The canoes were bumping each other, 15 of them shifting with the current, crowded together behind the starting line, which was a white rope strung 20 feet up from one sycamore to another on the opposite bank. Dave in the back of our canoe had jammed his wide racing paddle among rocks on the bottom, anchoring us so we didn’t move forward but hovered, fluttering more or less in place as a kestrel might do in a breeze. In the front I paddled gently against the current, on one side then the other as the nose swung a little left and right, to keep our nose pointed generally in the direction we wanted to travel.
When the starter raised his pistol, the oiled barrel glinted, and the energy present became suddenly palpable, an inescapable fact. I became aware of the river’s flow vibrating our aluminum hull and stimulating me. I sensed the steady pressure rocking us, insisting we rush ahead. Bent forward on my seat, I felt the sun’s heat on my neck, shoulders and arms, plus the constricting grasp of invisible water in the air. The July humidity was high. An alluvial smell widened my nostrils. Human activity had disturbed the muddy bottomland, roiling silt and decay to the surface.
Voices from the shore shouted somewhat frantically. Friends, relatives, and strangers screamed, encouraging competition and exertion, supporting the racers’ decision to test themselves against one another as well as nature. It was social insistence made audible. My tensed muscles became more rigid, my senses hyper-alert.
Part of me, however, was soaring aloof like the hawks riding thermals above us, watching our strange sport from a distance. I saw this moment occurring in a matrix more complicated than I had imagined before. Despite the clamor outside myself, I knew this endeavor was a personal thing, this commitment to cover as fast as possible an 18-mile course, to float upon this moving surface faster than we’d ever gone before. In the process to beat those who couldn’t keep up. Dave and I had no illusions about winning. We were amateurs who’d never raced before nor even canoed so far, but we had fished from canoes, grown adept at drifting downstream, and completed three race-oriented eight-mile practice runs. All this had convinced us that, with the application of a little common sense, we were ready.
Egos undoubtedly had convinced us as well. My wife called us macho men with derision, at which we laughed. To be honest, though, we did consider ourselves outdoorsy types if not roughnecks. Dave had played tackle on a small college football team and was a National Fish and Wildlife serviceman stationed in Lebanon’s district office. I was an ex-Marine with some athletic success playing baseball as a teenager. Though we pooh-poohed any chance of winning, we were middle-aged men who planned to do more than show up, and thus, to surprise everyone.
Realizing this was also alarming. A fear of failure had been nagging me since we’d paid our entrance fee. I’d answered my wife’s ridicule by citing our experiences on the river, but I hadn’t mentioned to myself or to her that we’d never depleted ourselves to achieve a maximum speed while canoeing. We believed we were saving ourselves for the race and therefore being realistic.
I’d also not mentioned a training run on high water that caught our canoe broadside and swamped us. The current had swept me downstream, while heavy rubber boots and coat took me to the bottom. I was nearly out of air when a sandbar miraculously rose up under my feet. Almost nonchalantly, I simply walked up it through the brown-stained water and survived. The accident also dunked Dave. We spent two frigid hours on the bank beside a bonfire we built from deadfall, warming up and drying out before paddling on to the car five river miles ahead. We’d prepared for a little wetness but not full saturation. The water’s strength had also surprised us. Thus, we told ourselves, we’d learned a lesson. But our wives had never heard about it. Now I thought we’d perhaps fooled ourselves and again made ourselves vulnerable to the indifferent elements. Obviously, our judgments were not infallible.
However, simply being at this place excited me and calmed the negative feelings. From where we sat rocking on the water, waiting for the pistol’s bang, the western lookout atop the eastern bluff was visible. You had to know its location to see it, and I did, having often stood up there and through leaves and limbs watched the ripples gleam, tumbling downstream through the narrow valley. From there I’d also watched the flood of traffic northwest flashing north and south across the I-71 Jeremiah Morrow Bridge; the old movement as slow as time, the new, imitative movement frenzied. At that lookout like a sentry, I’d been invisible to those being watched except through the lens of imagination.
Dave and I knew the basic history here too. About 200 years ago a white frontiersman who spoke English named the site Fort Ancient, guessing that it was created for defense because of its three miles of raised earthen walls. Actually, nobody knew its purpose. Because of burial mounds, many wide breaks in the walls, and the discovery of other ancient constructions, experts now suggest that ceremonial intentions probably inspired it. It took 400 years of manual labor and many generations to finish the site, beginning over 2,000 years ago. Wikipedia calls it “the largest prehistoric hilltop enclosure in the United States.” Despite its intense study, the place and the several native-American cultures that inhabited it remain more mysterious than understood.
Growing up just a few miles away, I learned from visiting and understanding the site to perceive a depth and a resonance in the world. My daytrips there started at about eight years of age. This was before the state’s popularization program, erecting a museum, staffing the site with rangers and volunteers, attracting crowds of visitors through widespread publicity. Before all that, basically alone and without any more mentoring than a few signs, I explored the historical remnants and understood them in my own terms.
Those who’d lived there long ago obviously lived in harmony with nature. To them everything was part of Mother Earth and, as such, had a spirit. Every creature and thing was sacred, with a soul, and their souls and human souls were connected to the Great Spirit. With my religious background, I felt a kinship. Those people’s beliefs and my own overlapped. In that psychic atmosphere, I enjoyed leisurely picnics, ballgames on the 100 acres inside the enclosure, hikes on top of the walls and along hillside trails, and on later visits, sometimes watching stars with a girl I’ve never seen since. Those were different times, I was different then, but my basic thinking has remained the same.
As all this may suggest, love of nature also lured Dave and me into entering the canoe race. Dave and I had joined Little Miami, Incorporated, near its beginning, a group that lobbied for and had recently succeeded in getting the Little Miami’s National Scenic River designation. The water on which we were poised was in fact about as unspoiled as any in Ohio, with banks full of native flora and fauna. Plus the designation’s ban on new buildings within river-sight was a triumph of local ethics over business. Therefore, this race was a celebration to us.
The race also represented a journey through a sentimental past. As the starter’s finger began depressing the trigger, I anticipated traveling back through teenage innocence. The race would pass several places where I’d parked with girlfriends to “make out,” as we’d called it then. This meant that we would sexually tease ourselves into an excitement we always abandoned. Guilt-ridden Catholics, we found frustration more attractive than the fear of eternal damnation. This “necking,” as we also called it, was foreplay so pure, I never confessed it. Rolling downriver, I meant to look for these places. Nostalgia made them holy in memory. I felt a kind of sorrow over losing my youth. Those gravel scars, those fishermen’s pull-offs between the narrow county roads and the water, beneath sycamore and willow limbs, would, I assumed, bring images of Gail, Susan, a girl whose name I no longer remember, and the boy I used to be.
In my mind, the Little Miami River appeared like a ribbon that curved around and connected many incidents and people in my childhood. Those nights parked in my mother’s grey Mercury with a girlfriend, I was always aware of its presence. I could hear it tumbling past us toward destinations I might never see, the Ohio River, the Mississippi, the Gulf of Mexico. Its unstopping movement forward resembled the way my own life plunged on insistently, as if I had little control of it, as if I were a twig caught in a current, swirling on toward a destination I couldn’t anticipate nor choose without its indulgence. The river’s spirit seemed to have gotten inside me, and maybe that was how those ancient Indians felt.
So, entering the race felt necessary although the outcome was iffy. Dave and I couldn’t know what we’d encounter nor how we’d react. We intended to complete the race at least. We’d promised ourselves that. We planned to paddle cautiously. We carried water. We knew hydration was important. We wouldn’t overtax ourselves, hopefully wouldn’t go so fast as to exhaust ourselves. We’d float on without paddling if that’s all we could do. I suppose you could say that the finish of any race is a personal thing. It’s over when it’s over. When the racer is done. But we had a goal, naive though it was, to reach the finish line, and to do more than that if possible.
Waiting for the gun to fire, we sat there poised. It felt as if we were like men riding the back of a tiger. Remember what happened to them? Years later, here I am, a product of that experience, consuming it in print because I happened upon an old newspaper article that featured a grainy picture of the race start. In the photo, Dave and I are centered among the other canoes, taking our first stroke, our backs to the camera, bent over: a younger us with long curly dark hair, red headbands, sleeves cut off our shirts, a water bottle slung on our backs with a drinking tube extending up and over a shoulder so we could drink as needed. We were like babies taking their first breath and exploding in cries that signal their intention to live.
The pistol’s explosion released our pent-up energy. The racers yelled savagely. Their agitated paddling resembled washing machines suddenly thrashing soapy water into froth. The birth of the race propelled us ahead, straining, pushing, dragging our oars through a water so recalcitrant to our wishes, I immediately felt frustrated. Our canoe moved, but very slowly despite linking our muscles to gravity and the river’s momentum. We hit the chute I’d been aiming us for, its darkness indicating an area of swifter, deeper water, but other canoes converged there as well. Four canoes tipped over, colliding. Several caromed off us. I grabbed the sides of our canoe to balance, and we stayed afloat. Then a canoe struck us broadside. Its prow pushed us into shallow water where we touched bottom, tilted so far left we had to step out in knee-deep water, right ourselves, float the canoe to deeper water, climb back in, and start off again. The canoe that had knocked us aside was already 50 yards ahead and pulling away.
In anger and disappointment, we paddled strenuously on, and our excitement and adrenaline slowly wore off. Reaching mental calm, resting my already weary arms, I remembered our plan to hold back and save ourselves for later. We’d been stupid to paddle like that. How far had we gone? If just a mile, that left 17 more to go. I shook my head. The number seemed huge.
The water I’d thought of as pouring forward now seemed as thick as paste. I had to stab my paddle down to get it into the liquid. Then the river seemed to cling so my paddle came back up into the air only with effort. Worse, the river was more shallow than deep and we were obviously too heavy. The canoe was 17 feet of standard Grumman aluminum. I’d noticed the other canoes were shorter, lighter, and their handlers lighter, but ignored their message. Dave and I carried our overly indulgent past in our bodies, and that idea tormented me as we scraped our fat metal bottom on the riverbed. “You okay?” I asked the fifth time we had to get out, drag the canoe over shallows, climb back in, and start off again. “Yeah. We’ll make it. Don’t worry.” But Dave sounded exhausted.
Every canoe in the race passed and left us behind. We coasted more, paddled less, but continued on. The sun baked us. We couldn’t use the shade by the banks. The water was too shallow there. Farther out in the open, we caught the heat and drank our bottled water. When those ran out, we twice mooched water from bystanders, the third time from our wives. They pleaded with us to stop, tempting us like sirens. We could have easily carried the canoe, put it on their car, and gone home because they were at a public landing. Doubts surfaced. There might not be another good place to quit. Private land bordered the river from there on and so was not accessible to the public. Yes, we’d sworn to finish, but Dave or I might suffer from dehydration. We could really disable ourselves.
“You going to be okay?” I asked as if he knew the future. We were already wading, dragging our canoe away from our wives.
“Yeah,” he muttered.
Almost blindly, we navigated many long stretches of nearly still water and wide sweeping turns. My doubts about our ability increased. What lay ahead seemed interminable. The forested hillsides with thick shadows under tree limbs were seductive. I imagined sitting back against a mossy trunk with iced tea in hand, dozing off. Instead of stopping, though, I more and more frequently saturated an old towel I’d brought, wiped off my exposed skin, spread the rag over my head, and let the river drip down over my face and neck. It wasn’t a smart idea. Spring floods came to mind, and sewage plants overflowing into the river. But the dripping seemed like salvation, my only comfort, cooling my desire to slump forward and rest.
It occurs to me now, from this sentry post in the new millennium looking back, that as we traveled south I didn’t once think of the river’s passage through my childhood, the locations where I’d fished, the places where I’d parked with girlfriends. I didn’t think of the Native Americans who’d canoed where we were floating. I didn’t search the leaves on the banks for glimpses of wildlife. I passed obliviously through it all, through the villages of Morrow, South Lebanon, and Fosters. I did, hopefully, wonder if race officials might send someone up the river to us, a Doctor Kevorkian who might offer to help end our torture. Who might stop us for good.
As if in a dream, I eventually looked up and saw that we were drifting toward bright banners hanging on a rope. I sensed spectators on the bank, other canoeists, a few clapping. For several minutes we’d apparently been passing streets, traffic, and houses on the banks, none of which had registered.
What did register was that, stopping just beyond the finish line, somehow we’d made it. Like angels, our wives were there, helping us stumble ashore. They wiped our faces with wet cloths and handed us bottles of water. We gulped them down and asked for more. I felt better at once. How appropriate to end in a town named Loveland.
We didn’t object when our wives helped us carry the canoe. Other participants were picnicking, eating sandwiches, drinking beer with friends and relatives. One of them said, “Way to go.” I mouthed thanks. We ourselves had packed no food and were simply going home.
Dave said, helping to hoist the canoe onto the racks on the car roof, our wives again doing most of the lifting, “They all got 10 years on us.”
“At least.” I figured the oldest of the other racers were in their mid-20s.
After lashing down our canoe competently enough (Dave and I found lifting our arms and using our fingers beyond our capabilities), my wife drove, Dave’s wife sat beside her in the front, and we he-men wrapped ourselves in blankets to protect the backseat and, frankly, to stay warm. I felt chilled. In the enclosed space, I was washed up residue, smelling of the river.
“We’re too old for this,” I said.
Dave said, “A little more training, we’d be okay.”
Let him have his illusions. I touched the medallion, shaped like an arrowhead, hanging from a cord around my neck. Cheap plastic, our only reward except for the satisfaction of finishing the race.
The moving car rocked like a canoe in rough water. The wives were talking, Dave was breathing heavily, and I snuggled under my blanket, shrunken like a man in his 90s. Despite the soft seat cushions, pain occasionally shot from the central core of my butt outward, upward and downward. My head felt heavy and seemed to wobble on my sore neck. My fingers and my palms were raw with broken blisters. Despite the pain, I began to doze off.
“Vanity of vanities….All is vanity.” This popped into consciousness just before reaching Oblivion. I’d heard the words from pulpits and lecterns, from priests and nuns and brothers. I’d aged beyond my years pursuing speed, racing on a symbol of time as if time passed too slowly, sweeping me and everything else along to the end.
Bill Vernon considers writing his therapy, along with exercising outdoors and doing international folkdances. Five Star Mysteries published his novel, Old Town, and his poems, stories and nonfiction have appeared in a variety of magazines and anthologies. Recent publications include stories in The Ekphrastic Review, Bull, Cha, An Asian Literary Journal, As You Were, The Military Review, The Wild Musette Journal, Fiction on the Web, Adelaide, and Good Works Review. He lives in Dayton, Ohio. billvernon230@gmail.com.
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