Monday, April 19, 2010

It lives!

As Mark Twain said, "Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated." So, too, with my canoe!

I always knew Royalex is an amazing material -- evil synthetic plastic it is -- but this is crazy. After writing my squished canoe off to a life of limping leakily around reservoirs due to injuries incurred beneath a crushing heap of compacted roof-slide snow, Nuannaarpoq executed a remarkable rebounding after spending a couple of days soaking in the healing rays of the spring Sun, straightening, rounding out, dents and kinks leaving scars but smoothing and stretching back flush.

I'm damn near ready to start a Nuannaarpoq religion.

To test this -- and as first sacrament -- I hauled her down to the swelling and swirling Animas at the north end of town, where Rio and I paddled her upstream (well, I paddled whilst Rio lay there with her nose on the gunnel gorging itself on the spring riverine richness). We inched our way along the big sweeping cottonwood-lined bends under the flanks of Animas City Mountain, then turned and rode the brown snowmelt back down to town.

The redwinged blackbirds were ridiculous, just carousing and yelling to each other and singing and whistling away over their sense of ... well, nuannaarpoq.

And I felt my own joy. Because despite the garish Harry Potter scar that now runs down her midsection, my canoe's good figure was back and her geometry incredibly returned to form. She cut the water like she wanted to head upstream to mate.

Rivers do that to us ...

Anyway, it looks like we're back together. True, both of us have our dings and scars and weakened points on our resilient-but-travelworn frames -- and neither of us can probably withstand much of broaching any more.

But I'm happy to correct my previous obituary (especially for the reader who suggested turning Nuannaarpoq into a flower pot ... ). It looks like we have a few more runs in us after all.