October 15: Your special place, the mind

I am riding my bike and I am riding it and I am going places.  And going and going and getting places, not getting places, and one place that I have not gotten to yet is a place special to you.  You may be surprised when I say where this special place is, because it may not be special to you yet, but it should be.  That special place is -- wait, let's not get there yet, this is personal.  This blog is all about you so let's take our time.  Your time.

You can probably guess what I'm not going to say -- I mean, not with any high probability or anything, but there is some probability.  I'm not going to go on and on about how beautiful and/or handsome you are, although we all suspect this is a subject that remains of interest to you, and may continue to do so as long as we agree this is a socially acceptable topic and not yet too awkward.  Nor will we discuss your cleverness, stick-to-it-ive-ness, and your popular attitude and demeanor.  

No!  The subject of you is the mind, where we live today.  I am standing in your mind, hand in grotesquely exaggerated hand of your cortical homunculus, staring around in awe at the thoughts that are conveyed from place to place on those imaginary belts as waves of neurotransmitters vibrate strangely on their quest of cats.  You have many interesting thoughts.  I reach out and take one, and your homunculus checks it out on the tip of its distended tongue.  Your first thought: Is this entry going to continue like this?  Because this is really weird.  But... imagine if the author really did get the canoe trailer rolling, and managed to bike a long ways, like 50 miles...

Why, I am flattered.  For the next thought in your wonderful imagination, instead of all the things that are normally there like bus schedules and little people and the boiling point of mercury -- you are imagining me there!  "I am shocked," I say, "Shocked.  I put this entire blog together to talk about you in particular, and how wonderful you are and special and so on and yada yada yada."  The homunculus nods its massive head.  "-- but it turns out your special thoughts are just going to be about my canoe trip?  Well, then..."  I sigh and sit down.  I suppose it's time to talk about myself for another 40 pages.  Why don't you sit there and imagine with all those special thoughts of yours...

I am riding and I am riding 50 miles today because everything is hunky dory and the wind is in the right direction and even the bike trailer which I made and was specially cursed ahead of time by the angels at creation is actually working.  I did not want to stop for anything, not fame or glory, or 30 pounds of potatoes for only $10 or a restroom break or spare inner tubes (oops) or even a banana.  I mean, the wind was with me, and I wasn't trying to be rude to the reporter who waved me down but that's kind of a big deal.  So I chewed up the last of the amazing haul of apples the Rothkes gave me while answering him with annoyance as he jotted words down in his notebook: [SAFF.  CALGARY.  ST LOUIS.  YOUNG.  HEALTHY.  SINGLE.]  Every tickle of the air as I stood there still was a lost moment of motion --

No, those words of the reporter were not his assessment of me but my assessment of myself, the reasons I gave for the trip.  They were as good as any I could give at the time.  Five years later, writing this, I still don't know what it was about, but I know it was good, and it's over, and I sometimes sorta want it again, but it wouldn't be the same.  Old hat now.  I know exactly where my physical limits are.  It's important, maybe one has to be fully animal before being fully human.  Likely not -- I got no answers here, just a collections of days, stitched together to fill time.  Who am I? is a question that matters more to others than yourself: you're just you.

Day 116 ended: Yogi Lee Trail

October 14: Miles per hour

Twenty-eight.  The earth is a menace.  It comes and keeps coming, tossing its rocks and branches at you in fits until it sits there silently wondering why this creature is to weak to strike back.  For a second, only, it renews its attack.  The wheels are friends that keep rolling, jumping around on the gravel, twisting left and right as they fight to hold on to this raring planet.  When the road and the trees line up there isn't infinity there, just The End being pushed this way through no will of its own.

Twenty-nine.  After each horizon another takes its place, but who can say this goes on?  A horizon of color is left behind and no one can say now what color it was.  A horizon of space beside me, and time, still, in the future.  Some.  Lives slip past.

I'm holding on to the handle, not used to the rumble jumble sliding around on a bucket seat.  Safety belt on but I can't check the drivers.  There's no thought here, just sensation.  Thirty.  Thirty miles per hour riding in Scott's car back to Thief River Falls, the fastest my body had been in months.  It would be too perfect to say my soul had barely left the canoe -- but certainly my thoughts were there.

Slowness and standstill the rest of the day, I fought a more visceral battle with the ground as it chewed up spokes and inner tubes -- legs kept spinning.

Day 115 ended: I did not record the place

October 11, 2008, Part 1: Crossing the medicine line

Supposedly at one time the Indians referred to all white man's magic as "medicine," and no medicine was as potent as the 49th parallel.  Crossing this invisible border was a way to earn salvation, a wall unbreached by American armies.

It can still be a place of changing fortunes.

I had always worried a bit about the border crossing.  Crossing on a road meant I wasn't just sneaking over like I considered doing if I cross via the river, but still I was worried what response I was going to get as I walked down the line, pushing my contraption in the long line of cars.  The worst scenario I could imagine was the border agents deciding my vehicle wasn't road-worthy.  In that case they could turn me around and the Canadian agents might stop me too, until someone came to rescue me from the no-man's land between the borders.

As it turns out, I had no problems at that particular point.  The agents maintained serious faces, but I felt like I amused them.  One only asked what the mysterious powder in one of my unlabelled canisters was, and was satisfied by my insistence it was just brown sugar.  The other questioned me at length about my trip: where I had come from, where I was going, and whether I was being treated well on the road.  He spoke at length about his son's trips: walking across Spain, biking across the U.S., and later north from Tierra del Fuego.  In fact, I think I was the one who cut the conversation short, trying to look out for the long line of cars behind me.

I stopped at the first gas station I saw.  It was my friend Calvin's wedding day and I was determined to get ahold of him.  My calling cards were dead, and I had no American cash or bank cards.  I knew I would eventually have to make it to a Bank of America since I had lost my check card, and I needed to free some of my long-term savings to use it.  I assumed a BoA would be findable relatively early on entry into Minnesota.  In fact, there are no Banks of America anywhere in the state.

So, I decided to withdraw money from my Canadian bank at an ATM.  First, I needed to check how much was available, so I asked for Account Balance, which resulted in the puzzling response "Invalid Operation."  So I blindly attempted to withdraw first $60, then $40, then $20, to be met with, respectively, "Insufficient Funds," "Insufficient Funds," "Insufficient Funds."

Scrounging around in my canoe, I found a few loonies and toonies, and the $20 bill Sarah King had left in the Tilly hat she gave me.  I had been saving it for a special occasion, and this was it.  I bought a phone card and counted my money: $6 US and $13 Canadian plus change.  Money was one less burden on the trip.

Calvin has organized a bicycle flotilla of groomsmen for his wedding; I interrupted their grand ride from a little gas station in Minnesota.

Day 112 continues.

October 9, 2008: Return of the land canoe

As the hours of daylight dwindle, my conscious thoughts are buffeted by cold, by wind, by physical exertion, while my subconsciousness rages at night.  I begin dreaming in surprisingly cohesive, realistic short stories and novels, ensconsed in the warm dark of my tent.

I lay there thinking I would simply recreate the dubious system I used in that initial short ride, patiently repairing its faults at every bump and corner.  In any case I must once again purge all excess weight; get rid of the canoe covers that have always frustrated due to my inability to attach them well; eliminate the warm weather clothes I rarely used even when it was warm; drop the books I have finished with; throw out my Missouri license plate "985-ESC" brought for purely sentimental reasons.

When I came to Calgary, I came in a white, 1989 Cutlass Sierra that my parents expected to die at any moment on the road.  But it was a survivor.  Racing the sunset to a camp site one night I drove off the side of a road in the South Dakota badlands, where one or two hundred yards further on would have been fatal.  I was pulled out and my tires reinflated by a ragtag team consisting of a crippled war vet, a policeman, an Indian, and a dog.  I had a couple flat tires in Wyoming, and although it dropped its muffler somewhere in Montana, I was napping in a pull-out at the time so I easily recovered it and threw it on the passenger seat, where it spent the rest of its life.

The car was simply left out back of my first place in Calgary, weathering eight months of winter without a single use, but when it came time to move it started without any problems.  My insurance had expired, but that was okay -- I planned to simply once again pack up my possessions, drive the couple of miles to my new home, and leave it again until the next move.

I left it sitting on the curb that night, and the very next morning the winds came up, and the car was totally smashed by a tree, falling from the other side of the road.

I woke up to the sound of workers clearing branches from it, joking, "The show-me state?  Well, we sure showed him!"

It was a total loss.  I rescued the driver and passenger seats from it, as well as the license plates and the car stereo.  At one time I had the car stereo and motorized driver's seat both running off of a heavy-duty computer power supply, but before this latest trip all that stuff was thrown out, the lone license plate surviving as a souvenir.

As I lay in my warm sleeping bag, almost against my will my mind forms the image of the license plate folded up on the front of the canoe, a horizontal groove placed where it should maintain its place on the back of the bicycle rack.  It's a saddle joint, like in the thumb; this groove allows the boat to pivot up and down, while the notch between the carrier wheels on the bicycle rack limit the side to side motion.  The plate even protects the canoe from being scraped by the rack, as it was the first time.

That business settled, I fell into a deep sleep.

In the morning the thing began to take shape.  The notched plate was fitted over the right place in the canoe, screwed there to prevent its motion.  I only had vise grips to turn the screws into the hull, so they couldn't go in all the way, but this was a boon in the end; the extending screws provided additional points to attach bungee cords, in the most critical place near the joint.  Epoxy putty was placed over the tips of the screws inside the boat to strengthen the connection, prevent them from tearing out the hull under the applied loads.

And so I was committed to trying this thing.  I would make a change here and there, and then bike the thing around the park, over grass, up and down the slight slope.  By trial and error the bungee cords assumed a streamlined shape about the pivot point, until the bike could smoothly turn this way and that, accelerate and decelerate without the slightest jarring.  When I got off once without propping up the bike, and it easily fell down in place without anthing coming undone, I knew I had it.  The plate on the boat and the rack were the bony plates of the joint, bungee cords my tendons, and a carved up inner tube was the soft cartilage in the middle.

I did leave many things behind, including all the curmudgeon's tools, writing "free" on his fence post and leaving it over the pile.

I biked towards the bridge on Manitoba highway 23, hauling my 15.5 foot boat behind me.  A big brown sign told me I was crossing the Red River.  The bridges of Manitoba are generally much better kept than those of Saskatchewan, and even now construction work was going on, and a kid was tending the "stop/slow" sign as I approached.

"How's it goin'?" I asked.

"Alright, how about you?" he said.

"Oh, just doing a little bit of canoeing."

Day 110 ended: 49*08.460N, 097*09.081W

October 8, 2008: All too helpful

The first boat ramp after Winnipeg is at Morris, almost two thirds of the way to the border.  After that, there are a couple more, at St Jean Baptiste and Letellier, before the border town of Emerson.  So much my map could tell me.  But it could not indicate the conditions or slopes of these ramps, which was increasingly important to me as I struggled upstream on the Red.  I wanted to get off the river and onto the road, if possible.

Early in the day I encountered the ramp at Morris.  It was clearly built for a higher river than what was present, a nice gradient down to to a point some three feet above the water, and then as an afterthought, an ad hoc thirty degree slab of concrete leaning into the water below.  It was unclear how this lower ramp was supported, since I could see a gap underneath; furthermore the precarious thing was covered with a foot or two of mud.

There were more ramps further on.  As I passed, a fisherman with outstretched arms was telling his girlfriend a story, and then shouted at me, "Whoah! You came out of nowhere!"  Fighting the current I had second thoughts.  This man seemed friendly enough, he may know what the later ramps would be like.

I parked the canoe and walked over to ask him.  He said, "I'm as new to this area as you are!" which was clearly untrue, since he knew something about the ramp at St Jean Baptiste: it extended down at a forty-five degree angle and he was clueless how anyone launched any boats at the thing.  I decided to make the attempt here.

As I struggled to drag my canoe up the muddy slope, having no firm hold on anything but my rope anchored forty feet away, the fisherman turned his rod away from me and locked his Bronco as a precaution against my continuing presence.  A procession of trucks had stopped at the top of the hill as I did this, their occupants staring or sleeping, until finally one old curmudgeon stepped out of his blue truck and demanded to help me.

I felt there was little he could do.  I already had the boat past the mud, the slope from then on was comparably gentle or dry, but he insisted to tow the canoe up, and then haul my baggage.  I was powerless to resist, and besides that thought it would be too proud of me to refuse to allow this man to help me.

He was 85 years old.  "Nice," I said, thinking that he did not look the octogenarian.

"Yeah," he said, " all of my friends are dead!"

"I hate canoes!" he said as I unloaded my things from his truck, which successfully carted them all of forty feet.  "They're just things the Indians used to drown themselves in!"

"I just had to tell you my opinion," he said.

I told him that I planned to haul the canoe about 200 miles to Lake Itasca, the headwaters of the Mississippi River, or perhaps find someone to drive me there.  He said he'd drive me himself if I could get him the gas money, "about $500".  I thought that was a bit steep, especially since the gas would be a bit cheaper in Minnesota and I figured his truck made more than five miles to the gallon.  But on calculation, it was doubtful if I could pay for the gas given my currently available funds.  I had spent so much money in Winnipeg on bags, clothes, and board, I was down to about $150.  My American funds were all tied up until I could reach a Bank of America.

He left as I tried various configurations for hauling the canoe.  I could put the wheels far back on the boat and bungee the front down to the bike rack, but it was hardly possible to keep this stable enough in turns; the boat wanted to jump out of its cradle.  Balancing the load over centered wheels seemed to be most stable for the canoe.  After all, this is how I got it down from my house to the river in the first place.  But this was alwaysa bit tricky in the joint to the bicycle.  The boat wanted to heave up or down as I started and stopped, or escape to the right or left on turns.  When the bike went down bungees would come undone and need to be reconstructed to continue.

A smooth-faced man came by, his construction vest brightly visible over his four-wheeler.  He seemed quite impressed with my trip thus far, and thought he might be able to find something that would work as a hitch at his workplace.  He would certainly come back and check on my progress in any case.  "See you!" he said before driving off.

"See you later!" I said.

I found a forked branch on the ground and thought I might be able to screw it into the deck of the canoe, and secure bungees or ropes across the fork to secure it to the seatpost.  My screws weren't long enough and the thing tore out of the deck with little applied force.

Some kids came by on mopeds, driving around the park in circles.  I thought this was just their version of staring at strangers, learned from their grandfathers in the trucks on the hill, so I ignored them.

The curmudgeon came back and was not impressed by what I was doing.  He started throwing things out of his truck that he was sure would help me.  A huge rusty C-clamp, a giant vise-grip, heavy metal bolts, a fence post, a 1x6 board.  As he dropped things into and beside the canoe I could just imagine this thing growing massive without bound, until its inertia prevented me from getting started on even the flattest ground.

He noticed the kids, and yelled "Get off the grass!"  He got out his camera to take photo evidence of their transgressions of the park.  They eventually left after an interval timed to indicate that the curmudgeon was not their boss.

He was a blacksmith, but all his tools were 12 miles away, he said, so there was nothing he could do to build a proper hitch for me.  He measured the fence post on the board, and declared it "not long enough", though for no purpose clear to me.  He was partly deaf, and in particular deaf to my hints that he might not actually be helping me much.

Finally it was time for him to go home for the night.  He was leaving for BC in the morning, to celebrate the Thanksgiving weekend.  All day it had been growing overcast and bitterly cold.  "Winter is coming, young man!"

He offered his final judgment on my plans, after playing at help all day.  "If you ask me, it's a s----y outfit.  It's too small!"  And then he drove away.

I set up camp in the cold, dark "Scratching River Campground."  It was a waste of another day.

Day 109 ended: 49*21.138N, 097*21.053W

Day 34: Little Chicago

I locked up my motel room and decided to walk downtown. The neighborhood I am staying in was clearly up and coming 30 years ago. At one intersection two furniture stores grin at each other across the street, both promising "real oak", and both closed permanently. The residential section has fared no better. All the paint is peeling, and every other house has a "Beware of Dog" sign posted. From behind their locked front doors the horrible screaming arguments of people in need is overheard without eavesdropping.

I had a feeling of apprehension about my visit to town. It took two hours of thirsty pedaling to get here from the east side of the park, I could have sworn the attendant at the first motel refused me a room because of my scummy appearance, and here I was shacking up for the night in the slums.

And then a thought of correction made its way into my head. "Kevin, you always hate a town the first night. Give it a chance this time!"

A man hailed me as I walked by on the sidewalk, asking if the bus was still in service. Looking at the peeling orange paint and unkept appearance of the bench, it seemed doubtful to me. But I had no idea, and told him I had just arrived in town. So had he, and he was quite excited about it. He had just bought a house for $68,000, and being a professional carpenter he was going to fix it up and sell it in a year for twice as much. He'd lived in Calgary and Regina, but didn't enjoy the price of staying in those towns.

When I told him I was walking downtown, he quite animatedly told me "You'll love it. You know what they used to call this town in the 1920's? Little Chicago. Al Capone came up here sometimes." Apparently, to run his business when things got uncomfortable in the States.

I walked by a grand building, a library/gallery/museum/gift shop, according to its sign. It sits next to a little park with a creek running through it, and here are many strange things to look at, even with the library closed. There was one path running into the park, posted with three signs. The first two read "Pedestrians only" and "Service traffic only", and I spent some time in confusion over whether the conjunction or disjunction was implied here. The third was easier to understand: "Waterfowl can be aggressive." Most of the waterfowl were mallards.

There are also two time capsules celebrating Moose Jaw's centennial, both to be opened a hundred years after their sealing. The first was to be opened on Moose Jaw's bicentennial in 2082, and the second to be opened on the occasion of Moose Jaw's bicentennial in 2103. And that took a bit longer to figure out.

So much for the park, except there was one entrance dedicated to the memory of a man surnamed "Gate". I kid you not.

This being a Friday night, there was not much for me to do downtown. I have never been one for the bar scene, and feel awkward in a situation where I know the names of neither the people nor the drinks. It probably wouldn't help that I had mud on my face, and was wearing jogging pants and a bright green t-shirt both made baggy by my paddling diet. But then again, I could be wrong as well. As I say, not my scene.

Most of the places I would visit the next day, a borscht sampling salon, a smoothie bar, and the Tunnels of Moose Jaw, were closed. I spent some time in Reader's Book Shop, which is a used bookstore that also has Internet terminals, and seem, with its wall of manga and Magic: the Gathering cards, to be transitioning to serve a geekier audience. I scanned the shelves searching for my current two favorite authors. John Steinbeck and Tom Stoppard. They've become favorites by writing the only two entertainment books I have with me, "Travels with Charley" and "Arcadia', respectively, both well worn and falling apart from the rigors of adventure and rereading.

Finding nothing to my taste, I return to my motel room. Although the sign reads "Newly Renovated!", every surface but the carpeted floor is covered in wood paneling - and poorly, I might add, with white paint showing behind every knot. On the wall was what appeared at first glance to be a framed cross-stitch of John 3:16, but on closer inspection proved to be a photocopy on certificate paper.

Although I have a bed available to me for the first time in over a month, it seems the comfortable toilet seat was a greater blessing to me. For, I have painful diarrhea all night long.

Day 34 ended: 50*35.691N, 105*24.672

(These are the canoe's coordinates, at the park boat launch. I do not have the coordinates of the motel.)

Day 33: It just wouldn't work

"We can get you this spot here. It's only two minutes from the boat launch."

Two minutes is clearly a driving time and only proves to me that the registration girls here don't have a clue what I am asking for. I just want a site on Buffalo Pound Lake where I can set up a camp for just my canoe and my tent. Is that too much to ask?

I told them "I'll think about it," and walked out of the registration building. I came to a conclusion. It's nice stopping in these provincial parks to get showers and laundry, but it would be too much of a pain to haul my stuff up from the water to some a camp site. There's nothing across the lake, so I figure if they can't find a spot for me, I can just cross to the other shore and camp right with my canoe.

So I re-entered and tried to explain this to them. I said I understood that they had no designated spot on the water, but I don't need much room, just for my tent, really, and that I would like to use their facilities and that I would like to give them money. The three of them briefly consulted and then I got the conclusion, "I'm sorry, it just wouldn't work."

You're right, it wouldn't work, Saskatchewan Provincial Parks. The relationship that started out with memorable showers, had continued into winks and illicit activity on the grounds, had now come to this. There was no place, anywhere, for me in their lives. But that's okay, Saskatchewan, I've been looking forward to Manitoba for some time now. Of course, I'd still use the washroom and showers here. I still hd physical needs, even if I had been emotionally rejected.

I was frustrated, maybe largely because I knew what perfect campsites there were up the lake, that I had passed up to get there. I'll admit, perhaps if I had come some other day, or people with mor eknowledge and authority had been manning the desk that day, things might have come out differently. I just hadn't been ready for this response.

My bike and I coasted down the hill, back to where my canoe was parked. This was "seasonal camping", and it was inhabited primarily by these rather large camper units. For a long time I couldn't understand the appeal of these things. They all have names like, "Wilderness Tripper", but clearly they don't have anything to do with wilderness. But Steinbeck's book "Travels with Charley" has at times made me lust after one of these units and the luxuries it must contain. A real bed every night! A kitchenette, a bathroom and no doubt showers too!

They may be worthless for wilderness adventure, but they seem pretty good for travel, and the inhabitants I've met seem to agree. Drive about your little home on wheels and then you can pay to park it for a night on a green lawn with little planted trees, everything the suburbanites inside can't bring with them. Then they spread out their lawn ornaments, erect a little shed, and even build fences or hang big black tarps around their site so they can have a little bit of Privacy. Apparently Privacy is a big deal to your modern camper driver, because at the registration desk the girl trying to find me a spot ranked all the sites in terms of this Privacy, a term that has utterly no meaning to a person who has essentially been living on the river, alone for a month. I much prefer Neighborliness to Privacy.

So, I had gotten it into my head that campers are for travel. But this lot was for "seasonal camping", whatever that was, and there was a huge mowed field, room for two soccer games that I'm sure never took place, between this lot and the lake. I wandered around for a bit hoping to ask permission from someone lakeside to set up a tent in their lot for a couple nights, but the place seemed almost entirely abandoned. I supposed "seasonal camping" meant people lived in their nice suburban homes most of the week, with their big lawns and televisions, and then commuted out to the park weekends to stay in their metallic homes with big lawns and televisions. The whole park just seemed so fake to me at that point: the mowed lawns, the raked beaches, this parking lot that people thought of as wilderness adventure.

I decided I wouldn't take up residence on these absent folks' lawn away from lawn. But I wouldn't erase myself completely from view. I set my tent on a nice beach on the opposite shore, where absolutely anyone would see me, if they just turned their heads away from the television for a minute.

Day 33 ended: 50*36.515N, 105*25.142W

Day 3: Bikin' to Gleichen (and the "Indian house")

The Siksika Nation owns the section of the Bow River from just after Carseland to the Bossano Dam. When I called their head office, I was told I would need a permit to canoe this section, and to get a permit I would need to see the Department of Lands, located in the head offices just south of Gleichen. Gleichen being roughly 25 miles (40 km) away, I would need to ride my bike there to obtain the permit.

About the ride there, I do not have much to say. It was raining, but I made good time and was happy to feel as though I were going uphill all the way, since that would mean an easy downhill ride back.

During one of our landlord's frequent complaining sessions of us as humans and as caretakers, they said that the small pile of junk that had appeared in the back when two new people moved in made our place look like an "Indian house". I asked Calvin what this meant, and he said it was general racism. Now that I have observed some real "Indian" houses, I can perhaps provide a description of those I saw on the road.

In an area proclaimed by sign as the "West End Development", were what looked like some prefab houses laid out in a seemingly random pattern. My first impression was that they were dismal, not because of collections of junk, but rather by the lack of it. All these identical houses, each painted in some plain color appeared soulless, unlived in. And after seeing a couple more of these developments further on, my general impression was always of these buildings being plopped down, indiscriminately on the prairie. There were rarely the kind of strong architectural features, such as fences, driveways, sheds, trees, and the like which make a building appear to belong to the place, and even when these features were present it simply made the feeling of otherworldliness extend to the border of the fence, say, rather than the wall of my house. If a squadron of UFOs were to land in Stanley Park, they would appear to be as at home in the landscape as these houses in the prairie.

But above all, I did not see any conspicuous junk in the yards. I do not know why, but in my stranger's imagination, it is because these people live without all this extraneous material, as if ready to pack up their houses and go on to the next world at a moment's notice.

At the office I met some weathered faces who told me where to go for my permit, and I wondered how my face would look at the end of my journey. I was able to quickly get a $30 permit for one day of boating on the river.

On the way back to the park, I could not tell if I was truly going downhill most of the way, because the wind was so incredibly strong in my face. I got back, my legs exhausted but my arms still in good shape, and went a couple of miles so I could camp on free land and be able to empty the water out of my boat.

Day 3 ended: 50*49.572N, 113*23.673W

Day 1: Off Without a Hitch

There I was at the put-in. A crowd of Canadian friends had come to see me off early in the morning and had already waited more than an hour for me to show up, pulling my homebuilt canoe behind my folding bicycle. The hitch that was to be the centerpiece of my plan had broke as soon as it had been asked to pull the fully-loaded canoe, so the canoe was held in place by a makeshift system of ropes and bungees that continuously came undone as it went over bumps and holes in the pathway.

Right in front of me is a series of compression waves generated by the Calgary weir. They weren't the largest waves, but they looked utterly terrifying as a proving ground for my canoe, which had only previously been tested in a kind of glorified bathtub, a duck pond at Prince's Island Park.

And then Shawnti came, holding the most afraid little cat I have ever seen.

This cat, String, was under threat of eradication from our landlords, for the crime of coming around to the house and visiting us every day. At one point it was decided that the best thing to do would be to send her with me on my journey, and we ould adventure together. I even bought a life-jacket for her, having some trouble with the sizing because I couldn't find anything between a terrier and a pug.

The cat did not seem thrilled about the adventure, so I had to set off without her. I had already had enough trouble without a terrified cat adding to it.

Those initial waves were indeed the worst I would see all day, but I had never canoed on a river this big before. I constantly found myself getting turned every which way, and it wasn't until I saw a group of experienced paddlers "peeling out" of an eddy that I realized my mistake. The current in an eddy is still or backwards compared to the main current, so hug the inside of a corner too closely, and you'll get turned around, pulled into it. Fortunately the process reverses as well -- just aim your canoe upstream out of the eddy and the current will catch you, turn you right side around and hurtle you on your way.

One of those paddlers asked me about my trip. I told him that I was a math student who was dropping out of school to go basically as far as I could.

"Well," he said, "if you keep going you'll eventually reach the Hudson's Bay."

This really wasn't part of my plan, but the way things were going, instead of mentioning St. Louis or New Orleans, I simply said, "I had an idea to pull the canoe on the back of my bike, but that isn't going so well."

He nodded, looked at the scratches in the bow from the bike rack rubbing the boat, the broken inwhale duct taped into place, and the haphazard collection of objects thrown into the boat, and said, "Well, I'm sure I'll see you again on the river!"

He neglected to say what state he expected to find me in.

It was only later, as I began looking for a campsite, that I began to relax and take stock of everything. No one would say this was going well, but should it, in a real adventure? I read many of these books written by men who paddled big rivers like the Missouri and the Mississippi, and the most interesting ones, the only true "adventures" were those written by folks with nearly no clue what they were doing as they started out. This gave them the opportunity to grow, to learn new skills, and see and experience new things as they went. They may have "bumbled their way from one disaster to the next" as one of their more prepared comrades put it, but their stories were interesting and the experience clearly added to their lives.

Not so the ones who started out well-prepared, with a full skillset. These people seemingly sleepwaked from one location to the next, never learning, never seeing, never feeling anything. Their true stories are not on the river in those books, but earlier, when picking up their skills, when dreaming their big dreams. But having already developed their skills to perfection, the actual river tour is a bore to them, as they try to beat down the miles as fast as they can to get back to what they really cared about. In my mind, it is these guys who wasted their summers. One's highlight was his "invention" of a meal consisting entirley of uncooked oatmeal in cold water. But I guess at the end he was able to check a box off his list of things to do in life, so good for him.

With such a start, I was pretty sure I wasn't just wasting the summer, mine will be a true adventure, bumbling and all. I could honestly say I had no idea where I would get, when I would get there, and how.

I found a beautiful little campsite before the Carseland weir and thought, ah yes, this is it, whatever happens, I will figure it out.

And by the morning nothing bad had happened other than some creature with invisible footprints had broken into one of my waterproof bags and taken some oats and my best ramen.

Day 1 ended: 50*48.449N, 113*28.584W