With Hans Solo captaining and Chewbacca as co-pilot, the Millennium Falcon famously made the Kessel Run in less than 13 parsecs. In his young adulthood Han convinced Chewie to make it 12 parsecs (“Ya round down!” he said). By his middle age it had become “under 12 parsecs.” Either way, the hyperdrive was working that day.
In the Fall in duck season I experience my own race against time or a clock or history, when I put in the 17’ camo-painted Grumman canoe, loaded with decoys and Peppy and paddles and straw, at the Swamp River landing on Otter Lake Road, and paddle as powerfully as I can upstream a mile or more to our spots where the Swamp branches into tentacles like a monster in the dark.
Some mornings are clear and there are all the stars and planets out in the darkness and the river basin is black and the sky is space and that is how you navigate in the dark before the light comes gray then pink then red on your left, Easterly.
But if you’re lucky as a duck hunter then it is overcast and windy and loud and it is pure black at 5:30 a.m. and the only things navigating you are instinct and memory or the sounds of reeds along the banks under the canoe like fingernails on the hull of the aluminum canoe or the wild rice hanging up your paddle, these meaning that you are too far port or starboard, so you correct and find the lapping waves and wind of the main channel.
From the landing in the narrowness to the first dog-leg left and a little beyond in the dark it is an asteroid field of beaver. Peppy stands in the bow smelling and sniffing the air, and then in the blackness off five or ten or fifteen yards comes a “Slap- Splash!” of the beaver tail, and every time it spooks us. Then in the broad blackness the startling by the mallards that quack somewhere at our coming and take flight somewhere in the darkness.
Always on the Swamp – flowing up South to North – the wind is in your face. Maybe it is how the broad valley channels the wind. Maybe it is that in the dark at 5:30 a.m. the wind blows North, and at 8:30 a.m., going downstream, it turns to the South, against us.
And always it is a race against time to get to our spots – the stand of cattails in the middle of the swamp, or the willow point at the first tributary, or the cove on the right past the jack pine or the paddies of wild rice on the left. To get there in the half-light in time to put out a dozen mallards, half-a-dozen wood ducks, two ringnecks and two honkers. Then to slip up and camouflage and prepare and rest in peace oneself before shooting, which is a half-hour before daybreak.
A better duck hunter would wake up earlier. But I’m only on the edge of stove-fire season, and without a woodstove stoked overnight it is difficult to get out of bed at 4:45 a.m. and 30-some degrees. There’s never enough time for breakfast, and sometimes not enough for coffee.
I do not remember to what adventure the Kessel Run led Hans and Chewie and the Millennium Falcon. Only that it led to Kessel itself. Like the old, old stand of cattails habited by the muskrat and beaver and us duck hunters and dogs, one third the way up the Swamp River – that is, South – on the open water between the wild rice and reeds and sedge grass and willows and alders, where all good things are, timed not in parsecs, but in seconds and minutes and the shooting hour and first-light and the new morning and our new day.
I would like to rest in less peace but more power, as the Jewish service of the dead has said. That I might be less tired and sleepy and anxious when I arrive at my destination.
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