The surfin'.
The wave riding.
Thousands of handwritten pages, all manner of botanical, celestial and anthropological observations, and not once did Meriwether Lewis or William Clark talk about all the fun they were having on the river.
Or how canoes carved of cottonwood and ponderosa pine responded when paddled upstream - or across the stream - at high water.
Those journal entries were left to the corps of middle-aged boaters who met last Sunday on the banks of the Clearwater River, at the big eddy a quarter-mile below Lenore, Idaho.
"We are here to answer a couple of looming Lewis and Clark questions," said Bill Bevis, the Missoula writer who captained the modern-day expedition. "There is no mention in the journals of upstream ferries - of how they crossed the Missouri at flood stage."
Nor did the explorers discuss in any detail the design of their dugout canoes. Were the hulls rounded? How thick were the bottoms? What about the gunnels?
"That's what we're going to find out today," said Bevis, motioning to the three crudely built canoes bobbing in the water at the boat ramp. "What can a dugout canoe do in big water?"
The call came last summer from Joe Mussulman, proprietor of the lewis-clark.org Web site.
"As a scholar and a canoeist," he asked, "would you consider writing an article on the dugout canoes used by the Lewis and Clark Expedition?"
The Corps of Discovery traveled in cottonwood canoes in the spring and summer of 1805, as they pushed up the Missouri River to the great falls, and beyond. Then, in October of that year, they built and boarded canoes of ponderosa pine for the trip downriver on the Clearwater, Snake and Columbia.
Mussulman wanted a Web story on the dugouts and the role they played in the expedition's push to the Pacific.
"At that point, we both believed it would be an overview of what other people had done," Bevis said. "There has been some good scholarship on the Lewis and Clark dugouts. There are people who have read every journal entry looking for every mention of the canoes."
In all those thousands of pages, though, the diarists included less than a dozen useful mentions of what was going on with the canoes in the water, Bevis found.
"There were three or four mentions of wind and waves, and a couple of entries about hitting rocks and busting up a canoe, but I realized we really don't know what kind of canoes they had or how they acted in the river," he said.
Bevis needed a dugout canoe.
He needed Philip Johnston.
Eight years ago now, a promoter came to Orofino, Idaho, looking for woodsmen interested in "rediscovering" the lost art of dugout canoe construction as part of the bicentennial commemoration of the Lewis and Clark Expedition of 1803-1806.
He'd buy the logs if the assembled sawyers would put their knowledge of wood to an unusual test by building a dugout canoe.
Johnston, a retired logger who lives in the woods eight miles out of Orofino, bought his own piece of ponderosa pine and went to work. Three hundred hours later, he had a 33-foot-long, 2,400-pound canoe.
"How do you make a dugout canoe?" Johnston said. "You get a piece of wood and carve off everything that doesn't look like a canoe."
The bulk of the work is done with axes, he said, although he makes a few cuts with a chainsaw to get things started.
With 12 dugouts now to his credit, Johnston can turn a tree into a boat in about 80 hours. Every one of them looks different, the product of how the wood looks and feels to its carver.
Johnston's kept his original dugout - the big 33-footer, and has toted it to dozens of bicentennial events, including last Sunday's gathering on the Clearwater.
His latest canoe is a 20-footer - 33 inches wide and about 1,400 pounds. Before Bevis and company dropped it in the big eddy, it had spent about 10 minutes in the water. In a pond.
"It floats pretty good," Johnston said, "but I'm afraid these fellas are gonna be swimming when they hit those waves."
The paddlers looked nervous as their commander gave his final instructions.
"I do not want people in the water below those big waves with a 2,000-pound log rolling over on them," Bevis said.
The paddlers looked out at the rapids, then at the three dugout canoes that were to be their transportation through the rapids, then back at Bevis.
"We can only have one boat in trouble at a time," he cautioned. "One boat at risk at a time."
They'd begin with two dugouts and all 10 paddlers in the water - six in Johnston's 33-footer, three in an 18-foot cottonwood dugout, one in a kayak.
Bill Hudson, the kayaker, looked the most nervous of all.
"I'm trying to figure out how I'm going to pick up nine people at once," he said.
Dick Barrett, a University of Montana economist and longtime canoeist, had recruited most of the "old masters" on hand for the experiment - men who've regularly paddled canoes on Montana rivers over the past 30 years.
"We have a lot of experience and a lot of good paddlers here," Bevis said.
By comparison, the soldiers in Lewis and Clark's contingent were babes in the water, he said, "although they were big strong guys and they'd logged a lot of river miles by the time they got to the Clearwater."
"And we could all be their fathers," added Barrett.
Bevis assigned Rod McIver to command the smallest boat, the 18-footer built by Columbus craftsman Walt Marten.
McIver took Barrett with him in the "little" 800-pound canoe, and also Mike Johnson, a retired Sentinel High School P.E. teacher and former national champion flatwater canoeist.
They slowly paddled out, inspected the waves, selected their eddy line and shot through in a couple of seconds.
The crew of the big dugout was still in flat water, positioning and repositioning themselves, and calling to shore: "Are we trim?" "Are you sure we're trim?"
Paddles dipped into the water; the canoe barely moved. Paddles dipped deeper into the water, and the canoe inched forward, as the modern-day corps realized what was needed to move 2,400 pounds of pine through still water.
Bevis shouted orders from the back of the boat, as this crew too found their line and pointed their dugout downriver. And shot through the waves like a rocket.
"Woo-hoo!" came the critique - the fun finally on record.
"It was so much fun being in the boat. The entire crew could simply handle whatever came up," said Bevis. "There was all this squirrely water, not just regular waves, but sudden boils - things you can't anticipate - and everybody just knew what to do."
And the big dugout, Barrett said, "I was totally unprepared for its stability in that wave train. It was just amazing."
"If you paddle a conventional canoe - which is much lighter and much smaller - when you go into a wave train, you expect it will get pitched around one way or another," he said. "You have to get used to letting the boat roll around under your body.
"But that thing was steady as a rock. It didn't respond to the waves at all."
Johnston's big canoe has a 6-inch-thick floor. "So the center of gravity is down under the water," Bevis said. "It's not a canoe, it's a battleship."
Still, the canoeists were worried when they took out the newest dugout - the 20-footer. It not only had a thick, flat floor, but also flat sides.
"Looking at it, we thought that boat would be terrible in a side current," Bevis said. "That flat bottom met the almost vertical side at a 50-degree angle, with a minimum of chine."
"But wow, what a hot boat," he said. "It was just fabulous."
Back onshore after their first few trips through the rapids, the paddlers were abuzz.
"We're oughta take these to the Gorge," said Bill Rossbach, a Missoula attorney. "We could clear out the kayakers pretty quick."
"I want us to take these back out now and really challenge the water," Bevis said. "Let's see what they can do."
Paddlers jumped eagerly into dugouts. Hudson abandoned the "rescue kayak." And Bitterroot canoeists Alan Burgmuller and Chuck Anderson even tried pushing the cottonwood dugout upstream with long poles.
"Those guys had a pretty out-there lifestyle," said Burgmuller, himself a whitewater canoe racer. "They had a lot more at stake than we do."
Who among the Corps of Discovery donned helmets when they encountered rough water? Who wore a life vest? Or a wet suit? Who had knee pads?
And what wouldn't the soldiers have given for a bag of trail mix, with dried tropical fruits and nuts? Or for a Suburban and boat trailer to pull their mammoth dugouts out of the river?
"Modern-day risk takers," Burgmuller said, "have it easy."
Sometimes, scholarly work is so much fun.
"We have knowledge that we didn't have four hours ago," Bevis proclaimed when his Corps of Rediscovery climbed out of the Clearwater for lunch.
"People who say Lewis and Clark couldn't have done this or couldn't have done that because they couldn't cross the river in dugout canoes are wrong," he said. "Now we know."
"Lots of people assumed those were very crude boats, and that Lewis and Clark were very limited in what they could do in high water on a river," Bevis said. "We assumed they wouldn't have dared cross the Missouri at flood stage, that it was too dangerous and difficult, but we've proved that wrong."
"We surfed that 20-foot canoe," Bevis said. "We buried the nose. We filled it two-thirds full of water, and it stayed upright."
In fact, after lunch, the paddlers managed to accidentally crash Johnston's dugouts into each other - head-on smack in the middle of the rapids - and still stayed afloat.
"That big canoe just let us get away with murder," Barrett shouted when the paddlers returned, wet and laughing, to shore. "I was all the way bow under, but that boat was so long it just went right through the whirlpool."
"I thought the airbags would deploy," said Eric Kress, a Missoula physician.
"Way to go, McIver," shouted Rossbach. "You've got the entire Clearwater River and you smash your boat right into mine."
"I thought the big boat always has the right-of-way," said McIver.
"You mean, the downstream boat," Rossbach fired back. "That was just great."
You've got to wonder, Bevis said, why Lewis and Clark never mentioned how well their dugouts performed in fast water.
They did, of course, tell of running the rapids at The Dalles, on the Columbia River. But those journal entries focused more on how the captains put all non-swimmers on shore with the expedition's most valuable possessions - and how the Natives lined the cliffs to watch the spectacle.
But there wasn't a single "woo-hoo" in that day's diary. No mention of high-fives. Or of surfin' the waves.
Of course, Bevis said, "they were writing for Thomas Jefferson and history, not for Outside magazine. They took for granted the daily adventure and river travel stuff, and focused pretty squarely on the accomplishments."
When you think about it, he said, it's not that surprising. "If we wrote about a trip we took today, we wouldn't talk about putting the keys in the ignition or what make of car we drove - or how we drove it."
We might just forget to say how much fun it was.
The new journals
Watch the Website http://www.lewis-clark.org later this month for Missoula author and canoeist Bill Bevis's report on the dugout canoes of the Lewis and Clark Expedition - and his modern-day corps of dugout paddlers. He'll file a second, longer report this fall.
|
 |
 |
Add your comment now! Write your comment in the form below.
(Email address is for verification only. If you'd like to email a story, look for the link above)