Chapter Twenty-One
Paddling up the Shashawanaga…
Paddling up the Shashawanaga, Brubaker saw that while the trees in the city were still about fifty percent green, out here the process was a couple of weeks further along. The colors were spectacular.
“This is where the canal ends.” Brubaker told Nibbles, who was up front. “If you go up the bank on the left, cross the road, and root around in the underbrush, you’ll find what’s left of the original channel.”
Nibbles stared up, and off to the left in some doubt.
“The original channel is twenty feet higher.” Brubaker explained. “Back in the 1880’s they cut a by-pass, to drain what used to be called Schmidt Lake, and to alleviate flooding further downstream by Le Gran Binge. It’s all vegetables now, cabbages and onions and stuff.”
The floodplain was black soil, with clay and limestone hills to the south, and sand dunes to the north. Valuable real estate.
“Really?” Nibbles called back from the front of the boat, arguably, trying not to rock it too much...
They had parked the van at the Highway 65 Bridge just outside of Titusville, and were paddling upstream. When Nibbles looked back, it was surprising to see just how fast the road and bridge had disappeared around the first curve of the river. The current was about three or four knots, according to Brubaker. Huge trees hung overhead.
“How do you know?” Nibbles asked.
“I lived just down the road for about a year and a half.” Brubaker said. “My old man used to bring us up to the Scout camp. I cruised around here a lot in my MGB. The old man would take us to a place called Three Falls. That’s on private property. I’ve wanted to buy that land since the first time I saw it. Hard to believe a ten-year-old can have such dreams.”
It might still happen, Brubaker, came a surprisingly strong voice in his head.
“I’d like to see that. How far up is it? Can we make it?”
“Ten kilometres downstream.” Brubaker replied. “We’ve got places to go today.”
When they first got out of the vehicle, it was windy and cool, but the high banks of the river sheltered them. With the sun out, the 12-degree Celsius temperature was bearable. When necessary, they could button up again. Their collars were open. So far, gloves were unnecessary, although they both had them. Leaves of brilliant yellow, russet, apple red, brown, orange, purplish colors, floated upon the meandering river. All the weeds, and grasses, the bushes on the bank added to the blaze of color. And sound, due to the breeze, and smell.
The smell of autumn was in the air.
“Listen.” Bru held up for a moment.
“…honk, honk…honk, honk…”
Craning his neck, Nibbles saw several V-shaped echelons of geese flying southward, straggling along high overhead.
A beautiful trout stream.
“What do we do if we see that cougar?” Nibbles asked seriously enough.
He was up for a tour in the boat. As long as it wasn’t too much work. As long as it was steady enough to roll a few doobs. As long as he could keep a few cans of Pepsi cool. As long as he had candy bars and a bag of chips. Bru did warn him, but he really didn’t take it too seriously the night before, talking on the phone. But to see the river, to see how remote, and how wild it actually was. A kind of revelation.
“Total aggression might work. Just attack the thing yelling and screaming. The real problem is a surprise pounce from above. If you see it first, you’re probably all right. But if it jumps on one of us from above, somebody is going to get hurt real bad. Probably even killed. Maybe even both of us.”
Nibbles chewed on that for a while.
“Why is that?” Nibbles asked.
“If a cat attacks a deer, the rest of the herd just runs away. But a human being will defend its own kind.”
Were humans just animals to Brubaker?
“That’s why you brought me along. Your odds just got twice as good.” Nibbles nodded ruefully and only half-jokingly.
“You don’t have to be able to outrun a cougar.” Brubaker retorted. “You just have to outrun your buddy.”
They were grinning like idiots. It felt good, for some reason.
“Heh-heh-heh.” They both said it at once.
A male-bonding moment, with shared risks, and sacrifice, (after all, they could be at home watching the Speed Network or something,) and unknown reward. The Goddess of Fortune might smile upon them.
“That’s pretty unlikely, but if we stick together I’m sure the cat won’t bother us. See that big branch up there? Hanging out over the water?”
“Yeah. What about it?” Asked his companion.
“Notice how the bark is all torn off there?”
“Yeah. What did that?”
“Ice.”
“Ice.” Nibbles’ astonishment was evident. “Holy fuck. That must be forty feet up there.”
“I’d say that’s about…twenty-seven and a half feet.” Bru joked, but it was a better guess.
“Okay.” Nodded Nibbles.
“We’re at low water this time of year, and I don’t know how far we’ll get. I figure a big cat hunts mostly deer, rabbits, turkeys, stuff like that. The biggest part of its diet might be fuckin’ mice. The odds of seeing him are awful small. But I’ll check every place on the bank where there’s a sandy patch, or a muddy bank where the deer come down.” Bru explained quietly. “Do me a favor, Nibbles? Let me paddle. Just sit there, and keep absolutely silent. Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em. Just keep your eyes open.”
Nibbles stopped paddling, turned his head, and nodded. He put the paddle in the boat and began going through his bag for the binoculars. If Bru said so. Anyhow, Bru was half cat himself.
Nibbles marveled. Silently the prow of the boat rounded the turns. While the bow swung from side to side with each stroke, their general course was straight up the river. When they came to a sunken log, with branches sticking out and pointing downstream, Brubaker steered well clear, and powered up with a few firm strokes.
Brubaker never clunked the paddle against the side of the boat. Chuck rarely made a splash, although the sound of water dripping off the blade could occasionally be made out if you listened, really listened.
Autumn colors in the Ausable valley.
Nibbles looked back and saw they were actually leaving a wake, due to Brubaker’s strong paddling and the strength of the current. Just like a speedboat, the little wavelets lapped at the shore in regular succession. Bru pulled her into the proximity of the bank, holding the boat with the point of his paddle tucked into the bottom of the river.
He looked over the gravel bar. Pale sand was under their keel, about ten or fifteen centimetres down. Nibbles saw that the canoe wasn’t drawing much water. With a certain amount of silt in it, you couldn’t see very deep. Sunlight slanted down through the trees, and he could hear the tops of them thrashing around. As more leaves came down on an oblique angle, freshets of soft, moist, autumn air caressed his face. If you studied the water carefully, you could see the shadows of rocks under the surface of the milky green water.
There was a smoky blue haze in the air.
With a hint of wood smoke on the breeze, he caught the sound of engines off in the distance.
“What’s that?” Nibbles broke the silence.
“Tractor.” Bru replied in a low tone. “They’re probably taking off corn, or maybe soybeans.”
Nibbles caught the sound of water falling, and up ahead he saw a semi-circular formation. Bru stroked away again and they moved forward.
“There’s rapids up there. How are we going to get up that?”
Nibbles studied the situation with the binoculars. The banks came down at an impressive forty-five degrees. While the only major growth on them appeared to be grass and weeds, and willow-like shrubs, right on top of that the forest grew. It seemed pretty thick from this position and this angle. Now that he understood how much the water level varied from season to season, he could see that islands covered in scrub were under water during floods and the big run-off in springtime.
No wonder nothing grew on them. Scraped clean by ice, the dwarf willows were the few things that could survive, sheltered in amongst the boulders. Brubaker appeared to be listening. Then, without further ado, he nudged the boat a little farther ahead, into the eddy behind a rock, and sat there some more.
“There’s the sweet spot. Watch this.”
He shoved his paddle way out forwards, then gave a little sweep, with the blade held straight up and down, angled slightly. The boat drifted to the left, but kept station. The foaming currents all around them had little effect.
“Eddy out.” They pulled into a spot behind another rock. “Here we go.”
Bru did it again, and this time water splashed up high on the curve of the bow.
The tip of the canoe seemed about to pass under the brim of a miniature waterfall, about a half-metre tall, and a metre wide. Nibbles tensed up, ready with his paddle and expecting a boatful of water. Brubaker patiently maneuvered the boat until a big boulder was on their right, with the riverbank looming over them in a cutaway curvature to their left.
The water roiled down in a series of flat, shallow steps, but Bru saw no major standing waves. No foaming holes, no logs, no overhanging trees. A good portion of the river followed the curve of the bank, by-passing the semi-circle of sunken rocks that foamed and splashed and burbled to the ear. They sat in the foam, as it seemed to suck them forwards.
Nibbles was impressed.
“I’m going to need you to paddle on the left.” Brubaker called over the noise of the rapids.
Nibbles dug in and began pulling, and in a surprising turn of speed, they reached the calm, glassy water above. Only fifty metres up the river and around the next bend, they came across an even bigger one.
“How are we going to do this?” Nibbles watched, fascinated, sure his buddy had it all figured out.
“Sometimes you have to get out and pull her through. But don’t worry, that’s why I brought a towel. Did you bring spare socks like I told you?”
Turns out Nibbles hadn’t.
“That’ll teach you. Now spark up one of them doobs.”
The bow of the boat crunched into a golden sandbar, covered in scattered leaves, and with multi-coloured pebbles peeking through.
Crack.
Nibbles turned and had a look.
“Ah.” Said Brubaker, as the first of the Old Milwaukee slid down his parched and eager throat.
“And in the beginning, the old man of the mountain said, let there be beer.”
He poured a small libation upon the waters, a small but important ritual he hadn’t enacted in far too many moons.
“You really are crazy, you know.”
“I know.” Brubaker sighed in contentment. “I know.”
Nibbles choked up and began to hack and cough, passing the joint back to the rear of the boat. It rocked gently with his movements.
“Cough. Cough.” That was what he said.
“If there are any big cats about, they know we’re here now.” He observed, after catching his breath again.
Chuck just smiled.
“Sit and relax. Don’t make no sudden moves.” Putting a paddle down into the sand to brace himself, balancing carefully with his beer, with the doobie clenched between his lips, he eased up and out of the craft.
He held the gunwales for Nibbles to do the same.
“Hold up for a moment.” Nibbles hung on, and Chuck spent a minute studying the sand bar.
“Not much to see. Come on up.”
He pointed at the sand.
“That’s a coon, that’s a squirrel, that’s deer, and that’s a heron, a Great Blue. That one there’s a skunk.”
He kept looking all around.
A fine day in the neighborhood.
“A fine day in the neighborhood. Just like The Wind in the Willows, or even Hammy Hamster.”
His buddy looked on carefully but said nothing. For the most part, he would take his word for it.
“I should have brought my fishing rod.” Nibbles noted. “What a fantastic day.”
“One or two more sets of rapids, and then we’ll be there.” Brubaker reckoned. “If we take everything out of the boat, it shouldn’t be too bad.”
Brubaker showed him how to keep the boat right side up, and simply place the prow under your arm. With the two of them, Nibbles leading up the incline, they soon had the boat in the water again. Brubaker never would have guessed it, but he had some teaching abilities, and every so often the urge to pass something on came over him.
“The Shashawanaga is one of a very few major water systems in Canada which lies entirely within the Carolinian Zone.”
“What’s that?” Asked Nibbles.
At the age of forty-four, and after three heart attacks in the last ten months, the art of relaxation was new to him. After three years on methadone, he had taken up a new hobby, with a cheap camera that he had bought for two bucks at a garage sale. He liked to take pictures, and Brubaker seemed to know the country like no one Nibbles had ever heard of. He put the paddle down, and with full zoom on the lens, took a couple of shots. Brubaker described how the river came down out of the plateau of south-central Ontario, curving back to the northwest, collecting behind the dunes at Le Gran Binge in a series of meandering bayous, before finding its way to Lake Kandechio.
“Because we’re so surrounded by the Great Lakes, the climate is actually the same as it would be a lot farther south.” The two men paddled steadily along a flat stretch of river. “It’s the same weather, and to a certain extent, the same wildlife and plant life as in the Carolinas. Maybe like Kentucky, down around there.”
The big lakes took a long time to freeze, admittedly a long time to un-freeze in spring. Yet it was a moderating influence on the local weather…
“So, what does that mean?” Nibbles saw a big blue bird leap up out of the shallows.
It went silently flapping up the river. He was familiar with the blue herons.
“It means it’s a very special place.”
For the time being, Nibbles had to be satisfied with that.
A special place.
END
Images. Louis.
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