The Canoe

My wife and I went to a state park a while back and were delighted to find that they had canoes to rent. I hadn’t been canoeing since sixth grade when I paddled all the cute girls around the lake under the moonlight. She had never been at all. So, we decided to give it a shot.

Successful canoeing is all about timing. You have to get in sync with your paddles…the same stroke, the same strength. If you can accomplish this, then you can jet across the lake in a smooth, straight line. If you can’t, chaos ensues. This is where we found ourselves…chaos.

We quickly found out that I have a long, strong stroke, and my wife has a short, weeny stroke. So, basically we headed in the opposite direction of whatever side of the canoe I was paddling on. At first we tried having one of us paddling on one side and the other on the other side. But since I had the stronger stroke we just kept going in circles in front of the dock, like a fish with only one fin.

To compensate I tried switching back and forth from side to side in-between strokes. Unfortunately, so did my wife, always on the same side. We looked like we were doing synchronizing canoe, zigzagging across the lake. I tried to get it so our synchronization was on opposite sides of the boat, but like I said before our strokes were of different lengths. I was still in the middle of my stroke when she was already switching to the other side, so we would get two strokes on one side and only one on the other. This eventually led us into the overhanging branches of a willow tree sitting on one of the banks.

After we got disentangled from the tree and back out in the middle of the lake, I gave up on the whole affair and quit paddling. I just sat back in the canoe and let my wife do all of the work. Her short, weeny strokes didn’t take us far and not very quickly, so she began to suspect something was wrong. She turned around to see me sitting in the back of the canoe, my paddle on my lap, eyes closed, enjoying the warm sun on my face. This of course brought about an exchange of some not-so-pleasant words and gestures with a paddle, which almost tipped the canoe and both of us over and into the lake.

By this time we had floated into some lilly pads. They were so thick that we couldn’t turn around, so we were forced to throw it in reverse and attempt to back out of them. That is when it happened! For the first time all afternoon we went in a smooth, straight line. I told her that I wanted to try an experiment and for her to keep going in reverse.

It was beautiful. Our strokes were perfectly matched. No zigzags. No circles. We shot across the lake at full speed. The faster and straighter we went, the more fun we both were having. We were laughing and talking, as the wind blew through our hair. We were passing other canoes having their own struggles to get it together. But not us. We had found our secret. That canoe may have had six gears, but we only needed one.

Reverse.