Anyone facing death feels a surge of life flow through them. I’ll have the simmer of this feeling for the five weeks of my trip. I am familiar with it. Running rapids, running into bears, spraining an ankle, hurting my back. If I wanted, I could think of endless reasons not to leave home. I’m not sure why we think we are safer at home. Is it because things are more familiar? And if things are familiar, bad things won’t happen there?
When I was twenty I knew someone would die, but not me. In my forties, I realized I’d die, but not yet. In my early 70s, I know I’ll die; I just don’t know when, or how. As a kid, I thought you grew old and died. Now that I’m old I realize there are a thousand ways to go. W.S. Merwin has a poem where he says we know the day we are born, and every year we live through the day we will die, but don’t know it. I like that. To solo canoe, I had to make peace with dying alone on a journey. The part of that I’m not comfortable with is dying slowly out here.
Before you leave, you have to report your trip to the RCMP in Yellowknife: what color are your eyes, your height, color of hair, color of tent, what kind of canoe, next of kin, and when you will return. Years ago, before an earlier trip, I went to hand in my information. There was a young mountie on duty. After he looked at my report, he called over his shoulder to a man I could not see. He asked if he should get a photograph of me. The voice came back, saying, “Naw, don’t bother. They never look like the photograph when we find them.”
Aliveness and its attendant joys of noticing, feeling, loving, dancing, and canoeing are enhanced by knowing I’ll die.
Last spring before the trip I held a museum exhibition at Rockford University outside Chicago. The name of the show was Already Broken, based on a Japanese koan. Here is a short video that sums up my feelings.
It may not seem like this has much to do with canoeing, but it does. It’s an unseen element, like the thought that a canoe not only carries cargo, but dreams. What are your dreams?
