Listening Post: Take me to the river

With Brian reporting this week from outside his usual Adirondack stomping ground, learning the pleasures of the St. Lawrence, I am reminded of how little time I have spent on the River (capital R) lately, to my regret.

My father brought us to the North Country in the late 1950s and immediately began inducting me into the world of water, exploring anything vaguely navigable in a disreputable collection of canoes and rowboats, some supplemented with even more ancient and puny outboards.

By the mid-sixties, though, he graduated to a serious piece of marine engineering, dubbed Hobson’s Choice, which he berthed at Morristown. The Choice was a wooden lapstrake hull Lyman built in Sandusky, Ohio in 1960, and was still weighed down by its original twin 40-horse Johnson outboards, one of which was almost always in working order. Summer weekends, the phone rang on unanswered at our house as we learned the river from Massena to Clayton, pulling out in early morning, and coming back to dock in twilight.

I’m always amazed at how many of my neighbors have never spent a day on the water, meandering between the Thousand Islands, or throwing wake down the Brockville Narrows. It’s like those lifelong New Yorkers who have never been to the Statue of Liberty, or to the top of the Empire State Building.

Wait no more. I’m heading down to Clayton myself in about an hour. I hope to see some of you at my reading at 5 pm in Winged Bull Studio.

Tags: listeningpost