BeWonderNow (69)

keep on paddling

“keep on paddling”

That’s what my dad used to say whenever we’d hit rough water. Or when we had to cross a lake into a strong wind. Dad took me into the Boundary Waters Canoe Area in Northern- most Minnesota when I was still in elementary school. My dad loved to be on the water by any means available—canoe, sailboat, row boat, fishing boat, ferry boat, or an aircraft carrier at sea. He just didn’t swim. He never learned. But he made damn sure I learned at a very young age.

Dad was landing on aircraft carriers in rough seas before I was born. I learned a lot from my dad. I like to think that I take after him in some good ways. I like to imagine that“keep on paddling” was my dad’s mantra although he wouldn’t call it a mantra. He wouldn’t call it anything more than “doing what’s required.” That’s just how he was raised, and how we all were raised.

Soon after my first trip to the BWCA with my father, I began going to YMCA camps. In Minnesota, this means a lot of time on, or in, the water. I learned to swim at YMCA Camp Ihduhapi, as well as sail, shoot a bow, make a camp fire, do camp crafts, and live away from home in a cabin with 12 kids for two weeks. I still have the canoe paddle I memorialized with my name and date during camp craft time.

After that first trip into canoe wilderness with my dad, I’ve returned to the BWCA perhaps fifty times over the years, often going at least twice a Summer. Always on the lookout for an escape, I would go canoe camping in the BWCA with church groups, with Scouts, with buddies, with girlfriends, I even guided trips and have taken a few solo trips, too.

There’s even that 1100 mile canoe trip down the Mississippi I took in Junior High School that I blogged about a few months ago. BeWonderNow

My point being that, like my dad, I love to be on the water and in Nature, by any and all means possible. My brothers, uncle, grandparents, and nephews all have this love of boating and camping and being in Nature in common with me. So many of my dearest friends do, too.

Like the oft’ quoted Scout motto — “be prepared” — I’d like to add— “keep on paddling” — to the universal life truths we learn while communing with Nature. It’s pretty difficult to be prepared for a brain tumor diagnosis, or for any severe or shocking or completely unanticipated scary life event, yet so far, the memory of my father’s voice in the stern of the canoe encouraging me to “keep on paddling” keeps me paddling.

Nature is not, of course, always benign and beautiful. It can be frightening and terrifying also.

Not too many generations ago, raw nature and wilderness tended to inspire fear and dread in "civilized" people.

They represented Otherness and the Unknown. That which is "wild" is also "bewildering".

Today, wilderness is usually considered to be something good and in need of preservation.

The beauty and awesomeness of it dominate our attention.

We are attracted by wilderness, the Otherness of it, the sense it is something inevitably outside of us.

Always beyond us, it is what is ultimately real.

We cannot adequately appreciate this aspect of nature if we approach it with any taint of human pretense.

It will elude us if we allow artifacts like clothing to intervene between ourselves and this Other.

To apprehend it, we cannot be naked enough. 

In Wildness is the preservation of the world.

Henry David Thoreau (1817 - 1862) American Author

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