Portage: A Family, A Canoe, and the Search for the Good Life by Sue Leaf

Abstract

Reviewed by: Portage: A Family, A Canoe, and the Search for the Good Life by Sue Leaf Kevin Koch Sue Leaf, Portage: A Family, A Canoe, and the Search for the Good Life. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015. 249 pp. $16.95. Every once in a while, you encounter a book seemingly written for yourself. And maybe even about yourself. I frequently felt as if I were looking in a mirror while reading Sue Leaf’s delightful nature memoir, Portage: A Family, A Canoe, and the Search for the Good Life. [End Page 85] Perhaps it was her three-decades-plus marriage to her husband Tom, with many of their best times spent outdoors in a canoe. My wife and I have tallied just a few less than the author, and we too head to water, woods, or cycling roads as often as possible. Maybe it was the four kids they brought along on outings (including Mother’s and Father’s Days . . . parents choose!). For us it was three. Definitely it was the seventeen-foot, green, Old Town Penobscot canoe. They must have bought the one next to ours. And shuttling from the canoe back to the car by bicycle—done that, too. True, Leaf and her spouse’s portage-laden canoe journeys—through the Upper Midwest (another similarity), the Boundary Waters and Great Lakes, and occasional outlier trips to places like Montana, Ontario, and Louisiana—have been far more ambitious than the local floats my wife and I have undertaken. Yet the book is no less relatable, even to those who have never dipped a paddle. For Sue Leaf and her husband are, like most of us, working people with busy lives. They head off once each year, more or less, for a week-long canoe trip involving camping, portaging, and minimalist living. Portage chronicles the almost-annual ventures in semi-independent essays ranging from their dating days, to their first and successive forays with children, to their first voyages into empty-nester waters. In the hands of a less-skilled author, it could become a clichéd trope that canoeing offers lessons about life. But while the essays of Portage often do open up to universal reflections, they are organically connected to their preceding narratives and uniquely insightful. Canoeing with children, for example, “reinforced in our children less tangible ideas: that it’s good to roll with the punches and learn how to execute plan B, for there is always a need for a plan B.” If the kids complained, they were plied with three questions: Are you warm? Are you dry? Are you fed? “If the answer is ‘yes’ to all of them, a camper is in a good place.” There are mishaps to learn from. After an ill-fated route through rapids, “the gash on the hull of the Old Town remains, reminding me to choose wisely.” (Another glance in the mirror: our Old Town likewise sports an accusing gash from an ill-executed maneuver.) Leaf and her spouse all too soon paddle into middle age. On a more somber note, Leaf explores Native American traditions that present the canoe as a liminal boat that “would carry us to our new life.” More cheerfully, sans children to instruct in the ways of the wild, they occasionally opt for an easier float, even allowing for the luxury of a cooler, which previously [End Page 86] would have been too heavy and bothersome to carry: “Hey, we’re empty nesters! Approaching decrepitude! We’re entitled to cold beer in camp!” But more than what we learn is what we see, hear, and encounter. I’ve paddled only once in the Boundary Waters, and through Leaf’s accounts I can feel once again the weight of a canoe on my shoulders during a long portage, can see the copper-colored, tannin-tinted clarity of frigid lake waters, and must whisk away pesky mosquitoes. I’ve never paddled in the south or in Canada, but I can visualize their daughter’s eagerness to paddle “toward one floating ‘log’ after another” in search of an elusive Louisiana alligator, and can ponder Ontario’s Nellie Lake with its eerie deep clarity...