High Notch, and the night the summer left

I had the list on the dash and the Penobscot on the roof and the particular calm of a man who has hosted the same weekend long enough to stop inventing it. High Notch is two lakes and one carry. Nick had already written everybody about wool. I had already told him I would not be late, and then I was ten minutes late, which is how you stay the one who hosts without becoming the calendar.

Put-in

The lower lake was still a summer lake when we backed down to the gravel. Sun on the water. The cedars throwing a smell like a clean shop. Somebody’s dog barked once from the campground road and then thought better of it. Pete had the vests in a pile before the coffee thermos was open. He does not make a speech. He holds an orange one out until your arm goes through it. On High Notch that is not decoration. The water under the warm surface is snow that got lost.

We went tandem where the boats asked for it. Nick left the Discovery on the trailer. He wanted the bow of the Penobscot, and I wanted him there. He is quieter once the hull is wet, which I like, and he sets a stroke you can trust, which I like more. Sam and Jules took the Magic, Jules pretending he was not proud of it. Marcus slid the Wenonah off alone, because that boat is a sentence that does not need a second voice. Brick had the Prospector and the kitchen, which is the same fact stated twice. Pete took the Tripper with the throw bag where he could reach it and the camera where the spray would not.

I checked the painter, the spare paddle, and the scrape on the right bow that I have declined to fill since 2011. A clean hull is a hull that stayed home. We pushed off with the vests buckled. The first stroke took, and the gravel dropped away, and I felt the weekend become a thing with weight.

On the water

The first hour was the kind of paddling that makes a man’s shoulders remember what they are for. Nick’s back worked under the vest in a steady roll, blade in, blade out, the drip ticking the gunwale. I matched him from the stern with the Navigator, and the Penobscot tracked as if it had been waiting all month to be taken seriously. There is a privacy in a tandem that people who only paddle alone do not get to have. You hear the other man breathe. You feel the correction in his shoulders a second before the bow moves. You answer with your own blade, and the boat either agrees with both of you or with neither. When Nick dug in on the long crossing I dug in with him, and for a while we were one animal with two paddles and a green hull and nothing to prove to the shore.

The lower lake is long enough to get honest. We spread out, because the water was glass and glass invites a little vanity, and then we pulled back together, because men are men and we wanted to see who was working. Marcus was ahead without seeming to hurry. The Wenonah does that to a person, and he has the decency not to smile about it until camp. Sam was talking, across twenty feet of water, about the Navigator in my hands versus the Grey Owl he had brought for the flat. Jules was letting him talk, which is a form of friendship I respect. I told Sam the Navigator is a tool, not a personality. He told me that was what people say about tools they have already fallen for. He was not wrong. I did not give him a grin he could see from the Magic.

There was no wind to speak of, so we made our own resistance. Past the midpoint I called a pace, not a race, and for twenty minutes we paddled as if the far shore had insulted us. Nick counted under his breath. I stopped counting and just drove. My hands warmed inside the grip. Sweat found the line of my spine under the vest and stayed there. Brick, who had been loafing with the dignity of a man carrying cast iron, decided to join, and the Prospector came up on our quarter like a rumor. We held him off. Barely. He laughed once, short, and fell back to the speed of a person who still intends to cook. Pete stayed where he could see every hull. That is what safety looks like when it trusts you and still does not take the day off.

By the landing for the carry, Nick had a dark patch between his shoulder blades and I had the good ache across the chest that means the day has started to count. We drank. The bottles tasted like plastic and effort. Pete made us keep the vests on until the boats were actually out of the water. Correct, and also how Pete loves a person.

The carry

The portage is not long enough to be a legend and not short enough to do while talking. It climbs through fir and huckleberry and a rock step that has taken a shin off every generation of this club. Brick claims a fellow named Hal cursed that step in 1974. I believe him. We doubled what we had to double. The canoes went first.

Marcus and Pete took the Tripper. I watched them get it up, the yoke settling across Pete’s shoulders, Marcus’s hand flat on Pete’s lower back for one second so the hull would not twist when they hit the step. A practical hand. It stayed a practical hand. I found something to do with a strap.

Nick and I took the Penobscot. He is strong in a way that does not advertise. At the rock step he reached back without looking and found my wrist, and we went up together, the boat a weight between us and the weight, somehow, the thing that kept us neat. I thought, not for the first time, that the club runs on exactly this: two men, a hull, a problem the size of a hill. Then the thought got out of the way and we walked. His boot heels. My breathing. The thwart creaking when I shifted. Cedar duff, dry as flour, then a wet patch in the shade that wanted us on our tails. We did not give it the satisfaction.

Brick complained about the kitchen pack in the voice he uses when he is happy. Jules carried more than the plan required and pretended it was an accident. Sam timed nobody and still knew who had been slow. At the upper lake we set the boats in the shade and stood with our hands on our hips, sweating, grinning, a little stupid with it. The upper lake was darker. Even with the sun still high you could smell the fall waiting in the north corner, a metal smell under the warm one.

Fishing

We left the tents in a pile and went back out. The fishing is why I keep the September date and do not let anybody move High Notch to a river weekend. The trout here are not famous. They are small and bright and they hold where the shade meets the drop-off. Nick had packed two rods, because Nick packs the thing you will wish you had. Marcus had one, and he used it the way he paddles, which is to say the extra motion had already been edited out.

Nick stayed in the bow of the Penobscot. The vests stayed buckled. Pete had already given the lake the look that means the rule did not expire at the end of the carry. We drifted the west shore, me correcting with the paddle so quietly the hull barely confessed to it. The sun sat on Nick’s forearms where the vest ended. His line went out clean. He missed the first rise and did not swear, which I respected, so I did not mention it. He made the second one, a cutthroat about the length of his hand, and when he turned with the fish the pleasure on his face was so plain I felt it in my own mouth.

“Don’t get proud,” I said.

“Too late,” he said, and his knee knocked the thwart, and he was laughing, and the boat took a half inch of water we both ignored.

We kept four fish among the boats that bothered to try. Enough for Brick. Not enough to boast about in a room with overhead lighting. Sam caught his on a fly he had tied at the kitchen table and immediately began the lecture. Jules told him to deliver it to the trout. Marcus caught two, reeled the second one in as if he had expected the cooperation, and said, “They’re in the shade.” That was the whole seminar. I caught nothing. I ran the stern and did not mind. Some days your job is the boat. The boat was doing what I bought it for.

Pete, who had put the rod down to watch the rest of us be worse at this than we are at paddling, took one last cast out of politeness and came up with the best fish of the afternoon. He looked embarrassed. We did not allow the embarrassment to survive. Brick held the creel up in the stern of the Prospector like a man receiving a delivery he had already scheduled.

Camp

Camp was the shelf above the outlet. Same fire ring as last year, same log that fits two men if they are willing to be men and not strangers. Brick had his shirt off before the skillet was hot. Fifty-two and still built like the fellow who carries the Dutch oven because he wants the weight, not because he lost a coin flip. The fire was going to like him. He knew it. He did not perform it. He salted the trout, found the cornmeal, and put Sam to slicing an onion with the authority of a person who has ended arguments by feeding people.

The afternoon had been warm enough that the shirts came off and went on the line. Vests on the thwarts. The ordinary fact of a camp that is only us and only for a night. I will not make a speech about it. The upper lake held the light a long time. Pete’s back was a map of the carry, red at the shoulders where the yoke had sat. Jules looked about nineteen with his hair wet, which he is not, and which I am not going to tease him for until he is dry. Sam sat on the log with his knee against mine because the log is short. Neither of us moved the knee. The trout went into butter. There was a beer that tasted like cold metal and a day you had spent on purpose. Somebody passed the hot sauce. Somebody always passes the hot sauce.

We talked hulls, because we are not going to become different men just because the view is good. I said the Penobscot tracks. Brick said tracking is for people who never carry a kitchen. We were both pleased to be the men who have had this exact exchange before. Sam wanted to know, again, why I will not switch to a bent shaft on flat water. I told him the Navigator fits my hand and my hand is not taking applications. He looked at my hand when I said it. The fire popped. I let the look happen and then I asked him to find the plates.

Nick read the morning plan off a damp card. Coffee. Boats. The carry down. The lower lake. The cars. He had written “wool” in the margin of the July note and underlined it again on Thursday. I had packed the wool. I had also packed the private opinion that I would not need it. High Notch likes to correct a host.

The turn in the weather

The cold came down after supper, which is ruder than coming down during. The notch above camp went from gold to blue in about twenty minutes. A wind arrived that had not been on the water at all. The shirts came off the line while they were still damp and went back onto the bodies that had been glad to be rid of them. Fleece over the top. Then we looked like a club again, instead of a photograph somebody might put on a calendar and misunderstand.

The fire worked harder. We sat closer. That is the whole trick of a September night and I am not going to pretend there is a finer philosophy under it. Brick’s shoulder was against mine. He runs hot, which is the cook’s privilege and also, at the end of a day, a public service. On my other side Sam had gone quiet in the way he goes quiet when the day has been good, and the wool of his sleeve brushed my wrist every time he reached for the coffee. I thought about the drive home and the Sunday supper I had said I would make. I also thought about staying inside that little heat until the fire was only a color. Both thoughts were true. Only one of them had a time written next to it.

Jules and Marcus had drawn the small tent. When the temperature kept falling I heard Jules swear once, cheerfully, and then the sound of a sleeping bag being zipped to the chin. Later there were low voices, the ordinary negotiation of whose hip got the cold side of the pad. Not my tent. Still my camp. I smiled at the coals and let it be.

I slept under a tarp pitched off the Penobscot’s stern, which is a foolish sentence and also accurate. The hull made a wall. Nick was on the far side of the fire pit in his bivy, because he likes to see the sky until he does not. Around midnight the sky went out. Cloud ate the stars. I woke once to the smell of rain that had not yet fallen, and to Nick crouched at the pit with his glasses on, feeding a stick in with the care of a man keeping a promise he had made to a fire. The light was on his mouth and on his hands. I said, “Leave it. It’ll go till morning.” He said, “I know,” and fed it one more stick anyway, and went back to the bag. I lay there with the ache in my shoulders and the good weight of being tired for a reason. I did not move again until dawn.

Take-out

Morning was a different month. Frost on the gunwales, thin as a machine scratch. Our breath in front of our faces. The upper lake the color of tin. We made coffee with our hats on and stood closer to the fire than dignity strictly required. Brick fried the last of the trout with eggs and did not apologize for the smoke in our fleeces. Pete counted the vests, then counted them again because the cold makes people sentimental and sentimentality is how a vest gets left under a log. In that air the foam felt like a kindness on top of being a rule.

The paddle back across the upper lake was quiet and fast. Marcus went ahead and waited at the portage without commentary, which is his way of saying the morning is good. The carry down is easier on the legs and meaner on the hands. A canoe wants to run away from you when the trail drops. Nick had the bow. I had the stern. We talked only at the rock step, where he said “yours” and I said “mine” and we meant the weight. His hand found my wrist again. Same hand as yesterday, warmer because of the wool cuff. I noticed. Then the lower lake was in front of us, and the noticing had a job, which was to get into the boat and paddle.

The lower lake had a chop on it. Small, honest, the first wind of the fall doing what it is paid to do. We put the vests on over the fleece. We looked a little ridiculous. We were right. Nick set a pace and I drove the stern and the Penobscot took the little waves on the quarter the way a good hull should, not fighting, not wallowing, just working. Spray came aboard and tasted like a slate roof. For a while I stopped being a host and was only a stern paddler with a bow man he trusted, and that was the best twenty minutes of the weekend. Sam and Jules argued, briefly and happily, about whether the Magic was too much boat for a chop that size. It was not. Marcus disappeared and reappeared at the head of the little fleet. Brick sang two lines of something and stopped before it became a performance. Pete kept the Tripper where he could see all of us.

We took out before the day could change its mind a second time. Hulls up. Straps. The scrape on my bow still unfilled and still mine. The gravel smelled like wet stone and cedar. In the lot everybody got loud in the way you get loud when the cold has left your body and the work is finished. Nick checked the list and then, because he is Nick, checked it again. Jules said we ought to come back before the notch closes the road. I said we would come back when the calendar said so, and that the calendar was Nick, and that Nick had already put October at Ravenshore with the wool still in the note.

I had a Sunday supper to get to. I said that once, so they would know why I was not the last car, and then I did not say it again. On the highway the Penobscot hummed on the racks and my shoulders hummed under it. High Notch had been summer when we put in and something else when we took out. That was the weekend I wanted. The fellows had been exactly as strong as the carry required, and a little more than that, and I am not going to write the extra part any plainer than this. I like the way we look when we are tired and close and still willing. I will host it again next year. I always do.