May 08, 2006

I was chomping down a mermaid sandwich at the Raintree Cafe when Paul brought up the idea of canoeing down the Maitland.

“Everyone backed out on me,” he said, slouching his shoulders slightly. I took another mouthful of my sandwich which now tasted like fish and adventure, not mermaids. The Raintree Cafe is the place where all spur-of-the-moment plans are made.

“Hey, I’ll go,” I offered.

“Have you ever canoed down a river before?”

“No. But I’ll try not to drown us,” I said.

Paul seemed content with that, so on a Friday afternoon we packed our bags, climbed in the van, and sped towards the Maitland through a landscape that grew increasingly more bizarre. The tiny villages we passed were hotbeds of surrealism: young Mennonite girls in bright, blue dresses rollerbladed on cracked sidewalks, farmhands rode their ATV’s smoking Cuban cigars, and cars were inexplicably suspended in the air.

We reached the Maitland at dusk and climbed under a bridge to touch the crisp waves that leaped up at our feet. The Maitland is a creature of extremes — in the early spring torrents of water drown the nearby fields and in the summer the riverbed dries down to a trickle. But that evening it looked perfect for canoeing.

The high water levels made us unexplainably happy. Everything around us was suddenly exciting and full of surprises, even the trees on the river shore that were crawling with vermin. We laughed on the deserted bridge, our bellies hungry for rapids.