The Stern Seat at Seventy One

There were maybe sixty people on the bank. Folding chairs. A grill going. Kids in the shallows.

And standing knee-deep in the brown water, in her good jeans, with her shoes still on, was my daughter.

Signe did not wave. She just stood there with her hands open, waiting, the way you stand at the bottom of a slide.

We came in slow. I could not have come in fast if they had paid me. The volunteer at the bell, a gray-haired woman in a fire department T-shirt, looked at her clipboard and then looked at us, and she grabbed the rope with both hands.

She rang that bell like it was Christmas morning.

The man next to her started clapping, and then a few others did, people in folding chairs who did not know us from Adam. I heard someone say, “That’s Ansel Vik. He hasn’t raced since the seventies.”

Signe waded out the last few steps and caught the bow of the canoe with both hands, the same way she had caught it on the eighth morning, and the same way she caught it when she was six. She held it steady.

Greta turned around in her seat to look at me.

My arms had gone. I mean they were done. My hands were shaking so hard on that paddle that I had to lay it across the gunwales to keep from dropping it. I could feel my chin starting to go, too, and I did not want her to see that.

She did not say anything. She just reached back over the middle seat, took the brim of my old green fishing hat, and pulled it right down over my eyes.

“There,” she said. “Nobody can see you now, Grandpa.”

I sat there in the dark under that hat, with the bell ringing and my daughter holding the boat, and I let myself cry for about as long as it takes to say the Lord’s Prayer. Then I pushed the hat back up.

Greta was grinning. Signe was not even trying not to cry.

“Two hours and nine minutes,” the woman with the clipboard called. “Lorne and Vik. First in youth and adult.”

“There were only three of us in youth and adult,” Greta said to me.

“First is first,” I said. “Don’t tell anybody.”

Four minutes later, I heard the bell again.

I was sitting on a cooler on the beach by then, with a paper cup of the fire department’s coffee in both hands, because I did not trust one hand to hold it.

The long skinny canoe came around the last bend with Trevor and Halvor in it, paddling steady but not hard. They were both wet to the knees. They had sand on their legs to the shin.