Cascade Paddle Club Canoes, camp, and the same good company.

From the boxes

August 1958, as the log had it

Wood-and-canvas boats, kapok vests, Kodachrome. The weekend the club likes to mean when it says it has been going a long time.

Copied from the club log. The hand is probably Walt Keene’s. · 16 August 1958 · Cedarkettle Lake

Wood-and-canvas canoes on a mountain lake, 1958
The boats that started the argument we are still having.
Men in undershirts cooking at a 1950s canoe camp
Camp. Coffee. The kitchen was already the point.
Two men in a wood-canvas canoe wearing kapok life vests
Kapok vests, which look like furniture and still count.
Group of men with paddles and wood canoes, 1958
The fellows, then. We do not have all the names. We have the posture.

The club was four years old, or at least four years into calling itself a club. Walt Keene’s log is brief in the way of men who thought the photographs would do the talking.

They took two wood-and-canvas canoes to Cedarkettle. The lake was the lake. The men cooked, paddled, and stood for a picture with the blades like rifles at rest. On the water they wore the kapok vests, which Hal’s later minutes still mention as if someone needed reminding even then.

There is a note about a meet with “the coast men,” which we take to be the grandparents of the Olympic Peninsula Paddlers. So that habit is original too.

We do not have a report in the breezy style. We have this, and the Kodachrome, and the feeling that if you put Brick’s skillet into 1958 it would know what to do.

More of the 1950s are in the crate. They are not on the site yet. When they are, the faces should stay in their decade. The present fellows were not there. The club was.