The Canoe that is to Be: Part 2

She bulges in all the right places. She lays soft, supple and nude on the strongback. I have just finished crafting her hull and I’ve done good. I catch myself stealing glances, with my head along one stem, following the curve of her form, noticing how each cedar strip defines her form. Her cedar strip skin has transformed the vertical rhythm of the molds into a sensuous jazz melody, whispering at for and aft and Peggy Lee full bodied amidships. I take particular delight in feeling her tumblehome sides. It’s, well, like feeling a woman’s ass. I run my fingers from her shear line, over the crest of her bilge and tumblehome to her bottom. She is the Mistress Canoe.

The crafting of her hull did exact a blood price. A glove lies on a table top, flat and lifeless. It is my work glove, the left one, made of ivory nylon mesh with a royal blue latex palm and finger pads. The palm is spattered with droplets of blood, giving it an almost Jackson Pollack artistry. The droplets are the color of black going into red, jaggedly irregular and randomly scattered like a handful of pennies dropped on the sidewalk.

What happened is obvious from the thumb pad. It is torn diagonally, in a lazy barber pole stripe that is caked with dried blood. Towards the middle of the tear, an inkwell of a hole yawns, where a shot glass of blood had oozed, glistening in the afternoon sun. I had fed my thumb to my table saw and felt the blade’s bite. I was lucky; I did not have to pick my thumb off the shop floor.

However, the wound would travel a rocky road to recovery. Two weeks later the it turned black; gangrene had paid a visit. The wound was reopened, the skin peeled off the thumb pad and the muscle tissue scrubbed and probed it to remove dead tissue and ground in pieces of wood and glove. The healing time doubled. For over a month my thumb was bandaged up, looking like a soft serve ice cream cone.

A week or so after the bandage came off I sat sipping a cup of coffee, rubbing my index finger over the bulbous hunk of scab and scar tissue that was now my thumb pad. My thoughts drifted off to a November duck shoot. It was an early November afternoon that was more winter than fall. The sky overhead was a duck hunter’s sky; sunless, gray, the clouds textured like a Mexican tuck-n-rolled interior in a 57 Chevy. Under this sky the labored, cupped winged flight of waterfowl was easily noticed, making them bold targets.

Out across the expanse of marsh in front of my blind a storm was massing itself for an assault on the marsh. As it rolled across the waters and salt grass flats of the Great Salt Lake, it drove a headwind that sucked up dust and water, giving it the appearance of a roiling avalanche tumbling over itself. When the headwind invaded the marsh, it teased the unsuspecting water into spitting white caps that double-timed after the wind.

I stood up, looked over the front of my blind and braced myself. The head wind rolled over my small flooded island, pelting me with cold marsh spittle, beating the surrounding cattails into submission, rupturing their swollen heads, sending millions of seeds cavorting down the marsh under lacey canopies.

As I watched, the nucleus of the storm grew, boiling within, turning violently dark. As the storm approached, it churned up massive amounts of static electricity, releasing it in jagged tongues of lightning that flicked out, like a snake’s tongue, searching for grounded high points and slicing open the sky, who roared in agony, like a gut shot lion. With each flash and roar I jerked my head down, turtling it between my shoulders. It was clear I had overstayed my welcome.

I dug my canoe out of its hidey-place and pulled it around as I picked up my spread of decoys. Each time I stopped to pick up a block, the silt swallowed my boots, locking me into position, while the wind sliced across my wet hands, robbing my fingers of warmth and dexterity as I wrapped the soaked anchor line around the decoy’s head. After stowing it in the bow of the canoe I plunged my hands under my water fowling jacket, nestling them into the concentrated warmth of my arm pits. Before I moved to the next decoy, I had to break the silt’s lock by rocking my feet heel-to-toe. Only then could I take a step without stumbling and filling my waders with November’s marsh water. After tossing the last decoy aboard I trudged back to my blind, one muck laden step at a time, pulling the canoe by the bow line, while the headwind boxed my ears and slapped my face playing every bit the part of a street thug.

I looked at my hunting buddy, a Chesapeake Bay retriever, who was sitting on top of the large muskrat den. The headwind was bulling him as well, but he did not shrink from it. Rather, he turned his muzzle into the wind and savored the smorgasbord of marsh smells that the headwind had served up. It felt good to be here at the storm’s edge, even though I knew it was going to be combat-paddling to cross the open expanse of water and evade the snake’s tongue. I was right with the world.

I parked the boat in front of the blind, loaded my side-by-side shotgun, shells, thermos, the Chesapeake Bay, and the days bag of five ducks; two pintails, one mallard and two widgeons. The Chesapeake Bay sat amidships, threw his muzzle back into the wind and continued to sample the smorgasbord.

The day’s bag of ducks, however, was not as I had left them when I went out to pick up my spread of blocks; they had been decapitated. The Chesapeake had apparently acquired a taste for duck head. I suppose the heads have a creamed filled crunch to them, something like a deep fried Twinkie-potato chip combo, and for the Chesapeake, you can’t eat just one. The birds were still fit for the table so I just chuckled and called the Chesapeake a “fucking goat”. As usual he did not acknowledge my comment.

I shoved the boat out into the impoundment, climbed into the stern seat, grabbed my paddle, reached out, sunk it in the muck and pulled hard. The canoe leaped forward. The headwind caught the bow and peeled us leeward towards home. With the wind at my back, each stroke of the paddle pulsed the boat toward the access canal, where I would no longer be prey for the snakes tongue. My heart beat fast and my arms pulled hard on the paddle. The waves that broke on bow’s stem beat out a warning, “Lightnings a comin…Lightnings a comin.”

Will I paddle the Mistress Canoe through adventures like this? Only Chicken Man knows and He ain’t sayin. It’s hard to admit that the Mistress Canoe has suffered a setback by my hand. The epoxy covering her outside bottom surface has blistered badly; some of the blisters are the size of an out stretched hand. The tops of the blisters have been torn off, exposing a gooey jam like material under the fiberglass cloth. The two part epoxy must not have been mixed well enough, preventing the molecules of hardener and epoxy from mating properly. The only fix is to strip the entire bottom down to the cedar planking and fiber glass her again.

I God it’s been a long time since I have felt this defeated, but it is what it is. The urge to throw a tantrum, Sawzall her up and throw her dismembered parts in the garbage, was brutally strong. I hadn’t realized how heavily I had invested myself in this boat. My wife jolted my thinking and made me realized that part of me lives in this boat. True enough. Ah hell, to tell the truth I just hated having my faults put up for public display. That’s why, I suppose, the destructive impulse was so strong.

Indifferent to my bruised ego, the Mistress Canoe waits for a belt sander, running 60 grit, to strip off her bottom skin of epoxy so a new layer can be applied. It’s late September and duck hunting season is upon us. Will I launch her this season? Like I said, only Chicken Man knows…the belt sander is fitted with a new belt and my dust mask sits on my bench top.