120 Miles in a Canoe

I’m not really the adventuresome type. I love to travel, but prefer a hotel to a tent, a car to a bike. I really don’t have any desire to sky dive or bungee jump or get my nipples pierced on a drunken dare. But I did once take a 120-mile seven-day canoe trip down the Namekagon and St. Croix Rivers in Wisconsin/Minnesota when I was fourteen years old. A friend of mine and his dad and uncle invited me along, and against my better judgment, I agreed to go.

I’d been canoeing before, but the longest trip I’d done was the Zumbro River outside of Rochester – a three or four hour jaunt that had none of the rapids that would curl (or straighten?) your short hairs, no Land of the Lost waterfalls into another dimension.

A large part of me that was afraid to go – afraid that I couldn’t handle the work of paddling for that distance, afraid that we’d capsize and become wedged in rocks beneath the river’s surface, afraid that I’d get eaten by...something.

But there was the bigger concern of disappointing my friend, so I agreed to go.

We did near twenty miles a day and camped at night, and that second day when I woke from a restless sleep on the not-so-soft ground, my arms and shoulders felt like they’d been filled with lead and pounded with a hammer.  But eventually by the fourth day, my muscles grew used to the paddling, my body found its rhythm, and I was mentally in the canoeing zone.

Twenty miles a day is a long time spent on fairly calm waters, and the weather cooperated with us. There were a few rain showers, and we gladly accepted them as a change of pace. Rain brought its own atmosphere, its own smells, its own sounds. There was the sizzle on rain on the river, the patter of drops on our ponchos. But the best part of the rain was the respite it gave us from the deer flies.

Those were the hardest part of the trip, much harder than the endurance it took to paddle. And it wasn’t the biting, although that could be painful. What the deer flies brought with them was a challenge to maintain sanity as they endlessly buzzed around our heads. They’d dive close to our ears, and we’d swat and miss, and then they’d circle and dive and chuckle at our helplessness. I realize this doesn’t sound like that big of a deal, but this went on for hours every day, with only the aforementioned rain bringing relief. There were times when I’d lose my mind and swing at them with my paddle, forgetting that my friend was also in the canoe, nearly taking his head off in the process – but if knocking his head off would’ve stopped the buzzing, it might very well have been worth it.

But mostly...

Mostly the trip gave me a profound appreciation of nature – of the beauty and the stillness and those times of not-so-stillness, of the give and take of dipping a paddle in water, watching the cold river drip off the paddle’s glistening end...

Pierre Elliott Trudeau once said this: “What sets a canoeing expedition apart is that it purifies you more rapidly and inescapably than any other travel. Travel a thousand miles by train and you are a brute; pedal five hundred on a bicycle and you remain basically a bourgeois; paddle a hundred in a canoe and you are already a child of nature.” 

That single canoe trip had a large influence on my life. It changed how I looked at nature. It’s made its way into my writing – most directly into the canoe journey of the sisters in Northwoods Deep. Many of my memories of that trip made their way into that novel. The deer flies, certainly - the mosquitoes. But also the pull of the river and the new mysteries and wonders it brings around each and every bend.

On Stephen King

I’ve noticed that it’s almost not cool to confess a love for Stephen King’s work – or maybe he’s taken for granted by so many of us.


‘Who’s you’re favorite horror author?’ they’ll ask.


I’ll try to think of all the new hot, cool authors out there, before stating my obvious choice, because, you know, an old stand-by just ain't fresh and - cool. But I'll eventually say, ‘Stephen King.’


‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’ they say, unsatisfied. ‘But who else?’


As if he's been around too long to be cool.


Remember how when you were a teenager eager to get your driver’s license, and then you finally get it and you can finally take the car out on your own? It was such a freeing experience, the first giant step toward independence. That car took you places, man! And it was thrilling – you got to choose where to turn, choose which roads to take. There was no one to tell you to roll the windows up or down or turn off the air conditioner or change the radio station.


Your ability to drive took you into that adult world of work and freedom and sex. For so many of us, our cars were the only privacy available if we wanted to get out from under our parents’ noses - where else could we take our girlfriends or boyfriends to experience those first sexual fumblings? Or - at the very least our cars could transport us to that old graveyard at night, where there were only the dead to witness our youthful exuberances.


But then...


But then you begin to take the old, reliable car for granted. You forget how amazing it was and still is.


Stephen King is kind of like that.


My older brother had a paperback copy of The Shining. You remember the silver one with the black silhouette on the cover? That’s the one. Anyway, I’d seen it sitting on his bookshelf for quite a while, and one summer day, when I was bored and nothing was on TV (only three channels, mind you!) and there was nothing else to read, I picked up that novel, and...


And my life changed.


Please realize I already enjoyed reading at that time, and was fairly well-read for my age. So it wasn’t that it opened my eyes to reading.


But...it did. It re-opened my eyes to reading.


It was the way he crafted the words – the way he used italics and sentence fragments, forcing my eyes race to across the page, starting and stopping and pausing to his rhythm – a rock-and-roll kinda rhythm. He created a pulse in that novel that attached itself straight to my heart and forced the blood to nearly burst through my skin.


Of course the storytelling was top-notch, too. Without the storytelling, all the writing tricks in the world wouldn’t have helped.


But his ability to tell a story...


Wow!


I was thirteen years old when I read The Shining, and after reading the last sentence of that novel, I had to have more. I proceeded to read every novel he had out at that time and every short story of his I could find. And my parents, God bless ‘em, always bought me his newest hardcover for my next handful of birthdays. It was always my favorite present.


So now, all these years later, all of these Stephen King novels later, I think readers take him for granted.


I know that I sometimes do.


‘Yeah, of course he just wrote another great novel, but so what else is new?’ they say.


Sorta like he’s a car. ‘Runs great, been driving ‘em for years, so?’


So without the car, man, it’s one hell of a long and tedious journey from here to there. Dig?


Maybe we’ve grown a little old, perhaps a bit too large around the middle to make love in the back seat of our cars, but they can still take us places – amazing places, places you wouldn’t fuckin’ believe...


So yeah, I’m happy to admit that Stephen King is my favorite author. He’s brought me on some of the best journeys, some of the most exciting road trips – and so many of them! And best of all, the engine on that thing still purrs like a son-of-a-bitch.

Why Horror?

I was one of those kids with a closet full of living, breathing monsters, bogeymen and your general serial killer-types, waiting to creep out and do their worst to me as soon as my parents fell asleep. The reason I’m still alive is surely attributable to those early years of constant vigilance and my insistence on keeping the hall light on. My parents also had a role in my survival, in that I often made them check the closet and prove to me that there was nothing hiding in there. The inhabitants of the closet always seemed to sense them coming, however, since they were never present when Mom or Dad opened the closet and put on a show for me of shuffling the rack of clothes and reaching to the back to touch the bare wall. I also did much checking under the bed. What would’ve happened if there actually had been a monster, bogeyman or serial killer, I don’t know – but at least I would’ve seen it coming.

So how did that child version of me soon fall in love with the horror genre? I don’t know exactly, but maybe I learned that watching horror movies or reading horror novels and stories was a way to be able to control the frights. I could always close the book or magazine, or turn off the television.

Or could I?

That’s one of the great things about horror – sometimes you know you should stop watching or reading if you want to get a decent night’s sleep, but you can’t. There’s no way to stop; the narrative keeps dragging you along, kicking and screaming, and won’t let you out of its grip until the end.

But usually, when it does finally let you go, you realize that you’re still safe. The book or the movie or the magazine didn’t kill you, it didn’t eviscerate or disembowel you while you weren’t looking. And that’s pretty damn cool. And believe me, you need to be safe and whole to keep vigilant against the monsters who live in  the closet and under the bed.