Canoes can help a person learn--or relearn, since most of us were experts as children--the gentle art of goofing off. Away in a canoe, removed from the gripping hands of society, we're free to be wholly, wonderfully unproductive.
After a day of paddling in lovely surroundings the urge returns to sing out loud, to catch frogs with our hands, to lay back and watch clouds.
Any canoe works well for goofing off, but the best boat for the job is a traditional wooden one. This is personal opinion, of course, and not easily defensible. If I were a true traditionalist I would paddle a birch-bark canoe or a hollowed-out log. And I recognize that the modern revolution in synthetic materials has created canoes of unexcelled durability and performance. What I'm talking about is something else altogether. Call it soul.
It's probably a romantic conceit to believe that wood has soul while fiberglass, aluminum, and plastic do not. But there is a crucial difference between synthetic materials and wood. Wood was once alive. It was a supple, growing thing with individual character, shaped by wind and rain. You can see its character in the grain, feel it in the grip and heft of a gunwale or paddle shaft. There is a quality involved that can't be reproduced synthetically.
It takes time to appreciate such quality. Skin-deep beauty is easy to find, but to recognize it at its deepest and most enduring levels you have to invest a great deal of time in close contact with it. Spend hours playing a fine old Gibson mandolin and you gradually come to recognize how good it is--how subtle and bright its tones are, how responsive it is to individual styles of play.
A similar responsiveness exists in any good tool, canoes included. At first, except for its appearance, a wood-and-canvas or wood-strip canoe might not seem special. It might seem clumsy compared to a Kevlar racer or fragile compared to a Royalex tripper. But paddle it all day and you witness a transformation. The virtues of those other boats are in mechanical characteristics that make them efficient, fast, and durable. The wooden boat's virtues are less utilitarian and less tangible. Instead of characteristics, it has character. Instead of traveling the shortest distance between two points, it meanders. It seems to come alive beneath you. You can sometimes hear it hum and whisper.
Wood-strip or wood-and-canvas canoes are part of a legacy of North American boat building that goes back centuries before the arrival of Europeans. The bark canoes of the first Americans were built on a framework of white cedar, black spruce, maple, or ash that is astonishingly similar to the frames of modern canoes. (Students of canoe construction will be pleased to know that the classic Bark Canoes and Skin Boats of North America by Edwin Tappan Adney and Howard Chappelle is back in print, from Smithsonian Institution Press.) Few pieces of equipment are as worthy of being called classics as wooden canoes. Few experiences make you feel so much part of an historic continuum as paddling such a boat.
If your purpose in going out on the water is to get as far as possible from the linear, nine-to-five place where you earn a living, then there is no better boat for you than one built without concern for clocks. So much time goes into the construction of a wooden boat that it is the kind of project often saved until retirement, or for long winters, or for otherwise fallow periods of unemployment. It is not a job you want to tally in hours and dollars. The people who build such boats commercially are far more concerned with tradition and craftsmanship than with profit.
In our culture, where anything new is automatically assumed to be better, it is considered a kind of blasphemy to argue for traditional ways of doing things. But sometimes the old ways are the best ways. Sometimes we need to be gloriously impractical. Sometimes we need to find the soul in things before we can find the soul in ourselves.
Copyright (c) 1996 Jerry Dennis. All rights reserved.