Getting Into The Canoe

I grew up in Toronto. We didn’t have money for very much, but my mother somehow scraped enough together for two weeks in a tiny cabin at Lake Simcoe. It wasn’t close to the beach and walking barefoot across the hot tar to get to it was part of the adventure.

A few years later my brother married Anne, a girl from Rosseau, Ontario. Her parents had a cottage on Lake Rosseau. In fact, it was right next to Lady Eaton’s summer home, now owned by Martin Short. Somehow she was able to give us two weeks in this paradise. We had no car and had to row across the lake to get into town, but we loved the place.

It was here I came to love canoeing. Anne’s brother would cycle out to the cottage and my brother and I would spend hours in the canoes with him pretending we were fur traders or Indians. We even made a totem pole one year.

My love affair with the canoe was not instant. The first time I tried to get into one, I had one foot on the canoe and one foot on the dock. Slowly the canoe started drifting away from the dock. My legs stretched farther and farther apart until I went, plop, down into the water.

The second time, I didn’t do much better. I tried to quickly shift my weight into the canoe and flopped right over the side and into the lake again.

On my third attempt I almost tipped the canoe, but managed to keep it afloat. From that moment on, I got better and better until I didn’t think twice about getting wet.

This experience taught me a few things about life.

To start, you can’t keep your feet on the dock and in the canoe forever. You have to commit to one or the other, and you can’t wait too long to make that decision. If you don’t make up your mind, you won’t achieve the results you would get from either choice. Since the canoe is there, once you decide to put a foot in, though, that should be the focus of your objective unless you find something drastically wrong, like a leak.

Next, when you make up your mind, you can’t simply rush into the decision. It takes some knowledge of what you will do. Even then, you might fail the first time. That doesn’t mean you give up. You just try it again.

Finally, it usually takes practice to learn how to do something easily and efficiently. If that was your objective, it is worth the effort.

Once you are in your canoe, then you have the delight of paddling all over the lake and discovering new territory.