No wind, a low sun, and cool air; a quiet morning paddle on a mirror lake where the only sound is the dipping of one’s paddle, and the low whoosh of the canoe as it breaks the fathomless plain; This is nature in all its glory.
For us it’s never been about the end-result but always about the journey, and as we’ve grown older, its moments like this awaken our dormant soul. If you want to explore your physical self, be a thru-paddler, and test your metal against the elements. If you want to explore the trail, the world, and more importantly your inner self, be a section paddler. For the record, Eric and I might not even be considered section paddlers, we’re more like turtles; we move slowly, take in everything we can, and hardly ever paddle in a straight line, even when it’s part of the plan. For us an erratic zig zag journey is the best way to explore the world around us, it allows us to stop and look things over, to wander and absorb things we might have missed had we been paddling to meet benchmarks and schedules. Nix on the badges, we’re inveterate wanderers who believe the whole is more than the sum of its parts, and only through exploring can we understand how we fit in to the world we see around us. Thoreau wrote the following in Walden and we wholeheartedly agree;
“We need the tonic of wildness... At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.”
We spent the better part of two summers, a spring, and two falls working on this book and it’s an adventure we’ll appreciate for the rest of our lives. Our experiences at times were visceral and “in your face”, and we loved it, but the true appreciation of what we experienced will come at some point down the road, because one truth about learning is written in stone. The learning comes later, and only by reflection can we truly grasp and absorb what we experienced.
We’ll be back next year and the year after that; we didn’t paddle every inch nor could we, so there’s more to do. At some lakes we simply stood on the shore and thought; “Holy Crap, look at how big those waves are, as a hard wind blew in our face. At other times, we stared in disbelief at all the boulders and wondered where the water had gone. As seasoned wanderers, we have a few simple rules and safety trumps excitement the same way experience guides inexperience.
Wants and needs dictate how you approach an adventure like this one, but nature sets the parameters, and it plays no favorites, is unyielding, and if you don’t respect its power it will exact a heavy price. Nature doesn’t feel bad for you if things go wrong, nor does it try to teach you any lessons, so it’s imperative as a participant, to respect its power and learn from your mistakes.
The other issue for us while working on this project was the difficulty of balancing our inveterate love of the out of doors with our workload. There were times when we did something and then had to do it again because like any hunter, we as photographers were searching for a special place, a special mood, a special kind of lighting or other factor to get the “picture”. More than once Eric heard me say, “This is it.” or, “This isn’t it; Can we drive back here tomorrow morning? It's only 85 miles.” Mood is also an important component for us to communicate successfully as photographers, and if we’ve done our job, the pictures we take speak as much or more than the words we write. A good photograph pulls the viewer in and draws on his or her emotions. A good photograph can say it all.
Often, when returning from a trip filled with clouds and rain, people would tell us how sorry they were about all the “bad,” weather we’d encountered. We’d just smile and say to ourselves; “No, no, no, that’s exactly what we needed and wanted, and yes the rain may have made it hard, and we may have been miserable at times, but it’s exactly what we needed to get the kind of photography we were searching for.”
There’s also a gift we receive when we come to terms with tough situations; when we embrace the misery. In the worst of times, and we’ve had some hard times I’d mention to Eric with a smirk, that we might be in the “moment”. Standing in water and soaked to the bone; wet, tired, sore, and smelling like dead animals, having our mental toughness tested by an incessant army of black flies, or just plain chilled to the bone with no hope of finding dry clothes, are all potential moments to remember; It’s the memory to think about after Thanksgiving dinner when others have loosened their belts and are trying to nap; watching some football game they aren’t really interested in; or trying to figure out why they didn’t take Friday off. It’s the moment we hope to think back on and reflect, and whatever the misery, just the mention of that possibility allows us to laugh together, knowing that on the third Thursday in November we have a present to mentally unwrap, one that will make us smile all over again.
The trail covers approximately 740 miles, and includes 22 streams and rivers, 58 lakes and ponds, and 53 miles of portaging divided among 63 “carries”, but unless you plan on canoeing in a straight line from Old Forge to Fort Kent you’re going to paddle more than 740 miles and portage more than 53 miles. Many rivers and streams become unnavigable during dry conditions and require extra portaging. Wet conditions can also change the narrative; sometimes creating more portaging “opportunities”, sometimes less, depending on what portion of the trail you’re paddling.
We began our adventure on a warm spring day, setting out from a small beach, next to the dam, in the hamlet of Old Forge in the Adirondacks, a stone’s throw from the NFCT Kiosk that marks the trail’s western terminus; and we ended our adventure on a wet September afternoon eighteen months later, at a boat launch in a small park just below the Fort Kent Blockhouse. We still aren’t quite sure how we missed the Fort Kent NFCT Kiosk, nor do we care. At the time it was a big deal, and we ran around looking for our grail, convinced we needed a picture of us in front of it; a closure shot for the book until it dawned on us, our trip as in life, isn’t about the beginning, nor is it about the end. It’s really about everything in the middle, and we’d done a pretty good job covering all that stuff in the middle at least this time around, so we saddled up and headed off in search of dry clothes, as new thoughts began to circle around in our heads about what might be in store for us next year.