My little birch canoe

This past Sunday morning, as we were shaking off the dusty cobwebs of sleep and scavenging our kitchen for breakfast, Elizabeth suddenly asked, “Do you want to go rent a canoe today?”

My mind folded in on itself trying to draw the chain of connections that had led us to this point and, failing to do so, crawled into a corner and whimpered quietly whilst trying to untangle its pretzeled self.  This was pretty much out of the blue, as far as I can tell, and was also a pretty great idea.

We packed a picnic lunch, complete with a really great couscous salad Elizabeth made, and headed down to New Brunswick (the one in Jersey, not in Canada) in search of canoes to rent and paddle.  The one we ended up renting, contrary to the title, was not birch and was not little.  It was a big aluminum behemoth, the sort that people use when they’re traversing the wilderness with three month’s worth of food, or perhaps a yearling calf, aboard.

We ran into three distinct challenges on this adventure.

First, I have not paddled a canoe in close to a decade.  Perhaps canoeing is like riding a bike, but if it is then my bike had two flat tires and a missing gear, and the steering column was about 30 degrees off center.  As we struggled our way down the canal, leaving a tortured, erratic “s”-shaped wake behind us, we kept asking each other, “How do you go straight?”  I’m not sure why we kept asking, because I think it became pretty apparent pretty quickly that neither of us really had the answer to that question.  Fortunately, apart from a few near collisions and the fact that our zig-zagging caused us to travel twice the distance we would have had to cover if we’d gone in a straight line, our navigational challenges never led us to bodily harm.

The second challenge was the picnic.  We had a 50-pound pack of food in the bottom of the canoe, and had just assumed that, somewhere along the canal, we would find a gently sloping grassy bank where we could drag the canoe up and have our lunch.  I’m not sure if this is an issue with canals generally, or just this one in particular, but all the banks were perfectly vertical and about a foot above water level, and lined right to the edge with trees.  It made for serene and beautiful canoeing, but did not really lend itself to coming ashore for picnic-type events.

We tried eating in the canoe, which started awkwardly and nearly ended very, very badly.

The third challenge was that canoeing is really a form of exercise.  You may recall that Exercise and I have agreed to disagree.  We respect each other’s place on this planet, but that doesn’t mean we get along.  After an hour and a half in the canoe, I began to realize that I was getting quite tired, and a little sore — both in my shoulders, and where my ass was trying vainly to find a comfortable spot on a flat aluminum seat.  In case you were wondering, my ass never did find that spot.

We ultimately ended up driving to a nearby park after we had docked the canoe, and had our picnic lunch-cum-supper on a blanket there.  It was less precarious and a good deal more comfortable than in the canoe, and I got to shovel food into my non-canoeing face, so that counts as a win in my books.

photo credit: aussiegall