Wings

By William E McCarthy

How do you prepare for disaster? 

When John Dexter's solo canoe crashes during the first day of a canoe trip in the wilderness of northern Maine, he is lost, injured and alone in some of the deepest, uninhabited wilderness in the state. Will this teenage boy survive long enough to find his way out? Will anyone come looking f

• Language: English
• Publisher: Hayseed Publishing, LLC
• Release date: May 18, 2021
• ISBN: 9781954923027

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE

WE WERE ON the river early. In fact, the sun wasn’t really up, but in the pre-dawn glow you could see that there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. Should be a great day once it warms up, I said, trying to keep my teeth from chattering.

Oh, I think you’ll warm up fast enough, once you start pulling against that water. The sound of the voice of Rick’s father competed with the noise of the roaring river. Now you look out for him, he said to my cousin Rick.

That was a joke! Rick was a couple of years older than me, but if you spent any time around us you would never think I was the younger one. And, I wouldn’t be the one needing to be looked after. We had spent all last summer paddling our one man canoes at a place just below Steep Falls on the Saco River. My stepfather would drop us off in the morning on his way to work, and we would run the rapids all day. We had a place about five miles down the river where he would pick us up on his way home. At first, we had a few dumps, but eventually we got the gist of really controlling the canoes. By about our third trip on the Saco, the canoes hardly had a scratch to patch up when we got home. It was great fun. We got so we could crash through the rocky whitewater areas, go ashore, portage back to where we started, and begin all over again. If my mother had seen the way we shot the rapids, she never would have given us a second run.

Toward the end of the summer, we really got serious about taking a long trip. We spent a couple of nights in my tent, camping along the banks of the Saco, planning our great run down the Allagash. We did some more camping and canoeing into the fall, but stopped once hunting season started.

I won’t have you sitting out in the middle of the woods, John Dexter, waiting for some out-of-state crazy to shoot you. My mother’s view of everything seemed to involve me being hurt in some way.

Our fall weekends were spent in blaze orange, hunting with my stepfather and Rick’s dad. They were forever talking about how to tell which direction we were going, or which way the deer were running, but I already knew a lot about that from what I had read in old books that had belonged to my father. I had a good time matching the pictures of wild plants that you can eat in his Boy Scout Field Book and finding signs of animals other than deer and people. Rick, of course, didn’t need a book since he already knew everything.

In the evening, in front of a warm fire, I spent a lot of time and energy planning the spring run on the West Branch, part of the Allagash Waterway. Rick spent a lot of time questioning and making fun of every part of my plan. He found problems in everything. Of course, speaking of problems, my mother was not at all in favor of this wilderness nonsense, as she called it. Why do you have to go the end of the earth to have fun? What’s wrong with the Saco River? It was good enough for you last year.

She didn’t ask questions because she wanted an answer. In fact, if I tried to tell her what it was like, she would always remind me of how senseless it was to lay out on the hard ground, eat food that you would mostly burn over an open fire, and have no shower or bathroom to use. To my mother, the idea of roughing it meant finding a budget motel in some town that only had a diner where you could eat. Now that I think of it, she never liked picnics either.

She didn’t mind me planning, because preparation was very important to her. She figured it was a kind of research, and research was educational.

Why don’t you study other folks who may have used these rivers to carry furs or other goods to the early settlers? Her question was so obviously the question of a teacher. I didn’t mind though, as long as she wasn’t telling me I couldn’t go.

She hadn’t looked happy as we packed the car to begin this trip. She asked Rick about the life jackets, and he answered, They’re with the canoes, right where we left them at the end of last summer. He had climbed into the back seat of the car with the back packs and laughed nervously.

I didn’t believe we’d ever actually do this. The look on Rick’s face didn’t convince me that he was all that comfortable with the whole idea. Are you sure you packed everything we’ll need?

I felt like dropping the heaviest pack on his head. Yeah, it’s all here, I said, wishing he had taken a little more interest in the planning when it might have helped. I had a checklist of everything that I packed for both of us: rain gear, clothing, flashlights, insect repellent, mess kits, waterproof matches, and about twenty other must-have items. I felt good about the preparations. Of course, I knew Rick would give me a hard time about the menu I had prepared, but the meals had to be made up of lightweight foods that we could easily carry.

None of that seemed to matter now. Rick wanted the lead position, and he was busy making sure that his canoe wasn’t loaded more than mine. The cold air reminded us that even though it was Memorial Day weekend, winter was not so far behind us. We were thankful that no remaining ice chunks were left to accompany us on our run down the river.

Our paddles touched the cold water and our canoes surged forward, skipping across the white foam as if they had a life of their own. I’m sure that we were out of sight in moments, but all my concentration was focused on what lay ahead, and I couldn’t afford a glance back. We had gone over the maps one more time the night before and talked about where we might find the best campsites and estimated our arrival time at Chesuncook Dam as early in the afternoon on Monday.

The air was cold, and the spray from the roaring river soaked me, but the excitement of finally being on the water made up for any discomfort that I felt. The sun began to shimmer through the trees that lined both sides of the river, and occasionally would bounce off a black patch of water that hadn’t yet been turned to foam by the rocks and boulders of the West Branch. It felt great to glide through the churning water, and I was confident with the skill I had developed last summer.

It amazed me that it took so much work to keep the canoe pointed down river. The canoe wanted to turn with the swirling water. It was hard enough for me to avoid hitting things that might dump me into the water, but to imagine doing it backwards was scary and crazy. It was hard work, and even with the thrill of moving with the incredible energy of the water as it tore through the rock-filled riverbed, I was rigid and tense as I maneuvered my canoe around the ever-looming obstacles. I felt as if I was just another part of the canoe, and I had the feeling that I could be easily snapped in half if I made the wrong move.

I watched about fifty yards ahead of me as Rick maneuvered around a fallen tree that reached across the river and then skillfully handle the five foot drop among the large boulders immediately in front of the tree. My body tensed as I prepared to duplicate his moves.

The tree was not the problem. As I came around, I let the front of the canoe turn too far to the right, and before I could blink, the swift current jerked the canoe around and I was headed backwards over the rocks.