File photo/Rhonda Silence This canoe does not belong to the writer, but to editor Rhonda Silence, however, it too, has seen many wonderful family trips.
Yesterday I went out to the shed behind the cabin to affixthe new license stickers on my ’72 Grumman. As I wiped off the space to mount the new stickers, I began to think about my life as measured by this canoe: as a new father in the Pacific Northwest, as a Midwestern weekend adventurer and now, as a grandfather spending lots of time at the family cabin on the edge of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness.
In the spring of 1972 my son Joel and I drove down to Seattle from our home in Bellingham, Washington to pick up the new Grumman from REI. I was 32 and Joel was 3. On the way home we stopped by my folks’ place in Seattle to show off the new Grumman. I mentioned to my dad that the new canoe rack whistled at highway speeds. “I think I have a nice wooden roof top carrier that my friend Carl Johnson gave me in 1948 when he traded in his Chrysler,” said my dad and he fished it out of his shed. The Aslanians are savers. I still use that rack.
The Grumman has been with me for more than half my life and nearly all of the lives of my children. In the beginning, we used it at our family’s lake cabin on Lake Whatcom near Bellingham. The young kids loved to swamp the canoe in shallow water, turning it upside down and hollering into the air space underneath.
We would canoe to the abandoned railroad trestle across the lake so Joel could pry rusty spikes from the rotting pilings. We had boxes of those prized spikes around the cabin. We dipped our paddles near bass nests in the shallow water and skirted the shore like stealthhunters, concealed by the overhanging cedar boughs.
On the salt water, one of my favorite destinations was the uninhabited Hat Island not far from Larrabee State Park. We would paddle out there to picnic and Joel would accumulate piles of star fish and my daughter Sasha would make Hula skirts out of kelp. When we got home the Grumman always got a bath to wash off the salt water.
My wife, Solfrid, was not happy driving around Bellingham with the canoe on top of our Chevelle all summer. I liked to be ready for spontaneous adventures. The kids and I would often shoot out to Lake Padden for a paddle/ fishing before or after dinner—we did catch a few trout too. But Solfrid had to admit the canoe did make it much easier to find the car at the grocery store parking lot.
One of our last outings in Bellingham was portaging the Grumman into a little public lake just off the Mount Baker Highway. On the way in through the forest, Solfrid noticed that we were walking through a meadow of wild strawberries. I plopped the Grumman down and quickly all four of us were on our hands and knees eating the berries—never have we gorged on as many wild strawberries—what an incredible day.
When we moved to Minnesota, the Grumman had a new place to play: the St. Croix River. One trip stands out. Theweekend after Labor Day in 1975, we camped at St Croix State Park. We hired an outfitter to run us about 15 miles up river. Theday was hot, the water was warm. We paddled a little, swam a lot and ate a huge picnic. I recall repeatedly wading down river where I would stand in the middle of the river and the kids would swim down to me. To this day I have never seen bigger smiles on any swimmers’ faces. We also spent many, many Father’s Days floating down the river. The kids were getting bigger, I was getting older, but the Grumman was a constant.
For many years the Grumman was the canoe of choice for our annual BWCA trips. On many of those trips I would carry the Grumman and a large Duluth Pack. (Now at age 69 and sporting a fake hip, I carry a Kevlar canoe without the Duluth Pack.)
On one of our BWCA trips with the Grumman, a couple of my buddies wanted to take pictures of Basswood Falls from beneath the falls. I was the designated paddler; they took the pictures. I felt pretty daring and took us in too close; the falls spit us out like watermelon seeds. It was by far the most wild, dramatic capsizing in the Grumman’s history and all the pictures were ruined.
When my son took his college girlfriend, now his wife, out for her first BWCA trip in the Grumman shortly after their college graduation in 1991, they were young and bullheaded and knew they did not need chemical bug repellant—this was June, the worst month for bugs. In spite of the bugs, they had a wonderful trip.
Since 1993 the Grumman has moved to a third home, a cabin on Clearwater Lake just off the Gunflint Trail north of Grand Marais in the BWCA. The lake allows motors, and one of my buddies came up with a Grumman motor mount and I found a nice little 1963 three horsepower Evinrude. I used to be a purist, but the motor does allow easy trips back to the cabin on those windy days when I’m with my little granddaughters. Please know the Grumman’s still had many more miles under paddle than outboard.
One windy day last summer was almost the end of the Grumman and me. It was Labor Day weekend and Solfrid and I were a third of the way down the lake inside the BWCA when the canoe foundered and swamped after filling up with water from the wind-driven waves. We were in the water hanging onto the gunwales for over an hour before we were finally able to maneuver the Grumman (and us) to shore and dump out the water. With our one remaining paddle, we eventually made it back to the cabin, thankful for those flotation tanks the Grumman folks stuffed into the bow and stern. Safe and warm that evening, Solfrid and I mused about the events of the day and our combined age of 132 years.
As I walked out of the shed this year, I glanced back at the Grumman and thought how spending that $300 in 1972 was one of the best expenditures I ever made. A few years ago, anxious to repeat history, I brokered a deal for my daughter and her young family to buy a neighbor’s used Alumacraft. I wrote Sasha a note. “A canoe is the best bargain you can find for a young family. ” With luck, they’ll have it their whole lives, too.
This story, submitted by Paul Aslanian of Clearwater Lake in Grand Marais, seemed a perfect addition to the Cook County News- Herald issue, which will be on newsstands on Father’s Day weekend.
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