I was born by a river and should have been a fish.
Instead, I get to paddle. I love what’s underneath water (as I love Ah-Ha moments inside us). I travel in a canoe using a wooden paddle to make ‘J’ strokes that move the boat forward. If I take a strong stroke on the right, along the side of the canoe, the bow arcs left. That’s where the ‘J’ in the stroke chimes in. At the end of the long, straight stroke, a slight twist of my lower, right wrist forward turns the paddle blade parallel to the side of the canoe and, along with the upper left arm, prying the paddle shaft against the gunwale, completes the ‘J’ in the the ‘J’ stroke. Most people break their upper wrist backward toward their chin to angle the paddle, not a smooth motion, but it still moves the boat. Others would never let the paddle shaft touch the gunwale. One form beauty takes is to watch a good paddler paddle.
My paddles are cut after a Naskapi paddle made in 1928 in Labrador. The Labrador paddle is pine. The wood I use is either sassafras, or oak. The sassafras is lighter, and just as strong as the oak. The long thin blade acts as a gas peddle, allowing me to regulate how much water I push. The standard beaver-tail paddle can only push maximum water. With my paddle, I can easily paddle eight hours a day without exhausting myself. The small rise to center down the blade makes executing the ‘J’ stroke smoother. Instead of metal hitting the gunwale, it’s the softer sound of wood on wood, although this summer I’m paddling a Clipper Canoe with a metal gunwale, and not my precious LOON. I’ve put four new bottoms on her over the thirty years since Denny Alsop built her. She’s gained weight.
Today, I started paddling. The way to prepare for paddling is paddling. It’s preforming the motion that tones the body. I move off my core. I bend forward at the hips, shifting the shoulders to reach my right arm forward, not using my arms except to hold the paddle. One stroke after another. It becomes a meditation. Seeing the blue distance five miles ahead allows me time to dream, or follow my breathing, one stroke after another stroke, after another. As it becomes hypnotic, my mind wanders, and today mine went to Claire. I promised myself, and a few others, not mention personal things in the blog, and I won’t, but this was a happy memory, a prose poem. And it took place underneath my surface, long ago.
At night Claire ensured we closed out any light especially traveling: towel over the red dot of the TV light, another towel rolled and placed along the bottom of the door to cover hallway light we lived in a deep and dazzling darkness saw more clearly in that dark light where we questioned the questions where the dark and dreaming work off each other we were neither here nor there here or gone but there all the time in the dark apprenticing ourselves to The Jeweler who tapped and hammered us smoothed out the rough bits adding shape sharpness and sense we were translating ourselves to each other meeting together in the luscious pool of our fluids and a drop of celestial oil the darkness hid our shyness and made it possible to talk reveal cry be held the questions we lived in that darkness were not mine or Claire’s but seemed born of the world an unasked for crop to neglect avoid prune or harvest we had to let go of the land we’d stood on before now we were two-stepping one step deeper into the world and one step deeper into ourselves we harvested the revelations of all the dissident elements that seek a home found one in us the current of our stories strong enough to float us to each other and back into the world.
