Let Them Paddle: Coming of Age on the Water, by Alan S. Kesselheim, 2012. Fulcrum Publishing, 320 pages, $19.95
People who are raising or have raised children should be warned about reading this book: Chances are good that it is going to make you feel very inadequate.
Alan Kesselheim and his wife, Marypat Zitzer, are Bozeman residents whose lives together have been as much a commitment to shared adventure as to love. Even before they were wed they embarked on a 420-day journey by canoe through northern Alberta.
They’ve been at it for nearly 30 years now, striking off on river trips of varying lengths even as their family expanded to include three children. Their oldest son, Eli, was in the womb when Kesselheim and Zitzer traversed the Kazan River deep in Nunavut, the Canadian territory that encompasses the northwest reaches of Hudson Bay.
Eli was just 8 months old and his brother Sawyer was in the womb when the family canoed the length of the Yellowstone River, from the head of Paradise Valley to the Yellowstone’s confluence with the Missouri.
The boys were still preschoolers when their sister Ruby experienced her “birth river,” the Rio Grande.
Later on, as each child reached the age of 13, the family went back to their birth rivers and re-created those earlier trips. Family members kept their own journals and also wrote in a group journal. All that on-the-spot reporting obviously contributed to this book’s many detailed descriptions of wind, water, wildlife and weather, of blackflies and mosquitoes, of meals eaten and firewood gathered. The writing is always evocative, often quite beautiful.
During one overland outing, when the family is hiking up to the headwaters of the Yellowstone River, tracing Ruby’s river to its source, Kesselheim reflects on a night in that deep wilderness:
Except for the hum of space, it is absolutely silent. Silent enough to feel the inexorable lift and grain-by-grain erosion of mountains, the fractional growth of summer flowers, the turning of the planet. Also, how heroically small we are in it. The birds are still, the wind is calm, only the lapping noise of light drowning everything in its grace.
Here he is on canoeing the Kazan River into Forde Lake:
More river, more rapids, the hurling current, then the expanse of Forde Lake opens before us. It feels as if we’ve been riding a train, wind in our faces, and then are suddenly dropped off at a platform, dragging suitcases.
Kesselheim revels in the natural world, worries about what we humans are doing to it, rejoices in the opportunities his children have had to experience it before it is too late. Sometimes it’s hard to say what he enjoys more, reveling in the vestiges of wilderness or despising the false allure of civilization. He doesn’t even like to read when he’s deep into a trip, preferring to live on river time and to connect with the world in a visceral, primal way. No matter how long he’s gone, he dreads the end of a voyage. On rivers like the Yellowstone, where a paddler must now and then walk into a town for fresh water or food, he feels another kind of dread.
I hate the intersections with civilization during a trip. They are rife with potential for strain. Temptations are suddenly available. Options present themselves. Turbulence enters what was, just a mile upstream, unruffled water. It is easy to backslide.
He is likewise almost always disappointed when his family crosses paths with another human being, especially townspeople, the clerks and bartenders and loiterers the family encounters on brief forays into population centers. Kesselheim scorns them or writes them off as overweight dolts who couldn’t survive without the pitiful comforts of society. His crankiness, though, is altogether understandable and more than a little endearing, as was the crankiness of Thoreau.
What makes this much more than an extended piece of nature or travel writing is that it is also the chronicle of the growth of an exceptionally close family. We watch the children mature and become distinct individuals, learn of their quirks and fears and desires, how each reacts to the technical and psychological challenges of an extended river outing.
Sometimes Kesselheim seems overprotective, as if he would like nothing better than to have his children spend their whole lives on the water, beyond the reach of wordly temptations, safe in the cocoon of a loving family. Reading this, how can you blame him? My generation, Kesselheim’s generation, invented the concept of “quality time,” which is more of an indictment than a descriptor. If you have to call it quality time, it probably isn’t. But imagine spending 40 days in the wilderness with your spouse and three children, united in a common purpose, all working together just to meet the physical demands of the day. This is something better than quality time, and there is more of it on a 40-day trip than most parents will have with their children in a lifetime.
But I don’t want to make this book sound too serious. Kesselheim comes off as a soberminded man, but he rarely misses a chance to delight in the natural world, or in seeing his children gloriously alive, as on the Yellowstone when they all slip out of the canoes into the current, then “come aboard with great splashes of water, glistening like otters, teeth chattering.”
Toward the end of the book, Kesselheim says that for his children, living on the water “is as simple as sleep, as profound as moonrise. It is not something we have given them, but a thing they have earned. All we did was put them there.”
That would have made a wonderful ending, but Kesselheim the storyteller spins one more anecdote about the family’s outing on the Rio Grande, and ends this valuable account with an image so beautiful and perfect that the book seems to end with a gasp.
