You’d be amazed what people will tell you in a ferry line. I’m leaning against my car on a scorching July day, trying to catch a faint breeze while waiting for the ferry to load. A man in the lane next to me is doing the same. He gestures to the canoe on my roof and delivers a classic opener:
“Nice canoe you got there.”
The canoe confessional
It’s the kind of throwaway comment you say to pass the time. I tell him I’m on the way home from a trip and that I work for a paddling magazine.
That’s all it takes.
“I haven’t paddled in years, but—”
And he’s off. The time he was on a weeklong Boundary Waters trip with his brothers. They dumped a canoe, lost a shoe and soaked their sleeping bags. His dad was still alive then. His brothers still talk about that trip.
I ask him if he has a canoe of his own, and instead he tells me about his daughter. He got a canoe for their first trip together. She was seven. A thunderstorm came out of nowhere and it poured rain for three days straight. A slog at the time but magic in memory. She’s 21 now, and he’s real proud, though he doesn’t see as much of her as he’d like.
It’s not just the ferry line. My cherry-red canoe is a conversation starter and a magnet for stories. Notice the canoe, and suddenly, we’re not talking about the weather, we’re into the summers that changed everything. The people we miss. The best times. Or the worst. I hear these stories everywhere.
A plaid-clad couple at a gas station tells me they got engaged three decades ago on the Nahanni River. “Ever heard of it?” they ask.
In the hardware store parking lot, a man throws out his arms to tell me, “Catch of a lifetime; fish was this big.” It was during his first solo trip, back when he was too scared of bears to get much sleep.
The quiet woman at table eight at a friend’s wedding lights up when she talks about her teenage summers spent at paddling camp. She lived off trail mix and met her best friend. She and that friend are going out for an overnight later this summer, she says, the first since her diagnosis.
Maybe you’ve had some of these conversations, too.
The canoe—or kayak—confessions, as I’ve come to think of them, are sometimes someone’s favorite paddling story; other times, it’s their only one. I’ve stopped trying to guess where they’re going. Some stories are about the boat. Most are about something else entirely. Who they were with. Where they were. What the trip made clear. The boat doesn’t matter so much. It’s who and what it connects us to.
Back in the ferry line, a man in a safety vest waves on the first vehicles and the motorcycle engines roar to life. Pulled from his reverie, my chatty lane neighbor looks a little startled.
“Nice chatting with you,” I say.
I still don’t know his name, and thanks to my canoe, we never did get to the weather.
Kaydi Pyette is the editor-in-chief of Paddling Magazine.
This article was published in Issue 74 of Paddling Magazine. Tell you all about it later. | Feature photo: Virginia Marshall
I met my best friend because of our canoes on our cars parked in a YMCA parking lot. We each spotted the other’s canoe and wondered for weeks who the other paddler was. Finally someone introduced us. We have had decades of paddling together with our wives, meals together as we shared dreams and design ideas for cabin get ways and trips.