DAD'S PADDLE
“He loved everything about camp, especially canoeing.”
My father grew up in Philadelphia but spent his boyhood summers at White Mountain Camp on Sebago Lake in Maine, first as a camper, then as a counselor. He loved everything about camp, especially canoeing. He taught his charges the strokes and how to be safe on the water.
Sometime during the years when he was starting a family and establishing his orthopedic practice, Dad inherited the decades-old canoe he’d paddled on visits to his father’s cabin in Medford Lakes, New Jersey. It was a bright yellow 18-foot Old Town, made of canvas and wood with cork sponsons along the gunwales to enhance its balance in the water. As a boy, Dad had christened it Old Bus because it could carry so many kids. After he inherited it, he bought himself a proper Old Town paddle, made for steering from the stern. He schooled my brothers, my sister and me in the strokes and safety precautions he’d taught his campers.
Each August, Old Bus went with us to the Jersey shore and rested on sawhorses in front of our rented beach house when not in use. As teenagers, my brothers and their friends loved to paddle it furiously through the breakers, then turn about and ride it in on the waves as if it were a surfboard. Such jarring treatment of such a venerable craft eventually took its toll. When it was no longer seaworthy, Dad donated Old Bus to a summer camp in Mays Landing, New Jersey, where it lived out its days filled with soil and geraniums.
His next canoe was handsome and dark green. He called it Dad’s Dream and planned to take it out on streams nearby, but one night, thieves spirited it away from its sawhorses in the backyard. He never bought another canoe, settling instead for rented aluminum ones, though he disliked the way they handled—too light and prone to side-slip and tip over. He disliked the aluminum paddles as well and continued to depend on his own faithful old favorite—solid, sleek and responsive.
Once or twice a summer, Dad would take us on a day-long canoe trip in the New Jersey Pine Barrens. On the designated morning, he’d don his old blue swim trunks, his multi-pocketed canvas painter’s jacket, an ancient straw hat and the moccasins he wore in and out of the water. For him, function topped form. His orange backpack held his Swiss Army knife, his first-aid kit and a very old pack of what he called the emergency Chiclets. We’d load his station wagon with an ample picnic lunch, flotation cushions, his paddle plus extra paddles for the rest of us, and off we’d go, singing the silly camp songs he’d taught us.
It's been 16 years since Dad died, and nearly 20 since this paddle sliced cleanly through the cedar waters of the Pine Barrens in his capable hands. I keep it because it reminds me just how much joy he derived from those canoe trips with us. While he relished a solitary paddle on a small stream, he took far greater pleasure in initiating so many of us into the pastime he loved. And there were many. Over the years, cousins, nieces and nephews, friends, and friends of friends have all told me how fondly they remember the fun of those long-ago trips.
I’ve also met patients of Dad’s who’ve told me how kind and caring a doctor he was, always taking time to explain X-rays and test results and what he was doing as he worked. He was a good doctor to the paddle, too. After years of use, it developed a stress fracture along the shaft. Had it been a living bone, he might have applied a plaster cast, but since it was wood, he wrapped it tightly with duct tape and continued to use it. After all this time, the tape still holds.
—Susie Toland
Susie Toland lives and writes in Philadelphia.