Nicola and Me

We're back. We lived. I've decided, after sleeping on it, that I might possibly want to do this river canoe thing again. If everyone is really nice to me and I get a wet suit and a PFD with twice as much floatation, that is.

Around ten o'clock Saturday morning, approximately an hour or so behind schedule and therefore right on time, we sallied forth in caravan formation to the put-in on the Nicola, about twelve kilometers upstream of our campsite. It was a sunny morning, and the rills and trills of the river beside the roadway shone brilliantly, if a bit low.

At the put-in, the talk was all of how bumpy the trip ahead would be, and when, not if, we'd have to get out of our canoes and line our way past shallows a crawdad would find crowded. While the car drivers shuttled the cars back to camp, us passengers slid down the bank to river's edge and dandled our feet in the cool water. The day would get hotter from then.

Eventually, we were sorted, the drivers were back, and one by one each canoe peeled out from the bank and we were off. Mostly tandems, there were three solos, one of which was the 13 year old daughter of the trip leader, herself on her first solo river outing and feeling the pressure. I could empathise.

Early on, we had one unexpected dip and wallow (as usual, I'm sure there are technical terms for this stuff, but in one ear and out the other...) which reminded me unpleasantly of the rapid I'd swum three weeks earlier. On the other hand, there was the close-up view of the eagle's nest, compleat with half-grown eaglets, the tall trees and diving kingfisher. I was starting to feel pretty good about everything after the third or fourth little quick rocky bit, and my ability to pry or draw us into an eddy on command, when another couple pulled in behind us with an extra canoe resting on their gunwales.

It wasn't much of a canoe, after all, as it had only one spacer thingy, no gunwales, no seats, no skin and a large tear down one side, right in the middle. They'd spied it on the bank, clever eyes, and snatched it up because, well, because it was there and they were there and it looked lonesome. We tried to think up reasons to haul it all the rest of the way to camp (salad server! planter box! fixer-upper!) but in the end Dave settled for piloting it solo through a miniscule rapid while another person took pictures to prove he hadn't sunk, which is what anyone of less skill would have done in that wreck. Afterward, they propped it up in the shade along the bank, where it could watch the river go by in peace.

That was lunch. Following lunch, the river got a lot more interesting. Much more shallow, lots of rocky bits, lots of noisy rushing bits. I found I'd worked a blister into the inside of my left thumb, and then that I'd broken it, and before I had a chance to be properly sad about that, we were into a rapid, over a rock, and slammed sideways by an opposing wave. The canoe tipped right over on its side and I stared down into light green chilly rushing foamy water and thought, "uh-uh. We are not dumping." I leaned all the way over the other way, hard, and for a wonder the canoe righted itself.

Nola was doing similar helpful things at her end, and we both got massively painful calf cramps but we didn't have to swim. Though we did take a few minutes to stretch our legs.

The distance between rocky fast bits tightened the closer we came to the campsite, and colder when a smaller chilly creek mixed in. Now I really didn't want to go swimming, hot as it was. On the plus side, it was quite shallow. On the down side, the riverbed was coated in slick algae clinging to hard stones.

We were all feeling the heat. My and Nola's water bottles had warmed up to the point where the water tasted bad, but we drank it anyway. It was that or heat stroke. Three o'clock came and went, with us still on the river and yet another rapid sounding up ahead. I started to get really nervous and to crowd the lead boats, despite Nola's admonishments to relax. We ended up on a wide shallow place too close to other boats for her to take the easiest line, and so ended up gravelling out in a place where an incoming creek met the Nicola. We had to walk the canoe to deeper water in all that, me slipping and sliding on the algae'd rocks and just barely keeping my shit together, Nola quite sensible and calm and apologising for getting us into that (!) and assuring me that it wasn't far now, we'd be back at camp before I knew it.

As it was, we had two or three kilometers to go before we saw the campsite. The take-out was at the bottom end, but we elected to stop opposite of Madeline and John's tent, leaving the canoe tied up to a tree below their camp, and so missed the comedy of errors at the last rapid, where two canoes each dumped on the same insignificant rocklet. Nola and I weren't the only tired campers!

We spent Sunday breaking down camp and stowing gear and lazing and sketching and visiting. I had to work today, but we wanted to stay for the pig roast Sunday evening, it being a tradition of Rivers Week. The drive home was marked by, one after another, spectacular rainbows, saturated colours stretching up and around and over.