THE RIVER POURS between the boulders, every scarred with crimson and inexperienced paint left by canoes that didn’t thread this needle fairly neatly sufficient. Standing within the boat, I twist to the appropriate to plant the iron tip of a 12-foot-long spruce pole into the riverbottom, snubbing the canoe to a cease. The subsequent transfer is the tough one. I shift hand positions, grasp the pole tightly, and twist from the balls of my toes all the best way to my shoulders. The bow torques to port, catches the present, and ferries throughout stream to ship a V of clear water over the lip of the ledge.
“Good save,” says Bob Thompson, watching from the bow. The grizzled former Maine sport warden and longtime Maine information has been education me on poling strategies for a lot of the morning.
I grin with reduction. This was a very long time coming. I’ve wished to study to pole a canoe by way of rapids ever since I noticed {a photograph} of an outdated Mainer arduous on the ability in Nationwide Geographic means again in 1973. Within the picture, the shoreline was fanged with darkish spruce, the river offended with whitewater. The person wore a wool plaid shirt and stood in a half crouch, centered in a picket canoe with bent cedar ribs like bleached bone, and in his fingers the person held a stout straight pole. The {photograph} was alive. I stared on the picture and thought: In the future.
Now I’m on that very river, the famed Allagash Wilderness Waterway of Maine, with a stick in my hand and one other outdated man within the boat, instructing me one of many oldest expertise of the traditional North Woods.
Previous College (of Thought)
It’s hardly information that many of those outdated woods-ways are fading quick. When is the final time you carved a feather stick? Why excellent a trucker’s hitch when cam straps are three for $9 on the big-box retailer? There’s no must sweat over a whetstone when Amazon will drone-ship a gizmo that ensures a depraved edge.
For a lot of, I think about, these expertise are touchstones of the previous, a means of staying related to roots and heritage. For others, they function a backup plan—if the GPS goes clean, we take solace in understanding navigate by the celebrities. However these views cheapen old-school expertise. Most of them weren’t worthwhile as a result of they have been newfangled on the time. They have been worthwhile as a result of they labored. As a result of there are occasions when understanding shoot iron sights is one of the best answer to the problem at hand: Plan A, not Plan B.
Poling a canoe, for instance. Over two days on the Allagash I learn to transfer a ship in swift water too skinny for a paddle, and hopscotch upstream by poling from one calm eddy to a different. I learn to put a canoe in impartial with a pole, transfer it over, ahead, upcurrent, sideways—all with nothing greater than know-how and a stick. There are sketchy moments. Twice I practically flip the boat by planting the pole downstream, wedging the gunwale towards the pole. However I’m not half-bad standing upright, feeling the river within the balls of my toes, listening to the steel clink of the pole foot discovering buy within the cobble.
Then the wind comes up late one morning, and it’s clear that I’ve been swimming within the child pool the final couple of days. I crab ahead with all of my energy, heaving on the pole, however the canoe pirouettes throughout the river. We’re going nowhere till Thompson and I choose up the paddles and stow the pole below the canoe thwarts for the remainder of the journey.
However I’m hooked on the outdated methods by now. And impressed, as a result of even earlier than I picked up the pole, not half-hour into our Allagash in a single day, I noticed how the previous stays related within the huge woods.
Rescue Effort
Early throughout our first morning on the river, Thompson and I rounded a bend right into a scene of chaos and confusion. On the riverbank, two teenaged boys huddled collectively, soaked to the pores and skin, holding canoe paddles. Eighty yards downstream, a small flotilla of canoes had rafted up beneath the rapids, with extra children watching a single canoe and its two adults paddling furiously towards the present. And in the course of the river, a swamped canoe was pinned the other way up on a rock, its backside bashed in like a soda can.
Instantly, Thompson took all of it in and barked instruction. “We’re making an eddy flip behind the subsequent boulder. See it?”
“Received it,” I replied.
As soon as within the eddy, we stowed our paddles and Thompson pulled out the pole. He deftly pushed his means upriver, boulder hopping, eddy by eddy, climbing the present till we have been abreast of the swamped canoe. We hoisted it on high of the rock, emptied the boat, and set it afloat, lining it by way of the remaining rapids to the youngsters ready beneath.
May we’ve got achieved this with out poling the canoe? I doubt it. And never so shortly and with such grace. And we definitely would have missed the appears to be like on these younger males’s faces, dripping water, mouths agape, as they watched the outdated man do one thing extraordinary: standing up within the boat, pushing the canoe up the rapids, climbing the river with a stick.
This story initially appeared in a 2016 situation of Area & Stream. Learn extra F&S+ tales.
