You'd think that by now I would see it coming, but I never do. It's as if I've got some enormous thing over my head and I'm trudging along looking at my feet, with the blackflies roaring in my ears and the sweat pouring down my neck, when I look up and there they are: my children. Tall, beautiful, confident people striding away into adulthood. How could I have missed it?
It's one of the reasons we take canoe trips.
A canoe trip means time in the wilderness with portages between lakes. Everything has to fit in a few packs, so there's room only for essentials, and because this is Canada, you're at the mercy of bugs and weather. They have a close relationship. If it's muggy it's going to be buggy, and you'll spend your evenings huddled around a damp fire hoping the smoke keeps the blackflies away. Sometimes it's wet, sometimes cold, often both, and sometimes for the whole trip.
An effortless kind of connection
There are also days when blue sky stretches from the back of your mind to the end of your imagination, when the sun breathes contentment all day and the most beautiful, cool, clear, natural swim is never more than a step away. Even that, though, is not the main reason we go. We take canoe trips to be together.
It isn't obvious together time. There aren't hours to sit quietly and think of the things we should have said years ago. We're busy packing up the tent or finding a campsite or making a fire or putting up tarps or paddling for hours on end; singing a song, telling a story, listening to the wind, dreaming of what's for dinner. None of that, though, gets in the way. Talk comes up as it wants to. It’s the most effortless kind of connection I know.
That's why you'd think that on a canoe trip, I would see them coming: those moments of arrival when the person who used to be a child is suddenly a young adult.
Growing up
With my daughter it was like turning a corner. The end of the school year came, and with it thoughts of high school and choices and ideas, and her life rose in a single step. It was breathtaking.
With boys, though, the physical part often comes first. They're up to your chin. They eat for two days. They go to sleep, and then they're up to your nose. It's so sudden that sometimes it takes a while for the rest of their life to catch up.
That's what can happen on a canoe trip: catching up.
We were on a long, uphill portage. It was hot and muggy and the bugs were ferocious. I had a 17-foot canoe on my shoulders – a clumsy, heavy, personal sauna. I stopped for a break, to swat the flies, and put the canoe down, and that's when I saw him: the kid I used to carry like that, on my shoulders, with his own canoe, his own burden, his own strength, his own responsibility, his own independence.
"I'll see you at the top, Dad," he said, and I watched him climb away, into the woods.
Tom Allen is a Toronto broadcaster, father and canoeist, trying to keep his head up.
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