Continued from page 41— Panic. Keening sobs
rising inside me. I can’t breathe. No, this isn’t going to help. Calm down. Sur- prise when my body obeys. Tough maybe it’s respond- ing to the sight of our guide’s bright yellow jacket as he runs along the shore. Our guide throws a rope and I stop the canoe’s determined down-
THE BOW REARS UP AND THE WORLD GOES COCKEYED
stream progress and am pulled to safety. I want comforting arms around me; I want a soothing voice telling
me it wasn’t my fault, there was nothing I could do. “What happened?” I gasp. “You did a classic air brace,” comes the wry reply, and I’m sent away
to run up and down the shore to get warm. • • •
It’s 10:30 by the time we finally make camp. Te day has been a 12- hour adrenaline rush. After our guide has gone off to bed, I discover the lunch bucket I was using to do the dishes has completely melted on one side—I left it too close to the fire. I’m stricken with little-girl fear. Our guide will be furious. We seem
to be losing or ruining his equipment, piece by piece. Te others wander off to their tents, and I’m alone in the night. Not
ready for sleep. Te long hours of sunlight have wreaked havoc with my internal clock. I sit on a rock on the gravel beach and look across the river to the black spruce tree silhouetted against the faint blue glow of the sky and, silently, I sob. I weep because I’m sure I’m going to be in trouble over the bucket. I
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weep because I’m alone and so out of my element. But I also weep for the spruce trees. Tonight they look like people trudging resolutely up the mountainside. Pilgrims seeking wisdom. I thought I’d found wisdom, a modicum anyway. I thought I’d left
behind my childhood need for approval and attention, and my fear of being rebuked. And yet here I am, sitting on a rock in the Yukon, and I’m a little girl sobbing her heart out. No more secure, no wiser than that little girl I thought I’d grown out of long ago. And the spruce trees on the other side of the river seem tonight to be all the other sad souls of the earth.
• • •
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It’s our last day on the Bonnet Plume, and we’ve left behind the big canyons and big water. Te river here is braided into many channels, separated by gravel bars of amazing symmetry and strewn with spruce and birch tree sweepers that are a deadly trap for an unwary canoe. Tere’s no slackening in the speed of the river; if anything it’s fast-
er. Tere is a sense of urgency, of momentum being gained, of being rushed, inevitably, to some conclusion. I look at the trees lining the shore, many of them leaning at pre-
carious angles, some of them, through no will of their own, about to plunge into the river, others already lying dead in the current, and I realize why on this trip I seem to be reliving my childhood: I’m one of those spruce trees. Tey seem to be trying to escape the river, but can’t—like me trying to escape that little girl I thought I’d outgrown. I thought I could free myself of her. Only to find myself seemingly right back where I started. But I’m not where I started. In fact, I’m nowhere I’ve ever been be-
fore—doing things, like navigating rapids and hiking mountains, that were never, even in my imagination, a part of my childhood. I can no more help my childlike reactions in this unfamiliar new world than spruce trees can avoid tumbling into the river. And so, as we navigate the last kilometres of the messy, rushing
Bonnet Plume, I am filled with a compassion for myself I’ve never felt before. And a quiet joy in being me.
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1.888.781.0411
www.canadacanoe.com SUMMER/FALL 2009
BRENDA MISSEN lives, writes and stores her canoe on the banks of Ontario’s Madawaska River. Her memoir recounting a decade of solo canoe trips is called If Jesus Were an Algonquin Park Bear. This is an excerpt from an earlier work.
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