(A world class education from the stern of a canoe)
I wasn’t great at high school physics. I was an excellent calculus student, but I couldn’t apply the math well in physics with all the vectors and trajectories. Nonetheless, I feel like I have a PhD in applied hydrodynamics and mobile ballistics, and nowhere does that become more apparent than when your buddy hands you a canoe paddle and says let’s go jump shoot some ducks.
We left Charlottesville at 430AM, allowing plenty of time to drop the downstream car and double back upriver to the launch site. The snow was sticking everywhere except the roads. Hopefully the ducks would be pushed out of the fields and onto the river. Our hearts sank as we pulled into the launch site and saw we weren’t the first car there. In jump-shooting, if you ain’t first, you’re last. Luckily, it turned out to be a man walking his dogs through the powder-dusted parking lot, so we proceeded to throw on our waders and drag the canoe down to the bank. I’d crossed over this river umpteen times during my college years in Lexington, and always admired how bucolic and pastoral it appeared, snaking its way through the patchwork-quilted valley floor. Up close, it was much more sinister, a cold, dark, and powerful current, surging from the rains earlier this week.
I hadn’t paddled a canoe down a moving river since I was 12 or 13, most likely at summer camp in western North Carolina. It’s amazing how quick my paddling skills came back to me in the pre-dawn darkness of a January snowstorm. I suppose self-preservation has something to do with it, but after making it through the first rapid and entering a slower bend, the attention of the hunt was clearly a factor as well. I was hyper focused on how the craft hugged the inside of each bend and how the bow was pointed to optimize Matt’s angle on the hidden mallards that hopefully lay in each side eddy. Give me scratch paper and a calculator and there’s no way I could’ve computed the optimal line down the river, but somehow my attentive brain and semi frozen hands were managing the calculation just fine.
He told me to expect a different type of shooting. As opposed to shooting a descending, decoying bird with an exposed breast, you’re shooting a rising bird, moving away, and his vitals are shielded. A lucky pellet may knock his head or break a wing.
Soon enough, we came upon four mallards sitting on a gravel bar at the tail end of a small island. They saw us early, forcing a long shot for Matt. We didn’t let the miss discourage us; instead, they gave us some optimism of what else might be around the next bend. Ten minutes later, I saw two characteristic black heads facing straight downstream. I hissed to Matt, “Ringnecks. On the mudflat to the right.” Their negligence astern let us close the distance to about 20 yards, when they erupted off the water and flew back upriver, presenting a beautiful opportunity. BOOM BOOM BOOM. The shots echoed off the steep banks enclosing the river, cruelly forcing us to relive the three misses.
We took a break to change positions, and I knelt in the bow as he guided me downriver. Whatever subtle movement needed to steer the canoe had been enough to ward off the chills, but now I was frozen, my immobility inviting numbness to my limbs. When I finally saw a half dozen geese milling by a log, my normally fluid tendons had congealed like 10W-30 in a frosty engine, and I was a bit late to fling three desperate volleys at their impenetrable backs as they hustled downriver. I’m sure I ignored the advice to shoot high.
It turned out that was the last of the fowl we’d see that day. The final third of the float was birdless, but we couldn’t let the boredom lull us into a stupor. The largest rapid was just upriver of the take-out, a foaming and frothing series of back-to-back 90-degree turns. Matt’s dad had recommended we portage around, but the faster flow pushed us on the rapid sooner than expected, and the higher water levels left us no good take-out. We took it head on. Cross-draw to nudge the bow to the left to get through the first turn. Draw to bring the bow to the right and line up for the second turn. Hard paddle forward to keep us off the strainer along the left bank and straight through the final drop. If we had stopped to compute the angles, the vectors, the power, and the balance necessary to slither through, we’d be dead. Instead, intuition built on experience kept us upright and got us home safe. Maybe each of us needs some off-season “mobile ballistics” work on the skeet range.
Fast forward 6 months, and the semester may be different, but I imagine the quality of education will be still the same. The mobile ballistics class will be replaced with “string theory.” The requirement for a speedy and sneaky ambush will be replaced by the need to slow down and allow enough time to let my partner fire a sixty-foot cast to the smallmouth waiting behind that log. The supercomputer between his ears will deliver a pinpoint presentation that no silicon-metal-oxide-transistor on earth could process. Some things are just better left uncalculated and undigitized, a mystery to computers and textbooks but instinctual to those of us who received our physics education in a canoe.