10-Oct-99 Sunday
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It's a good thing there's another day of the weekend, because there are still a lot of things I wanted to do.
Yesterday was the big Third Annual Souhegan River Canoe Trip. That's how Mike, my co-worker from my previous job bills it, anyway. Mike, Daver, and I were most of the software group at that place, and the three of us always went out together to get lunch. There were several Daves at that company, but of course user IDs on the computer network had to be unique. Dave R had user ID daver, and we always called him that. Since there was already a Dean at that company when I got there, I had to be deanb on the computer. You can't pronounce that.
Well anyway, Mike has always been an enthusiastic canoeist. I'm sure one reason he bought the new house he did in Amherst, New Hampshire was that the Souhegan River goes right past the backyard. I don't know if his property per se goes down to the river. If it's not his property at least there's nobody else there. You can carry a canoe down some log steps, through a trail filled with poison ivy, right to the water from his garage.
Two years ago the river was very high after a couple of big rains and the current was downright scary. Last year we did the trip in November. It was cold. The river was very low and there were a couple of places that were hard to get through. This year Mike decided to try earlier in the fall when it would be warmer. It had been raining a little early in the morning, but the weather was clearing as I drove up route 3 through Nashua and Merrimack to be at Mike's by 10:15. I ended up almost half an hour early. Daver was in for the weekend; he lives in Beaverton OR now, but is planning on coming back to New England. The big trip turned out not so big; there were Mike and his wife Diane, Mike's parents (I guess in their sixties, hale and hearty), a couple who are friends of Mike's parents, and Daver and me. Mike's 8- and 5-year-old daughters had rounded up friends to come along, too. Diane and the kids met up with us about 3/4 of the way through the trip.
So, the seven of us set off in two cars with four canoes to downtown Milford NH. We turned off Souhegan Street on a gravel driveway down to the back of an industrial building where lots of big galvanized culvert pipes were lying around and a nice new bright yellow snowplow blade was waiting for the winter. Mike drove his van home so Diane would have it to bring the kids in later and came back with his Saturn. Meanwhile we dragged the canoes down the bank from the parking area to the riverside (I think Daver and I, as the younger folks in the party, did most of that) and got all the paddles and life jackets organized.
Unloading spot. Note snowplow. That's Mike's parents' van.
The water was a lot higher than for last year's trip. Last year Mike's parents had trouble finding a route through the shallows just downstream of the put-in spot and the trip got off to a slow start. Yesterday there was plenty of water to get through, and a good current. For the first mile or so below the start there were lots of ripples showing rocks just below the surface. You had to be paying a lot of attention and steering carefully.
Watch for those rocks, Mike!
The river is probably less than fifty feet wide in most places, though it's always hard for me to judge; wide enough that you can turn a canoe around easily at any point, but narrow enough to provide good cover from the wind. Most of the shore is wooded, with forest or grassy banks coming right down to the water. In several places there are high sandy banks on the outside of bends and sandbars on the insides. The trees were beginning to turn color. In two places kingfishers flew out along the river ahead of us, and at another point we saw a medium-big hawk, I think red-shouldered, land in a nearby tree.
Mike insists that all participants pick up at least one piece of trash along the trip. Daver got a little compulsive about the cleanup effort. He and I accumulated beer cans, plastic soda bottles, most of the case of a TV set, and half a plastic chair. Mike picked up a mass of orange plastic construction site netting as well as so much ordinary trash that we weren't sure how he was going to fit any kids in his canoe later.
Mike with construction netting; his parents in background.
Just past the bridge carrying NH route 101 is the only real rapids of the stretch of river we did. Two years ago the water was so high we barely noticed it -- the whole river was fast and the rocks that make the rapids were far submerged. Last year I was in the bow of Mike's canoe, and I didn't paddle hard enough to make the curve at the rapids. We bumped the bow of the canoe on a rock but got through without serious difficulty. This year, with more water than last year but not so much as to hide the rapids, I paddled like crazy at the right spot and turned the boat through the gap just right. If I do say so myself. Yeehah! Ride 'em, canoeist!
A little farther on the river goes through a golf course. Yes, folks, we were paddling down the middle of a water hazard. Mike has a golf ball retriever, a telescoping aluminum rod that extends to eight or ten feet long with a little basket on the end. It was in the canoe I was in, and I was privileged to use it! Mike's family and his parents had been at the shore on Prince Edward Island last summer and had a great time hitting salvaged golf balls off the seaside cliffs into the ocean. My assignment: scoop up next years bucket of balls. The first gold ball or two we came to were evasive -- if I could reach them at all with the scoop they bounced along the bottom and drifted farther in the current, or the canoe drifted past before I could get the scoop in position. At last we came to the mother lode of lost golf balls. It must have been a place where the tee was a little in front of the water. When a golfer topped his/her ball it would roll along to the bank of the river, bounce a dozen feet down the bank, and plop in. Mike's mom held her canoe onto a tree on the bank and held the stern line of our canoe so we could stay in position over the sunken golf balls and I scooped and scooped. After a half dozen I was getting pretty good at it. You put the basket down over the ball, give a half twist to get the basket under the ball, and lift. After fifteen or so we decided we had caught our daily limit. Mike, alone in a canoe, had continued down the river to where Diane and the kids were going to meet us. We three remaining boats left a few golf balls for the next people and proceeded.
A few bends further down the river we turned to look behind and were dismayed to see the third boat filling up with water and Mike's parents friends standing, soaked, in the middle of the stream. They had caught the canoe broadside on a protruding log. The river was shallow enough that there was no drowning hazard, but hypothermia is a concern even when the air temperature is in the 60s if your clothes are all wet. It took about half an hour for us to get the water out of the swamped canoe, change into drier clothes or put on more layers, and get our act back together. In the process Mike's dad tipped the swamped canoe again and got himself about half as wet as the other two people. Eventually we continued with one dry and one wet person per canoe; Daver and Maggie switched boats. I insisted on staying in the bow of my boat, because I wanted to see where I was going and I'm pretty good at steering around obstacles from the bow. Besides, Maggie had been in the bow of her boat when she ran it into that log.
We got to where Mike, Diane, and the kids were waiting without further incident. Mike drove the couple who had swamped back to his house and found dry clothes for them while the rest of us waited (for what seemed like another half hour) and dragged one canoe up to the parking area, because we thought we should have two adults per boat. When Mike came back he said no, he wanted four boats to continue, even though that meant that two boats would have only one adult each. Back came that boat to the water.
Emily, Christine, Brianna, Brianna, and Brianna
Don't worry, Emily and Christine will be wearing life jackets
before they get into a boat.
Mike took the three older kids, Brianna, Brianna, and Brianna; Diane and Mike's dad canoed the two littler kids, Mike's mom and Daver took the third canoe, and I took the fourth boat (the one that had tipped) by myself. It was the first time I've gone any distance in a canoe without anyone else in it. It worked OK. I found myself mostly taking two strokes on each side and then changing sides to keep the boat going reasonably straight. Kayakers, don't tell me how much easier it is to control a kayak. I know. Mike and the Briannas led the way, with the girls yelling, “We're number one!” as they paddled and splashed. A few bends in the river, a chance for the kids to romp on a sandy beach on the inside of a bend, and we got to the bank behind Mike's house. We hauled the boats up to the backyard (I don't seem to have poison ivy, even after walking through a lot of it in my boating sandals), caught our breath, drove people back to where we had left the various cars, and came back for a big feed on the chili that had been simmering while we were all on the river.
Yes, it's autumn in New Hampshire
That was pretty much the day. It was after 6 when I left Mike's and after 7 when I got home. We watched Heavy on Sundance in the evening. I was a little surprised I was awake enough to notice.
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