canoetieu

Ralph W. Nimtz, Wooden Canoes: Beauty, Function, Integrity My interest in wooden canoes goes back to my childhood. I grew up on a small lake in southwestern Michigan, where my father would occasionally bring home an old wooden boat he’d found, cheap or free. He left it up to me to scrape, paint, and soak them to make the wooden joints swell to keep out the water. He liked to fish and counted on my help to bail out the rainwater, dig the worms, and stock the boat with beer. It’s a wonder I would even look at a wooden boat today. When I was in my early teens, Dad brought home a wooden canoe. Predictably, he was too busy to help me fix it, so my mother pitched in, ordering canvas from Sears & Roebuck and somehow helping me get it to float. I had many wonderful hours and meditations in that canoe. I grew up and life carried me off on its own tide. I forgot about that canoe. In the mid-seventies, after my father’s death, when I went back to Michigan to get some of his tools, I found the weathered, neglected hull of that canoe, too far gone to save, out in the woods behind the house. But there was another hull there, too, in pretty good shape, and I stuffed it in the U-Haul and so began my serious second affair with wooden canoes. It turned out to be our first and well-paddled Old Town Otca. *** A wooden canoe is a beautiful creation, with its graceful lines and the warm glow of its wood and caned seats. But it is beautiful in more than merely the visual sense – it is beautifully utilitarian, at one with the quiet ripple of water as it slips effortlessly through it, especially on a lake like glass at sunset or in an early morning mist. A full moon is not a bad time to paddle, either. A wooden canoe is functional – as transportation or as a tool for recreation and relaxation. Slip up on a blue heron intent on its next meal and notice how much more quietly that can be accomplished than over land, or, especially, in an aluminum canoe. A wooden canoe is lightweight, strong, stable and – most amazingly – it will keep you dry in the middle of a lake! A wooden canoe has Integrity. Made of local natural materials, it can be fashioned with simple tools. Each canoe is made of several different woods: northern white cedar is used for ribs and planking because it is lightweight and rot-resistant; spruce is used for inner gunwales because of its ratio of strength to lightness; ash or oak can take abuse, so is particularly useful for outer gunwales; as well, we use oak for seats, thwarts, and decks, and for ribs on all-wood canoes. I get great satisfaction out of uncovering the history of each particular craft and in coming to understand the individual builder’s design and craftsmanship. From stem to stern, each canoe will, under an experienced eye, offer up a builder’s particular way of doing things. And last, but not least, I enjoy paddling them, when all the work is done, and the quiet lake beckons.