The Stern Seat at Seventy One

My first thought was to drive over there and tell him to keep his word. I had the keys in my hand before Greta finished her cereal. Then I set them back on the hook by the door.

Here is why. My daughter Signe would have made him go. She is my daughter, and once she decides a thing, it is decided. Trevor would have paddled with Greta, because Signe would have seen to it.

And Greta would have spent ten miles in the bow feeling her father not want to be there. Every stroke. A child knows. You cannot fake that kind of thing for two hours on open water.

So I said, “What if I took the stern?”

She looked up at me like I had offered to fly. “Grandpa. You’re seventy-one.”

“I know how old I am,” I said. “I was there for all of it.”

That got a little smile out of her, braces and all. Then she frowned. “Have you ever even raced?”

“Nineteen seventy-nine,” I said. “Your grandma and I came in fifth. She was in the bow. She yelled at me the whole way and I deserved every word of it.”

“Fifth out of how many?”

“Eleven,” I said. “Don’t tell anybody.”

My canoe was in the machine shed, hung upside down on two ropes from the rafters, where it had been hanging since about the time Signe went to kindergarten. It is a green aluminum seventeen-footer, and it has dents in it older than Greta’s mother.

I let it down that afternoon and swept the mouse nests out. Greta found two paddles behind the old grain bins. One was mine. The other was shorter, with initials burned into the grip with a hot nail: M.V.

“Grandma’s?” Greta asked.

“Your grandma’s,” I said. “Mae Vik. She burned those letters the first summer we were married, so nobody at the landing would walk off with it.”

Greta turned it over in her hands. The varnish had gone cloudy. “Can I use it?”

I had to clear my throat. “That’s what it’s for,” I said.

I was a county surveyor for thirty-eight years. I spent my working life walking fence lines and creek bottoms with a transit and a chain, reading ground. The one thing I still trust about myself is that I can read a river.

The Kickapoo is not a big river. It is narrow and brown and crooked, and it runs between wooded bluffs with rock faces showing through the trees. People say it is the crookedest river in the country. I would not argue.

In late summer, it gets low. The sandbars come up on the inside of every bend, and the snags come out of the water like old bones. The current runs deep along the outside bank, under the roots.

A fast canoe that cuts the inside of a bend in late August is a canoe that is going to stop hard on sand. A slow canoe that stays in the deep water keeps moving. That is the whole lesson, and it took me forty years to learn it.