Musings Of A Muddled Male

Paddling the Circuit

By Bob Stevens, The Muddled Male

      For some time now I have been feeling a touch of envy whenever I compare my accomplishments to those of my joint columnists, Cisco and the Unmuddled Mathematician.  They seem to have lives filled with doing lots of manly things while I sit at my computer trying to remember embarrassing moments in my life about which I can write to bring you a chuckle.  But then I remembered a manly thing I did years and years ago.  A thing that I will share here in an attempt to upgrade your opinion of the Muddled Male as a real man.

      When I was about forty, I went with a group of Boy Scouts on a seventy-three mile canoe trip around the Bowron Lake Chain.  The Chain is a series of ten lakes plus water ways within the Bowron Lake Provincial Park in north British Columbia.  The lakes are located in a rectangular-like arrangement such that you start out at Kibbee Lake and if you continue around the entire circuit of lakes and water ways you will finally make your way back through Bowron Lake to a spot near where you left your car.  While it is possible for a really strong and really experienced group to make the trip in a couple of days, the trip for most groups traversing the entire circuit is five to seven days and includes lots of paddling and several portages where you have to carry not only your canoe and paddles, but also miscellaneous safety gear, a sleeping bag, a tent, all your food, and equipment to cook and eat the food.  You also have to carry ropes to suspend your food high in the air between two trees whenever you stop for the night because there are both grizzlies and brown bears in the area looking for something to eat.  Hopefully what they eat won’t be you.

      It was six-hundred miles from Kent, Washington, where we lived, to the Bowron Lake Provincial Park.  When we arrived it was the latter part of a May evening, and raining.  We pitched our tents in the rain, got up the next morning to fix and eat breakfast in the rain, and finally began hauling our now soaked gear to the first lake to load our canoes, also in the rain.  Packing our soggy stuff and carrying it from the parking area to Kibbee Lake took more time than we had anticipated and by the time we were finally in our canoes it was too late in the day to go any farther than to paddle across that first one-mile Lake and set up camp for the night.  Because the camping area was too small for the whole group, four of us, two adults and two scouts, decided to portage the mile and a half to the next lake where we would start out paddling again the next morning, with the Kibbee group following close behind. 

 May was the time for heavy spring rains and the trail was muddy as you can see by the picture of Tom and his friend Scott carrying their canoe through knee-deep mud during a portage.  We passed another traveler coming down the trail toward us with one shoe on and the other foot bare.  The sole of the shoe that had been on the bare foot was pulled off by the mud.  Each time he took a step and sunk into the mud with that foot, the upper portion of the sole-less shoe was forced up his leg in such a way as to leave it hovering just below his knee, a perfect mud depth gauge.

      While our group of four was preparing to push on across the three-mile long Indianpoint Lake, the Kibbee group decided that instead of following us they would go back to the lodge area, get a room for the night to dry out, clean up, and rest while they waited for the rain to stop.  They would then canoe down Bowron Lake several miles, camp, and fish for the rest of their stay while waiting for our group to complete the circuit and pick them up on the way back.  The need to dry out resulted from their decision to stretch a plastic tarp between four trees to shield them from the rain as they slept, and in the middle of the night the tarp tore and dumped fifty gallons of cold rain water down onto and into the sleeping bags where they lay curled up trying to stay warm.

      By the time our group of four got to Lake Isaac we were feeling like professional canoeists and thought we could handle anything.  That was until we looked at the map and saw that Lake Isaac was twenty-one miles long.  That was a long day and a lot of paddling.  When we arrived at the campground at the end of Isaac we were completely exhausted, and everyone but me laid down to take a nap.  It was a peaceful, quiet evening and I decided to paddle a little way out from the shore and just enjoy the solitude and the scenery without the nuisance of a life jacket.  On the way out I decided to adjust my position in the canoe to make it easier to row.  In an instant I was in icy water over my head.  The water was so cold it was almost impossible to catch my breath.   The only thing that saved me was a gigantic rock beneath the surface of the water just high enough to let me stand on my tip toes and keep my nose above water.  I didn’t have enough air to yell for help, but it wouldn’t have helped because everyone else was asleep.  And besides, I would rather have drowned than to let anyone discover they were traveling with a doofus.  I managed to grab the canoe floating near me and hung on while I kick-paddled the canoe and me, back to shore where I tried to dry off before anyone noticed.

      Thank heavens the remainder of the trip was less eventful and by the time we got back to the main body of our group, everyone was anxious to head home to a dry bed and mom’s cooking.  It was raining again and cold when we stopped part way down Bowron Lake to eat before we got to our vehicles.  We prepared what you might refer to as “miscellaneous soup” by dumping all the remaining soup packets together into one common pot.  One of the boys stirring the soup dropped the ladle into the pot and nonchalantly stuck his muddy, grungy arm and coat sleeve into the soup and retrieve the ladle.  Not one diner even flinched.

That trip taught me some basic lessons about Scout Canoe Trips. (1) While a Scout may be trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, and reverent, he is not necessarily always clean.  (2) Luckily a scout comes pre-equipped with a cast-iron stomach.  (3) When they said to not stand up in a canoe they were talking specifically to me. (4) A rain poncho stretched across two paddles works well as a labor saving sail.  (5) Bears are less dangerous than the Park’s outhouses.  The outhouses were well designed and sturdily built to withstand any kind of weather, but they didn’t prevent Park animals from chewing the wood away from around the seat to get to the perspiration-salt left there by sweating canoeists.  It was the only restroom where I had to hold my arms way out to both sides to keep from falling in.

As I write this column forty years later I am grateful to be way too old to be invited to ever go again.