My Paddling Partner
Lynda Childs
We have, indeed, returned.
Over the past thirty-four years, we have traveled from wherever we lived as often as possible to enjoy the Boundary Waters and Quetico. Our twenty-fifth trip will be in 2006. We have our own gear now. We now own a Bell Northwind, a nylon tent, and an ample supply of sunscreen! We no longer sleep in borrowed sleeping bags or on air mattresses that deflate by Day Three.
Until 1988, canoe-tripping was always something only just the two of us shared. That year our two children made a trip with us. Our sixteen year-old son (you do the math) had assumed he would paddle with Dad while the "girls" paddled the second canoe. That was Neil's finest hour, both as a father and a husband. Neil informed the presumptuous teenager that his mother and father would paddle their own canoe as they always had! Ed and his long-suffering sister learned to cooperate and, eventually, got their canoe going in a straight line. I remember it as one of the times I have loved my paddling partner/life partner the most.
Our paddling life has not always been easy. Neil has Type 1 diabetes and diabetic kidney disease. This has made planning meals a challenge. There have been occasional diabetic emergencies. Arthritis, resulting in thumb, shoulder, and knee surgeries, has slowed me down. I have become cautious on portages. Neil and I are both over sixty years old now. We wish we could do all of those things we once took for granted. We cannot. We will likely never repeat the thrill of a twenty-two-day trip, such as we made in 1992. Nonetheless, we carefully plan, we study our maps, and, God willing, we will be canoe-tripping in the Boundary Waters as seventy-year-olds.
