More river
This post is about shooting the river in a canoe, at the crack of dawn this morning. I will create a second post later this evening, which starts the “who we are” portion of our more structured content entertainment. In the meantime, the canoe trip was too cool to not share.
Over dinner on Saturday night, our friend, Jon Friedland, held up a thumb and forefinger about an inch apart, and said, “I came this close to calling you last night and asking whether you wanted to canoe down the river.” Even three days after the rain stopped, the river is still up, and it might be possible to shoot down it safely. Under normal circumstances, it would be too shallow and too slow-moving to be navigable.
Responding to Jon’s teaser, we agreed to try it early on Sunday morning. I got up a little after six, fetched the canoe from the pond, and strapped it onto the pickup truck. I left the canoe by the side of the road, where Alder Creek junctions with the Beaverkill River. Jon and I met five miles downstream, and drove back up to the canoe in his Jeep.
We had a brief debate about what we should wear (eg, helmets or no helmets, shirts or no shirts), which mostly revealed that we were buffoons and amateurs. Undeterred, we put in, and started down the river.
Overall, the trip was amazingly fun. We capsized twice, and swamped twice more, but mostly we stayed vertical and relatively dry. Each time we were out of the boat, we were standing in two feet of water, so it felt pretty controllable. We laughed our way through some rapids, and scraped the bottom of the canoe a lot, but we had no disasters. In the end, I was glad I had the helmet on, when my head bumped a tree that was jutting out of the riverbank.
It took us just under an hour to cover the five miles, which seemed pretty fast to me, but what do I know? A little flock of ducklings fled in front of us for most of the trip, and we disturbed a lone fly fisherman in front of the Inn. Aside from that, it was just us and the river. Jon is great company, and this was a terrific idea.
The summer of fun continues.