I've done my share of foolish things.
One of the most foolish in recent memory was paddling a fiberglass canoe over a low, rocky ledge-drop on the Ocqueoc River. I'll share credit for that bright maneuver with my paddling partner, Craig Date, who was in the bow seat, and who insisted we could make it over the drop without harm to the boat if we paddled hard to get up speed, and leaped it, ski-jump style. The bow made it over in fine shape, but the stern crashed on a jumble of rocks at the bottom, causing our lovely and unmarred Sawyer to split open like a ripe peach. A jagged, two-foot-long crack opened in the hull beneath the stern seat, and the river poured in.
We dragged the canoe to shore and turned it over to dry in the sun. Then we applied duct tape to the crack in long, overlapping strips, pressing it into place with the rounded back of a pocket knife to squeeze the air bubbles out. The patch held for the remainder of the trip. It held, in fact, for the remainder of the summer.
Duct tape--also sometimes called "furnace tape" or "silver tape," in part to ease the considerable confusion that arises when the uninitiated think you are saying "duck" tape--deserves to be included with paper clips and needle-nose pliers on everyone's list of handiest inventions. A furnace installer tells me that before the tape came into common use in the late 1930s and early 1940s, furnace ducts were put together with tape made of thin asbestos and paper wrapped and glued in place, or with liquid asbestos and gauze, which could be shaped much the way a plaster cast is shaped around a broken leg. When duct tape came along the job of installing heat runs became faster, easier, and certainly healthier.
Modern duct tape is so convenient and inexpensive we tend to be cavalier about its use, forgetting that in the old days emergency repairs of canoeing and camping equipment required an alchemist's knack for concoctions. Canoe trippers carried bulky repair kits that included strips of rubber, packages of zinc oxide, and cans of white lead. A punctured canvas canoe was patched with a chunk of cotton shirt coated with spruce resin; a split in the hull was sealed with an adhesive plaster patch made from zinc oxide mixed with water, warmed over a fire, and ironed into place with a hot knife; a shattered paddle was splinted and laboriously bound with fishing line. If you were in a pinch, according to John J. Rowlands in his 1947 classic of woodcraft and common sense, Cache Lake Country, you could patch a hole in a canoe with a mixture of one part bacon grease with 10 parts spruce gum, warmed in hot water.
Duct tape made all such tactics obsolete. With a roll of tape and a little ingenuity, it's possible to repair even the most seriously damaged canoe. Or canoe paddle. Or fishing rod. Or ax handle, tent, sleeping bag, rain jacket, backpack, and hiking boot. The stuff seems to stick to anything. Carpenters patch their leather nail aprons with it. Roofers use it to bind knee pads to their jeans. My 15-year-old skateboarding neighbor gets additional mileage from his tattered Nikes by mummifying them with it. Years ago I used it to keep the muffler attached to my old Buick Special, in spite of the tape's tendency to smoke and stink when heated. It also kept a brake-light cover in place and the cracked sideview mirror from falling out of its frame.
Without duct tape I would have floundered years ago. I consider it as essential to a successful outdoor expedition as a pocket knife and matches. My canoe and I might come home battered and bruised and held together with telltale strips of silver, but by God we'll be in one piece.
Copyright (c) 1996 Jerry Dennis. All rights reserved.