When my wife Leigh and I moved from Cape Cod to southern Norway in 2005 I left my sea kayak and paddle behind, under the deck of our small cottage in Onset, Massachusetts. When I returned precipitously to the States to be with Leigh in her final illness, I could not think of kayak or kayaking. Now in northern California, with a lovely marsh and abundant waterbirds almost beside my door, the Pacific Ocean and San Francisco Bay a short distance away, I wish I had my kayak — or rather, I wish I had a lighter, more modest kayak of the kind described below by Matthew Battles.
I was almost born on the water, Mercer Island in Lake Washington, but I graduated to kayaking only a decade ago, loving the boat's beauty, its quiet grace and oneness with ocean or lake, my ability to tote it - portage - on my shoulder, paddle in my other hand, as I hiked from lake to lake or around stretches of rapids in Canada and the US. My best teacher was also an arborist, and I swapped his kayaking lessons for joining him climbing trees.
Off the coast of Maine among the islands, in the sheltered waters of Eggomoggin Reach between Deer Isle and the mainland, on the open ocean, in almost any weather. The usually quieter water of Squam Lake in central New Hampshire, often at dawn in the company of loons and their haunting cry. In Onset Bay off Cape Cod. And most recently, a solo adventure across Canada, paddling in lakes, rivers and finally the sea. A favorite book in my childhood was Paddle to the Sea, about the making of a small kayak and its voyage from British Columbia to the Atlantic. A contrarian at the time, I traveled the other way.
"A recent kayak design," writes Matthew Battles,
"seems like a reprise of the Inuit boat. The Oru Kayak, a folding boat developed by a Bay Area startup, is inspired by origami, made of polyethylene, the rigidity of which allows less material to be used (the Oru weighs twenty-five pounds, ten pounds lighter than a standard consumer-grade kayak). Crucially, the kayak folds down to a parcel the size of an artist’s portfolio. It suggests the possibility of a gentler kind of paddling—a pastime knit into twenty-first century nature, one that could sustain our attention to the fragile worlds in which we paddle."
I have one on order, and expect delivery at the start of the new year. Pictures below:
WISH OUT OF WATER
Orion Magazine
October 23, 2013
by Matthew Battles
In form the kayak is singular, expressive, ideal—a shape that seems to bloom from the matrix of dark water and ice from which it springs. The kayak was in the first instance no mere boat but a weapon, an implement as important to the hunt as harpoon or bow. The shape it takes is closest to the shadow of the seal, perhaps, the very creature it was designed to pursue: hauled out on land or ice, the seal is an extrusion of marine-mammalian ungainliness, a wish out of water; immersed, however, its bauplan sharpens into trim. In profile, the swimming seal prefigures the kayak’s gracile, elongate architecture in its sharpness in bow and stern. And yet there is no mistaking it: the Inuit kayak is a made thing, an object entangled with our imaginative hands, an artifact and an intersection of calculation, material constraints, and human aspiration.
The earliest kayaks preserved in museums date from the early eighteenth century. It was an era of climate change, the thick of the so-called “Little Ice Age” that turned Brueghel’s paintings wintry and drove the Vinlanders out of Greenland. Throughout this time, wood was an exotic material in the Arctic, a bit like Royalex or Kevlar today. The Thule culture, which preceded the Inuit in the Arctic, had enjoyed a comparatively warm era, and they throve in larger, higher-density patterns of settlement and habitation than their successors down to Nanook’s time. Empowering the individual hunter to challenge walrus, seal, and even whale, the kayak helped make it possible for the Inuit to disperse into the smaller, sustainable groups the first modern Europeans encountered when they began to frequent the Arctic in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. With the kayak, the Inuit knit together a world of freezing floes and open water.
Whether paddling across a quiet pond, challenging wind and tide on the open sea, or surfing a standing wave in Class IV rapids, we latter-day paddlers arrive on the scene as escapees, shifted out of our workaday modes and relations into the betwixt-and-between of recreational wildness. Spending time in fragile estuaries or wild rivers can kindle concern for their preservation.
***I found all the mingled gifts and secrets of the kayak in play during a recent day of paddling on Plum Island Sound. On the rising tide, my wife and I left the Parker River boat launch and turned toward Newburyport and the Merrimack River. Behind the crenellations of the marsh grass, plovers and sandpipers started nervously, guarding our passage. Paddling into the Merrimack’s tidal basin, we caught sight of a row of proud Newburyport homes across the wind-raked channel and the dry, ragged nap of the marsh; astern, the windmills of Ipswich turned over the soft hills. Ahead, a low island rose—a subtle, estuarine insularity with an indistinct marsh-grass shoreline. As we paddled along its perimeter, the stridulation of crickets amidst the grass rendered an acoustic map of the island nearly firm enough to land our boats upon. My paddle brushed the sparse vegetal fringe as we hugged the leeward shore to take advantage of what shelter the rising, rustling grass could spare. Our two kayaks stitched their way across the harbor’s corduroy of wind and current, the thread-holes made by our paddle blades dissolving astern.
The kind of boat we paddled that day extrudes all the paradoxes of modern materials science: lightweight strength, unmakeable mass-producibility, long-lasting irreparability. It’s a consumer product conveniently placed at the end of a supply chain commanding dizzying energies and material displacements. To look at a modern recreational kayak honestly, one needs to see not only the retractable skeg and sealed bulkhead compartments, but also the automobile, the gas station, the refining plant, the gas flares, the surfaces of tundra and tar sands blistered and churned to mud.
"A recent kayak design seems like a reprise of the Inuit boat. The Oru Kayak, a folding boat developed by a Bay Area startup, is inspired by origami, made of polyethylene, the rigidity of which allows less material to be used (the Oru weighs twenty-five pounds, ten pounds lighter than a standard consumer-grade kayak). Crucially, the kayak folds down to a parcel the size of an artist’s portfolio. It’s a boat than can be taken on the subway, snapped together on the dock, and paddled into an urban waterway. In a city like Boston, you could even use the Oru kayak—or something like it—for commuting. It suggests the possibility of a gentler kind of paddling—a pastime knit into twenty-first century nature, one that could sustain our attention to the fragile worlds in which we paddle.