May 09, 2006

The good morning comes like a hit and run
With a marmalade sun for everyone. (Collett)

The knock on the door came at 6am, crisp and metallic. I awoke disoriented in a room full of posters of naked men, who leered at me seductively from the darkened walls.

“Bara bual hu?” I said, my brain fumbling to find reason in the early morning light.

Sensing my confusion, Paul said something comforting about canoe trips and breakfast. I promptly fell asleep again in his sister’s bed.

An hour later I was in the kitchen eating marmalade sandwiches and contemplating the rain falling softly outside the window. “There was snow earlier,” Paul reassured me. Somehow, we still decided that it would be a good idea to get inside a truck and drive through the country searching for a canoe. Soft rain fell on the windshield, and we blasted on the heat to keep warm. Turkey vultures swirled ominously in the sky looking for roadkill and adventurers.

The man at the canoe store made us sign papers saying that if we drown it’s our own damn fault. There’s nothing better than a taste of death in the morning.

By the time we reached the Maitland the rain stopped. We pulled on layers of clothes and gloves, and jumped in the tipsy canoe to get a full blast of wind in our face. It was cold, cold, cold, and whenever we would stop paddling, the wind would push us upstream forcefully, leaving a wake on the wrong side of the boat. We swore a lot, ate apples, and soon the sky filled with sunshine and fluttering birds.

That made us instantly happy. We paddle the canoe down the sleepy river, beaching it now and again to pee and explore the surrounding country. The Maitland seemed infinite and blue.

It took us eight hours of paddling to travel a twenty-kilometre corridor. Most sane people manage to travel that distance in about half the time. But we were not sane people — we were men of the river with our faces baked by the sun and our limbs stretched in impossible positions. And it was good.