up the creek without a paddle

Example: “If the ferry is canceled, we're up the creek without a paddle.”

Origin: American, and the polite version is a later softening. The blunt original names a specific and unappealing creek, and is attested from around the American Civil War period in the 1860s; the euphemistic forms — dropping the offending word entirely, or replacing it with something harmless — came afterward, and "without a paddle" was appended later still as an intensifier. The image works on a real asymmetry of moving water: drifting downstream requires nothing at all, while getting back upstream requires the paddle, so losing it does not merely slow the journey but removes any possibility of returning the way you came. Being up the creek is therefore not a matter of discomfort but of having no mechanism left for undoing your position.