My daughter told me we had chosen an admirable day. Radio weather priests had descried it: the wind wouldn't exceed 5 to 10 miles per hour, so our paddle would be calm and benign. She told this to every member of our party. All the wind had to do was hold that way until nine o'clock this evening, she told us. Hedge witches like my daughter know the value of projected mental energies for a weather magic.

I rose before six. It had been cool in the night, gusty the day before, but by eight, the sunny calm day was already manifesting. For some days we had prepared for it. We'd bought wood, we'd arranged people's schedules, we'd laid plans and loaded vehicles. Some of us arrived at her place before noon to move the couch out of its side room and down the stairs into the back of her grandfather's pickup. I was released from my work at noon, with two canoes already on the roof rack.

Part of the fun today was that two of the five of us were new to the camp, and so had no very clear idea what they were getting into; they'd come along with joy, just the same. My daughter can make these things occur. For a friend you just do it, without reckoning or stint. Thus she was raised.

The stout leather couch had to cross a mile of water, but moving large objects by canoe is a mature technology. We knew what needed to be done and soon had the canoes twinned. We've moved refrigerators, stoves, stacks of mattresses and box springs, and loads of lumber this way, often with fewer people and in much rougher weather.



In the pictures you can see the two crosspieces lashed in against the thwarts and the tensioning lines attached bow-to-bow and stern-to-stern. If all you need is safety in rough water, a single crosspiece will certainly create the catamaran, with the tautlines at each end, but we were hauling and required a platform.

The man seated on the couch is her grandfather. It was his pickup, and we wanted to show off the camp to him. He's eighty or so and you have to watch him all the time or he'll hog all the heavy lifting. Four paddlers, seated normally in the canoes, with the fifth man in the middle of the couch, made a stable and balanced craft, and he could perceive that, but he wanted to paddle and put my daughter in the couch. Hah. She prevailed again. She can be stubborn; he saw the set of her mouth and sat still. When I told him we couldn't see very well to steer, he was soon rumbling, "We need to head a little more to port." Made me grin.

The lake was of course nearly glassy calm, too. Hardly a zephyr stirred the surface; they didn't dare.  We moved the couch, five people, bundles of shakes, cribbing of PT four by four, and various day packs including our lunches, all in one go.  Friends and family of great mutual esteem had an amazing day on a beautiful lake.  We reclined on a leather couch in our harmonious camp and congratulated one another.  It was saved from being idyllic only by the presence of the black flies, but even they were sparse.

The only recalcitrant object was the ancient hide-a-bed we were replacing. My sister possesses photos of me and that enormously heavy couch taken when I was ten and it was red. We moved that elephant from house to house many times when I was growing up and each time it had made us pay.

We hoicked the thing out through the doorway and maybe ten meters along the trail, when it occurred to us, during a break, that we were going to break it up into pieces anyhow. We left it there. It was, in fact, lighter than it had been in my youth, because so many families of deer mice had nested and raised families in it over the years it was at camp.

I remember the excessive donkey labor it exacted of us to be ferried to the camp in the same way we moved this one. In those days, we had no landing to use, a mere mile off, but brought everything the length of the lake, many miles, beginning from the little sedgy stream mouth behind the fire ranger's cabin. The cussed thing had been due to be replaced a generation ago, but inertia is powerful, and my father could not move men to willing effort as my daughter can.