The Kumiski Report
Thank you for reading this week’s report. Although I had a birthday, we haven’t done much that could be considered fun this week. I went back into a stash of stories I was putting together for a book that never got finished, and found another good one. Lots of photo accompaniment, too!
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This week’s story is an excerpt from my unfinished book, Back of the Boat.
The Old Town Has Had its Last Ride- A Pictorial Ride Down Memory Lane
by John Kumiski
An old friend of mine has passed on. The ancient Old Town Tripper, serial number 211999, has had its last ride. It rode atop my van to the Seminole County landfill, where it was unceremoniously dumped. The Old Town deserved a better ending.
Jim Tedesco bought the Old Town Tripper in 1976 from Fernald Marine, on the River Parker, in Newbury, Massachusetts. A couple years later he moved to California. Before he left I bought it from him and had it until about ten years ago, when I sold it to son Maxx. He used it for canoe jousting. It has been sitting in my yard, providing wonderful habitat for insects, for about five years now. It was old, beat to hell, and really had nothing left to offer. Sadly, it was time to dispose of it.
I learned to paddle whitewater in that Old Town Tripper. I’ve taken at least ten trips of ten days or longer in it, in Maine and in Florida’s Everglades National Park, used it on rivers in New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, and North Carolina as well. I had it when I was a canoeing counselor at Camp Chickawah in Maine and a pioneering counselor at Camp Regis-Applejack in New York. My first trip to Florida included a six-day canoe trip in the Everglades from that boat. My first salmon, first bonefish, first redfish, first tarpon, all caught from the Tripper.
I’ve slept in it, once. It was not a comfortable night.
Both my sons had their first canoe trips in that boat. My son Maxx and his friend Brian enjoyed their first whitewater paddling in the Tripper, on the Tuckaseegee and the Nantahala, back when they were still in high school.
I’ve fallen out of the Tripper quite a few times, with quite a few different people. One memorable dump preceded my swimming through the Dumplings, a big rapid on Vermont’s West River, on the Saturday before Columbus Day one year. There were hundreds of people watching, shouting advice. I held onto the boat and self-rescued.
Most memorable, though was rolling it over off Cape Sable with my pregnant wife in the bow. I was running it with a little outboard and when it started to go there was no way to brace it. BAM! We were both in the water. When Maxx was born there was a wind knot in his umbilical cord. Susan and I know how that happened.
When I think back on it, it amazes me that a molded piece of plastic could have provided such a theme around which to wrap my life. BOATS! On the one hand a canoe is only “stuff,” but the Tripper provided so much pleasure, so many memories, so much access to wilderness not to be enjoyed any other way.
To say I felt a twinge of emotion as I drove home from the landfill would be understating the obvious. Fortunately there is another canoe in my yard.
I feel a need to go paddling…
Photo Corner!
A new feature to the report, each week featuring a photo from my Etsy shop.
This image is available for purchase at https://www.etsy.com/listing/4512711224/st-johns-river-sunset-reflection-fine
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That’s this week’s Kumiski Report. Thanks for reading.
Every day is a blessing. Don’t waste it. Go fishing! Go paddling! Go walking! Stay active!
John Kumiski – https://spottedtail.com – https://www.etsy.com/shop/PhotographybyKumiski
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