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For Tim O’Brien, and for the men – young once – of the Air Cavalry.
At the bow one paddled an old, old paddle. Long, thick and wide. He portaged it with the bulky camouflage lifevest slung through the shoulders while he humped a Duluth pack over 50 pounds.
In the Duluth pack he carried a hammock system of a rain tarp and blanket and hammock and many guy wires. He carried fuel and canisters and a stove – two stoves for contingencies. He carried a hatchet and clothing and food.
The food was dehydrated packets, and fresh eggs in a yellow container and thick cut bacon and one onion for a pita-bread sandwich with sausage and cheese and mustard packets stolen from the gas station. The fresh food he carried and paddled until it ran out or perished.
The Duluth pack molded his back, and the shoulder straps pulled his sternum wide to ventilate his lungs.
But he for one was immune to the hardship of weight.
More importantly he carried, broken down in four pieces, both a fly-fishing rod and reel and spinning rod and reel, and the flies and lures for each he carried in his camouflage lifevest mentioned above. At times he carried fresh fish filleted in Ziploc bags from the morning catch for the meal in the evening.
And most importantly on the second trip each portage he carried a canoe, 55 pounds, fiberglass, well-used, 16 feet or so, broad and squat. An old man’s canoe. A duck hunter’s canoe.
The canoe was hand-painted camouflage in earth brown and crisscrossed with the green color of wild rice and orange the color of nutgrass.
The older man associated with the camouflage canoe carried the stern paddle and a Duluth pack weighing 35 pounds. His lifevest was camouflaged, too, and lighter, older and faded, and he wore it on the second portages while he carried fishing nets and his fly rod.
He carried the lighter pack, but he carried many other things with him. He could not speak to the many other things other than the above that his younger buddy carried because they did not speak much or share much about those things they carried.
Apart from the nonmaterial things he carried, there was, too, the old tent, thirty-plus years old, and bag and pad and wet, musty, musky clothing; an old stove, 30-plus years old, and old white gas that burned yellow and warm and then hot and blue; food like the above, and mixed nuts, and rice like the Vietcong, and jerky and one onion again, plus one garlic bulb and one ginger root; coffee and tea and salt pork for salt and fat and protein which was negligible.
There was one, who is a girl, that humped her own chow in orange panniers. She forsake the chow on the first 48 hours of the trip, and then having earned it ate voraciously like a wolf. She humped treats that she got at noon and in the evenings. She was an indomitable bird dog and carrying her wide, bulky panniers she went into the hazelnuts and alders and honeysuckle with difficulty. It was July so the grouse chicks could flush and fly from her into the low brush, the hen grouse clucking and flapping just off to lead her away from the chicks. Then having treed the birds she would yelp, which was the only sound in the forest for many silent miles around.
At the portage landing she jumped into the water and stretched her legs; departing from the portage she crawled over the gunwale into her spot between the knees of the older man. For many long hours she stood or sat in standing water in the hull of the canoe, unamused by the moose or beaver, more curious at the mergansers and loons swimming or flying by.
She carried deer flies and horseflies and mosquitoes but had a resigned attitude toward them all. In camp she dug wallows to get to the cool earth and to escape the flies. Though she’d roll in fish bones and beaver castor and ashes, within a week she was as clean and soft and sweet-smelling as she’d ever been.
She carried nothing else.
They carried themselves, those three, those chosen few, on the portage in different ways.
One carried himself as a Tommy from Manchester in Colonel Nicholson’s command, with dignity and strength of spirit, with the will to not only endure, but to overcome. He carried himself in one manner as a Confederate from Blacksburg during Pickett’s Charge across the long, long mile of green open fields under blue skies towards the Union position at The Angle at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania: Assured, confident in the cause, thinking – as his father said – that if one in a hundred men die, it would not be him.
One carried himself low, hunched, heavy and troubled as a young GI slogging onto the gray beach at Omaha, heavy with water, under no command but his buddy’s, with concern and care, and only the thought to endure by eliminating the pillboxes that he could not make out in the distance but knew were there. At Pickett’s Charge he would’ve thought to himself, “If one in a hundred perishes, he would be me.”
The third was forever and ever like an Italian girl from the Bronx, on V-J Day – the end of the War – in Times Square, looking, looking, looking for a sailor, handsome or no, to kiss.
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