Dark Waters, Part One

Since a few people are paying enough attention to ask, here’s a some moments and episodes distilled from my trip with Sam down the Mighty Manistee river this past weekend…

Waking up and setting off in darkness . . . and I am seven years old again, going on business trips with my Father. I was up until three the night before, so I fortify myself with sweet, dark tea while Sam opts for donuts.

Standing on the damp church parking lot, we wait for everyone else to show up. It’s still dark and there’s a flash by the side of the street. Five or six deer streak across our headlights, sending ripples of excitement through the rest of us. Then they’re gone and the rain kicks in again.

Driving north, the sun wanders up as I sing along to Wilco, Billy Bragg, Tom Waits, and Johnny Cash . . . Sam reads comic books and watches the countryside. I run out of tea too soon and swipe the three extra bottles from the lunch bag — a choice I’ll regret a few hours later when I’m on the river, both for my bladder and my brain.

Setting out is easier than I thought it would be. There are about forty-five of us. The kids outnumber the adults two to one. Sam and I have a canoe of our own, perhaps twenty feet long, with our gear safely stowed between us. Everything is wrapped in plastic, just in case.

The Manistee has a pretty gentle current, but it winds back and forth like some kind of snaky metaphor I can’t quite come up with. I’ve got five or six hours of rowing ahead of me and I’ve just barely learned how to compensate for each new bend in the river. I spend the first hour bouncing from one bank to the other like a pinball machine, only in slow motion.

At one point we end up pinned against an uprooted tree (the sides of the river are a jumble of windfall and roots). Sam is crying in the front of the canoe, pinned by two jagged branches. We’re tipping dangerously to the left, the current is forcing us to the brink of capsizing. I am calling to Sam, my mind drowning with images of his throat torn open by a splintered limb from the tree. At first he doesn’t answer . . . but he finally shouts back that he’s “just really scared.”

I tell him not to worry, in utter Dad mode and toss my oar into the bottom of the canoe. I literally shove us free, conjuring up comic book images of strength and fury to give my thirty-five pounds underweight frame the power to make it happen. We drift free and I say to myself “Well, okay, let’s try not to do that again, shall we?”

Finding the current on a river is like nothing I know of . . . except perhaps navigating through life itself. If you look closely, you can see the place in the water where it slides forward, somehow separate from the rest of the river. But just when you think you have it, it shifts to the other side. And, as I soon learn but fail to master, the current is also where all of the junk gathers . . . so if you follow too closely, you’re going to get stuck in the deadwood. Life is a river — I know, not exactly original. But after a couple of hours on the open water, everything gets broken down to essentials. Every few seconds, you have to shift and compensate.

Compensation becomes my new religion. I’ve always been good at looking ahead, but it takes me a few hours to realize that I’m just not looking far enough ahead. Once I figure that out, it gets a lot easier to avoid getting stuck. Well . . . somewhat easier.

Three hours later, it finally hits me: There are different ways to paddle. Technique at last! And that each of them has a specific effect on the direction, speed, and angle of the canoe. Unfortunately, it will be another twenty-four hours before I even come close to figuring out how to make them work for me.

I spend four hours on the first day, battling my way up the river before we get to the designated spot for lunch. The whole way there, I’m popping slivers of beef jerky and chocolate into my mouth every few minutes in order to keep my energy levels up for the constant and mind-numbingly monotonous paddling.

From time to time, people from our group pass us and at least eighty percent of them are singing Veggie Tales songs (“We are the pirates, who don’t do anything…”) I find myself wishing more than once that I’d brought my slingshot along.

There’s nothing like doing everything wrong on a river, with your nine year old son completely relying on you, in front of real men who have been hunting and fishing and canoeing since childhood. Everyone is very polite and when they pass, they shout out helpful instructions (“The trick is to steer with your paddle.” Yeah, thanks.) and I am reminded of the reason why I don’t belong to a health club. Real men can’t resist showing the skinny guys how to do it properly — be it lift weights or stretch or fold your jockstrap or paddle your soggy ass out of a clump of roots).

We finally make it to the meeting spot for lunch and drag our canoe up to the base of a bluff. The dads stand around and eat sandwiches while the kids run wild in the woods. Far off, we hear gunfire and I look at one of the other fathers and say “Yeah, that’s a good sound.” Surrounded by guys in camouflage and khaki and hiking boots and ponchos, it occurs to me that I’m probably not going to be the first one to make a ‘Deliverance’ joke and so I squash the urge and remain silent. And it really isn’t a Conrad (or even Dante) crowd.

They’re all dressed for the outdoors, perfectly prepared in every way for whatever challenge nature or weather sends their way. I’m dressed, well, how I usually dress for life in general: Black jacket, black long sleeve t-shirt, blue jeans, sunglasses, and Doc Martens. I hope that my wardrobe sends the message that, yes, while I may not have a fucking clue what I am doing out here in the woods, I indeed have no intention of actually getting wet today.

Near the end of lunch. I’m sucking down little plastic cups of Dole peaches (I really need the sugar if I’m going to make it another four or five hours to the campsite). Sam runs up with what appears to be rotting animal bones cupped in his hands — which is, of course, exactly what they are. The kids have found a desiccated porcupine carcass and are scavenging bones and teeth and even the quills for souvenirs. I gingerly seal Sam’s share of the grisly booty in a ziplock bag and stow it away. One kid walks by with the actual fucking porcupine skull cupped in his hands, picking off stay bits of dried flesh and rancid fur. I take a strip of homemade jerky from one of the other fathers and nod my thanks.

A few hours later, on the river, I ask Sam if he thinks that animals have souls. He says that they do. I then ask him if he thinks that the porcupine will haunt all of them for stealing its bones. He turns and gives me a look of such impressed, fascinated horror that I am very proud of being this sort of father.

The river gets very shallow in places, sometimes only a few inches deep. It is in one of these spots that, staring over the side and mesmerized by the passing stones and underwater glass just inches away, we scrape to a sudden halt in the center of a sandbar that is perhaps thirty or forty yards long. This will be the only time I utter the word “fuck” on the trip and so I think it’s important to mention it since we’re so very obviously screwed.

I try to pole us free with the paddle (is it a paddle or an oar?), but the inch-by-inch shift is excruciating and I rapidly burn away whatever energy the canned peaches gave me at lunch. In desperation, I stand up and — while people pass us by, shouting kind encouragement like “You really need to watch out for the shallow parts!” (I count it a matter of personal pride that I resisted the urge to give any of them the finger) — I hop and lift at the same time, scraping the canoe to the very edge of the sandbar where, thankfully, one of the other canoes (fortunately not a Veggie Tales cultist) helps pull us free.

At one point in the afternoon, the rain starts . . . on and off every few minutes. We’d had a lot of overcast skies up to that point, with lovely little breaks of sunshine. But now it appears that we’re so very definitely hosed for the duration of the trip.

The last hour or so to the campsite is a monotonous blur of paddling and compensating and taking quick rest breaks between bends in the river. At one point, Sam gasps as a pale tangle of driftwood on the bank suddenly, magically, unfolds into an origami heron and swoops low over the water, heading downstream in a slow motion blur of blue and gray. As we travel on it rises up four more times, staying ahead of us, going from bank to bank, sweeping back and forth across the river like a memory.

Finally the rain starts coming down in earnest and I break out the yellow and green vinyl ponchos. It’s another two hours before we make camp, wet and hungry, straggling in along with everyone else.

Fortunately, the rain has stopped by the time we get there. People unpack and set up their tents. We’re bunking with a fellow named Mark and his two sons. I lend a hand with the tent, remarking that I’m surprised to find that it’s not all that difficult to set up. He assures me it’s less fun in the rain.

By the time we’re done, they’ve started a campfire.

More to come…