Portage: A Family, a Canoe, and the Search for the Good Life by Sue Leaf
Portage is a wonderful collection of dream-fulfilling canoeing adventures commingling with nature and spiced with tidbits of historically enlightening information.
Sue Leaf and her husband Tom chose a good way of life...very satisfying and immensely rewarding while ecologically living with nature.
This is a great lesson plan for humanity to follow while reaping gratifying returns with positive self-sustaining rewards.
I loved all the chapters, but my favorite was when Sue shared her experiences canoeing the Bois Brule River in Douglas County, Wisconsin. I grew up near the Brule, and some of my earliest adventures were in a canoe on Brule.
Click here for a link to a chapter of one of my wild experiences on the Brule.
EXCERPTS from Portage by Sue Leaf
Mr. Ito had packed a book and a lawn chair and would spend the time on shore, but Bob and Joanne and I could paddle about to our heart’s delight. I rushed home to change into my swimsuit and get permission. I can still hear my father’s voice. “Oh, I don’t know, Susan Jean. That sounds like not a good idea. Too dangerous. Those canoes are tippy. What if you capsized?” “I can swim,” I pointed out. “I’d wear a life jacket. The Itos have life jackets. They’re required by law.” “Yes, you can swim,” he countered. “But can you swim in deep water? No, no, you can’t go. It’s just too dangerous.” My temper flared. This made no sense! The Itos weren’t foolish. They were very smart, in fact. All sorts of people paddled canoes without fear, without endangerment. I was not going to lose this opportunity. “Well, I don’t care. I’m going,” I declared.
I had the skill to be on the water, that normal people went out in canoes every day, that risk was involved in everything one does.
What amazes me even now is that this time there were no consequences. No one yelled when I got home. No one clobbered me. I wasn’t grounded. I lost no privileges. My parents and I must have reached a kind of détente that day,
How fortunate we sometimes are, the blind and naive young who operate without the benefit of experience. I realize now that I myself had been a canoe that day, cutting with ease through the water, swiftly gliding into my future.
“What is: the good life.” Never wanting more, never striving for more, never trying to accumulate stuff. Surely those seventeen-year-olds in Mr. Johnson’s classroom, at least two of them, saw even then the glimmer of wisdom when it is asked this way. The veracity of this statement is especially obvious when sitting in a canoe, making your way across sparkling blue water, with everything you will need for the night and the next morning stowed in Duluth packs wedged between thwarts. One’s needs and desires are bounded by what is, and surely it is good, beauty, and grandeur apparent at every hand.
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