Canoe come out and play?

My hands pulled dry bags from the van and I plopped the rubbery pillow-like masses on the driveway. My younger sister walked by carrying a sleeping bag into the garage. I saw her out of the corner of my eye and I felt the urge to check the answering machine for messages from our friends. I turned my eyes up the street and saw my nieces, two growing girls with a third on the way.

The answering machine is ten years gone, our friends have moved up and out of town; like my sister, they are married and have children of their own. The family van is long gone, replaced by my parent's Sportsmobile for rolling in retirement.

Canoeing with my family makes me feel like a kid. I'm getting better at hoisting the canoes on cars and tying knots to hold them down, but that's still the purview of my dad. It's not something I do much more than yearly. Sometimes that seems like a problem, but like most of my problems, that all seems to flow downstream when we finally get to the campground near the river. Water gun warfare returned in force this year as even more big and small children joined the manufactured fracas.

My niece Madeline, now 4, had stocked up on small-person-friendly artillery and threatened a watery downfall for her Uncle Dave. As we headed out again this year on the Niangua river with a smaller group of about 20, water came down from the sky. The rain slowed the first volley as raincoats and ponchos were donned. The rain lasted longer than predicted, but it was a soft cool rain in the July summer and I found it refreshing.

With Clare working and my uncle unable to join us on the river, I had the unique pleasure of paddling the old Grumman with my aunt. We knocked off two days and 14.4 miles with relative ease. The water was down from last year, and the few rapids left seemed all but harmless. My aunt's been canoeing longer than I have and her experience in the bow was noticeable. She'd know to draw before I needed to ask and we'd glide past fallen branches and protruding rocks. She did brace more than expected, but that seemed to provide her some comfort. We mostly stayed out of trouble when we weren't causing it.

Aunt Julie and I launched a number of in-boat attacks on small children and her grown children and their significant others. In some of these we came out wetter than planned. When not being drenched by a spray of water, I couldn't help but smile to see my cousins both running their boats calmly on the Niangua. When did we all have time to age? It must have been between canoe trips, because I found myself asking the same question at the campsite, between s'mores.

The tents have mostly been replaced by Sportsmobiles and some of the tents that did remain had blowing fans plugged in to electrical outlets. This is not the roughing it, the conservation, that I remember. Comfort has come to outweigh those other values. It's hard to get too upset about those choices though, especially when family, community, and enjoying the outdoors on and off the river remain.