Searching for Petronius Totem by Peter Unwin

Author:Peter Unwin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ISER Books
Published: 2017-08-26T04:00:00+00:00

9.1

BY THE SHORES OF GITCHE GUMEE

THE FINAL ACT in the fall of Petronius Totem took place on a bright May Two-Four weekend outside of a dilapidated fish and chip shop on the wharf at Rossport, Ontario. It was there that Petro, with my help, attempted to become the first man in history to circumnavigate Lake Superior in a rubber inner tube.

I had taken all the necessary precautions. First, I secured the vessel, a standard beach-variety inner tube purchased with Canadian Tire money from a Canadian Tire store in Sault Ste. Marie. She was a good tube, and seaworthy, and we christened her The Ship of State Has Sunk, painting her name in nautical white lacquer on the bow. Duct-taped to the deck was a polystyrene container filled with two dozen Canadian dew worms. It was Petro’s intention to complete the world’s first solo–inner tube circumnavigation of Lake Superior living only on fish that he caught with rod and reel. The fish he planned to wash down with three forty-ounce bottles of Highwoods ten-year-old Canadian rye. For backup he packed in six cans of tuna, and two mickeys of Bell’s scotch. The whiskey he hooked up to a broomstick taped to the inner tube and ran some plastic tubing so he could suck at will. The pole stood in loosely for a mizzen-mast and the entire contraption resembled a post-apocalyptic hospital gurney jerry-rigged for sea travel. For reading he brought along twenty-six novels by Georges Simenon wrapped in plastic and floated with the help of three large party balloons, towing them behind him on a twenty-foot nylon rope. He had also lashed a rather ornately carved hookah to the tube with nylon rope, along with a specially designed book-holder that permitted hand-free reading in winds up to forty kilometres per hour.

The event was a planned impossibility from the start. I didn’t seriously expect Petro to circumnavigate a lake the size of Portugal in a five-dollar inner tube. Even with global warming I did not expect his body to withstand the summer temperature of Lake Superior, which is that of a refrigerator. And that was at the height of summer. I just didn’t care very much. Neither did he. Elaine, for her part, had already dismissed the undertaking as “pathetic performative masculinity.” She had agreed to accompany me only because Alex was in computer camp and she wanted Maddy out of the city for a few days, and because she could never turn up an opportunity to feast on fresh whitefish. She was convinced Petro would not survive the voyage. I think, in fact, she may have been looking forward to it. To help ensure Petro’s survival, I’d purchased a wetsuit for ten dollars from a Sault Ste. Marie yard sale, although I now suspected that what he really needed was a dry suit. I had done my research, at least some of it, but I wasn’t entirely sure whether it was a wetsuit or a dry suit that was needed in extremely cold water.

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