(Host) Commentator Willem Lange dreams in the summertime of miles of unbroken snow, and at this time of year, of rivers in the far North.
(Lange) Many years ago our family canoed down the Allagash River in Maine. We stopped one sunny day for lunch at a very messy campsite, and were bedeviled by hundreds of sweat bees – yellow jackets. You’ve seen them; they land on your sandwich as you’re biting into it, or fall into your drinking cup, or crawl inside your shirt collar.
Mother’s allergic to them, and the rest of us didn’t think much of ’em, either. So we tried a trick I’d heard about somewhere. We got an empty wine bottle – there were lots of them around – filled it half-full of water, set it at one end of the picnic table, and smeared maple syrup around the inside of the opening. Within seconds the bees had begun landing on it and tumbling into the water below. Before we left, most of them were in there, with more coming. And none of us had been stung, or even bothered much.
I was reminded this week of that long-ago lunch. The Hulbert Outdoor Center in Fairlee, Vermont, holds a Wilderness Paddlers Gathering in March, and the invitation’s just arrived. We’re supposed to contribute any bright ideas we have. I’m going with the bees.
Last year there was a couple who’d paddled across the country from the Pacific to the Atlantic at South Carolina. The wife, a diabetic, somehow had managed to keep her insulin at the right temperature all the way. Another couple had paddled from Montreal to the Bering Sea. Think about that! Still another husband-and-wife team trekked by snowshoe, towing Cree Indian toboggans, 400 miles from Labrador to Ungava Bay in late winter. There were specialists in voyageur routes through the boreal forests; others who love the rugged rivers of Labrador, some who had done the huge, powerful rivers of northern Quebec, and quite a few who, like me, have an irresistible urge for the Great Barren Lands of Nunavut and the Arctic coast.
I don’t know why, but though we watched hundreds of beautiful slides and videos, it was the misadventures that most captivated our imaginations. Like trying to make pancakes in a high wind near a sandy beach; makes them a trifle gritty. Or wet socks that slide down around your instep inside your boots during a long portage. Or losing a loaded canoe in the rapids just at dark and wondering all night how bad it’s going to be when you find it.
All of us older paddlers have seen great changes in the rivers of our youth – hydroelectric dams; clear-cutting; roads where once was unbroken forest; recreational development; and in once-stable native villages, television, video games, and drugs. The impact of our culture has been pronounced and fierce in the North, easily overwhelming and destroying traditional native cultures.
Some of us feel that, like global warming, our culture will have a greater negative effect in the North than anywhere else. Others see hope in the recent land claims settlements that created homelands administered by native officials. Either way, the great unbroken expanses of northern wilderness are disappearing, and we older paddlers are glad to have seen them before the tide began to turn.
This is Willem Lange up in Etna, New Hampshire, getting back to work, but dreaming of distant rivers.
Willem Lange is a contractor, writer and storyteller who lives in Etna, New Hampshire.