I think I have the humble pen thing figured out. It seems to come naturally when writing about misadventures. In any case, it works for me.
Humility will also take you far when canoe tripping. Lacking humility in the wilderness is the surest way to get into trouble. I’m frequently awed and humbled when I’m out there. In fact, that’s why I go out. Frequent humblings are good for the soul.
Humiliation? That’s another matter. But it’s just what I stumbled into last year on a trip with my friend Scott.
We had been given the job of preparing a base-camp for a BBC crew while they filmed a television special with Ray Mears. Mears is a bushcraft expert from the U.K. The kind of guy that can carve a paddle out of a tree in minutes or get a fire going without a match without breaking a sweat. The man’s bushcraft films are admired by thousands of fans worldwide, and here I was, charged with setting up his camp.
We were to stay a day ahead of them on the river, making sure everything was set for when they arrived.
“You want to be a writer, don’t know how or when? Find a quiet place, use a humble pen.” — Paul Simon
It sounded like an easy job. And it would have been. If we had cooking pots. If I hadn’t forgotten them back at the put-in.
After taking an increasingly panicked inventory of the campsite I stared at the river and considered paddling back upstream, but we were too far and the current was too fast. We were trapped.
The first evening Scott and I ate peanut butter sandwiches rather than cook up our macaroni dinner. It was a hardship but we got through it. But not being able to boil water for coffee the next morning was unacceptable. What’s more we had to figure out a way to cook for the eight-person crew about to arrive that day.
First we tried placing hot rocks into a barrel pack full of river water, which gave us luke-warm, murky water filled with dirt, ash and probably parasites.
Next we spent an hour carving a log into a bowl to heat over the fire. It looked good, until it ignited, leaked and spilled its contents, dousing the flames. The third attempt was a little more successful. We found an old whisky bottle (bushcraft indeed) back in the bush, filled it half-full with water and hung it about a foot above the fire. A long while later, we had bubbly water to steep our coffee grounds in.
At noon the film crew arrived and I put on my humble hat and told them what had happened. Then, with little hope I suggested that maybe the bushcraft expert could show us, and the camera, what he was made of.
Mears looked thoughtful and for a moment I thought I might be about to learn something. Turns out I already knew his lesson.
“Well Kevin,” he said, reaching into his canoe, “we could use these pots left behind by some poor fool back at the launch.”
Later, with a full belly, I had to agree he was good at what he did.
This article first appeared in the Spring 2009 issue of Canoeroots Magazine.
