Canoe Livery Letters

From: bsteiger@northlightgallery.ca To: landon.redding@merrickvillecanoe.ca Subject: Private canoe lessons?

Hello Mr. Redding,

My name is Betty Steiger. I'm fifty-four, I paint for a living, and I have somehow talked myself into performing at the Merrickville Talent Show next month. My act is a synchronized canoe routine on the lake. Here is the problem: I have never been in a canoe. Not once. I moved out here from Portland three years ago for the gallery job and apparently the lake looked so peaceful I decided it owed me a performance.

Can you teach me? Fast? I can pay your private lesson rate, whatever that is. I'm free most mornings before my shift. Please tell me this isn't as ridiculous as it sounds.

Betty

* * *

From: landon.redding@merrickvillecanoe.ca To: bsteiger@northlightgallery.ca Subject: Re: Private canoe lessons?

Ms. Steiger,

Not ridiculous at all. I've had stranger requests. I ran a tour bus for twenty years before I bought the livery, so I've seen people attempt worse things with less practice.

Here's what I'd suggest. Six lessons over three weeks. First lesson is basic strokes and balance, that's the part most people skip and then regret. Second we work on turning. Third and fourth we build the routine you actually want to perform. Fifth we run it full speed. Sixth we polish. Rate is forty an hour, cash or e-transfer, your pick.

One warning. The camping stove in the shed has a stubborn valve and it keeps failing to light, so if you were counting on tea after lessons, you may be counting on cold juice instead. I'll keep trying to fix it.

What mornings work for you?

Landon Redding Merrickville Canoe Livery

* * *

I reply saying Tuesdays and Thursdays, seven in the morning, before the gallery opens. He sends back a thumbs up and a paddle emoji. I look up what a paddle emoji means and decide it means nothing.

The first Tuesday is cool and the lake has that flat early light I would kill to paint. Landon is exactly what I expected from the emails, a man in his late forties in a faded livery t-shirt, standing on a wooden dock next to a red canoe like he was born there. He's forty-eight, I learn, never married, and he talks about canoes the way I talk about ochre.

"Okay, first thing," he says, holding the canoe steady against the dock. "It's going to feel tippy. That's not you doing it wrong, that's just a canoe."

"Great. Wonderful. I've signed up to perform on a tippy thing."

"You'll be fine. Sit low, knees loose, and paddle like you're stirring a big pot." He demonstrates from the bow seat and I copy him from the stern, wobbly as a newborn deer. He walks me through the forward stroke, the draw, the sweep. Every time my grip goes wrong he reaches over and moves my hands, and every time my pulse does something stupid I have to pretend it's about balance.

Afterward I carry two bruised shins and a strange lightness home. That night I write in my diary, the cheap spiral one I keep by the bed:

Dear diary, today a man put his hands on my shoulders to fix my posture and I nearly fell out of the canoe from the other thing. His hands were warm and he said "relax, you're holding yourself as stiff as a fence post" and my pulse jumped like a hooked fish. He is not doing anything. He is just teaching. I am fifty-four years old and I am keeping these lessons anyway. For the talent show. Obviously.

* * *

Thursday morning there's a text waiting when I wake.

Landon: Stove still won't light. Shed valve's done. Cold drinks it is, hope that's ok

Betty: I don't care if we drink lake water as long as you keep teaching me. Bring the juice.

Landon: Lake water is off the menu. Juice it is.

I grin at my phone like a fool and put it in my bag.

* * *

The second lesson is the hips lesson. Nobody warned me about the hips lesson.

I am practicing a slow sweep stroke while he watches from the dock, and he keeps saying "your whole boat is leaning, not just your arms." Finally he wades in, boots and all, steadies the gunwale, and then puts his hands on my hips from behind to show me how the rotation should start in my body, not my shoulders.

"There," he says. "Feel that? The power comes from here."

I feel that. I feel that considerably more than I should. His breath is on the back of my neck and the lake is completely silent except for water slapping the hull and my own heart making an idiot of itself. I finish the stroke, mostly correctly, and do not fall in, which I count as a triumph given the circumstances.

That night, diary again:

Dear diary. Today Landon steadied my hips from behind in the canoe and his breath was on my neck and I think I may be learning more than canoeing. What am I doing. He's a client-facing small business owner and I'm a client. There's a whole transactional structure around us. Forty an hour, and the lessons are paid for and should stay exactly that, a separate thing from whatever this is. And yet. I keep thinking about his hands. This is either a disaster or the best thing that's happened to me since I moved to Ontario and honestly the bar for best thing was on the floor.

Is it terrible that I hope the stove never gets fixed? Is it terrible that I'm considering slowing down my progress so the lessons continue? Six lessons. Then the talent show. Then what, Betty? Then what.

* * *

From: bsteiger@northlightgallery.ca To: landon.redding@merrickvillecanoe.ca Subject: Today

Landon,

Good lesson today. I think my sweep stroke is finally behaving. I wanted to say, since we're two lessons in and I haven't fallen in the lake once, that you're a good teacher and I'm glad I emailed you.

Also, and please take this the right way, when you corrected my hip rotation I could actually feel what you meant. The stroke I mean. The stroke made much more sense. So. Thank you for that.

See you Tuesday.

Betty

P.S. Sorry about the stove. Maybe it's a sign you should buy a kettle.

* * *

From: landon.redding@merrickvillecanoe.ca To: bsteiger@northlightgallery.ca Subject: Re: Today

Betty,

Glad it's clicking. Tuesday we start building your actual routine. Think about what music you want, because paddling in time to something is easier than paddling to a metronome in your head.

Re: the kettle. My sister sends me one every Christmas. I have four kettles and zero working burners. The stove is a curse at this point.

Landon

* * *

Tuesday I bring coffee in a thermos instead, two cups, because apparently I have become the kind of person who brings a man coffee at seven in the morning at her own canoe lesson. He accepts his with a surprised look and says "well, now I feel bad about the juice situation," and I say "don't, the juice was fine," and we drink coffee on the dock with their feet hanging over the water while loons do their loon business out in the fog.

"Can I ask you something?" I say. "Why a livery? Twenty years on a tour bus and then you buy canoes?"

"Bus was cities. Windows and traffic and people asking for the bathroom every ten minutes." He shrugs, looking out at the water. "This is quiet. Water's honest. It dumps you over if you lie to it."

"That's very philosophical for a man who owns a shed full of rental canoes."

"I contain depths, Ms. Steiger."

"Betty."

"Betty." He says it like he's testing the weight of it. "Okay, Betty. Show me what you've got."

We work the routine for an hour, me in the canoe, him on the dock calling corrections, and when I finally nail the full sequence without a wobble he actually cheers, both arms up, and I laugh so hard I nearly tip the