The Canoe Diaries: Chapter 1

Fish Head Soup

My love affair with canoeing began after a bowl of curried fish head soup in a small open air restaurant on the far northeastern corner of Singapore sometime in January 1997. I had been traveling around Asia on business and met up with an old colleague, Dick Isherwood, who just happened to be in Singapore on business, too. When Dick asked me whether I wanted to have lunch and then go hiking on an abandoned plantation somewhere in the middle of the Straights of Johor over the weekend, I should have realized what I might be getting into. Years back when Dick and I worked for the same company, everyone had a Dick Isherwood story - How he convinced another colleague to bushwhack up the side of an unexplored volcano in Indonesia or how he swam to Ellis Island when a freighter heading out of Manhattan swamped his sea kayak.

Dick started with the company years before I did, but took a hiatus for 10 years to trek and work in Nepal. It wasn’t until he found himself married and the father of a Bengali girl and a Nepali boy that he returned to resume his corporate existence somewhere in his late 40s. By the time I met Dick, he and his family had worked and traveled across the world. But, he had settled in northern New Jersey with his kids in middle school and photographs of the Himalayas filling his office walls.

After we finished our curried fish head soup, Dick led me to a rickety dock, to an even more rickety wooden boat which took us, along with about 10 local residents, across the rolling sea to an island several miles distant.

“If only” said Dick looking longingly across the swells, “I had my sea kayak”.

“Ummm”, I replied, thinking “If only I had taken two Dramamine.”

The sky was warm and blue and the breeze finally convinced me that eating fish head soap was not such a bad idea after all. We landed at another old wooden dock at the edge of a ramshackle village. As we disembarked, I was struck by how different this place was from Singapore, with its rusty old cars and chickens and dogs roaming freely.

Dick and I wandered through the streets of the town to the far side of the island with its white sand beaches and unidentifiable rusty machine carcasses. The weather was warm and clear, and I asked Dick a million questions about his adventures. Even if Dick were by nature a boring or stogy person, which he is not, his adventures are so enthralling, I could listen to him for hours. I was not his captive audience. Rather, he was my captive storyteller.

Somewhere after Dick reentered corporate life, he started taking his family canoe tripping, a term I had never even heard of. I wasn’t interested in canoeing, but I found vicarious pleasure listening to Dick’s adventures. As we walked along he told me how the summer before his family paddled a river up in Canada all the way to a place called Moosonee on the St. James Bay. His kids had flipped paddling through one of the rapids and they had a fire sale of wet gear floating down the river. After paddling north for nearly two weeks without meeting a soul, they arrived in Moosonee – a town filled with tourists who had traveled North by train on the Polar Bear Express.

As we were walking along, Dick told me that in the coming summer he was heading to a place I’d never heard of called Algonquin Park. To get there, he would have to drive from his home in New Jersey, through Toronto and on up into Ontario Province. When I realized that he would be driving through my hometown of Rochester, I invited him to stop on his way north.

We made our way back across the Straits of Johor, Dick looking longingly at the occasional sea kayak that we would pass and me looking longingly at shore. On the taxi ride home, Dick explained that the old cars littering the abandoned plantation were exported from Singapore where driving rusty or damaged cars was illegal. As the taxi sped on, we passed Changyi Prison.

“You know why crime is so low in Singapore, don’t you?” he asked.

I raised my eyebrows in a blank response.

“Well”, he said “they hang all the criminals.”

A Proper Upbringing

I grew up in Utah and like most local residents only went to the Great Salt Lake under duress – usually entertaining out of town relatives – who were simply dying to say they’d floated in the salt waters – or who had just overstayed their welcome so long that there was absolutely nothing else to do with them. Wilderness wasn’t foreign to me. Fresh water was.

In Salt Lake City in the 70s, the most accessible alternatives to Church activities were smoking pot and hiking. You either fell in with a Good crowd or a Bad one because there weren’t any other options, like, for instance, band camp.
I had my first marijuana brownie, spelunking somewhere in the Uinta Mountains on a school outing in Eighth Grade.

As a teenager, I would walk out the front door of my house, up the foothills of the Watch Front and into the canyons and ridges of the surrounding Mountains. Neither of my parents went camping, but they were happy to let me backpack in Southern Utah with any family friends that would take me. Routinely, they let me hike off into the Wasatch Mountains to camp unsupervised with several boys I knew from high school. I spent one summer working for the forest service and another at wilderness survival school. By the time I graduated high school I had hiked all over the Rockies, wandered the canyons of Southern Utah, backpacked in the Uintas, smoked a little marijuana and somehow managed to maintain my virginity.

All that changed my freshman year in college.

When I turned 18, I made a beeline for the Utah border and headed for the east coast. By my junior year, I had transferred to school in Boston to study Chinese, and from there I went Shanghai and then to New York City. Perhaps with a broader range of social options, I went outside a little less. Don’t get me wrong, I always loved to be outside, but I got distracted. By the time I first met up with Dick Isherwood in Singapore, 20 years had passed since I’d spent a night outside under the stars.

Why Not?

Several months after Dick and I made it safely back to the shores of Singapore, I called Dick in New Jersey, to see if he and his wife, Janet, would indeed like to stop for a night on their way to Algonquin Park.

Dick said instead, “Why don’t you just come with us?”

Twenty years is a long time to be inside. And my sole canoe experience at the age of 17 had been less than stellar. For hours my mother and I fumed at each other’s incompetence as we paddled in circles down the Delaware River. I wasn’t sure a week long canoe trip was for me.

“Well”, I said, “I’d love, too, but I don’t think my husband, Brian, will go for it.”

I know. I know. I can’t always be expected to own up to my own shit, can I? Besides, Brian is a nice Jewish guy, born in Miami and raised in the suburbs of New Jersey. I wasn’t expecting a whole lot of enthusiasm about this one from him either.

But I called Brian at work because I told Dick I would.

When I explained to Brian what Dick and his family had invited us to do with them, he paused and said “Sure, why not?”

“Why not?”

Next time you are at the edge of a quiet pond, drop a pebble in and watch the water ripple. See how the minute waves stir up the silt at the edge of the pond. Maybe a seed pod resting at the shore is pushed over just a little, so that the sunlight and the warm earth take hold and the magic that is encased within the seed swells up. Over the next week a small sprout pushes through and then, the first leaves unfurl. Return each year in spring and look again as the sapling takes root. Over time you will watch the trunk strengthen and the branches open to the sky. Remember this.

“Why not”. These two words changed everything.