Drifting

DRIFTING / Carter Martin We would all be idle if we could. Samuel Johnson, Boswell's Life, III. April 1776 I am happiest when I am idle. I could live for months without performing any kind of labor, and at the expiration of that time I should feel fresh and vigorous enough to go right on in the same way for numerous more months. Artemus Ward, Pyrotechny, III. Pettinghill AYELLOW AUTUMN LEAF FALLS slowly down, spinning, to land soundlessly on the smooth surface of a slow-moving stream. The leaf is slightly cupped and floats with the almost imperceptible current, turning first one way then the other, then not turning at all; it briefly touches another leaf. It passes a rock, gets caught a few moments in the eddy there, touches the rock and returns to its downstream motion at the very place where it had entered. A person small enough and light enough could lean back against the curved and raised stem of this yellow leaf, drift with it wherever it would take him, look up into the trees and the blue air above him, or down into the green water on which he rides. He might say to himself, "Ah, this is canoeing; this is what I dreamed about when I was a child, and here it is, all true." Thus, the Platonic form of one of the most basic and perhaps the most popular kinds of canoeing, which can simply be called drifting. Its appeal is so strong that one should never allow the ethic of work and effort to subvert his need for this experience. While there is a fine and noble tradition of physical skill and muscular power and moral bravery in past and present American canoeing, it is only the yang requiring the yin of drifting. Choosing a boat should be as unconsciously meditative as drifting itself; use whatever is available, and think about your choice as little as possible. Drifting should be autonomic, spontaneous, and intuitive; the torpor is bénéficient and spiritually productive, but it must be genuine from inception to conclusion. Even the decision to drift or go drifting should be as nearly as possible subliminal. The boundaries of choice are wide. At one excluded extreme is mere flotation, which allows moving with the current but subjects one to assault by the temperature differential between the water and ambient The Missouri Review · 222 air, between one's body warmth and the sapping chill of the river or lake. Inner-tubes, life jackets, water-wings, air mattresses and the like are thus not acceptable for drifting because they induce self-consciousness, a concern for altering a state rather than simply occupying one. At the other extreme is any craft too wide, too long, too deep, or too heavy to permit the natural motion of current to take its maximum effect on the drifter. Weight increases draft, i.e., the depth of the boat in the water, and as draft increases, so does the need for deeper and deeper water. Ideal drifting occurs when draft approaches zero, enabling the boat to pass unimpeded over snags and nearly exposed boulders, yet still be responsive to variations in current. The liabilities of excessively long or wide boats are horizontal rather than vertical. Length impedes easy and natural turns, a basic pleasure of drifting; furthermore, length limits one's choice of rivers in a ratio of boat length to a factor derived from the width of the stream and the acuteness of its bends. Boat width is similarly to be considered if narrow and shallow passages, as between boulders or between a rock and a snag, are to be negotiated. Close tolerances here are a great pleasure, but scraping or stopping are disruptive and disheartening. Logically one could conclude that the small coracle is the ideal craft, only as wide as long, drawing at most two inches of water, and being keelless, bowless, sternless, turning at the whim of the current, the wind, the paddler, or spinning from a concatenation of all three at once. No craft more resembles the floating leaf in shape and relative weight, and yet one need not be Ariel, Puck, or...