You Canoe It!
I loved going to summer camps when I was a kid. Loved them. These were week-long, overnight summer camps, away from my family for the most part and almost always accompanied by my longtime best friend, Dave Johnson.
The first camp was Illahee, and I have no idea what kind of affiliation it had, Scouting, Church, YMCA, Shriners, Knights of Columbus, no idea. All I know is that the year after Dave and I attended between our 3rd and 4th grade year, it closed down. I do not mean to imply that we had anything to do with that. I can also report that to our knowledge, nobody died or was lost in the woods during our session week. But as 3rd almost 4th graders, I doubt we were very keyed-in to current events.
So with Illahee shut down, and my parents, Jonesing for one sweet, sacred week during the summer for their motor-mouthed son to be someone else’s problem, they hunted for another summer camp option. They found it at a place called Camp Lutherhaven in the far away Inland-Empire Idaho land of Lake Coeur d’Alene.
Camp Lutherhaven was a little bigger than Illahee, offered more camp type activities, and huge added bonus, was attended by my elementary/jr. high school crush, Sandy Fairburn. Dave was roped in, and our summer camp adventures would continue, this time with more opportunities to try new things and have fun.
And have fun we did. For the next three years, Dave and I, along with various other kids we knew would enjoy Lutherhaven and get into all kinds of hijinks. But those stories are for another time. This story is about my last adventure at Lutherhaven, the summer before my 8th grade year, and it was a doozy.
What made this year different from past years were a number of things, the biggest one was that Dave wouldn’t be there. I can’t remember if he had a conflict or if he just didn’t want to do it, but he wasn’t there. It wasn’t like he was my sidekick, Dave isn’t sidekick material. I didn’t think I was his sidekick either, which meant I almost certainly was, but whatever the case may have been, I wouldn’t have him to lean on during what would be the most difficult camp experience I had ever encountered.
The other big thing that set this camp apart, was that we wouldn’t be staying in the relatively safe space of the main Lutherhaven campus of cabins. This year I would be part of a small group of campers that piled into a tiny armada of Gruman canoes to paddle all the way around the rather large Lake Coeur d’Alene and sleeping in small camping areas as we went. The brochure made it sound awesome, and the fact that Sandy would be in one of those little canoes made it even more appealing.
In order to take full advantage of this unique opportunity to win the heart of this 8th grade Aphrodite, I asked my mother to take me to a real barber for a real flat-top buzzcut. The kind all the coolest teenagers from my favorite TV shows sported. You know the shows: Ozzie and Harriet, The Donna Reed Show, Father Knows Best, My Three Sons, etc.; the television programming every young teenager loved to watch in the late 1980’s. Rol, the barber, did not disappoint. He gave me a crewcut so precise that I would have been automatically drafted into the US Navy had it been 1941. Sandy would surely find it irresistible.
I learned early on in life that overpacking had benefits that I felt outweighed the negative aspects. I never wanted to be somewhere without something that could possibly be needed. I like having items that are multi-functional as well. My Swiss Army Knife does an incredible amount of heavy lifting in these situations. On top of that nimble and useful tool, I planned to stuff my giant, water-resistant army duffle full of useful items.
I had a little tent, extra large garbage bags, lots of underwear and socks, toiletries, a small pharmacy of medications, rain gear, bucket hat, camping dishes kit with utensils, camera, clothing for every climate (baring arctic temps), toilet paper, canteen, bug spray, sun block, towel, sleeping bag, pillow, and a collapsible fishing rod with tackle box. I think I even brought an extra folding knife. It all fit in my duffle, though the fishing pole case did stick out considerably. For a canoe trip, I was ready to rock, and by rock, I meant row. I was ready to rock and row. (I know you paddle a canoe and you row a boat, but I really wanted that joke to work.)
From our town, Lutherhaven was about 3 hours away and because many kids went to that camp from Ellensburg, carpools were organized for the trips there and back. I’m not sure with whom I rode there with, but I don’t think it was Sandy. I do know that when we arrived there Sunday afternoon, all the campers were organized into the camps and areas where we needed to be, and the canoe trip group was no exception.
The camp wisely took everyone’s picture the first day when we arrived, not just because it would be the happiest and cleanest all the campers would look for the entire week, but also to have a current photo to distribute to any search and rescue teams in the unlikely event that a child would wander off unattended into the Idaho Panhandle wilderness. Our canoe group took our place in front of the camera as soon as it was complete.
In addition to myself, there was of course, Sandy, along with fast friends of hers, Hillary and Angie. Two other campers from Ellensburg, that I knew a little bit were Ross and Colby. Colby was in a play group I was in from the diaper age, so I knew him a little better I guess, but we hadn’t exchanged many words with him living in Ellensburg and me in Kittitas. Ross and Colby were both better at being teenagers than me. Kurt and Casey were two guys that I got to know quickly and liked them immediately. They were a little taller, maybe a year older, and definitely brawnier. They had brought the style of a thin gold chain worn with a non-descript baseball cap from the cosmopolitan fashion hotbed of Bozeman, MT. Matthew was an old friend I reunited with there through happenstance from early elementary school, and we got along great. Travis was a kid along for the ride because his mom worked at the camp and I had met him the year before. He was a little different but fine. Last and certainly least was Anthony. That wasn’t his name, but to avoid picking on a kid at a time that should not define what kind of person they are at their core, I’m changing his name. This little disclaimer should not be considered foreshadowing, but hey, draw your own conclusions.
The two people in charge of supervising this expedition was Counselor Tim, Mid 20s with a receding hairline, and Gretchen, a German exchange counselor that probably learned she was on canoe-trip duty that afternoon.
The remainder of the day, the canoe group learned basic canoe safety, the many different paddle strokes to control a canoe while in the water and what our trip would look like. And it would look like this: Our group would be roughly two to a canoe and spend five days to make a big loop of Lake Coeur d’Alene. The lake itself is impressive, as mountain lakes go, it is 25 miles long, and ranges from a mile to 3 miles wide in places. There is over 109 miles of shoreline to explore and enjoy, with camping areas, private homes and a wide range of wildlife to be seen. Our canoes would make morning and afternoon trips taking us from campsite to campsite, hauling all our gear and food that we would need with us. There would be scheduled stops in the middle of each day for meals. There would not be access to showering, however washing in the lake was encouraged.
Did not having access to showers tip me off that we may not have options for other bathroom opportunities as well? No, it did not. I guess in my mind, I believed that every stop would have a freshly cleaned restroom. Naïve would be the kindest way to describe that thinking. Foolish would be a better word choice. It wasn’t really talked about, or if it was explained, I was either too busy trying to think of the next funny thing to say or attempting to get Sandy to look at me.
That night we would sleep in a cabin at the main camp, and we would leave early the next morning to canoe around Lake Coeur d’Alene. We would be doubled up in our canoe assignments and I had all night to scheme my way into Sandy’s boat. It was also the last evening I had with a flushing toilet.
We were all smiles the next morning as our group prepared to launch from the camp’s beach. The camp director was down to see us off and the canoe’s had been pre-loaded with food and rations from the main camp in heavy duty plastic milk crates. Each canoe would carry some part of a day’s meal. We were given strict instructions to not touch the food.
I don’t know what happened when it came to canoe assignments, but it was absolutely clear that not only I not get assigned to Sandy’s canoe, but Sandy had taken a liking to one of the other guys on the trip. Which, if you’ve ever been an insecure teenage boy, is about as close to the end of the world as you know it. In terms of how that can affect a young man’s demeanor, the swing from self-hatred to jealousy is as lame a character arc as there can be and it is certainly unbecoming or a young man or an improver of that young man’s mood.
Adding insult to injury was that I was partnered up with the kid that I knew the least about, Anthony. Which was no big deal, I thought, because I generally got along with people well and made friends quite easily. The first thing I learned about Anthony on that beach as we pushed off the sand and into the lake, was that Anthony absolutely didn’t want to go on the canoe trip. He didn’t think this was going to be fun, he was hungry, he didn’t like canoeing or camping and he didn’t get enough to eat for breakfast.
Anthony was a little smaller than me, so he sat toward the front of the canoe to basically add a little paddle power while I paddled and steered from the rear of the narrow boat. By adding a little paddle power, I mean he added little. His paddle was certainly in the water a lot as he talked about nothing in particular—I couldn’t hear him very well because he was facing forward and I was not interested in any of the things he was saying. His paddle was doing more to slow us down than move us forward, and it was starting to get difficult for me to steer and propel us forward, so I asked Anthony to pull his paddle out of the water.
The group had a lovely first hour or so on the water, laughing and cruising alongside one another. We were making good time and the early morning was pretty on the lake. It was a little breezy at first and as the distant dark clouds started to roll in, we noticed the breeze turn into a wind, and that wind was kicking up some pretty intense lake movement. Tim hollered at all of us to get moving because that day would be our longest leg of the trip to our first overnight camp. The mood quickly changed from light-hearted pleasure cruise to something with more determined purpose.
Anthony and I were starting to fall behind, and about two hours into our canoeing adventure, it was starting to get serious. I asked Anthony to start paddling again, and to his credit, he did. It just wasn’t moving us forward into the wind where we needed to go. The rest of the canoes somehow managed to make it around a particularly rough point out of an inlet, and try as we might, Anthony and I couldn’t get around. Neither of us were having a very good time and we both desperately wanted to keep up with the group. And if I’m painting a picture that Anthony was terrible at canoeing and I was a canoeing masterclass PhD Professor and 6-time Olympic canoeing champion, please know that I’m a terrible painter and that this is not the case. Anthony was doing his best, I was doing my best, and our bests did not get us where we were going.
It took all the canoes far longer to get around the point that was the objective than it should have and a couple boats lingered back with us until they finally made it around with power and/or teamwork. I realized that we didn’t have enough of either and really poured on the power from whatever reserves we had. I was a little panicked that the group was gone, because once around that point, it was much smoother paddling in a semi protected area.
I was incredibly angry at the whole situation. Anthony was of little help and I convinced myself I could get the canoe around the point if I didn’t have the weight of him in the canoe with me as I paddled. Where the hell had my counselors gone? Surely they would see that they were a boat down, it had been at least 45 minutes since I had seen anyone else from our group. Even if I could get our canoe around the point, would I even be able to catch up? My arms were starting to get really tired.
“Don’t swear at it, do something about it,” Anthony said to me.
Apparently I had started cursing at myself, the canoe, the lake, the shore, the birds, the rest of the campers, and at Anthony’s inability to follow even the simplest instructions, for a solid hour or so. I don’t know how aware of the swearing I was, but as I tuned into it, I was a little surprised at the quantity and volume of which the swearing occurred. It wasn’t the filthy dirty, sexual type of swearing, but rather the angry, exasperated and powerful expletives that more like dynamite than poison. There’s a little overlap in the Venn diagram of naughty words, but swearing has everything to do with context, and the context here was frustration mixed with exhaustion and just a pinch of wanting to break a canoe paddle over the head of the person that just told you that the thing you’re doing that they find rather unhelpful is probably also the thing that is sparing them from my wrath.
After my umpteenth attempt at piloting us out of the rough inlet, we parked the canoe on the beach in front of a very nice lake house and I walked up to ask to use the phone. I was very tired, very hungry, and I thought I would call the main camp to see if there was anything they could do to help us out. Or maybe I could convince them to take Anthony to wherever he would have rather been, which was anywhere. A nice couple let me in to use their phone and I was able to leave a message with Lutherhaven Staff that we were having some trouble, not an emergency, just looking for a little help. I thanked the couple and didn’t hang around. I went back out to the beach where Anthony and the canoe were to find that he had helped himself to some of whatever was in our forbidden food crates.
“Dude, that’s not ours, that’s for everyone. What are you doing?” I asked him.
“I’m hungry and they left us,” he said. And he just kept eating graham crackers that looked like the most delicious food I had ever seen. I refused it though. I knew we would be in trouble for falling behind, and in recent hindsight that I had called the main camp and asked for help—which wouldn’t make Tim and Gretchen’s job review exactly sparkle. I wasn’t going to add “food thief” to the list.
It was incredibly windy now and the swells of water on the lake were around 3-4 feet high. Water was getting all over us but not exactly “swamping” the canoe as we made final attempts.
Something new was happening to me. The exhaustion gave way to nausea. I was getting very motion sick. My last few attempts to paddle around the cursed point were pathetic, not just because I was paddling my arms off, but I was doing so between puking over the side of the canoe and into the lake. This was the end of the first half of Day 1 of canoe camp. At least Sandy didn’t see the puking.
Tim appeared around the bend coming back for us with another canoe and a couple more paddlers. They were able to get us around the point and into slightly calmer waters. That was about the same time the camp director appeared in the familiar Lutherhaven speedboat to make sure we were all okay. Tim had a few words with her and I too let them know all was alright and that I prematurely called for help, just to smooth it over for Tim and Gretchen, because they didn’t deserve that extra grief.
The rest of the group was not all that far away and had stopped to wait for the lunch that was in Anthony’s and my canoe. Once we were there, and the crates opened, it was revealed that there wasn’t much of a lunch left for them to eat. Anthony pretended to not know what happened to all that food, and I was so out of it with motion sickness and exhaustion that I couldn’t defend myself in front of everyone. Anthony didn’t want to get in trouble, I get it. But that meant someone had eaten a big portion of the food, and if only Anthony and myself were in possession of this food, and Anthony swore up and down that he didn’t have any, that left only two choices: Our canoe had been robbed by professional ninja lake pirates in search of carrot sticks, graham crackers and sandwiches; OR the person in the canoe other than Anthony must have eaten the food. It may have been the exhaustion or the nausea, but I was getting the idea that the entire group was pretty sure I had eaten their lunch.
What was left of the food was eaten by the group. I didn’t have much, either because the sight of food was too much for me or because the group believed that I had already had my fill and then, like a jerk, was just wastefully throwing it all up into the lake. But anyone looking closely at my vomit would easily be able to see that it was entirely made up of eggs and toast, not sandwiches and carrot sticks. It turns out that nobody in that group was interested in working at a forensic crime lab and therefore uninterested in my exonerating bodily fluid.
My body was done, yet I still needed to spend the second half of the day in a canoe. Tim wisely broke up the canoeing teams and with an act of mercy, put Anthony with someone else. I’m sure he was just as tired of me as I was of him. I was placed in the middle of Hillary and Angie’s canoe, which I certainly didn’t argue with. I laid back in the middle of their boat and tried to sleep through the rest of the day’s journey.
Angie and Hillary worked well as a team and I was able to paddle only a little here and there. I was having vivid fever-dream hallucinations from the exhaustion, several of which I remember well to this day. One was of a small pyramid appearing in the lake, where I walked through to find Elvira, Mistress of the Dark guiding me into the pitch black hallway. There I was chased by the lizard creatures from Land of the Lost called the Sleestaks. They chased me through mazes, and even when I was awakened by our canoe getting jostled or somebody yelling, I would still fall back into the nightmare.
Every once in awhile I would try to politely warn Angie and Hillary that I was about to vomit over the side, and then I would violently wretch what little was in my stomach. I made sure to get it all in the lake though. Nothing came back in the boat with me. I believe Hillary was in the tail of the boat and had to paddle through it and did so like a champ. She did it with empathy rather than disgust. It would have been so much easier for them to just whack me over the head with a paddle and let the lake ease them of their burden by dropping my body over the side. But they had that night’s meal with them and rocking the canoe enough to dump a body would have made whatever dry goods they were transporting wet and soggy.
The waves did not stop. I was utterly useless to those two strong young women entrusted with one of the first of many times they’ve had to work extra hard to get some dumb man where he was going. And to drive that metaphor home, they had to paddle against the wind, through vomit, while listening to him moan on and on about some other woman—in this case, it was Elvira.
The three of us fell behind the group and the two young women decided they needed a break, either from the paddling against a relentlessly windy lake, or from the insufferable animated cadaver they were doomed to transport, or probably both.
Angie and Hillary helped me out of the canoe and up on to a rocky beach strewn with driftwood located about 100 yards from a moderately lovely lake house. It was a lake house that said, “my owners have a lot of money, but they don’t spend it on me.”
After propping me up against a log, Angie and Hillary disappeared, probably to pee or scream about me into the trunk of a dying ponderosa pine. Because of our lack of bathroom opportunities around the lake though, I believed they went looking for a toilet. They may have even told me they were going up to the lake house. I was rather delirious at that time, so I could be forgetting or it could have been another of Elvira’s tricks.
Sitting there on the beach, and looking out the 1/3 of daylight I had left on day 1 of 5 of this canoe adventure, a few things were starting to occur to me. The first was that I preferred to be on land rather than in the canoe because my stomach felt better and the nauseas feeling subsided. As my strength grew, I realized I was very hungry after graciously donating the entire contents of my stomach to the fish of Lake Coeur d’Alene. I also realized that although Angie and Hillary were two very bright, strong, kind and empathetic junior high students, they were still junior high students and would most definitely paint a picture of Steve Damm with so much vomit and resentment that not only would THEY never show any romantic interest in me, but my crush, Sandy Fairburn who would be back at camp tonight would be forced to permanently eliminate me from her list of possible suitors.
All I had done was try my best to get myself and a nerd with a black hole for a stomach around a corner in a canoe and I had utterly exhausted myself to a state of “uh, gross?”
After about 10-15 minutes motionless on someone else’s private beach wallowing in a low hanging cloud of my own shame, I heard Angie and Hillary return to the canoe area. Although most believed I was guilty of eating most of the day’s lunch (which Angie and Hillary would have known was untrue if they had bothered to inspect my vomit as they paddled through it), it was not lost on me that asking for just a little something to eat would be in poor taste, but I was in bad shape. I had only ever felt that terrible one other time before in my life and I never cared to be there again. So I threw the idea out there casually, you know, like a simple investment opportunity I’m only letting a few close friends in on.
“Hey, glad you’re back. Do either of you know if there’s just a little something I could put in my stomach to settle it down. I’m pretty hungry.”
“Uh,” They both said as they looked at each other and then back to me, “why do you ask that?” Angie finished.
“Just wondered, this motion sickness and exhaustion has done a number on me.”
“No,” Hillary said and gave me a look that was more final than annoyed.
But I had thought that I really bothered them because they walked a good distance away from me. Far enough that I couldn’t hear them eating crackers had they chose to NOT walk upwind where the crunching sound was carried easily from their smacking lips on the shoulders of the gusty winds of Lake Coeur d’Alene to the hungry ears of a middle school boy, finally breaking his spirit as he realized they lied not because of the wrong they were doing, but of the wrong they thought that I had done to them.
I was pretty pissed at the whole situation, and it wasn’t a good look for me.
It turns out, where Angie and Hillary had gone, was to ask if they could use the restroom at the lake house. Finding nobody home and believing their need to use a toilet was greater than their need to not be arrested for criminal trespassing, let themselves in to use the restroom…of a stranger’s house.
It would be another 3 days before I would be on the edge of doing the same thing for the same reason.
On their way out of the house, Angie and Hillary grabbed a few saltine crackers from the kitchen. I doubt any judge would consider that even “light burglary”, and years later the women would easily justify the act as something the owners would have graciously offered them anyway. More than likely, yes, but only after the owners mistakenly shot the two women dead. This canoe trip was already proving to be desperate times in regards to food and lack of bathroom facilities.
The wind died down and we decided to get back into the canoe and catch up to the group. I was able to paddle again, despite the lack of crackers in my stomach. I bravely pressed on in hopes of finding the night’s camp and possibly a warm dinner for the wrongfully accused.
It turns out that the rest of the group were right around the bend, just out of sight of us and someone was even getting ready to come back to see where we had been. By that time, enough people had interacted with Anthony enough to not only apologize to me for thinking I had eaten most of the day’s lunch, but to compliment me for not killing him while we were in the situation that made me exhausted and motion sick. It may have been that Anthony did me a solid and tried to smooth any ideas of me eating everyone’s lunch over. I’m not sure what happened, but everyone was overcompensating in the “Steve’s a good guy,” direction and that took quite a bit of the sting out of the day.
Remember when I described Angie and Hillary as kind and empathetic? Remember how I said they would more than likely talk to the group about how gross it was to deal with Steve while he basically slept and puked while they had to get him where he was going? I don’t remember them doing that. I don’t remember getting teased about being weak or too sick to “do my part” which I was certainly afraid of. They could have, and they wouldn’t have been wrong. It was gross, I did make their day more difficult, I did talk a little too much about Elvira, Mistress of the Dark. But they were actually quite cool about the whole thing. That brought peace to me at the end of the day…The first day.
Oh my goodness this is only the first day!
To be continued next week in “You Canoe It!” Part 2:
In that episode: Fishing, donuts, rain, cholesterol tests, I NEED a bathroom, I MAKE a bathroom, I’m scared out of my mind, body, and soul.