“If a man must be obsessed by something, I suppose a boat is as good as anything, perhaps a bit better than most. [they are] full of strange promise and the hint of trouble.” —E.B. White
Somehow, and no one knows how this happened, I married a wife who developed a love for the river and fishing. When I offer up a Saturday afternoon date catching slimy trout on the river or eating linguini in a fancy restaurant, she chooses, without hesitation, the river.
Most people upon encountering a canoe would worry about falling in and dying, complain about the back-breaking seats, or begrudge the fact that the entire craft is powered by a stick of wood and biceps. Not my wife. I cannot explain it, but I am thankful for it. She will climb into a sixteen-foot canoe and run the bow better than most men. She knows how to keep her weight in the center, how to land a fish without capsizing, and, best of all, knows how to be a good fishing partner: Talk less, tie on your own lures, unhook your own fish. That sort of thing.
Bill Mason, the author of several classic wilderness canoeing books, Path of the Paddle and Song of the Paddle, was generous enough to call canoeing an art. I thought this was setting the bar pretty low for art until I discovered that people not only skip stones and eat chili dogs, but make a competition of it. Compared to these? Canoeing approaches transcendence.
After all, there are 45 different paddle strokes for two-person canoeing and 21 for solo paddling. You can sit on the bow seat when paddling solo or kneel forward to give a lower center of gravity. You can jam your knees into the bilge to heel the canoe over, reducing the water line to make for easier paddling. You can sail your canoe. There are maneuvers to run rapids, to beach the canoe, and to paddle in wind. There is the jargon of canoespeak: tumblehome, sheer line, freeboard, keel, entry lines, rocker, gunwale, thwart, stem, bow, stern, waterline and bilge. There is much more there than meets the eye.
During the Great Toilet Paper Shortage of 2020, I decided to build a canoe. I am not a talented woodworker, but lack of talent didn’t seem to make much difference in the long run. I bought plans, a book, some wood, and put it together one step at a time. I also messed some things up, but that is another story and you didn’t need to know that. Some might call building your own boat a spiritual experience, but it isn’t, really, just the honest satisfaction of the work done for its own sake. These wooden canoes not only hold the beckoning luster inherent in all boats, but also hold semi-sacramental qualities of personal investment.
I’m not an overly emotional individual, but take a summer evening when the fog is hovering just off the surface of the river, and the sun is glinting red off the blade of the paddle; you’re catching fish, on a boat you built, using a paddle you carved, using a fly you tied? It’s hard not to go a little mushy. Or perhaps on an early morning on the way to some public land for an early season muzzleloader hunt; there’s a full Hunter’s moon, you’re ghosting across the water like fog, the sky is in the water and you can see the stars reflected just above the gunwale?
You should try it.