A boat building and river transportation project…
Bark Canoe
Mighty pine. Let us float together,
We chose you so we thought.
You seemed willing if not eager.
Living skin, for living skin,
Mine and yours, yours and mine.
We both bled that day though yours drained out,
Staining the Earth with your sweet life force.
And mine, just a trickle,
Soothed with a scrap of your bark
Nobody, taught us the proper ritual,
I hope that we did all right
Our skins they didn’t come off easily.
Living skin, for living skin,
Mine and yours, yours and mine.
And now it’s my sweat that stains the Earth,
Staining the Earth with my sweet life force.
And you, you are transformed.
You on the outside and me on the inside.
You on the outside and me on the inside.
Mighty pine. Let us float together.
We chose you so we thought,
Perhaps after all the choice was mutual.
Kootenai River II Water Transportation 2004
Introduction
We were not going to starve this time! Learning from the previous year how we limited our learning by our constant state of weakness I was determined that this wouldn’t happen again.
We bought and butchered a buffalo and spent much of our preparation time gathering wild foods.
I wanted to learn more and thinking that it could be fun to learn about boat building and boat travel (of which I knew almost nothing), we endeavored to build some traditional watercraft.
I found an old Kootenai man up in B.C who had built several traditional canoes only covering them in canvas instead of pine bark and as we progressed I would call him and ask him how we might proceed. I clearly remember asking him what to stuff the big hole between the keel and the end battens with after we had fixed the bark to the gunwales. He said “I usually just stuff and old sock in there”. We were trying to do it Stone Age so we used moss instead. Without him though we would probably never have put the canoe in the water.
As part of the preparation in the spring we paddled the whole Kootenai River in segments from where it crossed into Montana from Canada and existed for the first 70 miles as the Koocanusa reservoir to where it doubled back to Canada from Idaho. Portaging the dam and the falls we got an idea of what we might expect when we repeated the journey during the summer in the “Stone Age.”
Excerpt - Return: A New Look at Ancient an unpublished manuscript by Lynx Vilden
