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

From the boxes

July 1974, aluminum and a long weekend

Grummans, orange vests, and a fire that got away from nobody. A page from the years before any of the present fellows were born.

From the club log, Hal Voss, secretary · 20 July 1974 · Ravenshore

Men with aluminum Grumman canoes on a Northwest lake in the 1970s
The Grummans. They rang like bells if you kicked them. We kicked them.
Two men in an aluminum canoe wearing bulky orange life vests
On the water, in the vests, which even then was the rule if you wanted to stay in the log.
Men carrying an aluminum canoe through the woods
Aluminum carries like a good argument: loud, and then over.

Typed up from a carbon copy in Brick’s crate. Hal Voss kept the minutes in those years. None of the present fellows were born yet, except Brick, who was an infant and not on this trip.

The club took four Grummans to Ravenshore. The lake was high. The men were in the kind of shape the photographs still show. A few of the Peninsula fellows came over, which is how we know this habit of other clubs is older than we are.

Vests on the water. Hal underlines this. Someone had swum the year before and the minutes had gotten stern.

They carried one boat to the smaller lake and came back sunburnt and pleased. The fire was large. The beer was canned. The hulls, Hal notes, “sound like industry.” We still know that sound. We do not miss it as much as we claim.

The names in the margin are Walt Keene’s generation handing off to Hal’s. The faces are not ours. The posture is.