New adventures for Paddle-to-the-Sea

CONTRIBUTED TO THE GLOBE AND MAIL
PUBLISHED MARCH 5, 2003 • UPDATED APRIL 18, 2018

Last August, I met an old friend I hadn't seen in years. I had thought about him occasionally and would always smile thinking of the adventurous times we had enjoyed. He had quite an influence on me when I was a kid; still, I always figured -- based on other re-encounters with childhood friends -- that were we to meet again, our relationship would be disappointing.

I was right. As I began interacting with him, I realized the good times were over. He was still the same -- full of fun, ready to rock and -- he invited me to join him again. I, however, had changed -- at 44, I was too tired to be amazed, too concerned with retirement savings and loan payments, too cynical to shout with the joy of new discovery.

But he is a patient guy and we kept seeing each other. And over the course of the next many months, I found there was much more to our relationship than high adventure. I haven't yet told you his name. It's Paddle-to-the-Sea.

That Sunday last summer, I found him in our basement on the bookshelves. I had been looking for something to read. Running a finger over the titles, I stopped at Holling C. Holling's classic. Seeing Paddle-to-the-Sea on the book's spine brought a smile to my face as I remembered when we first met.

It was in 1967 in the library of Blessed Trinity School in Toronto. I can still picture taking Paddle-to-the-Sea off the shelf, crouching down and opening its oversized cover. Inside, I found a story prepared to treat me not as a kid, but as a young man ready to think harder. This book was different from what I had been reading -- there were no talking wolves dressed up like grandma, pigs building houses, or genies in lanterns.

Instead, it was about a boy my age, living in my country. In some ways, we were very different: he was a native Canadian who lived in the woods north of Lake Superior. I was an Irish-Sicilian living in a muddy new suburb called Willowdale in Ontario. But we were the same in that we both wondered what was beyond our home turf. The boy up north did something about it -- and he took me along for the ride.

He carved a wooden canoe and a man to steer it. The plan was to set the man and canoe on top of a hill. When the snow melted in the spring, the canoe would slide down the hill into the river below and, eventually, into Lake Superior and east, to the sea.

"You will go with the water," he told his canoe man, "and you will have adventures that I would like to have. But I cannot go with you because I have to help my father with the traps. The time has come for you to sit on this snowbank and wait for the Sun Spirit to set you free. Then you will be a real Paddle Person, a real Paddle-to-the-Sea." He carved a message on the bottom of the canoe, so other people would understand Paddle's purpose: "Please put me back in the water. I am Paddle-to-the-Sea."

When I read that, my heart leapt. I was just beginning to wonder about the world beyond sleepy Willowdale. Paddle got me started in discovering not only what else was out there, but also what it would take to find out. And we had a gas doing it, too.

Thanks to Paddle, I saw new things -- the fury of the Great Lakes in winter storms, Niagara Falls (dangerously) up close, how a sawmill works, and how animals and nature intersect in ways determined long before humans evolved from apes.

What a ride it was. I felt so much bigger after having read it that day in Grade 3.

On the August afternoon 35 years later, however, I could remember those feelings, but I couldn't actually feel them anymore. This made me very sad. So I the put the book back on the shelf.

But over the coming weeks, I just couldn't forget that boy or the journey of his Paddle Person. Something kept drawing me back to it all. So I spent the next months reading Paddle-to-the-Sea over and over. But I still couldn't figure out what this pull was. Then, one day, I did.

I wanted to find a certain section and, by chance, searched for it backwards, from the end of the book. And seeing the story unfold differently highlighted a new message. Yes, I saw the adventures, but I also realized that Paddle survives many of the jams he finds himself in because someone helps him.

A man at the sawmill picks Paddle off a log and sends him on his way. So does a little girl who plucks the canoe out of Lake Huron. An old woman near Montreal pulls him from the St. Lawrence and lets Paddle spend a winter with her. And a French fisherman on the Grand Banks fulfills the boy's dream by taking Paddle across the Atlantic.

On realizing this other story, I forged a new relationship with Paddle. No, flying over Niagara Falls doesn't thrill me anymore. But as I thought about how our world seems to be getting meaner everyday, I was heartened by those people and how they understood a good thing and helped it along.

I don't want to get mushy, but this revelation has got me feeling truly hopeful. So, I've taken to carrying Paddle-to-the-Sea around with me in my briefcase. Like that kid in the film The Sixth Sense, who hauled out his toy soldiers and religious statues whenever the "dead people" appeared to him, when the hard events of the world start to scare me, I take Paddle out as a kind of literary talisman -- not to ward off evil spirits, but to give rise to the good ones. Paddle reminded me that they're out there -- somewhere.