HoneyBe
July 3 started in my childhood bedroom, saw some time with honeybees in a kayak, and ended with fireworks and SimCity.
The morning of this Monday that I took off from work (since I got July 4 off anyway) was the first “weekend” day I had while officially living with my girlfriend of a year and a half. For the last two years Scarlette’s been finishing her B.S. and we’ve been splitting our time between a night or so at my parents’ house and most nights in her closetlike bedroom in a house with 4 roommates (and our bunny). Now that she’s moved out of there, we’re both living in my bedroom at my parent’s house.
Luckily we’re only going to be crammed in this fun little space for a month — between when she moved out of her house and we move into our new fun little apartment on August 6 — and if July 3 was any indication it’s not going to be so bad at all.
We woke up slow on Monday after a weekend in Bakersfield with Scarlette’s family and decided it was time we finally kayak together. I’ve had a $70 inflatable two-person kayak since the end of May, but the demands of a final quarter of Cellular and Molecular Biology had heretofore kept us from sharing a journey in it.
We’ve heard these two-person kayaks referred to as “Divorce Specials” for their ability to bring out some high tensions on the high waves and decided to take it as a challenge to the resolve of our relationship. Speaking of waves, the kayak is intended for only 350 pounds on calm lakes, but we took our at least 400 combined lbs. into the ocean with it.
The intention was to ride it from Port San Luis to Avila Beach and back.

So, from the little beach above the long white pier, to the beach right next to the shorter pier at the bottom. I know it doesn’t look that long from this angle … and it’s not, this was our first time out together.
We laid the deflated, rolled-up husk of the kayak on the gravelly asphalt above the beach, and pumped air into the base and sides using a special dual-action pump that came with the dirigible. It took about 5 minutes to get that, the little seats and the collapsible oars all inflated and put together.
After passing the brown pier we found this was actually pretty easy with the combined power of two. I sat in front, and so Scarlette followed my oar strokes, but sometimes the plastic would collide when she would try to paddle twice on one side to correct our path (or to take us off path). This was a little annoying when it happened but nothing I’d call divorce material.
Going under the piers was only slightly challenging so we went under the white, the brown, then turned back around, and decided to land on the beach and jump in the water.
Now sometimes this water is a little chill,y but when you’ve been out on the water paddling for a while it’s really the most refreshing thing ever and you totally forget it’s kinda cold. Not to be a shill for Intex, but if you live anywhere near a lake or ocean you too can pick up this amazingly affordable and surprisingly easy to use kayak.
Anyway, as we paddled back to the beach my car was parked at, a honeybee landed on my leg. This seemed a bit strange and unexpected, since the shore was at least a half-mile from us (and bees aren’t technically aerodynamic enough to be able to fly anyway, right?)
My first instinct kicked in and I flicked the bee lightly into the water to my left. Realizing almost instantly this was not a good thing to do, I fished it back out with my oar and tried to let it dry off a bit before setting the bee on the bow of the kayak. I sat in my front-row seat and slightly uneasily watched the honeybee.
I don’t know why I was uneasy. I haven’t been afraid of bees since about 2nd grade—when I realized they were pretty chill and only stung you if you weren’t chill to them — but being out on in the middle of the largest body of water on Earth and having my only route of escape hinge entirely on quite a few muscles I’d never used before (if not in like 8 years), I was not super stoked to then see a second honeybee land on the other side of the bow.
I stiffened up just a tad and noted to my jolly girlfriend that there were, in fact, now two honeybees on our nautical journey with us. She didn’t give it a second thought, and reiterated her love of paddling and why it probably is because she’s a pisces. I started to paddle back toward our little shore as well and quickly forgot the bees were even there. I’m still kind of amazed they somehow flew as far out as our kayak.
When we got a bit closer to shore, my love and I loosened the joints in our hips, lower backs and shoulders and leaned back in my cheap kayak and looked up at the sky. It was probably a bit more work to pilot this inflatable rubber kayak together than it is to pilot most, but it didn’t stop us from reveling in how far from shore we were and how the sun feels so much better when the cool water around us absorbs a majority of the rays and doesn’t reflect back off the smog and earth like it does in the increasingly crowded beach town we could only faintly, distantly hear.
We did this for a short while that will forever remain in my memory.
Later, we signed a paper to move into our new apartment two weeks earlier than planned, in an downtown office whose lawn perpetually has dog poop on it and that I once witnessed a houseless man assault with cries of “DIE” repetitively in broad daylight.
We got some Mexican food from a restaurant we’d previously only visited blind drunk after a night of “clubbing” and got the same meal we always did, and loved it just a bit less than usual because we were sober.
Later that night, I booted up the Super Nintendo version of SimCity and by some providence we both got sucked into playing it for the rest of the night.
Before that though we beelined to the top of Terrace Hill at dusk, kept our eyes on a baseball field in the distance from camping chairs while my dad prepared to take aerial footage from his drone, and after five minutes sat transfixed as a colorful pyrotechnical light show commenced.
