Death by hypothermia is one of the most significant dangers of taking a kayak on the ocean, along with drowning, sunburn, and (in Maine) being accosted by the Secret Service for paddling into the restricted waters around President Bush’s house in Kennebunkport. Yet sea kayaking offers practitioners the tremendous advantage of looking a lot more dangerous than it actually is. It epitomizes what Bergh calls “soft adventure,” the preferred recreation of baby boomers with bungee-jumping exclusions on their life-insurance policies. There must be a lot of us. Kitty Graham, executive director of the Trade Association of Sea Kayaking, estimates that between 75,000 and 100,000 Americans actively pursue the sport, up from approximately none 15 years ago. It is most popular in the Pacific Northwest (including Alaska), Baja California and Maine, but is growing fast all up and down the Atlantic seaboard and on both coasts of Florida. “When I first did this six years ago, everyone stared at me and thought I was crazy,” says the third member of our little expedition, Linda Lowry, 36, a Boulder, Colo., artist. “They still think I’m crazy, but they’ve stopped staring.”
Something unexpected happens when you climb into a sea kayak. A canoe sits you up above the water; you experience it as a vessel on which you ride. A kayaker sits in the water, down among the wavelets, like a porpoise. Constrained by the tight cockpit and the waterproof elastic skirt that seals the hatch, you have the odd sensation of almost wearing your boat, rather than riding in it. The paddling motion is a simple, elegant windmilling of the arms, not fundamentally more difficult than winching up a bucket–again, in contrast to a canoe, which only goes round in a circle if propelled by anyone who didn’t learn to paddle before the age of 12. A sea kayak has a small pedal-controlled rudder intended to help it turn. From my perspective, its most important use was in making the boat go straight.
Bergh demonstrated how you counter the tendency of the kayak to roll over and leave you dangling upside down in the water. The trick is to rock your torso gently from your hips in counterpoint to the rhythm of the waves. “Some people are too stiff to do this easily,” he admitted, “but you creative types like writers usually catch on right away.”
“I’m not that kind of writer,” I said quickly. But in fact the technique came very easily to me. It probably comes from riding the subway all my life, I decided.
The weather was misty as we set out, and the mist turned to rain, but we were cozy enough in our layers of miracle fibers. Life was undoubtedly more rugged, but far simpler, for the hardy Inuit who paddled through the Arctic centuries before the invention of the L.L. Bean catalog. For me to answer a simple call of nature meant a 10-minute struggle with Velcro flaps, zippers, drawstrings. That didn’t even count the time it took to find an island and paddle to it.
Bergh is slightly embarrassed about the necessity to experience nature swaddled in synthetic fabrics and encased in a fiberglass shell. Kayaking tends to attract people of a fairly austere ecological conscience, or maybe it makes them that way. One guide of Bergh’s acquaintance requires her clients to bag and carry out their own excrement-and weighs the bags to make sure no one cheated. Bergh himself is so sensitive to human impact that in his winter job of guiding ski trips in the Rockies he can barely stand to ski over someone else’s tracks. That’s not a problem with kayaking, obviously.
As we paddled, the islands slid behind one another, grew nearer or farther, but they never changed appearance, somber clumps of fir trees rising from broken shelves and ledges of rock. Each was fortuitously equipped by nature with a shell beach for landing. Great blue herons eyed us indifferently from the rocks; a harbor seal showed us his muscular, glistening brown back. Squat lobster boats buzzed by on their high-speed trips from trap to trap, threatening to grind us to mush; not infrequently, Bergh warned, the lobstermen tie down the wheel and set the throttle while they tend to their catch in back. For partial compensation, one can sometimes induce them to stop and sell a couple of lobsters at wholesale.
The seas began coming out of the south, the direction of open water, and the waves began to slow down and stand up. Water sloshed onto the decks and puddled in our cockpit aprons. Bergh reads tides, waves, currents and winds the way a broker reads the ticker; to him this meant it was time to get off the water and let nature take its course. We gained the lee of a small clump of rocks where great black-backed gulls huddled into the wind. Seeing us, they flew up in a bunch-inexplicably, I thought, in light of the contempt with which most creatures with “great” in their names treat the passage of human beings. But I soon saw why. We had scattered a small flock of eider ducks on the water, leaving the ducklings suddenly unprotected and vulnerable; a gull flapped down and seized one by the neck, then flew back to its perch and swallowed it nearly whole.
“We killed that duck,” Bergh said somberly.
“I think the gull killed it,” I replied.
“No, we did,” he insisted. I saw why he was upset. We had violated the ethic of sea kayaking; we had made a track.
We rested, gathered our strength for a half-mile dash across a channel where wave fought tide to an uneasy standoff, and put in on an island about the size of a hockey rink. There we made an elaborate camp. By the standards of wilderness activities such as backpacking, sea kayaking is ridiculously prodigal of weight and space. Each boat has a largish hold fore and aft crammed full of watertight sacks of food, gear and clothing, especially food. Owing to the dangers of exhaustion, sea kayaking is the one sport besides sumo wrestling in which participants are constantly exhorted to eat more. On longer trips Bergh has been known to take along campstools and folding tables. “Everyone thinks it’s crazy, until they try them,” he says. “If you’ve got the room, why have your butt in the sand the whole time?”
We awoke the next morning to a thick white fog; only the sound of lobster boats charging across the water at fall throttle told us we were camped on an island and not, say, a mountain. We ate breakfast for two straight hours. By midmorning the fog had cleared, and I pulled on my damp wet suit, which was like trying to get a golf ball through the neck of a balloon. We broke camp and set off again, three white streaks on the green ocean, which held no terrors for us.
title: “From Sea To Shining Sea” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-17” author: “Margaret Petrie”
Exploring the new Louisiana Purchase, forging to the Pacific and back in three years (1804-1806), they were the first Americans to see the entire sweep of the continent. Carefully mapping a journey of more than 4,000 miles, these explorers gave America its first tree sense of the epic reach of the United States. No Hollywood scriptwriter could hope to improve on this story, so improbably wondrous that the most shameless back-lot hack might hesitate before inventing a character like Sacagawea, the Native American woman who bailed the white men out of trouble at crucial points on their journey.
Ironically, Hollywood-not to mention grade-school textbooks tends to draw the curtain just when the story gets most interesting. They say nothing, for example, about Lewis’s manic depression, his scandal-ridden political career or his eventual suicide at the age of 35. Ambrose, on the other hand, has written acclaimed, multivolume biographies of both Eisenhower and Nixon. Heroes and troubled souls are his meat, and in Lewis he gets a twofer. A lifelong woodsman with experience in the militia, as well as Jefferson’s protege and personal secretary, Lewis was handpicked by the president to lead the Western expedition. Clark was Lewis’s choice as co-leader (they were old army buddies), but Ambrose leaves no doubt that intellectually, the expedition belonged to Lewis. He was a natural leader, an avid naturalist and a splendid writer, The Lewis journals are a beguiling mix scientific observation, travel writing and dry humor. In one entry, he eagerly anticipates his first sighting of a grizzly bear. A month later, having suffered several near-fatal encounters with grizzlies, he wrote, “I find that the curiossity of our party is pretty well satisfyed with rispect to this anamal.” (It was upon reading the journals in 1975 that Ambrose was inspired to spend several family vacations on the Lewis and Clark trail and ultimately to write this book.)
The multitalented Lewis was a chip off the Jeffersonian block. But the chip was chipped. Inquisitive and adventurous, he was also mighty squirrelly, happy only when he was in motion and singularly lacking in self-awareness. A national hero by the age of 32, he had become, three years later, a political failure as governor of the Louisiana territory as well as a drug addict and an alcoholic -proof of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s observation that “there are no second acts in American lives.”
The verdict on Lewis and Clark’s mission is mixed. Ambrose calls Jefferson’s dream of uniting the American empire through the water courses of the Missouri and Columbia rivers “a breathtaking vision.” But his admiration does not blind him to the expedition’s more material realities. “Lewis and Clark were advance men and traveling salesmen,” Ambrose writes, selling the Indians on the idea of cooperating with white aims, selling themselves and the folks back home on the idea of American empire. In their exploits were sown the seeds of American imperialism.
A remarkably balanced historian, Ambrose is neither a revisionist nor an apologist. Yes, he allows, Lewis always condescended to the Indians, lied when convenient and on one occasion stole from them. At the same time, Ambrose points out that despite all the “Great White Father greets his children” patter, here was a white man who admired most Indians and hoped that they could be amicably integrated into American life. Here and elsewhere, Ambrose weighs shortcomings against positive attributes and ultimately presents us with a convincing hero, “a great company commander, the greatest of all American explore, an in the top ran Of world explorers.” In this cynical age, “Undaunted Courage” is a dubious title, but Ambrose makes it stick. “If I was ever in a desperate situation,” he declares, “I would want Meriwether Lewis for my leader.” When it comes to assaying American history, one could say the same for Stephen Ambrose.
