Friday was yet another opportunity for Husband and me to celebrate our triskadekaversary. We lined up a (free) babysitter (thank you, C! Thank you!), but I wasn’t in the mood to go out for a formal dinner. I told Husband that the one child-free experience I was really craving was an hour on the lake in my kayak. Husband doesn’t kayak, but I promised him an hour lakefront with a book and a beer, unmolested by infant demands. He agreed, and we bought a six-pack of Hefeweizen and tied up the kayak.

When we got to the lake, though, we discovered we had forgotten the bottle opener. “We’ll figure something out, right?” I said.

“I might, but you’re going to be in the middle of the lake,” Husband pointed out.

I put a beer in my boat anyway.

The weather was perfect — sunny, warm, not too windy, but not too still and buggy, either. After about half an hour of paddling I started thinking about that beer. I examined the cap, thinking maybe it was a twist-off after all, but no such luck. The bottle cap even bore the words, “Use Bottle Opener,” no doubt to forestall lawsuits brought by plaintiffs like myself who found themselves without a churchkey.

I did have a regular key, though, and I tried to use it to pry the cap off. There was a little hissing sound of air escaping from the bottle, but I made no real progress. By now I was really thirsty and beginning to feel that my pride was at stake. It was a pretty sad state of affairs if, after three years in the Peace Corps, I couldn’t open a simple beer bottle without aid of modern technology. Really, I might as well hang up my Birkenstocks.

What would MacGyver do?

I surveyed the equipment at hand: Key. Child’s lunch box. Sigg water bottle. Volume 4 of The Raj Quartet. Hair band. Thousands of gallons of water. And…kayak.

The kayak has a lip around the cockpit coaming that is used to attach a spray skirt. I positioned the bottle with the cap under the lip and cracked it down. There was a gentle “poof” and then the cap came right off. I lost some beer due to the fact that the bottle was almost upside down when it opened, but other than that it worked like a charm. It was the best beer I’d ever had.

When I got back to shore, Husband had also managed to open his beer, but there was blood and broken glass involved. Score one for Peace Corps ingenuity.