Oscar and Felix on Water (Brian)

 
June 24, Burritt’s Rapids, Ont. --- We went to sleep last night under a violent thunder and lightning storm. The wind was lifting our tents and we thought we might get microwaved. But we woke up alive to pack up wet tents.

This Oscar and Felix thing is coming into clearer definition. In the day Al leads the row. At night I lead the hunt for food.

My friend Albert keeps a special Gatorade bottle his boat that does not contain Gatorade, although in a moment of fatigue you could mistake it for that. Not only does he have that in the boat, but he stores it there until it's full.

I prefer to pull to shore and do my communing with nature's foliage. Call me fussy, but I'm just not going to risk having a chemical spill in my boat and having to row with it.

Al stores his boat right side up at night, with stuff still in it. He bails it out in the morning. I turn my boat over and take all the gear in my tent.

Al for the most part does not get blisters on his hands. Maybe one or two. I have twenty.

Albert is driven to row, and I am not. I stop for pain and to take pictures. He rows on and he would row into the dark if I was not with him. One night we reached a town that might have a restaurant. It was 7pm, raining, and we had rowed for five hours in the rain. Al said, "should we keep going?” I have blisters from trying keep up.

I nibble on nuts in the boat, but Al doesn't care for them. He eats some kind of energy food he calls "globules" and he feeds me boat to boat. Today an orange globule stuck to my arm.

Yesterday morning it started to pour at 6am, just when we should have been getting up. We each knew the other was awake but said nothing until Al called over to my tent, "what do you think?"

I was thinking I wanted a down comforter.

We thought we would row all day in rain, but we pressed on into an overcast day without rain. Loons called out all day, and popped up next to our boats, trilling. We rowed 20 miles on open lakes. We saw pairs of loons every mile or so, mergansers, redwing blackbirds ... Lots of birds we are not good at identifying.

Later Al told me if I had decided not to row in the rain he would have supported me. He didn't want to get out of bed either.