Life with Liz: Staying afloat on summer vacation

This week, we started to make plans for our summer vacation.

The kids were thrilled to learn that we will be heading back to Cranberry Lake for a few days. You know, the place where we go to the bathroom in a hole in the ground. Seeing how excited they were to go made me forget my temporary discomfort, and I admit I am looking forward to unplugging for a few days, too.

Besides planning to eat all the s’mores and pudgie pies that they can, and divvying up into the girls cabin and the boys cabin, they are also getting ready to canoe even farther around the island than they did last year. Not long after we had this discussion, our very first, and last, whole family in a canoe trip showed up in my Facebook memories.

For as much as I love the water, I’ve never been much of a boat person. The Wonderful Husband, on the other hand, has fond memories of many hours spent in a canoe, fishing with his grandfather. When he came across a Craigslist ad for an Old Town Tripper that was similar to the one in his memories, he took it as a sign and decided that it was time to start re-creating some of these memories.

When he met up with the seller, it turned out to be a dad whose boys had grown up, and he was downsizing to a smaller craft. He was happy that the canoe would be going to a family that reminded him of his own and wished us many grand adventures. He even threw in the two small life jackets that wouldn’t fit around the necks of his now strapping college boys.

Full of nostalgia and ambition, we waited for the perfect spring weekend and headed out to Tuscarora State Park, canoe in tow. The fishing gear was stowed, the lunches were sealed up in a plastic bucket. We definitely looked like the All-American family, ready to tackle the wilderness.

The only thing we failed to consider was taking a 4-year-old, a 7-year-old, and a 10-year-old out onto the lake for the first time in a canoe was sheer insanity. Those particular ages don’t have the first understanding of physics, so things like “stay low” and “move slowly” meant little to nothing to rambunctious kids who had been waiting for this canoe ride for weeks. After almost capsizing before we even had our gear loaded into the canoe, I’m not sure why we didn’t stop and reassess the situation before piling everyone in and paddling out, but we didn’t. I think we deluded ourselves that everyone would settle down once we got underway. They didn’t.

I ended up in the bow, so I could only hear the chaos that was erupting behind me. Well, I could also feel the craft lurching from one side to the other as E gleefully saw something new and exciting and had to gesture wildly toward it so no one else missed it. I just kept reminding myself that we were only 20 feet from the shore and I had specifically taught the kids to swim for just such situations like this.

A suddenly seemed to develop some sort of motion sickness and, seated right behind me for the duration of the trip, threatened to hurl right down my back. I spent most of the trip directing him to shoot for overboard if he did have to throw up. G, the avid fisherman, started the fishing trip version of “are we there yet” and kept begging to be allowed to cast his line out. The WH and I were using all of our telepathic communication to keep the boat steady, and since he couldn’t see my face, he missed the “oh heck no” that I mouthed about getting the fishing rods out. Shortly, we had small kids in an unsteady craft with sharp hooks.

Miraculously, we made it back to the dock mostly dry and without any embedded hooks. A swore he was never going in the canoe again, and the WH was already planning a row boat purchase. Since then, the canoe has gone out many times, but with a lighter passenger load.

Last summer, as I watched my now-avid canoers zip around Cranberry Lake, captaining their own canoes and letting them chauffeur me around, I marveled at how far they’d come since that first canoe ride.

Paddling, mooring and even fishing from the boat have become second nature to them. Looking back on the photos from our first canoe adventure now makes me laugh. Like most of parenting and being married, we had no idea what we were getting into until we were in way over our heads, but it all worked out in the end.

Although, when you ask my kids if they want to go for a canoe ride, they will still need to know “who all is going” before they will commit.

Liz Pinkey is a contributing writer to the Times News. Her column appears weekly in our Saturday feature section.