At some point on a portage you are all alone, balancing the weight of your canoe and maybe a heavy pack on your back as well, as you place one wet foot in front of the other, over and over again.
You've already been out several days and the packs lost their pristine guidebook quality after the first day. Now they are lumpy and out of shape. They don't carry comfortably and your shoulders and neck are sore from sunburn and the strain of unaccustomed work.
This portage started out fairly flat and smooth but now you stumble in and out of small mud holes and balance gingerly across the half rotten logs spanning the larger holes, hoping your feet don't slip, sending you to crash beneath the weight of your burdens.
The flies have found you and you switch hands constantly to swat at them and wipe the sweat from your eyes. By hunching your shoulders you can shift the weight of the canoe from one shoulder to the other and while you are busy doing all this, the bow of your lovely craft bonks into a tree, sending you careening and swearing into the underbrush beside the trail.
This is the way these things go. Add a couple of ridges to climb up and down, hoping, always hoping that the last ridge will be, the last ridge and that soon you will see blue water shimmering through the canopy of trees ahead.
So much of the business of portaging is mental. Yes, they can be physically challenging because of the bugs, the heat, the sharp profusely intense ache in the muscles sloping down from your neck to your shoulders. Yes, portages can be difficult but how you deal with the difficulty is all mental.
A canoe trip though, is a voluntary thing; an activity undertaken for fun; for the experience of life in the wilderness, days on the water and nights under the stars. And knowing this you also know the portage is just one of the lesser joys that is part of the experience. Truth is, not all portages are evil and if we are talking about the real thing, I have gotten better at keeping my mental head 'up', even on really nasty portages.
Today is a different story. Today I am plagued by a gnawing, burning pain in a place that has no teeth and never sees the sun. I know I am in the middle of this portage: sometimes this portion is the longest part of the journey. You can't return to the beginning and the end is too distant. Don't count the steps, or the days or weeks, at least not yet. I learned long ago not to look for the end too soon or the whole portage just gets longer. And do not forget that in the fall there will be another portage and after that, one more and we should be home, free.
Free is the key word- free is the goal no matter how many steps we have to take to get there.
Free is that place on the map you marked with a large X. That is our destination but the X is not on the map we are using today. The map with the X lies buried deep in the pack on your back. It will be days before we can pull that map out and smooth the wrinkles away and we can't begin counting days, not yet.
After awhile a nameless tune comes into your head and you begin to hum as you step along, carrying your destination on your back. The water is up ahead, somewhere.
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