The annual gathering of wilderness paddlers and winter campers and travelers fills the dining hall at Ohana Family Camps on Lake Fairlee, Vermont. It used to be two separate rendezvous, but a general graying of the attendees combined with the hiatus caused by COVID militated for a blending of the two.
I’ve been at the gathering from its inception, for I don’t know how many years. Seeing old familiar faces is a large part of its charm. Listening to the stories of people who’ve run rivers I will never see and snowshoe travelers who’ve shuffled beyond the limits of my imagination is another.
It’s a good dose of difference for me and Bea, who have usually been coddled in the heated bedrooms of hotels. There’s an option here to bring your own tent and sleep outside, as it were, and use the john in the main lodge a couple of hundred yards away. I don’t sleep on the ground anymore, mostly because I can’t get up from it without great difficulty, and, besides, need to get up a lot more often than once I did during my misspent youth. So we opt for a cabin, with single beds, electricity, running water and a hot shower, and no heat. Luckily, the exertion of climbing out of bed and into clothes chilled down into the 30s has a warming effect in the dawn light, as well as incentive toward great speed. I always try to remember the old New England farm children, who did this every day all winter, in the dark.
Bea happens to possess from her former life a huge double-down sleeping bag. I swear you could fit three or four people in it. We experimented with it two years ago. The zipper on my side was broken, which made my night a bit exciting, though it made it much easier to get in and out of it. She’s had it fixed since then, so sleeping in the breath-steaming cold with just half my face outside took me nostalgically back to the good old days of sleeping rough.
The ambience of the main lodge and dining room is much enhanced by the genial crowd of lovers of the outdoors (about 90 this time), as well as heat, and even a large fireplace with a semicircle of chairs that seem to attract geriatrics. It’s BYOB, so we nibbled on cheese, crackers, and dip while sipping from a pint can of German beer and renewing old acquaintances till suppertime.
The title of the gathering, as well as Vermont’s proximity to Canada, attracts many Canadians, a few of whom are also presenters. After a couple of short readings intended to set the mood of the evening, we had a presentation by a young Canadian scientist whose current career is the study of what we call woodland caribou, that long-suffering (think habitat destruction) and likely eventually disappearing species that once haunted our New England forests and is now increasingly compressed into an area in northern Quebec. Then we heard about a young Canadian woman’s bike trip, with a small group of friends, down to the tip of South America. I’m not sure how many of us Americans appreciate the self-effacing, ironic humour (their spelling) of our Canadian friends. It’s delightful.
Afterward there was schmoozing, singing, music, and storytelling till people’s individual bedtimes. However, I was suffering from a hard cold and laryngitis, so instead shuffled up through the dark woods (with a champ flashlight) to our cabin. The water in the cold tap was quite satisfyingly refreshing.
We left after breakfast next morning. I was still hurting from the head cold, and felt a little like Typhoid Mary. Home beckoned. We drove leisurely over the heights of land between Chelsea and Vershire, and south of Washington, reveling in the colors on the mountains, and slid at last into Barre, traffic, and home.
Behind us we left a story about a river trip; workshops about sharpening and hanging an axe, finding the ideal snowshoe harness (you wouldn’t believe how many there are), planning food for a northern canoe trip, preparing a canoe for a long trip, map and compass skills, and a demonstration by special guests Anna and David Bosum (Cree elders from the First Nations village of Ouje-Bougamou) on “Making Donuts Kitchen.” I was really sorry to miss that last one. Another year, maybe. I’ll keep going back as long as I can, and as long as Bea keeps bringing that gigantic sleeping bag. Every visit is a trip down the beautiful rivers of memory.
