Chris Green reflects on some lessons he learnt from canoes.

What bow is the right kind of bow for me? Robert Ruark wrote a book in the 1950s called ‘Use Enough Gun’. It became a rifle-hunting classic and spoke directly to the machismo of hunters of the time. Advice about bows that is just as old and equally pertinent is ‘to shoot a bow heavy enough but one that you can still shoot accurately’. How heavy exactly? Well, with all the mystery of an instruction from an Oriental martial-art sensei it does not say, and here is where we get sidetracked by our egos because unfortunately men only learn from their own mistakes. Here are two stories from my past that may illuminate the point. ‘Horses for courses.’

It is about canoes
One Christmas university vacation in the seventies when I was young and still had lots of hair (lots of hair was good back then) I travelled to Canada. South Africa was still very isolated from the world. I was a hiker and active outdoors person and it being winter and very snowy I fell to imagining what it might have been like for the first settlers there as I walked the chilly streets of Toronto, apart from really, really cold! A big fall of fresh snow is very beautiful and also very intimidating. I had been up the berg and in Lesotho in the winter so I knew about cold. Trouble was I had just come from a hot and sunny Cape Town! I wandered into a smart (and warm) sporting goods store. It was fascinating to me, because it was full of the latest hiking and climbing gear. The variety and sophistication of the backpacks, stoves, and puffy down sleeping bags suitable for minus 20, etc compared to what was available at home almost caused me to miss a remarkable object right near the entrance. I could not really have missed it, as it was an 18-foot canoe. It was made with ultra thin slivers of pine plywood that seemed to be floating in a matrix of clear resin, so thin the bright spotlights glowed right through it. It was glossy and radiant. When I did see it I was gobsmacked, and I asked the shop attendant if it was a ‘real’ canoe or an elaborate sculpture. The shoppers around me went silent for a moment. (Where does this hick come from?) Then the nice man with admirable restraint and his voice dripping with condescension told me to go pick it up. Huh? That is a big, wooden canoe! (I was used to the rather clunky aluminium models from home). “Go ahead, use one hand”. I did, it was light. “That, young man, is one of the finest canoes you will find anywhere, and...” he followed with an ironic glance at my rather obvious ‘starving student’ appearance, “it is yours for two thousand dollars.” My jaw dropped for the second time in as many minutes as I heard that it was a handmade canoe, the maker had a waiting list and this one was only on loan to the store. On closer examination I was intrigued that it was held together with tiny brass screws and larger copper nails. All the joints were tight and handcut with perfect gluelines. The glues and resins were ‘new’ epoxies and gave the finish a hard, glossy surface. Under it the two-ply wooden skin had a translucence that spoke of pure class.

What is more, this canoe was a performer. The store owner was curious about my accent – South Africans were a rarity overseas then. “You have any big rivers in your country?” I said we did, and airily mentioned the Zambezi and Orange, trying to sound like I went there every weekend. They are big, but mostly the South African rivers are shallow and rocky. “I guess you have to be careful of crocodiles too, eh?” Yeah, and lions in the towns, etc. I was intrigued to hear that the builder of this canoe only made about five or six a year but as they were entirely handmade, it is a wonder he even made that many. He farmed-out the making of the paddles to another craftsman as he did not have the time. There were several different types of paddle available, depending on the intended use – decorated or plain, from long-handled ones for deep rapids to short, broad-bladed ones for pootling along gently in quiet backwaters overgrown with brush. I could just imagine fishing out of it. Fly fishing of course, no spinning rods here… well, maybe a light bass rod. Soft boat shoes like moccasins or none at all, and no heavy bait boxes or rough rocks. This was a clean-water boat. Its specs showed it could take a decent load, packed in soft river bags, tents in bags, etc. The finish was an epoxy and tough enough. I briefly considered cashing in my study money before common sense brought me back to reality. In the years since, I have become better informed. I have fished and paddled and have even done a few river trips in Canadian canoes made of fibreglass or aluminium and I always had a fabulous time, but I have often wondered about that canoe I saw that winter day in Toronto.

Roll forward thirty years and I was again in Canada visiting my sisters. This time it was late summer and I was up in the Muskoka region of Ontario. I now have much less hair but I think I am more diplomatic and better looking these days – distinguished, actually. Muskoka is a vast land of lakes, wooded hills, winding roads, small supply stores and holiday homes, mostly summer ‘cottages’. At least they might have been once. Now many of them looked like very fancy homes indeed. Like those found on the island in Knysna lagoon or Sedgefield and St Francis, except that each was surrounded by virgin forest and had its own boat house on the lake. Not all of them were so elegant and here and there, down unpretentious lanes, were a few that were clearly old family cottages of the original type. Some were over seventy years old, I was told. I could believe that, since my late mom was Canadian and was born during the last years of the First World War. She used to tell us of childhood trips to Muskoka with her dad on epic expeditions fishing and camping. In the summer the ferries across lakes and rivers made it a major thing. You drove to the edge of the vast lake system and then canoed if there was no ferry service from there onwards. It was actually far easier to go in the winter snow. The lakes are shallow and freeze over, so you just drove across them or took horse-drawn sleighs. I guess those trips must have been like the old hunting trips to Portuguese East Africa from South Africa in the twenties.

So there we were in 2006 and my sister’s friend Lyndy had invited us up to her folks’ cottage. Her dad was a sprightly 80 odd and her mom 77. They were still energetic and youthful, and they were also suntanned and fit after a few weeks at their beloved cottage. He noted my interest in the construction and told me they “…built this place in the early sixties. We have tried to keep it simple like it always was. There were no good roads then, mind. There was lots of game, and the bears could be a nuisance”. Chuckle, chuckle. “You like fishing?” I do like fishing and I have heard about bears all my life from my mum, so this was not news to me. A nuisance bear is like a 200-kilogramme hyena that skriks vir niks. You could shoot them back then if the local wildlife officer said so.

It was a nice little hand-built cottage that was in its original form without all the modern fancy stuff, still as simple as before but now with electricity. Water came from the lake and there was a septic tank. You could fish for lake trout or pike from the same rocks that were visible in old black and white photos I saw on the wall that had been taken from the front windows. Lyndy’s dad told me that in the winter it was not unusual to see or hear wolves, especially once the lake froze over. We had seen some deer and a moose on the way in. The next morning, after a lovely pancake breakfast, we went paddling about the lake in two canoes. My sister and I got ‘the red one’. Lyndy took their large sheepdog puppy in a newer fibreglass canoe. Ok, I could deal with that, I’d done a bit of paddling by then but I was not a hardcore canoeist and it looked like a nice canoe, if a little plain in its faded, dark red paint and old varnished woodwork. It had wooden paddles. Actually it was more interesting than that – there was not a scrap of plastic near it and the skin was a taut, red-painted canvas secured under a strip of ash and nailed down with roundheaded upholstery nails. The internal ribs were thin and numerous, and the inside had a lightweight, slatted floor. I recognised it was a real, classic Canadian canoe, an older relative of the one I saw in that store long ago. But while it was old, it was light and manoeuvreable. We came in after an hour or so and stretched and lay out on the rocks in the sunshine. Lyndy’s mom came down and asked me how I enjoyed the lake. I told her it was fun. “It’s an interesting canoe. It is very easy to paddle.” “Ohh, yes it is. I got her in my final year of junior high school at age 16”. “Whaaat? When you were 16?” Rats, that came out wrong, and I scrambled to think of a way out of my obvious gaffe. She smiled, ”Sure, the canoe is 61 years old. We had her re-covered when Lyndy was at university – back in the eighties, I think. Nice, isn’t it?” She smiled and looked across at this incredible canoe she had owned her entire adult life. She was a charming, gracious lady. Imagine the privilege of the gift of her life and having her poise and generosity. Today we risk missing life in our pursuit of it.

What has this to do with archery? Everything and nothing, we use what takes our fancy. The bow must feed our imagination, and also be ‘tough enough’ to do the job. If we are on a family trip and shooting stumps or tufts of grass with our small children we probably don’t need a very powerful bow, only one we can shoot for years and years until their grandchildren need to go shooting dandelions in the springtime sunshine.

Like Lyndy’s mom’s canoe.

pdated: Thursday, December 10, 2009 12:38 PM