the most part, they just gawked and giggled, but a little one who epitomized the cliche, cute as a bug's ear, managed a droll, "Nice thumbs."

My ineptness with water vehicles graduated from jugs to boats on the same lazy river when, a year or so later, with fear and loathing, I rowed a friend to a prime campsite to pitch our tent. Amazingly enough, the rowing went O.K., but my friend had some trouble fueling the Coleman lantern in the dark, and I struck a match close to the procedure so he could see better. Because I had seen a scorpion illuminated when the whole lamp blazed up and burned my friend's leg, we spent a sleepless night in the boat where I listened to him moan while critiquing my woodland skills.

No, I haven't many fond boat memories. Even when I've put my fate in the hands of others, I still manage to exercise my nautical idiocy. The summers I spent as a technical assistant for the Aquatic Biology Department at Oklahoma State University were fraught with boating blunders, some as simple as the time I detached the trailer from the pick up (instead of the boat from the trailer) and watched the whole enchilada roll into the murky depths; others as complex as the times I and Tarik, an Iraqi Doctoral candidate, would go out electro-shocking fish for his research.

Unfortunately, Tarik's lust for big bass sometimes overcame his scientific objectivity, and he would make hugely foolish moves (as if my condition were contagious). Once as we putted along shore with a generator pumping massive voltage from cables on two long booms off of the bow while I dipped up stunned shad and sunfish with a long-handled net, a huge bass bobbed up quivering. Tarik yelled, "Beeg feesh, beeg feesh, don't lose," leapt from the controls of the outboard and generator, and fell over the railing on the bow toward the bass and the voltage. Fortunately, I lunged for the lever on the generator with the same alacrity with which he had pursued the bass, or he might not have been able to look forward to seeing the USA bombhis country thirty years later.

Sometimes this scientific boat horror was a bit less direct, as in the episode where Steve, a religious fundamentalist Master's candidate, and I poisoned the whole arm of Keystone Reservoir on the Arkansas River. Again I felt somewhat responsible through contagion. We intended to get a thorough sample of the fish in a 1,000 square yard area by adding one part rotenone to 100 parts water, but, because Steve was trying to convert me to Baptism while he made his calculations, he added one part rotenone to ten parts water. I spent the next week leaning off the bow of our boat with my long-handled net scooping up bloated carp. By the end of that hot summer week, I wasn't so much scooping as straining them. Those evenings when I returned to civilization, my female companions weren't particularly impressed with my eau de rotten carp cologne.

When I moved to Montana about a quarter century ago, I decided not to press my luck any more than I had to--even though the place is a paradise for canoe, kayak, Mackenzie boat, and raft. Oh sure, sometimes I'll forget the lessons of the past and man the oars of a raft or boat so friends might take their turns fishing the Madison or Yellowstone. But then, after pulling over to check for gashes in the bottom of the boat, or dragging the raft out from under a log jam, these friends always suggest that perhaps I shouldn't row after all.

And sure, I admire friends like David Quammen, who says he some day hopes to be photographed in Groucho nose and glasses while kayaking over a Chilean waterfall, but as he says this, his voice sounds like that of a water-logged duck because he's wrecked his sinuses doing rolls by House Rock on the upper Gallatin; and I shudder with trepidation and rejoice in the fact that I can achieve the same effect by inhaling helium.

No, I don't own a boat, though another friend is storing a giant Coleman canoe in my garage, and I'm free to use it any time I wish. (My wife and I tried it out once on a local reservoir, and it led to a stout drenching and brief but severe strain on our relationship.)