Being on the water is proven medicine against non-riverine life: you have to proceed consciously, step by step, which makes the numbing routines of city life a breeze by comparison
To that end we invoked a battery of rationalizations to justify the trip. We had separate tents. We intended to keep our distance. We had gobs of hand sanitizer. The jumpy non-Toronto folk wanted the Toronto denizens to get tested beforehand: four of us did, all negative. We were going to be outside, where the risk of infection plummets. In any event, heading merrily down the stream turned out to be a dreamy decision.
The riparian wilderness comes as a surprise after living inside for four months. It is brighter and hotter and dirtier and more physically demanding but no less buggy than you remember. Within half an hour, we found a campsite. We erected our separate tents a luxurious twenty metres from one another, like barons with vast private estates. We were alone, but we could see each other – a non-existent state during lockdown.
We were in our tents by 9:30. Sleep came in batches. I was woken twice by torrential rain drumming the taut fly of the tent, as if inside a waterfall. But I stayed dry, a small and pleasant miracle, like testing negative. The dawn rose gradually through the scrim of my tent, from grey to faint blue to pink. Breakfast felt like a long-awaited reunion.
We dumped on the first set of serious rapids we came to – the Snake Rapids, as they are known. I will spare you the details beyond saying that we – well, to be more accurate, I – shouldn’t have tried eddying out where we did. In a 10-kilometre-per-hour current, a canoe exerts a force of about 1,350 kilograms. It smacked my left leg hard into a rock before I got out from under the boat, and tore an olive-sized flap of skin away from the Doctor’s fleshy palm.
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