Prompt entry #2

To stick your hands into the river is to feel the cords that bind the earth together in one piece.
-- Barry Lopez

What sets a canoeing expedition apart is that it purifies you more rapidly and inescapably than any other travel. Travel a thousand miles by train and you are a brute; pedal five hundred on a bicycle and you remain basically a bourgeois; paddle a hundred in a canoe and you are already a child of nature.
--Pierre Elliott Trudeau

Believe me, my young friend, there is nothing- absolutely nothing- half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.
-- Water Rat from Wind in the Willows

In the same way I briefly ponder what my life would be like had my wife and I never met, I wonder if I would have discovered my love for the boreal forest without the canoe, or if I would have been wooed and won over by another landscape. Or none at all.

A recurring image: I recline in the stern of the canoe; my wife sits in the bow. My paddle lies in repose across the gunwales. The river is wide but not so wide as to be impersonal. The current sweeps us along, past poplars and birch and gnarled stunted pines. A breeze keeps the bugs at bay. I close my eyes and feel the gentle rocking, a rhythmic yaw as ripples gurgle beneath the hull. My world is framed from beneath a wide brimmed hat; a shard of bright cerulean sky, gauzy clouds, blue water, rocky shore.

The gap between us is filled with gear—tents, sleeping bags, pots, skillet, books, journal, map, sunscreen and bug spray, noodles, pancake mix, crackers and jam. Each item stowed neatly in canvas Duluth packs—everything in its proper place. That is the first gift of a canoe trip; the winnowing of stuff, the flotsam of life pared down to the essentials. The knowledge that one doesn’t need to be bloated and bursting with things, that life can be simple after all.

Each night we make home anew. We find a flat spot for our tent, with a rocky outcropping sloping to the waters edge. We unload the canoe, set up the tent, and gather armfuls of firewood. We peel off clothes and plunge into the water, rinsing off the exertion of the day. Later, after supper is cooked and eaten, the dishes rinsed, the food packed up and stowed away, we sip tea as the sun sinks below the far horizon. Tomorrow we will do it all over again, an act of repetition that remains more ritual than routine.

Rivers, lakes, forests, canoe, my wife and I. Those are the ingredients of home, of the best of what life has to offer.