editor’s note
Paved paradise.
A recipe for time: three parts home waters, one part imagination
>> THERE IS A PARCEL OF LAKE, visible from my front yard, that my paddle has never touched. This week I went there, and the experience gelled for me all the reasons why we’re focusing this issue on kayaking locally and reclaiming urban waters. These days, kayak trips are getting shorter and shorter. Every-
body who’s heard of speed dating or bought pre-washed salad mix knows that we have less free time than our grandparents’ generation. A big part of the reason is that we’ve spread our- selves thin; we spend too many hours on the move. In her history of walking, Wanderlust, Rebecca Solnit explains:
“Just as the increased speed of factory production did not de- crease working hours, so the increased speed of transportation binds people to more diffuse locales rather than liberating them from travel time (many Californians, for example, now spend three or four hours driving to and from work each day).” For us kayakers, speeding long distances to get to postcard
places not only discounts and dissolves the space in between them, it also kills time that we could be spending on the water. Our precious, endangered leisure time becomes road kill. The good news is, we can slide up that slope. Take it from Dubside, the monomial paddler profiled by Nigel Foster in “Go- ing Commando” (page 29). What may sound like a recipe for a landlocked life—owning no wheels besides the rollers on the kayak cart he totes on public transit—means less time working for The Man, and more time afloat on the backwaters of his hometown. Dubside is an alchemist, teaching us how to trans- form water into time. Exploring locally is nothing new. Back when kayaks were still just for hunting, Henry David Thoreau was curmudgeoning away
6 | | ADVENTURE KAYAK summer 2007
about the same stuff in his bean patch in Massachusetts. “I have travelled a good deal in Concord,” the thinker famously said, warming up to a Walden chapter of blabbity blah about inner journeys. Taken with a drop of saltwater, the man has a point. You don’t have to navel gaze; just turn your attention infield a bit. Here at the editor’s desk, with digital dreams emailing in
from everyplace, it’s too easy to fall for the long-distance out- look. Last year we got a chiding missive from one of our loyal subscribers, Eric Hockaday, who wrote, “I wish you wouldn’t send me articles or flyers advertising far away exotic places to kayak. It upsets me because I can’t begin to afford trips and va- cations like that. I wish you would send me information about kayak trips here at home, here in Canada, especially British Co- lumbia.” Eric will be happy to see this issue’s article about Koo- tenay Lake (“Hippies, Huckleberries and Beer,” page 37)—true backyard paddling for B.C. types, and stoke for the rest of you to find a local trip of your own. If you think you’ve seen and done it all, try dipping into fa-
miliar waters by night, in the off-season, or some other creative way to gain a new perspective. After growing up restless in the middle of Toronto, I thought I knew the place and every way out of it. I’d left town a thousand times in every direction you can take a highway, but there was one angle I hadn’t tried: due south. I slipped off the beach one sunset, took a bearing for New York State or bust, and paddled straight out into the pure vertigo of Lake Ontario and sky. That shining smog-anchor they call the Golden Horseshoe spread out behind me in the dark like the Milky Way, and when I turned around to paddle back, there was a side of my home I’d never seen.—Tim Shuff
PHOTO: MIKE BROWN /
iSTOCK.COM
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52