Greta called the switches. “Hut,” she’d say, and we’d both swap sides at the same moment, the way we had practiced every morning for nine days. Twelve strokes. Hut. Twelve strokes. Hut.
The first three miles, boats passed us. That was all right. I had told her they would. Young couples, strong men, a pair of high school girls in a red canoe who were giggling the whole way and still went by us like we were anchored.
“We’re last,” Greta said around mile three.
“We’re not last,” I said. “There are four boats behind us. I counted at the bridge.”
“Four boats.”
“Four is a number,” I said. “Keep paddling.”
Around mile four, the river narrows between two rock faces, and the trees close in overhead so it feels like a green tunnel. It was cooler in there, and quiet, and you could hear the paddles of the boats ahead.
That was where we started catching people.
Not because we were fast. Because they were tired. The ones who had gone out hard at the start were sitting back now, shaking out their arms. We came up beside them, steady, twelve strokes and hut, and slid on past.
Greta did not say anything the first time. The second time, she looked back at me with her eyebrows up.
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“Steady and slow,” I said. “Cousins.”
At mile five there is a footbridge where people come out to watch, and there were maybe twenty folks on it. Some of them were people I had known my whole life. Old men from the coffee table at the gas station. A couple of women from church.
Somebody up there yelled, “Go, Ansel!” and somebody else yelled, “Go, Greta!” and an old fellow I had surveyed a line for in 1988 held up a thermos like a toast.
Greta ducked her head, but I saw her grin. Braces and all.
By mile six, my arms were starting to tell me things. My hands had gone tight on the grip, and there was a burn up the back of my neck. I loosened my fingers and breathed through my nose, the way I’d learned.
“You okay?” Greta asked without turning around.
“I’m seventy-one,” I said. “This is what okay feels like.”
Then we came into the long bend below the rock face, around mile seven, and I saw what I had expected to see.
There were three canoes on the sandbar.
Not tipped. Nobody was hurt. Just sitting. Stopped dead on that wide gold flat, in three inches of water, with people climbing out to stand on the sand and push.
One of them was a long, skinny racing canoe.
Trevor was out of the boat, up to his ankles, shoving the stern. Halvor was in the bow, trying to pole off with his paddle against the sand. The canoe would slide a foot and stop again.