Ralph Sneeden
Canoe
after Henri Vaillancourt
“All of us gone out of reach of change” —Edward Thomas
It was in September many years ago I paddled a birchbark canoe for the first and only time. We had to let it soak before we launched, standing next to it in the muddy shallows, leaning on the gunwales, making small talk as the tide flooded in, the marsh grass held its breath for another dunking, and the fibers of the hull began to register, to swell with the ocean’s information.
A war canoe, wide, with pronounced, vertical bow and stern, it could carry at least six, and you can only imagine how an object so relatively light responded to so many people working to propel it, all bent to the task, calling out to synchronize as we cleared the estuary into the empty bay where summer was being repealed, and the current conceded, gave up discouraging our progress.
Now that we had found our peripheral rhythm, we stroked in silence, eyes released from each other’s arms and paddle blades to absorb the panorama, almost a little disappointed no one was out there slamming along in a sleek fiberglass outboard to witness this quiet anachronism prowling along the deserted beach underneath the unraveling basket of Boston-bound contrails.
That early Autumn brilliance was suddenly upon me today, back again from before our children, their marriages, their own children. How the sun was a hot yoke across my shoulders. How that canoe grew more at home each second spent riding the dip and surge of confused seawater, gradually recognizing in that translucence a precarious blue language, some forgotten unratified agreement. Is there a statute of limitations for buoyancy?
I haven’t thought about that day so vividly since it happened. And I think I understand it better now, appreciate more deliberately while hunkering in this box of books, guitars, mementos and empty coffee cups my study has become, how aware I was of being suspended by a tension from which I had been estranged in every other boat. This one read the surface like braille, all flex
and accommodation; the rough husk had patience, bearing a band of clumsy dilettante hijackers over deep trenches where they should have drowned. Under my knees, the wet bark undulated between ribs as I stabbed the Atlantic and drew (take that, and that), convinced I was hauling the salvaged hulk of someone else’s past to a new, safer harbor, not some anxious hungry part of myself farther into the future. Do the implements of heritage (and, by association, longing) have an expiration date?
For two years, I’d seen it hanging, parched, capsized, sullen as a sarcophagus in the rafters of my landlord’s barn, dusted with decades of swallow down, bat guano, cairns of acorn caps and seed chaff arranged by wintering rodents. I visited it as you would a friend who’s gravely ill, equivocating outside his door, fearing your presence might hurt him by reminding him of what you have, and what he is missing or stands to lose, as if, somehow, the value of his life depended on you.
Ralph Sneeden’s poems and essays have appeared in Agni, The Common, Ecotone, Harvard Review, The Kenyon Review, New England Review, The New Republic, Ploughshares, The Surfer's Journal, and many other magazines. The title poem from his book, Evidence of the Journey (Harmon Blunt) received the Friends of Literature Prize from Poetry magazine. He was born in Los Angeles, has been a fellow at MacDowell, and currently lives in New Hampshire.