The Challenge of the Portage
by Tony Baroni (continued from page 4)

So little mishaps like this can occur, and I definitely walk slower when carrying both boat and pack, and the rests are longer.  But I'm only going over the portage once, not three times.  After the rest, I loaded up again and moved onward.

At the second rest, I figured I was about at the middle of the carry.  There was a good blueberry patch and I spent some time procrastinating starting out again by having a little snack on them.  Some kids came by me with their packs and said, "Hi." they picked a couple berries too and continued on.  Then a man and a woman came by with a canoe.  They said, "Hi," and passed by.  I was getting up the ambition to start out again when the kids came back.  I was sick of blue berries by then (I wasn't even hungry to begin with) so I loaded up and continued onward.  I passed the man and woman who were coming back.  It couldn't be too far now to the other lake.  But I wasn't going to make it without another rest. 

When there is no canoe rest or no suitable tree branch or crotch to use, the canoe must be put on the ground or you don't rest.  This is an especially strenuous act to accomplish - even taking it off your shoulders, let alone getting it back up there - when your weary.  But I managed.

The kids came back with their canoe.  I didn't want their parents to beat me too, so somehow I mustered up the energy to load myself up again and trudged onward.

One of the most beautiful things about a portage is seeing water at the other end; you know you're almost done.  I wouldn't have thought I could go the last hundred yards but seeing the water, then hearing the parents coming up behind me spurred me on.  A party was landing at this end of the trail.  Three boats.  The kids were there.  And there was one other boat with two guys by it eating lunch.  I don't know whether they were coming or going.  But I did how I had to put my canoe down and there was no place to put it.  There were rocks everywhere.  I didn't want to chance dropping my cedar canoe on the stones in front of everybody.  I surely wasn't going to walk back up the hill searching for a soft mossy spot to put it.  So I marched into the water, boots and all.  Luckily there wasn't a steep drop off.  I splashed beyond the canoes that had the only decent landing spots and plunked the boat onto the lake.  It tried to hang up in my pack again, tried to make a spectacle of itself and me, but I was able to thwart its evil attempt.  It floated next to me.  I thought I had made it.

Standing in the water trying to take my pack off, I realized it was going to get wet.  So I backed up to the canoe and tried to remove it so that it would just slide off my back into the canoe without getting soaked.

Do you know how a knapsack can sort of get caught in the crotch of your arm and not slide off readily?  Did you ever watch someone with one foot in a boat and the other on the dock?  Well, I realized that I was in both situations at the same time!  The canoe was drifting away.  I was performing a series of quick hops backward to stay with the boat while simultaneously trying to shake off the pack which nearly had me in a half nelson.  With any luck I'd just fall in the lake and drown.

The boat suddenly stopped and the pack came off and rolled down into it.

"Looks like you could use a hand," one of the fellows who had been eating lunch said.  He had waded out and grabbed my boat.  "Sorry, we would have moved our canoe so you'd have had a place to put yours down if you had asked.  Wouldn't normally take up a spot at a portage like this, but we were just too tired from the carry.  Didn't realize everyone would descend upon us so quick."

"I was too tired to ask anyone to move," I said.  "I just had to put this down."

"Know exactly what you mean.  Hey that's a beautiful canoe.  Did you make it?  Neat pack too.  Where'd you get that?  ..."

And so the incident ended with a bit of elegance after all.  At least the incident did.  But not the portage.

"Did my rain pants fall in the water while I was dancing around out here?" I asked a couple minutes later.  No one had seen them.  They must have fallen out along the portage trail.

Bringing the canoe into shore over to one side and out of the way, I tied it up to a tree and started back up over the trail, boots slurping and squishing at each step.  At the last rest, where there was no canoe rest and I had to put the boat down on the ground, that's where they must have fallen out.  I continued back, boots still squishing every step even though most of the water had been pumped out by now.  The pants weren't there.  Maybe they fell out where I picked the blueberries.  I squished my way back further.  Not there.  The first rest, of course when everything came crashing down.  I slogged back yet further.  They weren't there either.  I didn't really want to, but I figured I might as well be complete.  The rain pants weren't valuable monetarily, but they surely would be valuable in a practical sense if the weather got nasty, it was worth being complete.  The lake at the beginning of the portage was in sight from here anyway.  I dragged myself back to the beginning.  There they were.  They had fallen out when I first lifted the canoe up and shuffled it up and down onto and off of my pack.  I had almost executed a single portage.

It gave me something to think of as I wearily squished my way back over the three quarter mile trail for the third time.