In memoriam

When somebody asks me how long I've been paddling, I usually reply that I started in 1981 as a 13-year-old summer camper.  The camp I attended in western North Carolina had a good-quality canoeing program that took us on beautiful Blue Ridge Mountain streams, and I became fascinated with the idea that I could move the boat anywhere I wanted with a simple repertoire of strokes in combination with the river's currents.

But it wouldn't really be wrong to trace my paddling history back some ten years earlier than that.  During my childhood my family took trips to Hardy, Arkansas, as guests of my parents' close friends Roscoe and Jane Feild, who owned a cabin on Wahpeton Hill overlooking the Spring River just across from the town.  In my first decade on this Earth there was no place more magical than Hardy.  The Frisco Railroad ran right through town, and at that age I loved trains (I still do, for that matter).  Traveling between the cabin and the town involved crossing a rusty old one-lane steel bridge that we kids thought would topple into the river at any moment (it finally did topple during a flood in December of 1980).  Wahpeton Hill, part of the Ozark Foothills, had many of the features of a sure-enough mountain, my favorite being a craggy outcropping a short walk from the cabin that offered a lovely view of the river.

And then there was the river and the canoe.

The Spring River has long been a popular summertime getaway for residents of the greater Memphis area... perhaps too popular.  Several canoe liveries put their customers on a section a few miles upstream of Hardy, and all manner of unruly behavior is common on the busiest summer weekends.  Down at Hardy, in the shadow of Wahpeton Hill, the river is a quieter, more family-friendly place, and it was there that our two families swam in the cool spring-fed water and soaked up the sun on a floating dock.  The canoeing we did usually involved the little kids like me sitting in the middle of the Feilds' aluminum Grumman while the grownups did the paddling.  About a mile upriver there was a little shoals where my sister and I and the Feild children loved to swim and wade, and the canoe was the vehicle that got us there.

One of my favorite stories concerning the elite athletes I know is that of siblings Davey and Cathy Hearn, both of whom were world champions and Olympians in careers that started in the 70s and lasted until the early 00s.  Canoeing was part of their lives when the two were little, but it was the same kind of unstructured play that I engaged in at Hardy.  They didn't give much thought to serious racing until one summer day in 1972, when the news came on the radio that a member of their DC-area canoe club, Jamie McEwan, had taken the bronze medal in whitewater slalom canoe at the Olympic Games in Germany.  Suddenly, their heads were alive with thoughts like, "We're just like Jamie.  We paddle in the same canoe club, and run the same rivers he's run.  Why couldn't we go and race in the Olympics, just like he's done?"

I didn't have a role model of Jamie McEwan's stature, and I've certainly never achieved the heights in the sport that Cathy and Davey have.  Fortunately, you don't have to be as good as they to share in the joy of paddling, and my transition from the little kid playing around on the Spring River to an adolescent and adult plying the craft with much greater skill was not really that much different from theirs.  Once I was a bit older and had shipped off to camp for the summer, I was able to look at the canoes on the lake there and believe I belonged in one.  Soon enough I saw the canoeing staff counselors, several of whom were quite accomplished as paddlers, as the coolest guys in camp and just the role models I needed.

Roscoe was not a great paddler, or even a good paddler, for that matter.  But when my age was measured in single digits, I didn't need a guru.  I just needed somebody to put me in a boat and let my imagination do the rest.  Roscoe and Jane and my parents probably never gave much thought to whether I would go on embrace paddlesports as a lifelong passion; they were simply doing what all people should do for the children in their lives, and providing me with an activity to pass the time on those long hot summer days.

Roscoe Feild passed away at the age of 84 this past Sunday.  You can view his obituary in The Commercial Appeal of Memphis here.  I humbly pay tribute to the man here for the role he played in making me a paddler.

Manning the stern, Roscoe Feild guides the canoe alongside the dock with a not-half-bad rudder stroke.  His wife Jane sits in front of him, with their son John (in the orange life vest) and me in the middle.  My older sister paddles in the bow.