The Stern Seat at Seventy One

There were classes: men’s tandem, women’s tandem, mixed tandem, youth and adult, and solo. Every boat started together, one mass start, and the finish times sorted it out after.

We were entered under youth and adult. Greta wrote our names on the sheet herself. Lorne and Vik. She wrote mine in her neatest handwriting.

Trevor and Halvor were down at the far end of the landing, with that long, skinny racing canoe sitting on two sawhorses. It was a shiny thing, built for speed and nothing else. Halvor was waxing the bottom with a rag.

Trevor saw us. I watched him see us. He saw Greta in the orange life vest she had picked out herself in June, and he saw me in my faded green fishing hat, carrying the old canoe down with her on the other end.

He looked at the ground. Then he walked over.

“Ansel,” he said.

“Trevor,” I said.

He looked at Greta. “You’re paddling with Grandpa?”

“Yes,” Greta said. That was all. She was polite. She was her mother’s daughter.

Trevor nodded slowly. “That canoe’s heavy.”

“It is,” I agreed.

“You’ll want to stay out of the inside of the bends,” he said. “It’s low.”

I looked at him. He meant it as help, I think. “I know it,” I said.

He stood there one more second, like he had more to say and could not find where he had put it. Then Halvor called his name, and he went.

Greta did not watch him go. She bent down and checked the knot on her shoe instead, twice.

The pastor from our church said a short prayer before the start, standing on the tailgate of the fire department pickup with his hat in his hand. He asked for good water and safe paddling and that everybody would be home for supper.

Then the man with the air horn counted down, and forty-one boats tried to go through the same thirty feet of river at once.

It was a mess, the way the start always is. Paddles clacked. Somebody’s kayak went sideways. A boy in the canoe next to us yelled “Sorry, sorry,” and splashed Greta right in the face.

She laughed. Thank God, she laughed.

Trevor and Halvor were gone before we cleared the landing. That racing canoe went off like a dog let off a chain. By the first bend, they were in the front five, and by the second bend, I could not see them.

“Don’t watch them,” I said. “Watch the water.”

“I’m watching the water,” Greta said.

“You’re watching your dad.”

“I’m watching the water near my dad,” she said, and I let that be.

We settled into our pace. Not a race pace, really. A pace I could hold for two hours without my heart doing anything my doctor would want to hear about.