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Thirteen
Ways of Learning at a Rapid
Or how a formerly fearful flatwater
canoeist learned to stop worrying and love whitewater
by Ian Brown
The river is moving. The blackbird must be flying.
- Wallace Stevens, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
Some canoeists think too much
- CES Franks, The Canoe and Whitewater
 A man does not want to have to buy his first Spandex
leotards at the age of 44. But the brochure from the Madawaska Kanu Centre says to
bring a pair. I've enrolled at MKC, as it's known to paddlers, in order to learn to
pilot a boat through what paddlers call rapids and what non-paddlers call a stupid
idea. You see, I am a flatwater canoeist, and I've come to the conclusion that a
44-year-old Canadian male, a resident of a country that is 25 percent water, whose
lakes contain a sixth of the world's fresh water, ought to know how to paddle down a
surging whitewater rock garden. Hence the Spandex leotards. They are the first
of many humiliations.
My plan is simple. I will spend a week learning to prance nimbly
through turbulence in a kayak. I will spend another week learning to do the same in
a canoe. Then I'll never again have to stand on the portage trail like an
emasculated orphan, watching my companions shoot boiling rapids - the "lock and
bar" to the secret world of rivers, as the late Bill Mason called them in what used
to be the Bible of paddlers, The Path of the Paddle, before they started making
indestructible canoes out of nitrogen gas, or whatever miracle zygote they're made from
now.
So I climb into my truck in Toronto, and drive three hours
northeast to the Ottawa Valley, the original amniotic sac of Canadian recreational
paddling. I check into the Madawaska Kanu Centre, consistently ranked one of the top
whitewater paddling schools in North America. MKC has been around since 1972, thanks
to Hermann and Christa Kerckhoff, who emigrated to Canada from Germany and became champion
slalom kayak racers. Now it's run by their daughter, Claudia Kerckhoff-Van Wijk, and
her husband Dirk Van Wijk. Frankly, all those Js and Ks give me pause. I've seen
photographs of Dirk: he's 10 feet tall and looks like Zeus. Peter Gzowski once
called him "the king of the forest". Claudia's shorter, but just as trim
and blond. For 10 straight years from the age of 13 to the age of 23, she was
Canada's national women's kayaking champion. I imagine MKC will be a cross between
the Prussian army and a Teuton torture chamber. The only person I know who's been
there lasted a day. Then he pretended he broke his ankle.
 The Kerckhoff-Van Wijks have disguised their evil intent, however, in a neat,
spacious lodge that offers hot running water, comfy bedrooms, four-course meals, paddling
videos, equipment rentals, a beer and wine fridge, classes with no more than five
students per instructor, a masseuse, and the bracing company of good-looking
strangers. Best of all, right across the road in a pristine natural setting is
an eight-kilometre stretch of the Madawaska River. Unlike every other paddling
school's patch of foam, the Madawaska is controlled by an Ontario Hydro dam that's
opened every morning and closed every night by a Hydro employee named Raymond. At
MKC they call Raymond "the river god". The Madawaska's turbulence is
therefore guaranteed, and ranges from Class I to Class III rapids, which covers everything
a marginally sane human being would want to attempt.
How a paddler should learn to run rapids has been a point of serious
argument with canoeists for at least 100 years. But that's nothing. Canoeists
love to argue. They've bickered for 150 years about whether you should travel faster
or slower than the water around you - and that's when they weren't arguing about whether
comfort destroys a wilderness experience, whether pork rind really keeps mosquitoes away,
how much a canoe should cost, what it should be made of and the compelling question of
freeze-dried peaches. In the end, on the learning-to-whitewater-paddle question,
there are only two choices. Either someone else teaches you, or you almost die.
The first way has history on its side. Nearly all the
whitewater tricks used today were passed down from the native tribes that invented them to
explorers, voyageurs and fur traders. They in turn handed them on to prospectors,
guides, rangers, canoe clubbists, Christian fellowshippers, United Church missionaries,
camp counsellors and Boy Scouts (who were wary of rapids), European whitewater slalomists
(who suggested the Boy Scouts were wimps), weekend adventurers and Alex Smith, in more or
less that order. Alex Smith is one of the people who's supposed to pass them on to
me.
"I'd rent a wetsuit, frankly," Alex says my first morning at MKC
over a hod of pancakes. He has bright red electrified hair and is MKC's head
instructor - my teacher for the next five days. "Because unless you've mastered
both halves of the Eskimo roll, you're going to get wet."
I do as I am told. An hour later, looking like a
cross between a Parisian dominatrix and a tree frog in neoprene spray skirt, neoprene
wetsuit, lilac plastic helmet, purple bathing trunks,and the aforementioned Spandex
leggings, I find myself beside a lake, warming up my buttocks with four strangers.
I use the word strangers advisedly. Tiny Diane, for
instance, raises sheep for a living. Her boyfriend Marty works for General Motors
and has a handshake like a car crusher. They're in their forties and newcomers to
kayaking. Jason, on the other hand, is a young intelligence officer in the Canadian
Armed Forces. "Yes, I'm a spy," he says as we introduce ourselves.
"But I can't tell you where."
Within an hour we're on the water, trying to make our
kayaks go in a straight line. This is harder than it looks. Then we learn all
the kayaking strokes dreamed up in the past two or three thousand years by Innu and
Siberians and a few Mongolians. That takes another hour. Sweeps back and
fourth turn the kayak right and left; draws move the kayak sideways; braces prevent the
kayak from tipping over. Failing a solid brace, there is the Eskimo roll, or what in
these politically correct times is called the modified screw roll. After I almost
rip both my arms out trying, I call it the moderately screwed roll. My problem
is that I'm trying to muscle my way over. "It should feel very easy,"
Claudia says. Claudia once paddled every day for two years, and never
flipped. The secret, she says, is the hip - a body part I gather is located between
my shoulders and my knees. Failing that, we practice our "wet exits," in
which you rip your spray cover off and exit the boat while upside down in the water.
It's a little like re-enacting your own birth without the assistance of an
obstetrician.
Still, I can't say it's so bad: 44, and playing in
the water.
I remember the last time I went to summer camp. I was seven years
old. I remember how I watched my parents' car recede down the road after they said
goodbye for two weeks, and how I then threw up. I remember thinking, even then:
huh, this is what it must feel like when you die. You get lonelier and
lonelier, until finally you don't exist at all. I remember that I agreed to go
to camp so I could learn to canoe like the voyageurs. In stead I learned how to make
a whistle out of a leftover scrap of sumac. I'm trying not to see this as the story
of my life.
By the end of the second day we're running rapids. Yes. True we're
only bobbing along "ducky-style" behind Alex, the way toddlers follow their ski
instructor down the baby hill in winter, but that's part of the plan: the Kerckhoffs
modeled MKC on European ski schools, which chop up lessons into manageable bites.
The point is, we're paddling rapids.
We're apprised of basic river tactics and rapid morphology,
but it's straightforward: there's no talk of streaming vs. shooting water, sub- vs.
super-critical Froude Numbers, the superfluous arcana of flow. We keep it
simple: look for Vs in the water and remember Alex's Holy Trinity: angle (to
entre the current), motion (make sure you have some), tilt (downstream, downstream).
Angle, motion, tilt. Say this three times.
None of us have a reliable roll, but Alex always shows up
to rescue us by bumping his prow into our overturned boats. The soul of kayaking
isn't rolling, anyway: it's going over in the first place.
The first time I flip it happens so fast I think I've had a
stroke. Instantaneous and irreversible, like a genuine tragedy. My mistake was
to lean upstream - a terrible no-no in almost any whitewater sport. One must lean
downstream, to present the implacable bottom of the kayak, rather than the suggestible
gunwale, to the onrushing current.
But that's counter-intuitive. In the panic zone, you
want to lean upstream, toward the place you've already been, toward the place where the
water's coming form, the great warm Mummy. Whereas the trick to staying upright in a
kayak, I discover, is just the opposite. If you're going to go anywhere in a rapid,
or probably in anything else, you have to kiss Mama goodbye, embrace the unknown, and show
the world your backside. Angle, motion, tilt: as a general approach to life,
one could definitely do worse.
When things don't go well - when I've no sooner figured out the forward
stroke than Alex keeps harping that my elbows have to be up for a low brace; when I'm too
afraid, and can't bring myself to try a hole or a ledge - I think less of kayakers.
They're much too young, for starters - much younger than
the canoeists, who tend to be over 40. Unlike the canoeists, who prefer cheques,
Claudia says the kayakers pay by Visa. The drive sports car. "They're
yuppies," Claudia admits. "They're into speed and thrills."
According to the kitchen, they're less likely than canoeists to be vegetarian.
The most infamous guest at MKC showed up with his newlywed
wife. By the end of the week, she'd run off with their instructor. That guest
was a kayaker. The centre's most infamous canoeist, by telling contrast, showed up
four separate times for four separate courses, each time with a different blond.
Which is bad. But at least he wasn't married. Therein lies the spirit of the
canoeist.
 When kayakers aren't talking about where they've paddled
or what they paddle, they usually talk about paddling videos. These have titles such
as River Rescue and Messing About in Boats and often depict guys with
ponytails dropping nose-first down raging three-story waterfalls in Guatemala, saying
"the thing you want to remember going over the falls is to try and angle your boat a
little to the left, so you don't recirculate under the cliff" - which would
presumably be quite a bummer , man.
But the kayakers seldom describe in any articulate way why
they like to paddle. They simply feel the rush, the pure adrenaline high of flitting
through fast water, which in a kayak is perforce fleeting and solitary. It stops as
quickly as it starts, a windsprint. In a big heavy canoe, high out of the water, the
best a paddler can achieve is a partnership with the current. In a kayak you are
the current. It's like falling in love, when oneness seems possible, as opposed to
being in love, which is later, and different.
I admit not all kayakers are that way. Ron Atkinson,
the oldest of them, is short, round, bald and 70. He's a child psychiatrist in
Winnipeg. I never see Ron go down a rapid right-side up. One afternoon on the
lower Madawaska, he runs a massive torrent of eight haystacks and three times as many
rocks entirely el reverso. The trip takes an entire minute but Ron refuses
to bail out. It's a point of pride. He simply waits for his instructor to race
madly after him. "The new boat technology allows people to play," Alex
observes, "but it hasn't really improved the river-running skills of the
general population."
The next morning I run into Ron in the wash house.
"I'm amazed you're doing this," I say. In fact I'm amazed he's still
extant. "Are you actually having fun?"
"Sure," he says. "Wouldn't be doing it
otherwise. Have to show them what's possible."
What, that it's possible for a 70-year-old man to go down a
throbbing river upside-down in a kayak? For a kayaker the answer to that question is
always yes.
The apex of my kayaking career thus far occurs three days in. This
is the day we're to run the entire eight kilometres of MKC's stretch of the Madawaska,
which means running a rapid called Staircase. On the way we pass under a small
bridge. "The first time I ever walked under a bridge in the city was the
Gardiner Expressway in downtown Toronto," Alex says. "I was 19. I
tell this story to people, and they can't believe it. They say, 'You were 19 before
you walked under a bridge?' And I always say the same thing: 'Well, I'd paddled
under plenty of them. I'd just never walked under one before.'"
 Alex grew up the son of teachers in the
hamlet of Douglas in the Ottawa Valley. He was canoeing with them before he can
remember; he took up kayaking at 12, in what in his family amounted to an act of cultural
rebellion. At 26, he has been kayaking for 14 years. He can do anything in a
kayak, and still practices every day. There are maybe 20 days a year when he isn't
on the water. In the winter he has to stand in the shower afterwards for 10 minutes
to melt the ice on the buckles of his dry suit before he can get undressed.
Off-season he's a graduate student at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario, studying
the effect of UV radiation on amphibian eggs. Peterborough was where in the late
1850s John Stephenson built the first cedar-strip version of a native birch-bark canoe,
thus giving the world the Peterborough canoe, the boat that for nearly 50 years (at
roughly $45) was the most coveted canoe in the world. Today in Peterborough dry
cleaners offer 15 per cent off wedding dresses, but 40 per cent off sleeping bags.
Like Alex, they take their wilderness seriously.
What reassures me about Alex, however, with Staircase just
around the corner, is that he isn't a thrill seeker. He thinks of himself as
"an appreciation paddler. I much prefer going back to the same spot and doing
the same thing over and over. Because the thing about a river is, it's never the
same. The temperature is not the same, nor the level, nor the circumstances."
That applies as well to Staircase, whose name describes it
precisely, the toughest piece of water on MKC's patch of river. I'm so nervous at
the prospect of going down, I figure if I can stuff a few lumps of coal up my fundament
before I start, I'll have a handful of diamonds by the time I'm finished.
Not that the descent is required; Alex give us the option
of declining. But that's no solution: if I don't do it, I'll feel even worse.
 We stand by the river and scout a route down. I can barely see
the slim tongues of dark, deeper water (fils d'eau, the voyageurs called them)
that mark a passage through the foam and rocks and standing waves and horsetails and
ledges and recirculating souseholes. Our line is centre, then left into a small
parking lot of smooth, black water called Football Eddy. The problem, apart from
rocks and big fat holes, is that 98 per cent of the river roars right.
As we wait, the last of the tandem canoes ahead of us
shoots the rapid, and flips. Two women tumble out of the canoe and down the ledges
of Staircase like flecks of bark. One of them, a 48-year-old United Church minister
named Anne Beattie-Stokes, manages to swim to the nearest eddy. Her companion,
however, has to be rescued by rope. Meanwhile the canoe, an 18-foot, 80 pound dark
green ABS monster, bobs and hops and jigs in the hole. What the canoe doesn't do is
float out. We watch it for 20 minutes. A hole that can hold a canoe is not the
kind of hole I want to visit upside-down in a kayak.
"I can do this, right?" I say to Alex as we head
for the top of the rapid.
"Yes," Alex says.
"And it's not a bad sign that I'm nervous."
"Excited about descending is good," Alex says.
"Nervous after you start is dangerous."
Then I do it. I don't notice much, except how short
the trip seems, how the spray feels, sweeping hard to get the boat left, Alex's voice
saying "C'mon, Ian, c'mon Ian," then missing the eddy but somehow bumping
and leaning my way downstream into the next one down. I hear the cheer of my
classmates.
But my fear beforehand. . . that is not a
good sign. I know Alex would never take me down water I couldn't handle. But I
couldn't process the fact, which means my fear has a stronger grip than my reason.
That suggests a more profound lack of courage, one that might. . .
recirculate.
I make sure to sit next to Rev. Anne at dinner. I
have questions. She says she prays every morning and night, and sometimes on a
rapid. She says she too is often scared, and doesn't want die.
So then why do whitewater?
"Because life is too static otherwise," she
says. "And static means there's no change. And that's like death.
Whereas on the river, in a rapid, change is everywhere, in every moment."
"You mean in a rapid you have to live in the
present."
She nods enthusiastically. "You have to be totally
in the present. I call it wakefulness."
By the time we switch to canoes, I feel as though I live on the
river. I'm Cocky man, as Claudia predicted. "Do kayaks first," she
said. "That way you'll get your strokes down, and then canoes will seem much
easier. You'll find that you have much more time to react in a canoe."
This is true. Given the size of a canoe, however, you have much less chance to do
anything about it.
 My partner in the tandem canoe is Murray Campbell.
I've known him for 15 years. We'd been introduced to whitewater at the same time by
an autodidact I will refrain from naming. His name isn't important. It was
Colin MacKenzie. MacKenzie was self-taught: he ran rapids for five years, for
instance, sometimes losing three out of five boats on a single trip, before he heard of
something called back-paddling. It was MacKenzie who first made Murray and me stand
forlornly on shore while he displayed his manhood on the water.
But Murray's regret at not running the big water is nowhere
as intense as mine. By this I mean to say that Murray's from Saskatoon. He
travels the world as a journalist, but intelligent prudence is nailed into his DNA.
None of which would make any difference were it not for
Sarah Frizell, our instructor. Unlike Alex, Sarah's a woman: 25, chestnut
hair, blue eyes. She always waits before she speaks and when she's ready to speak,
she waits a little longer. She keeps her own consel. She has been canoeing
since she was 16, and can make her canoe do anything with barely any effort at all,
despite the fact that it's 11 feet long, rockered like a sauce boat, crazily turny - the
kind of "play boat" canoe weenies breathily describe as new technology, when in
fact natives used just that kind of boat to hunt 300 years ago. There's no such
thing as truly "new" technology in whitewater - the Inuit invented flotation,
while the Malecite Indians reinforced their birch-bark hulls with slats or
"canoeshoes," an early version of undentable ABS.
Sarah's crash helmet might qualify, though: white and
round, worn over a peaked cap and impenetrable sunglasses. She looks like a
motorcycle cop in a canoe, which may explain part of her appeal.
Murray and I are smitten. The other guys in our class
don't seem to upset either. To judge from our classmates, if kayakers are
sensation-seeking speed freaks, canoeists are genius boaters who love the life of the
mind. Peter Rice, a 57-year-old editor of an insurance newsletter from Cincinnati,
is always talking about things I don't understand: fractals, for instance, or
management paradigm shifts, or expanded music. His bowman, Helmar Drost, 57, is a
professor of economics at York University. Helmar's post-course stop will be his
cottage on Prince Edward Island, where he plans to spend a weekend with his book club.
They're reading Concilience: The Unity of Knowledge, by Edward O.
Wilson, the world's foremost expert on ants and. . . . oh, never mind.
Safe to say Helmar is no idiot. He also sports Spandex leggings, another
reason I respect him. Helmar has signed up for tandem class because of his kids.
"I saw them taking off and becoming more and more free. Yet when I saw a
set of rapids, I was portaging them. So I wanted another way to get around
them."
 We're fast learners. Maybe this is because
we're older, and feel how little time anyone has. By lunch on our first day,
we know the basic strokes. I love to do them, love even the names themselves: draw,
brace, cross draw, pry . . . an armoury of strokes, like noble
medieval weapons. By the afternoon, we're ferrying across the current. By the
second day we're eddying out and in, C-turning, S-turning, back ferrying. Murray and
I have a mean boat-tilt going too. It's like driving a very fast, responsive bus.
Sometimes we talk about paddling, and at other times we
talk about what married men in their forties talk about: why in the end you wouldn't
cheat on your wife, money, who you'd have the affair with if you did, jobs, whether we'd
tell our wives, school and kids, the likelihood of anyone wanting to have an affair with
us anyway, given that beyond 40 you're pretty much invisible to women. It's all very
pleasant. In my kayak I envied the canoes their seriousness; from a canoe, I now
envy the kayakers their grasshopper brilliance, their light, evasive touch. Coming
down the river, bright paddles flashing in the sun, they look like a hatch of dragonflies.
The only problem is Murray. I start off in the bow,
but Murray frets that he can't steer. I talked Murray into this nonsense in the
first place, so we switch places. Traditionally, in a voyageur canot du nord,
the avant was the strongest paddler; the gouvernail, or sternsman, was
the brains who kept the big directional picture in mind. Murray is not the strongest
paddler - in fact, from my point of view in the rear, he sometimes seems to forget he's
paddling at all. He holds the top of his paddle as if it has cooties. He
doesn't draw so much as poke his paddle in the water, like he's stirring pasta.
Sometimes I yell "Right! Right! Right!" and paddles left, left,
left. His most frequent question: "Is this where we die?"
I put it down to nerves and curse him silently.
Sometimes when I haven't had a cigarette in a while - in the tradition of my smoking river
forebears, the voyageurs - I swear at him volubly, another tradition of the
voyageur. I feel I am acting out the irascible history of our land.
Murray replies by insulting me. When an instructor
drops her paddle and I bend to retrieve it, denting myself between the legs on the gunwale
of the canoe in the process and pointing out that I've sacrificed my manhood for her,
Murray says, "Don't worry, it's not much of a sacrifice." I in turn refer
in a gently derisive way to the fact that in a red plastic whitewater helmet he looks like
he belongs in the back window of a car, his head bouncing on a spring.
So the tension's high the afternoon we take on Chalet, a fast, tricky and
very technical rock garden. Imagine driving an Econoline van up a one way street, in
the wrong direction pulling a U-turn, speeding up, and then pulling another U-turn and
parking the van, headed in the he wrong direction again, on the other side of the
street, in a space better suited to a Chevette. Now imagine doing all that within 20
yards, on water, into the current. That's the assignment.
We set out. We ferry well straight into the onrushing
flow. Then Murray starts to go for the draw - too early! I say "Not
yet!" Murray swings his paddle back to the upstream side, disrupting our tilt.
In a second we're capsized, bumping hard on the underwater rocks. I manage to swim
to shore, but I see Murray floating away, Sarah chasing him.
I'm emptying the canoe on shore when Sarah paddles up.
"Murray says you said no, not yet, and that threw him off. He's fairly
winded, so he may have something to say about it."
 Bastard! Ratting me out - to Sarah!
Claiming it was MY fault? I didn't say "No, not yet;" I simply said, by
way of encouragement and gentle direction, "not yet." And I
didn't ask him to throw his weight over to the upstream side of the boat like Sarah
Bernhardt doing Ophelia's death scene in Hamlet. It's true the bowman
leads, but. . . but. . . Murray asked me to call the shots
from the stern. . . didn't he?
Murray pants up. He doesn't seem too upset.
"I thought you said 'no, not yet.'"
"Just 'not yet.' I wasn't reprimanding
you." I don't seem too upset either.
"Well, then, we had a miscommunication."
"Yes. Are you okay?"
"Yeah. Couldn't swim over, though."
Then we climb into the canoe and promptly flip over once
more.
And suddenly everything is okay again between us.
That can happen on a river, psychological eddies swirling and dying. Murray starts
paddling like a champion. I improve too. The next day we run Staircase without
mishap. Then we run it again. Sarah graces us with a smile. "If
you're not swimming," she says, "you're not trying."
I sit there thinking about that, in between thinking that
Sarah likes Murray more than she likes me. Wild irises bloom along the shore of the
river. Someone once told me the irises originally took root after falling out of the
packs of voyageurs, who carried them for trade. I doubt that story is true, but I
want to believe it. I listen to the river for a while, trying to separate the rush
of the mainstream from the shamble of the eddies and the trickle along the shore. We
talk and bob, using what Nature has put here. The human ability to paddle may have
diminished, as Claudia and Alex insist. But the human capacity for inventing
pleasure is unbounded.
"You ought to visit the Wilno Tavern," Claudia says one
afternoon. "It's an interesting place."
The Wilno Tavern on a Tuesday night is unlike any bar I've
ever been in. Half an hours drive from MKC, Wilno was the first Polish settlement in
Canada. (The Pope dropped by the last time he was in the neighbourhood.) Then
in the '60's a raft of draft-dodgers and a brace of communes moved in.
Most of the survivors appear to be in the bar, part of a
high-density crowd of rafters, paddlers, tourists, locals, lawyers in denim overalls,
cottagers, and a solid core of aging hippies. There's a bevy of ultra-fit former
hippie women dancing, albeit to their own private beat - once conducted, apparently, by
the ghost of acid trips past. There isn't an ounce of self-consciousness in the
room. I sit in an unobtrusive corner, and am immediately approached by a tall,
fiftyish man in a white hat, black T-shirt, and a jacket that seems to be made out of
something and aluminum.
"Do you mind if I sketch you?" he asks.
I've never been sketched in a hippie bar before, so I say
sure. His name is Andrew. He sketches to pass the time between sets of the
band: his real passion is dancing. "I've danced four or five nights a
week in bars for the last 25 years," he says. "I love to dance. Want
some cotton?"
"I beg your pardon?" Maybe this is
Wilno-speak for who knows what.
He pulls out a wadge of cotton batting. "For
your ears. I'm half deaf, myself. But first I have to unplug the toilet."
He gets up.
The band's playing when he returns. People are waving
and pointing him out, calling him Disco Man. "I'd like to show you my
sketches," Disco Man says to me, removing his hat, jacket and T-shirt, to reveal
another T-shirt underneath.
"Oh, well, " I mumble, "I ...don't get out
here much. Leave me, uh, a number, I'll call the next time I'm in town, " which
will be never.
"You can't. I live with my mother in Toronto, so
I'm not in the book. And I don't have a phone out here. But I have maps to my
place in my car."
I figure he's a psychopath. He's going to follow me
back toward MKC, and once I'm on the deserted back road he'll drive me off the shoulder,
slit my throat, impale me with a broken kayak paddle and pin my portrait to my chest to
help the police identify my remains.
Instead, he starts dancing. He dances alone.
He spins on his heel, two and three complete revolutions at a time. He does a
complicated snakey weaving thing with his hands. People make room for him, watch
him. Women sway up and dance in his aura. He acknowledges them, but he keeps
dancing with himself.
It's a good time to slip out, head back to the lodge.
The next morning at breakfast, Jill Morris, the head cook, and the kitchen staff
are dancing as they prepare breakfast. "We do it all the time," Jill says.
So I sit down to eat. A woman in her late sixties
sits next to me. She's five foot four and Quebecoise. She's in the solo canoe
class - generally acknowledged to be the most physically demanding of all. "I
was canoeing, tandem, on a river in Labrador," she says when I ask why.
"And it was so beautiful. But then we went over. I was trapped
underwater. This was in the rapids. I thought I was going to drown. I
was very frightened, but somehow I made it to the shore. And afterwards I realized I
couldn't rely on paddling with another person. So I said, I must learn this
alone. It's ridiculous, I know. But I must do it. Because I love it.
I really do. I can't stop."
"Are you married?" I ask.
"Never," she replies, and raises her eyebrows.
"And your name?" "Janine," she
says, and smiles. "Janine Dansereau."
Dansereau. Janine Water-Dancer.
That's weird.
I hurry down to my class, where Alex is playing in a hole
in the river as he waits for us to arrive. He doesn't see me. He's surfing the
hold, standing his kayak on its nose - "rodeoing," as it's now called, as if to
bring two heroes of Canadian culture - the voyageur and the cowboy - a little closer.
But it doesn't look like a rodeo ride. Alex looks like he's dancing, too.
Disco Man, dancing cooks, Dansereau, the kayak dance: am I crazy to
think that is more than a coincidence, crazy to think canoes and kayaks connect things
that way? If I am crazy, I'm not the only one. Remember how, when the last
referendum threatened the existence of Canada, Pierre Trudeau said nothing, and instead
headed north "to look at the water?" Because even if the political thing
we called Canada changed, the land never would? Trudeau used canoeing a political
metaphor over and over again for a reason. Water and canoes are two of our best
legends even today, an automatically useful metaphor.
In his excellent book Idleness, Water and a Canoe,
Jamie Benidickson tries to assess the precise role canoes and paddling and rapids have
played in the creation of a collective Canadian consciousness, or at least a national
mythology. As a canoeist, Benidickson wants to believe the myth that we're all
joined somehow; as a lawyer, he's skeptical - knowing as he does that however much we
fanaticize about our links to our water history, Canadians own more snowmobiles than
canoes these days. But Benidickson does permit himself one modest buff of canoeing's
well-polished reputation. "The canoe," he writes, "carries
communities rather than individual paddlers."
Maybe Disco Man is part of that community. Maybe he's
an eddy on a synchronous river of canoe consciousness that invisibly and inevitably links
everyone who tries to understand anything about canoeing and the mystery of dancing on
moving water. Maybe all you have to do is step into the river, and it'll float you
to a place you never expected to go.
Frankly, I doubt it. I think I need some sleep.
What I am sure of - what I remember - is this: one bright afternoon on a fast
river, Murray and I danced from rapid to rapid with the best of them. We learned a
skill, one that has been around since forever and that as much as any other made this
country what it is to this day. It turns out you can do that, even if you're afraid
and in your forties. For a few moments, we actually know what we were doing, and
why.
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