Took to the woods bright and early long before first light. Drove the Jeep down to the ford by Claywells’s field and couldn’t make it up the other side, it being a one-legged jeep, so I just dropped the Grumman in right there. I discovered my mistake instantly but was too stupid to admit it, and by the time I was ready to abandon the scheme I was in the middling zone where the cost of abandon or pushing through were equivalent. Since I have a tendency for forward motion even while deliberating, a few more minutes of waffling and it was too late to back out. Shove off, scrape rock bottom on less than two inches of water, drag canoe over riffle, shove off. Repeat.
Finally got off a good shove and good water at the rock wall that plumbs the bank on river right and paddled furiously, my pale blue light scratching the granite blackness of pre-dawn. A beaver was up out of the water chewing on a Box Elder limb but took to the water as I came by. He swam close enough I could have high-fived him with my paddle, his eyes shining a weak blue in the white swath of my light. He was swimming for the labyrinthine sycamore root ball, undermined by constant water abrasion, the gnarled and ropy roots in impossible knots. Abstract art. Stare at it at high noon with an angle of clean light and it will mesmerize you.
I pulled the canoe up onto the bank and tied her bow to a sycamore. Here is the river. It runs by here every day, sometimes wine-dark like this morning under a fading cloud cover and sometimes translucent and luminous in the spell of full moon. Heraclitus said, “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” Which is true, but only partly because a river is more than its water. The same sycamores stand here as when Thomas Jody hewed out a life in these fields, when the steamers came up from Nashville, when Molly and Nan, who lived in the field behind me where the wilderness has taken over their house, tried to elope with two of the Coe boys and were stopped at the train station in Glasgow and sent back, their loves to be separated forever because of the prohibited interracial marriages. Was the shade of these ancient sycamores their trysting place? Here we are, under the same trees, the same river course with only different water and a different man. It is the same but different; philosophically, a different river, qualitatively the same.
I climbed into my tree and watched the morning come on—I had made it just before legal light—pure light as clean as a whetted edge cutting through waning foliage. Geese honked downriver at the head of Jody Island, where they always swim in the eddies and gossip. They took to the wing for breakfast about seven, getting up and flying in small flocks to the cut corn up the river. The big flock had a snow goose with them, adding a high-pitched, dissenting note to the cohesive gabble of the Canada geese, the Snow goose answering a gander’s honk so closely it sounded like a single honk, as if it were one of their own, which goes to show that the geese do not confuse unity with uniformity. I saw no deer.
Which was fine with me. Extracting a deer from my spot would take a three-quarter mile of paddling, a half mile on shank’s mare to haul gear and drag the deer, with a return trip for the canoe. I shouldn’t have been out here in the first place. There was enough adulting to be done to fill my day but I went hunting anyway hoping the rest would fall into place. I couldn’t help it; it was October.
October! On days like this, with a brilliant sky and bright woods, it isn’t possible to get all the goodness out of the day, and one must reconcile himself to wasting part of its beauty. The sap had begun to slow in its search for leaves, inching slower in its intricate passage up the cambium. The foliage had paled and the woods was opening, the dispersal of the crowdedness summer. By early November, it will feel like a church sanctuary on Monday morning.
It was time to go already. I paddled up to the rock walls where the depth petered out, beached the canoe, and walked out to the jeep. I eyed the bank that had foxed me this morning and horsed the jeep up and over it (you can’t do this kind of violence in the dark) and drove back the field, stopping to reconnoiter each ditch bigger than a cut-away mole tunnel. A two-wheel-drive jeep in wet grass is downright pusillanimous.
I ran—the day was moving on—down to where I had beached the canoe. I wasn’t about to skid her back up over the rocky creek, and so took a different route through the woods. I rolled her onto my shoulders. When I built my cedar canoe, I took pains to carve a thwart that would spread the weight of the canoe over a man’s shoulders. Grumman did no such thing when they designed the 17STD. A round aluminum rod from gunnel to gunnel and slightly forward of center: This goes across your shoulders and rides you like remorse.
One thing to remember: If you ever begin to feel a slow bruise developing across the shoulders while carrying a canoe, never stop to think about it. Sure, it hurts, but getting started again eats into travel time and doubles the troubles. When I got her to the jeep, I set the bow onto the roof rack and swung the stern up into line, then pushed it forward to center on the rack. Fastest and easiest way to transport a canoe.
I drove out the field, stopping again to design my route. Here a small ditch, approach angled ten degrees toward the creek, departure angled fifteen, a depression on my side. Here is a lesson in energy and resource management. There is no square deal, only an uneasy truce and the best bet is to find a way through that allows you to keep the jeep from going cracker-dog but keeps enough speed to claw to the other side. I would have to rely on the tires, a dubious and likely misplaced hope, to stick on the hill that canted toward the creek. Momentum would be against me. When I crossed, the speedometer was registering, the suspension went to the stops, and the canoe see-sawed like the big kid’s teeter-totter, the jeep’s hind end sagged toward the creek but hung on with one toenail and pulled herself up valiantly. I patted her. Good jeep. I came to the steep incline down to the creek and held the brakes and she slid down like an unwilling dog pulled by the collar, all four legs braced.
I navigated the deep fissure that ran through the dry creek bed and lit for the other side. No good, too slow. I backed up and tried again, this time accumulating as much speed as possible and at the last moment yanking the wheel to line up with the mud bank so my attempts to turn in mud wouldn’t hurt inertia. It slowed me down but gave me just enough to top out, the right rear wheel spinning for joy and reduced to 10 percent effectiveness. Stephen Hawking could have elaborated on these physics but he could not have played it so close. On the level and full of cheer, I hotfooted it to the pavement where I cinched the canoe (it was very loose) and texted my wife. “Be home in ten.”
A friend of mine regularly gainsays my hunting, thinking it an exercise of discomfort and futility. This fellow, bless his heart, has committed the American-death-wish fallacy of conflating happiness with comfort, thinking that all pleasure excludes pain and work. I cannot reply to this anymore. The explanation would take a half-hour lecture and include an esoteric set of words like “mystery” and “elemental” and “poetry.” I could take refuge in, “You don’t understand,” which is like saying, “you don’t have to if you want to.” Both are true but unsatisfactory, therefore better left unsaid.
Or, to borrow from John McPhee, “If you have to ask that question, you wouldn’t understand the answer.”
I pulled up to the house, left the canoe on top of the jeep, and went in for a cup of coffee. My wife saw me coming and first thing she said was, accusingly, I think, “You’re happy.”