1999
Adventures With Uncle Wally (Finding Your Way Back)
by Uncle Wally
It's always a good idea to know where you're goin'. But sometimes it's an even better idea to remember how to get back to your car.
Every now and then, Charlie and I get to feelin' real traditional and decide we want to go wild ricing again. We don't go every year, just when the fit takes us. Never knowin' when that might be, we always keep our eyes peeled for a good ricing lake. There are usually a couple of likely prospects pretty close to home.
One year we found what looked to be a perfect ricing lake, fringed all around with long, shallow bays, most of which were richly blessed with wild rice beds. It was too good to pass up. We were there bright and early on the first morning that harvesting rice was legal.
It turned out to be one of those perfect September days when summer was just beginnin' to lapse into autumn. Chill morning mists lifted into the thin clouds streaking the horizon. The sun was warm in a faded blue sky. For a pair of surly old curmudgeons, we were feelin' pretty sunny ourselves as we set the canoe on the shallow waters of one long bay and pushed off through the rustling plumes of ripe grain.
Charlie took the first stint of slowly poling the canoe through the muddy shallows bristling with the grasslike rice. I wielded the ricing sticks, pulling the rice stalks over the gunwale and whacking the grain into the bottom of the boat. It's a repetitive, manual labor that develops its own rhythm and sorta puts a fella into a contemplative mood. In fact, I was still contemplatin' stuff on a grand scale when Charlie prodded me out of my reverie a couple of hours later and suggested I take a turn with the poling.
Now, paddlers switchin' positions in a canoe out on the open water is always something of a dicey proposition, even if the principals aren't both gettin' a little creaky with middle age. But if I tell you that Charlie and I accomplished the feat with an enviable and elegant grace, you're just gonna hafta believe me, 'cause there were no other witnesses.
Well, I poled us through the remaining bays and before noon we had just about reached the carrying capacity of that old Prospector. I poled us back out into the open water at the middle of the lake. And then I noticed that we had a small problem.
I wasn't sure which bay led back to the car. Neither was Charlie.
Most of the bays on that lake had a discouraging sameness to 'em. And there wasn't much in the way of shoreline topography to steer by either. Mostly what we were seein' was wild rice and bulrushes stretchin' off to the horizons. So we drifted for a while in the languid, September sunshine while we debated our next course of action.
Three bays were headin' in more or less the right direction. We eventually agreed on which one to go out by. I pushed on the pole and guided us up our first choice in exit bays.
It wasn't a bad choice. Before long, we started catching glimpses of that old, rust-bucket Bronco of Charlie's through the swaying herbage. But it wasn't exactly the right choice, either. The car was pretty far off and we ran out of water several boat lengths away from the solid ground of shore. Try as I might, I couldn't shove us any closer.
Well, even if it wasn't the way we'd come in, we figured it'd do for a way out. So Charlie stepped out of the boat to pull us in to shore . . . and promptly sank. Like the Cheshire Cat beginning to disappear from the tip of its tail on up, Charlie began to disappear into the suspended, lakebottom mud. Only Charlie stopped disappearing at mid thigh. To spare your possibly delicate sensibilities, I won't repeat what it was that Charlie said just then.
It WAS an awkward situation. I tried to make the best of it. I told Charlie he'd hafta pay good money for a therapeutic mud bath like that at some New Age spa. He countered with the suggestion that I could save myself some cold, hard cash on therapy by gettin' out of the boat now and helpin' him pull it ashore. Darned if he was gonna haul my dead weight through the mud!
There wasn't anything else for it: I had to go over the side, too, and take my chances on gettin' sucked down into the swamp. It wasn't too bad. The mud never got much higher than my knees. And the surface mud was watery enough to let a fella move. I tried rememberin' how much fun I used to have, playin' in the mud when I was a kid. But somehow the mud that used to squish benignly through my toes seemed a whole lot friendlier than the mud that was currently attempting to suck off my boots with every step. It was a long, laborious slog back to dry land. And my toes were cramping with the effort of keeping my boots on long before we arrived.
We were both feelin' a little like Humphrey Bogart tryin' to man-haul the African Queen through the sand bars before we were done, except that there weren't any leeches. Which was OK with me. Bein' caked with mud from the hip down was bad enough. But mud washes off pretty easy. And in exchange, we had a hearty harvest of wild rice that was gonna taste pretty good all winter long.
Next time though, we'll remember to keep track of the whereabouts of the car.
*****
Well, 'til next time, keep your paddle wet. And keep in touch. Drop me a line c/o Mickey McBride, 8191 Belden Blvd., Cottage Grove MN 55106 or mickeymcb@worldnet.att.net. Let me know if you've ever gotten in over your head (or even just in over your knees) when you've been out paddling. Remember, Uncle Wally promises to 1) tell the truth so no one would ever believe it anyway and 2) never reveal your true identity to anyone, not even your local search-and-rescue team.
