Treed: Walking in Canada's Urban Forests by Ariel Gordon

Author:Ariel Gordon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wolsak & Wynn Publishers LTD
Published: 2020-03-12T00:00:00+00:00

My hand on the handle of a canoe paddle, except twenty-four years ago, when I was eighteen and just about to try out for the junior national rowing team. And it was an oar, sometimes even two oars, and I could use them to make the boat soar.

In those days, I spent most of my mornings scrambling in and out of a rowing shell, navigating kilometres and kilometres of the silty Red River, enclosed by elms and oaks, and full of speedboats and jet skis and the swells of water and sound they left behind. This evening, I’m in a red-bottomed canoe. It is just as light and easy to manoeuvre as the shells I spent ten years hoisting over my head. But the only things powering it are my arms. And I’m forty-two, not eighteen, but for some reason I’m trying to substitute power for technique. I’m gratified when I feel the canoe start to glide over Mayfield Lake.

Melanie Siebert, sitting behind me, has been paddling for most of her life. She’s even paddled for a living, spending fifteen years as a canoeing and rafting guide, and then also writing about it both authoritatively and beautifully. She’s quiet for the first half of our evening paddle: loon tremolos, blue-green water, dark green trees, grey twilight sky.

“Um,” Melanie says as I’ve just switched my paddle to the starboard side of the canoe because my right arm is aching. “I can show you a less tiring way of paddling, if you’d like.”

“Sure,” I say, brightly. Sigh...

She explains that if I started my stroke with my shoulders and not my arms, I would be more efficient. “Using my shoulders, I can paddle all day without getting tired,” she says.

She’s right. Even though I’m completely comfortable on the water, even though I made the junior national team and could still teach an intro-to-rowing class, I’m just needlessly tiring myself out this way. Twenty metres away, a loon feigns a wing injury, hoping to draw us away from his mate and their nest.

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