On The Water
Four alumni look back on memorable moments they've spent in canoes.
The War Canoe BY BILL NUTT '76
Rocky Geyer '77 and I built the war canoe in the fall of 1977. Back then a lot of people were starting to race big canoes. Lan McColough '78 was the president of the club. He asked us if we could build a boat like that. We said, "Yeah. We could build that." I had never built a canoe before, but I'd built kayaks, and I didn't see a problem. We didn't have plans to work from. I drew them up myself.
We built the canoe outdoors at Mitchell Paddles over in Canaan, New Hampshire, and it took longer than we thought it would. The canoe was 24 feet long, about 4 1/2 feet wide. Weighed something like 300 pounds. We built the hull out of white pine, strip construction, covered with fiberglass. The rails were originally made out of ash, but I worked on it later at the boat yard of a friend and converted them to mahogany.
We almost ran out of time. The cold weather caused some problems with the fiberglass, but it wasn't bad. We finished just before winter came. We built it for the club for $500, including materials. I think we made 85 cents an hour.
I don't reafly remember the first time we took it out, or how we christened it. Somebody pissed on it or poured a beer on it, one or the other. Probably both. The boat was so stable. One guy decided to go for a swim. He stood right up on the gunwale and dived in, no problem. Later that spring we stuck the boat on top of a van and took it somewhere down around Boston to race. We had our full 13 paddlers, and we won the race pretty easily. We built it for racing, but we didn't actually race it much after that.
In those days the club had a lot of white- water kayakers who liked to paddle on the Rapid River in western Maine. The Rapid had no road access then. To get over there we'd paddle down the Magalloway and across Lake Umbagog, and camp at the foot of the river. One fall we put into the Magalloway with the war canoe—a 24-foot canoe towing 12 kayaks behind it. We paddled the whole thing across Umbagog to the Rapid River. It was a rather amusing sight, especially at that time of year. Every time we came around a corner we surprised another duck hunter. They'd never seen anything like it.
"Paddle Like Hell" BY WALKER WEED '40
In the spring of 1937 I began a long association with Ledyard, which was then an open-boat canoe club equipped with wood and canvas canoes—Old Towns, Chestnuts and Whites. You had to pass a test to become a member. This involved, among other things, being able to paddle a figure eight with a J stroke. We took many runs on the White, often stopping overnight at the Shephards' farm in South Royalton, Vermont, sleeping in the hayloft and eating great dinners and breakfasts cooked by "Ma" Shephard. In those days the club's standard operating procedure in white water was to paddle like hell and try to move faster than the current. We were always swamping the canoes. When Ross McKenney came, he showed us how to backpaddle—how to slow down and stay dry.
Ross taught us many other things. How to make paddles. How to throw a canoe on our shoulders. He told us about the Allagash River in his home state of Maine. We had great trips up there in 1937 and 1938.
During my last spring, classmate Joe Dunford and I persuaded Pat Patterson '39 and Hank Merrill '39 to take us and a canoe up to the First Connecticut Lake. We had to make the trip in a hurry—I had an exam to get back to in Hanover three days later. They put us out in the dark. We slept and woke to find the lake frozen and very little water below the dam. We had a mile or so of timber downed by the 1938 hurricane to carry through before we could even put the canoe in the river. Lake Francis had not yet been created, so we paddled the stream down to Pittsburg, carried around the gorge and headed for Hanover. We camped on our first night below Colebrook. Woke up with everything frozen and paddled that day to Gilman Dam, where we camped in the paper company yard, again in freezing weather.
The Connecticut is still a great river—with lots of rapids in the upper sections—but this was before the Moore Dam reservoir, and a good section of the Fifteen-Mile Falls was still untamed. Below Gilman we had 10 miles of big rapids. After three more carries—at Comerford, Mclndoe and Ryegate—we ate a late lunch as we drifted and rested for five or six miles through Woodstock. Around 10 p.m. we passed Orford. We finally crawled out of the boat at Ledyard at 2:15 a.m. Wed gone 85 miles in about 20 hours.
I went straight to bed, and didn't get up until noon the next day. Missed my final exam after all. I don't remember what the exam was, but I remember that trip. Oh, to be 20 again!
Hot Dam BY MEGAN SHUTE '04
"Sophomores from the Source" is a 95-mile paddle starting in Lancaster, New Hampshire, and ending at Ledyard. The summer I went there were 16 of us. We took the war canoe and three little boats.
Some of the paddlers on the trip were pretty hardcore. But a couple of people hadn't paddled much before and didn't know any of us.The dynamic was amazing. Everyone was so pumped—we were all a little nervous about how far we had to paddle and how much we had to carry—pounds and pounds of canoes and gear. We got tired together, ate together, laughed at ourselves together and had a lot of fun.
We had to portage around five dams. We named them all. Whoever saw the dam first would bang on the side of canoe and come up with the name. We named the first one "Hot Dam." At one dam, the portage was really significant. It was a tiny path down a steep, steep hill, with a wobbly set of stairs. With the war canoe, that was quite a challenge. We called that one "God Dam."
We got up early each day and we'd paddle for a while, then stop and swim, then paddle again. We stopped at every one of the 15 or more rope swings between Lancaster and Hanover. At the Fairlee bridge, we counted to three and all jumped off together. We took our time. We got into camp every night around 8. At our campsite in Thetford we took the canoes out after dark, just to paddle around and look at the stars. We had a big skinny-dipping session. We rolled one of the canoes. That was the same place we saw a hot-air balloon, sponsored by Spam, of all things, come down lower and lower toward the river. The guys flying the balloon had seen the war canoe. They came down and landed on the river. They got out of the balloon and held it, standing in water up to their knees, talking to the paddlers in the war canoe. And I'm thinking, "Where else but at Dartmouth could you see that?"
The Sense of Possibility BY DAN NELSON '75
When I came to Dartmouth I'd never done any canoeing. But when I was working for DAM as an undergraduate intern, I got interested in doing a story on the St. John River in Maine, which was scheduled to be dammed. John McPhee had recently published a piece about it in The New Yorker. A Dartmouth economics professor named Greg Hines was putting together a trip to canoe the St. John before it got dammed. Somehow I got onto the trip.
When the St. John starts, it's very small and gentle, with easy riffles. Every day it gets a little more challenging, until at the end you're going down through Big Black Rapids and some serious, heavy water. I got paired with an alumnus, a colleague of Hines' who taught at UNH. He was a very patient, skillful instructor. He gave me an education in canoeing on the way down the river. After that I was hooked.
I went on a longer trip with Hines up in the Arctic, just as I was graduating. There were six of us on the trip—five of us in our early 20s and Hines, who was in his 60s. It was a fantastic trip. We didn't see any other people but we saw wolves and caribou and musk ox and crossed the Arctic Circle. That trip gave me a huge sense of possibility. The notion that anybody could get hold of a canoe and put together a month's worth of food and have the most unbelievable adventure in one of the most remote places on the continent was just breathtaking to me. That started a real love affair with canoeing and, in particular, canoeing in northern places. I've tried to have at least one canoeing adventure of some sort every year, whatever time and finances allow.
Some of the most rewarding trips I've made have been leading DOC canoe trips. Those trips are an opportunity to meet incoming students in the very best of circumstances. I love watching a group of people who initially have little in common end up figuring out, over a space of four days, how to work together, how to communicate, how to develop friendships. And then seeing how those relationships tend to endure through four years at Dartmouth.
The canoe, I think, is a vehicle for the best features of human relationships. On a canoe trip you're tied together in the same boat. On a DOC trip, where students don't yet know one another, two people are put in a boat and they have to talk. They have to cooperate and coordinate and get to know one another. After several hours on the water they reach lunchtime and they switch partners, and do it again with somebody else. There are long stretches of silence to fill, with talk or with thought. Sometimes we need to keep all the boats together so we know where everybody is. And sometimes people can go off by themselves. It's a perfect combination of being alone and being part of a group—and a perfect way for 10 or 12 people to get to know one another before coming to Dartmouth.
But there's another important aspect. The outdoors at Dartmouth is such a wonderful, rich resource. A canoe trip at the start of the first year gives students a chance to get plugged into that at the very beginning. It allows them a head start on what can give them a tremendous sense of joy and satisfaction during the four years they're students at this place.
