Winter Float on the Meramec
by Robert Lee Mahon
I can only open so much junk mail that reads, “This cancer plan will protect you and your family for the low semi-annual premium of 25.80,” before, like Ishmael, I must “get to sea as soon as I can.”
But getting to sea in Missouri means canoeing: or floating as we call it. So when that restlessness strikes in the middle of December, certain difficulties rear their heads. It’s all very well that my junk mail and bills make me feel like Thoreau’s farmer, bearing his house upon his back. Nonetheless, when winter approaches it’s more politic to pay the bills, read in central-heated comfort, and resign myself till spring.
At least till this past December, when my youngest brother, Tim, and I floated the Meramec River. For the record, the temperature didn’t get past the low twenties, and dipped down to five degrees. Also for the record: we left about noon on Friday, and were picked up about three p.m. Saturday, putting in below Highway N (Cambelton Bridge) and taking out near the Highway 185 bridge in Meramec State Park, for a grand total of just about ten miles. No odyssey, certainly. Still, we saw no other canoeists, fishermen or other human fauna during our twenty-seven hours on the river.
It is, I believe, the quality of a float which makes it noteworthy–not its length or duration. Ours, like Thoreau’s stay at Walden Pond (which lasted, after all, just two of his 45 years), was by way of an experiment. We wanted, simply, to see if we could do it.
Some of the pleasure from any such expedition naturally derives, not from the expedition itself, but from the preparation for it. This is especially true of winter floating, since we were acutely aware that we would be out: exposed, vulnerable to the weather.
Accordingly, most of our packing went toward making sure we would remain dry and warm. We started with a tent, which we rarely bother with in the spring and summer. To that we added a large tarp and plenty of rope, to use in erecting a windbreak. Our sleeping gear consisted of mummy bags rated down to zero, and air mattresses. We added a two-bladed ax, two camp saws, and a hatchet.
Finally, each of us packed a complete set of spare clothes, with a towel, in a separate trash bag. We also packed the sleeping bags and food in individual trash bags. -The age of plastic has made playing voyager a lot easier.
The principle behind all of this preparation is simple, and illustrates the unique challenge of winter floating. In one word: insulation. Fortunately, on a short winter float this struggle usually manifests itself mostly in the extremities: it’s not a question of death or frost bite, but of cold hands, runny noses, numbed feet. Sitting in a canoe in December won’t kill you, but it will make you uncomfortable enough to remind you…
We had floated only about a mile from our put-in point when we rounded a gentle right hand bend to behold a splendid gravel bar, strewn with drift wood. Since it was close to two o’clock, this looked like our spot.
It does take time to erect a comfortable camp in winter. We split the duties–while Tim went after the wood with the ax and saw, I unloaded the canoe, set up the tent, and began to prepare our windbreak.
Our recipe uses everything, including the canoe, which is emptied completely and placed on its side, keel to the prevailing wind, leaning inward–toward the fire. A paddle jammed against the middle thwart, and into the gravel, serves as a tent pole. Then the whole structure is stabilized and wind-proofed by heaping gravel all around the bottom of the canoe with the shovel.
I broke out the tarp, draping it over the canoe with at least a foot of tarp flat on the ground behind the canoe. Once again I used the shovel, this time burying the exposed strip of tarp.
Everything secured at ground level, the remaining two paddles were drafted as poles for the upper half of the lean-to. A few lengths of clothesline served admirably as stays, and our shelter was complete. (I prefer clothesline to more expensive nylon rope. While it doesn’t last as long, a few dollars will buy a bunch, and since it is cheap you can cut it, hack it, burn it, even lose it and not worry.)
More shovel work gave us a fire pit, with the gravel, piled up opposite the wind break, serving as a reflector. Home sweet home. Surrounded by piles of wood, gear safely stored beneath the canoe, the fire kindled, protected from the wind, we’d recaptured that elemental sense of security that civilization dulls and obscures. We’d beaten the cold and the dark, that “doorway of snow through which man emerged,” as Loren Eiseley puts it in talking of the ice ages.
These little meditations occur when the fire is burning well, and, for the first time the feet warm up.
For a fire, of course, is the sine qua non of winter floating. Primarily an aesthetic luxury in the warmer seasons, it becomes a simple necessity in the winter. The entire strategy of the float revolves around fuel for that fire. We’d expected to spend much of the first afternoon gathering wood, and we were not disappointed. (At that, I still had to get up and gather more at three a.m.)
I am, admittedly, a fanatic when it comes to fire, and cold weather makes me worse. My idea of a winter campfire is a huge pile of logs burning in front of my lean-to. The Indians of my childhood novels can snicker all they want; a campfire won’t replace central heat, but, combined with a reflector and a lean-to, a large one radiates enough heat for relative comfort. Huddling over a tiny fire to conserve driftwood is not my idea of economy. Rather, one of the supreme pleasures of winter floating is to get so warm you need to stand up and poke your upper torso over the windbreak to let the icy wind cool you down.
And with the luxury to sit, warm feet to the fire, backs in the warm air pocket formed by our lean-to, a swallow of bourbon bursting in our stomachs, the stew bubbling near the coals, comes the luxury of more meditations.
Upon work for instance.
Every American citizen should have to set up, a camp just once in his life (or, better yet, once or twice a year, so as to be constantly reminded), in the expectation of spending a winter night in it.
If nothing else, the experience should eradicate any romanticism the camper possesses about life in the wilderness.
Life outside in the winter quickly resolves itself down to at least one of those elemental simplicities that Thoreau meant to corner, and mean it is: life in the wild is work. Hard work, unremitting work. For over three hours we gather wood. Then, through the night we burn what we’ve gathered. We go out and get more, and then burn that.
What if we weren’t carrying our food in tin cans? And needed clothes? (It’s called subsistence living, and Thoreau might have managed it with a half-day’s work, but I’ve always wondered about those beans of his.) Not much time, certainly, for poetry, philosophy, or for that matter, arguing the relative merits of football teams or free agent salaries.
And then there’s the dirt. In summer, the river can help with personal hygiene, but cleanliness looks a lot further from godliness when the windchill drips below zero. By the end of our bit more than 24 hours on the river, dirt will be embedded under our fingernails, our hands will be smoke and dirt-stained, our noses will have run all over our sleeves, our jeans will be filthy with ash, more dirt, and the remnants of that stew bubbling so cheerily right now. It’s no wonder that one of the unspoken pleasures of outdoor living is the hot shower once you get back indoors.
But like the man says, “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.” And as we paddle down the river the next morning, banging our feet on the canoe bottom to keep them just half-frozen, ice collars slowly accreting on the paddle handles, noses numb from the fitful head wind, we realize that what we’ve bought is worth the price.
Even on float trips, times like this don’t come often. The day breaks and remains absolutely clear, the stark blue sky unblemished by a single cloud. And the river is the sky’s compliment: ice-edged today (yesterday, not a sliver), the Meramec is caught in its essential beauty. It’s as if we can see the river naked now, uncluttered by the detritus of spring and summer: no leaves, no insects, no fish (we see none at least), little algae, few beer cans. There is little of life, either ours or others, in the river this day. But looking at bottom rocks 15 feet down as we float over pools clear as emerald crystal, I think: “Here, at last, is the river. I’ve floated it so many times, but I was distracted. Here, by God, is the river. ”
We cannot fish, or swim, or shoot, or read, or doze, or drink beer. We do not have to sweat, swat mosquitos or cuss flies. We paddle to keep warm, and then coast and gawk: at clear blue sky and crystal green water, at a single hawk sailing in the pale, sharp winter sunshine, at a lone frog crouched beneath the thin shoreline ice. We grin at each other, and mumble our cliches about what a great day this is. Then we wipe our noses, and bend once again to the paddles.
Later, sitting with our backs to the stone of a sun-warmed wall, equipment stacked, belly-filled, waiting for my wife to pick us up, I see the Meramec, now burnished silver by the westering sun; and again I think, “There is the river.”
I remember some lines of Robinson Jeffers. Written about his beloved Big Sur, his advice also makes sense in Missouri: “To feel and speak the astonishing beauty of things–earth, stone and water, to feel greatly, and understand greatly, and express greatly the natural beauty, is the sole business of poetry.”
Perhaps it is the sole business of all men, poets or not, each in his way. Perhaps that is why Thoreau left Walden: to try to express that beauty which overwhelmed him, and which lies everywhere in Nature, in all seasons.
