Six years ago, I met a girl who wanted to go canoeing.
That our first real date was going to be a canoe trip seemed like a very good sign. Being a graduate of many years of summer camp, I thought I was very good at canoeing. It seemed like the best chance I could ever hope for to impress a woman. We had both moved from Ontario to British Columbia for university. The date came about because we had learned that we were both canoeists. She knew someone in Victoria who owned a canoe, so we drove my truck to the house where the canoe was stored, free for the taking, beside the garage.
My heart sank.
Here was a canoe of the type I had always disdained. Underneath a veneer of moss—it had been sitting out in the West Coast rain for that many years—was a disturbing sight to a canoe snob from the land of the silver birch and the cedar canvas Prospector. The keel looked like it had been moulded by laying a broom handle the length of the hull and casting it in a bloated, white, fiberglass ooze. The potbellied hull had the squat lines of a craft I imagined was designed for uncoordinated, pear- shaped people who knew nothing about canoeing.
And then there were the paddles. Ouch. At summer camp I had learned that equipment mattered. Every year, a paddle carver used to visit our camp and lecture us about the importance of carefully chosen wood, a delicately shaped handle that fit the palm of the hand just so, a butt end so gently sanded and oiled and protected from touching the ground that it would always feel like satin in your palm.
These paddles were not like that.
When we got to the lake, the object of my desires asked which of us would stern.
“I will, because I’m the man,” I said. I meant it as a joke.
She had been to summer camp for many years too. Except her summer camp was an all-girl camp. And at girls’ camps they teach young women that they can do anything, including a J-stroke, better than most men. At girls’ camps it’s not funny to joke that women belong in the bow. Nope, not funny at all.
“Before we touched land, we were in love.”
We decided to take turns in the stern in the spirit of equality. She showed me her J-stroke and then I showed her mine. Both were very sexy. I became grinningly pleased that I could put my head down in the bow and trust that she could keep that canoe going straight no matter how hard I paddled. When I was in the stern she said, “With you, I don’t mind paddling in the bow, and I can’t say that to very many people.” Bliss.
We pulled up on the shore for lunch and continued our mutual admiration. She commended me on how organized I was with the food. I observed how impressed I was that she knew not to wash our dishes in the lake. Here, I realized, was a woman who really knows how to trip.
We paddled to the end of the lake and fought a headwind back to the car. Our homely canoe was stable and true in the chop. We kept saying things like, “It sure feels good to be out canoeing again.” The cheap paddles with their frayed and waterlogged ends burned our city-softened palms and made our arms feel like we’d paddled together a hundred miles. Before we touched land, we were in love.
Three years later, we went camping together again and got engaged. In the spirit of equality, it was she who proposed.
What I learned on that first date—besides the fact that sexist jokes aren’t always funny—is that equipment doesn’t matter so much. Now I will say, to anyone who asks, buy the canoe you can afford. Buy a canoe with gunwales that will never rot and a hull that will last forever. Buy a canoe that you can keep by the lake, on the roof of the car, on the dock at the cottage or at the side of the garage—wherever it will be seen and be paddled and inspire, where it will be kept unlocked for friends and acquaintances and would-be lovers to borrow and paddle together. And I would wish for their sakes that its little hull tracks straight enough to make any paddler look good in the stern, that its short length be conducive to easy conversation, and that its initial stability be sufficient for making love.
Tim Shuff and his partner are going on a canoe trip for their honeymoon. They will be taking turns in the stern.
This article first appeared in the Early Summer 2007 issue of Canoeroots Magazine. For more great content, subscribe to Canoeroots’ print and digital editions here.
