From a Stones Throw

To look at it on a map, it doesn’t seem all that long, but to actually put an oar in the river…well that became a whole other thing. Laughlin, Nevada is hot and larger than one might think and very few of her citizen’s are interested in helping anyone simply hiking through, which was the nature of my business as I told the two separate police pairs.

My main interest was to make it to Lake Havasu. The problem was – I really didn’t have any idea where that was. I jus’ knew that I was en route that way and that this was where my journey had taken me.

As I sat on the bank of the Colorado River, being unimpressed by its not-so-mighty power and flow, I managed to gather the ire of a drunk guy and his wife. He began throwing rocks at me and yelling that I was spying him and his wife.

Needless to say I vamoosed and made myself scarce. Unfortunately for me, I returned that evening and discovered he’d left his Coleman canoe on the river’s bank and I willfully stole the damn thing.

Why I initially did this – I cannot explain. But it lead me to an adventure that I never dreamed of doing – attempting to paddle down the Colorado River to the U.S./Mexico border. How hard could that be, right? Right.

I put in behind Harrah’s Casino about 100 feet from where the canoe had been left and paddled out towards the middle of the stream and discovered the current was much swifter than it looked. Before I knew it, I was splashing my way beneath Highway 40 as the sun began to come up.

The river offered me a freedom I hadn’t felt in sometime. I grew up near the banks of the Klamath River in northern California and had become land-locked, living in the high desert, so I’d forgotten the feel of the water as it lapped at the sides of the canoe.

All that day, I paddled and drifted intermittently, trying to get my muscles used to the effort. At first, I thought it would be my arms that would be the greatest problem, but it turns out my shoulders and eventually my rib-cage and stomach muscles bore the brunt of the effort.

After six or seven hour, I put ashore where I clumsily dragged my ill-gotten canoe into the brush, rolled out my sleeping bag and fell asleep without eating. It was still dark when I awoke the following morning and began to question my decision to try such a foolish thing.

“Do I or don’t I?” my inner voice argued, “No one will ever know that you didn’t make it. No shame in that.”

It was the words, ‘didn’t make it,’ that goaded me to my feet. Instantly, I knew I had to continue because I hadn’t really tried and all I knew was that aside from hurting like hell, trying and failing is a lot better than never giving the effort in the first place.

Quietly, I went to work building a small camp fire and boiling water for a mess of rice and beans. Coffee, I decided would have to wait until later as I didn’t want to waste a bunch of time in an area that I was totally unfamiliar with. No sense in attracting anymore attention than necessary, after all I was piloting a stolen canoe.