Canoe Construction

I can forget things far easier than I remember them. But every once in a while, something that has been long forgotten becomes suddenly remembered - triggered back into existence by some phrase or situation. This occurred to me a while ago when I was talking with friends about canoe building and the subject of birch bark canoes came up and then the topic turned to dugout canoes. That conversation caused it all to come flooding back to me from some dusty closet within my mind into the more active regions. I hadn't thought of my experiences in building a dugout canoe for many years. The conversation had triggered the resurrection of those memories. Perhaps they had been suppressed and lying dormant for good reason.

I and my friend, Johnny, were just learning about canoeing then; we were quickly acquiring new skills and techniques associated with the sport - like how to open a padlock with a ball-pein hammer. (Without destroying the lock no less!) This was back in the days when all my canoeing was done at night. We would have to wait until well after dark before sneaking down to the beach to the back of the unoccupied cabin to get the canoe. We took good care of that canoe - never setting it on the beach, carrying it well into the water before getting in, washing the sand off our feet so as not to scratch the inside. We'd take a short paddle in the darkness, then put the canoe back and lock it up.

But it was not our style to have to be that careful with anything, we needed something we could abuse - but my father didn't own a canoe. He wasn't about to buy one either, being generally ungrateful of the work that Johnny and I had completed on his old wooden rowboat - modifying it into a beautiful little three mast schooner. The only good part he claimed, was that we had revived the old outboard engine that hadn't been running for years just so that we could make our way upwind in the schooner.

Johnny and I clearly had a serious problem to work out if we wanted to practice canoeing in the daylight. We held a high level meeting to discuss several proposals of solutions. These included: earning money to buy a canoe - we only entertained that proposal as the basis of a good joke; softsoaping one of our fathers into buying one - we had already failed at that; stealing one from someone we didn't know so that we could keep it on a permanent basis - the most attractive solution, but we would have had to explain to our parents where it came from; or building one ourselves.

These high level meetings were always held up in Old Feeb. Old Feeb was our favorite tree, a giant bull pine that towered above the rest of the young hardwood forest. He had many great branches to sit on where five or six of us would occasionally go to perch like a flock of birds. We could sit there and look over the top of the forest and see the mountains, Mt Cardigan in the distance dominating the local area of New Hampshire's White Mountains, and part of the lake. We discussed our situation:

"What do you want to do?"

"I don't know, what do you want to do?"

"Let's do something! What can we do?"

"I don't know, what do you want to do?"

"Want to build a canoe?"

"Ok! Tonight we can use our own canoe!"

Of course, we never did get it built that night. We hunted for a birch tree from which we could obtain the raw materials, but we never found a one big enough to get started. We did learn, days later, that "Pasquanny" meant "place where we get the birch bark for our canoes" in some Indian language from Mr. Windguster who loved to pontificate but was generally a very unreliable source of accurate information. A subsequent trip to Pasquanny Bay across the lake resulted in disappointment to find fewer birch trees over there and those even smaller than the ones on our side of the lake. They had been cleared years ago to make room for a rather large stand of cottages.

Days later we were back in Old Feeb trying to decide what to do, when one of us noticed the other big white pine that stood not far from Old Feeb. The possibility of a dugout canoe struck us! We ran home to do some research on building dugout canoes. Yes! There in the Tarzan comic book were two frames describing how Tarzan built a dugout canoe by burning out the inside of a large tree. That was all we needed to know, we ransacked my father's workshop until we found the bow saw, then ran back up into the woods.

"Where's my bow saw?," my father asked a week later. We had become bored of carrying it back and forth each day and concerned about being questioned by someone about what we were doing. So we had taken to leaving it in the woods. My father's saw search was the impetus to cause us to finish our job.

"You take a turn now. I'm bushed!," I said wiping sweat from my eyes and crushing another mosquito that was mining blood in my ear.

"You didn't saw more than three minutes! I'm not rested yet.," Johnny complained. "You have to go until the bow hits the bark. You're almost there."

And so we worked. All the way around the tree until the blade was buried sixteen inches into the wood and the bow of the saw hit the tree. But there was still nearly a foot more of tree uncut in the middle that the saw couldn't reach. The tree stood. We finally had too much. There was swimming to do. We gave up and placed the saw back in my father's workshop after using a brillo pad on the rust that had accumulated, each of us cutting ourselves several times in the process.

It was weeks later when we were once again in Old Feeb on a windy day whittling on branches with our jackknifes, trying to figure out what to do when we heard rifle shots. They were close! It was as if someone were shooting right at us. Then there were many shots - like firecrackers, then a loud crumbling noise. Old Feeb's partner was falling and he was headed right towards us. We would surely get knocked out of the tree and killed. We dropped our knives and climbed down out of that tree at a speed that can only be attained when one's life is threatened. We reached the ground and covered our heads so as not to be clobbered by the falling jackknifes that hadn't reached the ground yet. As we started to run, the tip of Old Feeb's partner swept to the ground right at the base of Old Feeb demolishing small trees and saplings in its way. It was the greatest thing that happened all summer! And we were still alive!

The next day we were back up there with the bow saw slapping mosquitoes and sweating. My dad had fortunately put a new blade on the saw, we paced off what we figured to be seventeen feet and began cutting. But we soon realized that the saw that couldn't go halfway through would do us no good now because it would now have to make it all the way through with the tree on the ground. We'd have to chop. We chopped for a day and found it slower than sawing. Well, it may be more work, but an axe was required to properly shape the stem and stern anyway, we figured. A check back to our reference manual was of little help - it didn't explain how Tarzan got the tree down or formed the bow and stern, but it did show him burning the inside out to hollow the tree into a canoe shape.

Burning seemed easier than chopping so we decided to do the hollowing job before separating the finished canoe from the rest of the tree. This was a good plan we figured because the lightweight canoe wouldn't be flopping around as we worked on it. The remainder of the tree would hold it secure for us.

We had a long discussion on the merits of using pine pitch to get the fire going. Perhaps we should smear pitch where we wanted it burned out to help control the fire. An experiment was in order. There was plenty of pitch oozing up out of the tree stump. So we decided to light that.

"That's going pretty good now," Johnny said.

"Yeah, maybe too good. You think those leaves up there are going to catch on fire," I asked.

"Heck, there twenty-five feet in the air," he pointed out.

"But so are the flames!"

"What have we got to put the fire out with?"

"Maybe a bunch of pine needles all at once will smoother it."

"Nope. That was a bad idea, but look at all those sparks flying. It's like a gigantic sparkler!"

"Come on, we've got to get this out. The ranger up on Mt. Cardigan probably is taking a bearing on us about now. I hope I have to go," I said as I climbed up on the log and unzipped my fly.

Johnny had a very commendable quality - a high pressure bladder. He was able to reach the top of the stump from standing on the ground. It was almost under control when the extinguishers ran out of fluid, so we then frantically dug some dirt with our fingernails and finally got it out.

Our canoe building project was ended. That was too scary. A hike up Mt. Cardigan the following day confirmed that the ranger had indeed spotted the fire. He claimed he could catch us smoking cigarettes from there. When we told him our story he commented on our intelligence, referred to us as certain anatomical parts, told us to get off his mountain, and not to play with matches anymore.

Years later I walked up into the woods with my father. It was the first time he'd ever been up there so I was showing him all the highlights: the old dump, our fort, where we camped when we slept outside, and Old Feeb. When he saw the other tree on the ground, long since barren of its long green then brown neddles, I proudly announced that Johnny and I had cut it down. He went kind of slack and began to look ill.

"That great big tree? You and Johnny cut that down? Just you two kids?"

"Yeah. Pretty good huh?"

He went ballistic! My father was well accustomed to going into tirades, but the ones I had previously witnessed could not even be considered practice for this one. It must have lasted twenty minutes. The ranger up on Mt. Cardigan probably heard it. I wished he would spank or hit me but he yelled and lectured. Then the rest of the day just kept mumbling things like: "That great big beautiful tree. You kids cut it down. Whatever possessed...? Who owns that land, who's tree was it? You stupid armpits. ..."

The last time I visited those woods, almost ten years ago now, there was a new house where the tree we had cut was. Sadly, Old Feeb was gone too. A turkey mound septic system dominated the place I could best figure where he had long stood.

Perhaps we had made the wrong choice, there are easier, quicker and more reliable ways of getting a canoe nowadays. But I suspect that in our failure we learned far more that summer than we might have if we spent it explaining where we "found" a canoe.