Catharsis

So it's a lovely day and I'm off to go kayaking again, this time to see how far up the La Vase river I can get in Jemima, the boat I bought last week, which was not designed for seeing how far one can get up a river, being 14.5 feet long. And in terms of following the historical trade route portage, which I have no intention of doing this year, and little interest in doing next, I'm not really heading in the right direction, going upstream from the end, Champlain Park at Lake Nipissing, instead of starting from the beginning, Trout Lake (home of the monster, which had the good manners not to eat me on countless daytime and moonlit dips).

But it doesn't matter; in its lower reaches at the moment, the river has no current at all, especially as the lake is so high right now, the highest I've ever seen - the lower river is just some lazy loops through startlingly beautiful countryside, where yesterday I saw a grebe, a muskrat, some weirdo non-diving duck with a red head, and loveliest of all a very pretty doe, who I surprised drinking from the river just a couple of meters away from me, and who stared me down in evident shock and bewilderment with impossibly big black eyes until I passed her, at which moment she booted soundlessly away.

First, though, I have to sit here and finish this blog entry, because I have to have a morning shit before I leave, so I don't have to hurry back at any point. It's a bit odd but I'm absolutely uncomfortable taking a shit in the wilderness. I wonder if that's just me or if everyone is like that, and I wonder if the revulsion to the prospect has any evolutionary remnants mixed up in it from a time when we weren't at the top of the food chain and were afraid of being tracked by predators.

Anyways. Kayaking is lovable for a lot of reasons, and I could go on about them ad nauseum, and no doubt will some other time. But probably the most lovable thing about it is the degree to which it's literally and figuratively cathartic. My bad moods can never stand up to the first twenty minutes of paddling, particularly in such a lovely place as this (damn, my childhood in this fucking arse-end of the world would have been nicer if I'd had a boat!), and I do some really great thinking, accepting, and moving on whilst on the water. And I don't know if it's because of the nature of the physical exercise or because of the mental relaxingness of it all, but the body becomes pretty content, after half an hour or so, to start signalling it's ready to get rid of anything superfluous in there (hence the necessity of taking the morning shit before starting out).

This manifests itself most obviously, in me, with great rupturing belches that echo through the calm of the tranquil northern Ontario morning, blending in seamless harmony with the crickets, frogs, and birdsong - the tranquil northern Ontario morning being full of the jay family, particularly a bumper crop of blue jays this year, whose raucous loud calls are about as pleasant, objectively speaking, as a young woman belching.