When in the city of dreaming spires, visitors must go punting. Browse the postcards in an Oxford shop, and you’re bound to see it: a standing boatman atop a biscotti-shaped vessel, guiding himself down a waterway using a long pole. What is more Oxford-esque, aside from the English-Gothic skyline, than the steady strokes of a punter, gliding down the River Thames?
When I arrived at Magdalen College in Oxford, an ignorant American student abroad, I couldn’t wait to go punting.
I learned very quickly that you do not punt on the Thames; the Thames punts on you.
The first part of a punting voyage is the hardest: getting into the boat, which is conveniently named a punt. A punt is like a canoe—five 2x4 slabs nailed together to make a rocking water cradle. Walking onto the punt toward the padded seats on the ends of the vessel is a delicate tightrope act. One wrong step, and you’re fish food.
I’ve learned to salsa by the time I reach the seats. The bottom of the punt contains a complimentary gift: water up to our ankles. Once I actually sit down with the other three passengers (fellow students abroad), we are soaked with briny Thames water.
The punting company employee shoves the punting pole, called a quant, at the fifth member of our group—brave Andrea, who has volunteered to pilot our vessel. And to Gloria, the girl seated across from me, the employee hands the world’s tiniest oar, “just in case.”
The employee waves. “Enjoy yourselves.” It is a deceitful thing to say.
We have one hour to circle the small bend of the Thames that leads back to the punt dock, which seems like plenty of time. But we have failed to account for the combined weight of five adult tourists stuffed with meat pies and toffee puddings. Andrea is pushing all that weight with a skinny pole.
Thirty minutes seem to have passed by the time Andrea backs us out of the dock. We are supposed to glide across the Thames, but we are scraping the riverbed more than anything else. To her credit, Andrea inches us forward with every fiber of strength she can muster, while Anna, Cat, Gloria, and I (the passengers) amuse ourselves with the small parcel of bread crumbs we’ve obtained to feed the ducks.
But the more bread we throw to those public menaces with feathers, the more they swarm our tiny island. By the time Andrea has managed to turn our boat in three perfect circles in the wrong direction, we are surrounded by an army of quacking terrorists. A few ducks try to hop in the punt and are (gently) throat-punched.
Cat begins to video the catastrophe. Meanwhile Andrea has successfully moved us two feet upstream and into a tree.
“Captain’s log,” Cat says in a Cockney accent, turning to film me.
“We’ve been out at sea for five days,” I report, “And we’ve been stuck in a tree for three of them.”
Cat laughs aloud as Andrea tries to wedge the quant into the bank and push us back into the river. She succeeds, mostly. The leader of the ducks takes advantage of our moment of victory. Cat is still filming.
“The Albatross!” I exclaim, batting the duck away as best as I’m able. He swims away but circles back toward our punt.
“Captain’s log,” I report in my Cockney accent. “It’s the Albatross. He’s coming back for seconds like me ex.”
Cat is laughing so hard she shuts off her camera. Anna, taking advantage of our glee, in a display of utter depravity, throws most of the remaining bread crumbs onto me.
It is a mutiny by one of my own crew. The Albatross assails me. I flail, shoving the bird back into the water. The devil is undeterred. Water is rapidly filling our punt, and Andrea’s will to live is draining even faster. Gloria has just rediscovered our tiny oar and begins to soliloquize about its smallness. Meanwhile, Andrea asks us if we could each take a few artsy photos of her as she punts us straight across the river into another tree.
I’m not sure how to relay to Andrea that I am embroiled in a battle for ship and soul. The Albatross circles back for another spar. Anna is sneaking the parcel of crumbs out of her pocket again; I lunge. A shower of Thames water rains over our company, but I have secured the Albatross’s food supply. I chuck all of the remaining bread as far away from the punt as I can, and I shove the empty parcel deep into my coat pocket. The Albatross quacks with fury, staring me down. I stare back; I have a war to win. And I do. The beast paddles off to harass a different vessel.
In the time that I have declared, fought, and won a war, Andrea has turned us sideways, and we are floating toward a low bridge. The support beams draw steadily nearer to my face until I’m kissing them; there’s nowhere for me to go except into the Thames, nothing for me to do except let out a few muffled screams at Andrea to turn the punt. She does—the wrong way—wedging us under the bridge.
Gloria snaps out of her “Ode to an Oar” in time to push us out from under the bridge using the tiny paddle. I’m realizing, as I peel my face off the bridge, that I could have used the oar to thump the Albatross into another dimension. But the tool is put to much more Christlike use in Gloria’s hands, which maneuver the punt back in the correct direction—just too soon; Andrea bonks her head on the bridge.
We burst into laughter at Andrea’s pain; we are the world’s worst passengers. If the other punters on the river haven’t guessed our nationality yet, it’s pretty apparent now. Once we’ve calmed enough to help steady Andrea, we realize we still hear laughter.
I turn and squint my eyes—and stare straight into a smartphone, held in the hands of an Oxford student on the bank of the Thames. Others gather around him.
The locals are videoing us.
To my knowledge, I’ve never been in a YouTube video, but I would not be surprised to find one of our group filed under “Idiot Americans on the Thames.”
“Andrea, get us out of here,” one of us says in a low voice.
Andrea obliges, carving wide chunks in the current with her pole. Gloria is churning the water at the head of the punt with her tiny oar, paddling as fast as she can to keep up with Andrea’s wide strokes. The two of them are like a pair of overworked oxen, sweat drenching them more than the Thames. Our one hour of Thames Time™ is almost up, and Andrea and Gloria are frantically rowing to get us back to the dock. Meanwhile, Cat and Anna and I sit back and relax, reminiscing about what our life was like before the British found out how incompetent we are.
And to think a band of ragtag American revolutionaries beat the British empire—the most powerful Navy in the world—in 1783. If our punting skills are any indication of American sea prowess, it’s an excellent thing the Revolutionary War was fought in the 1700s instead of the 2020s.
The punting employee watches us take up the remaining ten minutes of our time trying to dock the punt. I can tell he’s trying not to laugh. He gives us a sympathetic smile. “Hope you enjoyed.”
Hope we enjoyed indeed!
I do, in fact, plan on returning to Oxford. And I would even punt again—if Dwayne Johnson is the punter. I’ve just got to leave ample time for the locals to forget the face of this clueless American, who floundered in the shallows shouting, “Albatross!”