The Stern Seat at Seventy One

I told Greta that on the first morning, sitting on the tailgate at the La Farge landing at seven o’clock, the sun just coming over the bluff. She listened with her life vest already zipped.

“So we’re slow,” she said.

“We’re steady,” I said. “Steady and slow are cousins. They are not the same person.”

That first morning was hard. I will not pretend otherwise. My shoulders had not done this kind of work since the Carter administration, and the old canoe sat low and heavy in the water with the two of us in it.

We went a mile down and a mile back. By the time we turned around, I had a burn across my back like I had been carrying shingles up a ladder. Greta looked back at me twice to see if I was all right.

“Eyes front,” I said. “The bow watches the river. The stern watches the bow.”

“Who watches the stern?”

“The Lord,” I said. “And your grandma, probably, shaking her head.”

On the way back she showed me what Trevor had taught her. Switch sides on a count of twelve. Call it out loud. Keep the paddle blade close to the hull. Don’t splash; splashing is just water you paid for and threw away.

He had taught her well. That was the part that stung. He had put real time and real care into her, all summer, and then walked away from it in a driveway.

We went out every morning after that. Seven o’clock, before the heat came up and before the tubers came down from upstream with their coolers. Greta biked to my place at six forty-five with her braid still wet from the shower.

By the third morning my shoulders were only screaming instead of hollering. By the fifth, we made the four-mile loop to the second bridge and back without stopping. I timed it on my wristwatch. It was not fast. It was ours.

I had her paddle the bends while I called out the water. Deep left. Sand right. Snag at two o’clock. She learned to hear it in my voice before I said it, the way her grandmother used to.

On the sixth morning I hauled the canoe down to the long bend below the rock face, about seven miles below the start, and we put in just above it. I stopped us and let the canoe drift.

“Look at it,” I said.

The inside of that bend was a wide, pretty flat of gold sand, half a foot under the water, maybe less. On the outside, the river ran dark and quick under a big cottonwood that had half fallen in.

“The short way is the inside,” Greta said.

“The short way is the inside,” I agreed. “And by Labor Day, with no rain, there will be about three inches of water on it. Anybody who goes for that sand is going to be standing up and pushing.”