My canoe has survived highway crashes, rocky rivers and a family of raccoons

My canoe might not be ‘good as new,’ but it’s survived highway crashes, rocky rivers and a family of raccoons

GUELPH — The classified ad called out to me like a siren. I was immediately sucked in, seduced by the words that danced on the page.

“Coleman 16-foot canoe. Good as new, $350.”

I didn’t know I was in the market for a canoe until I had unfolded the newspaper that morning and stumbled on the ad. Suddenly, I needed to have that canoe. With zero planning and even less research, I was about to make what could fairly be described as an impulse purchase.

But no matter. All that was important to me in that moment was that a used boat was out there, lonely and looking for a new owner, and I was just the sucker to buy her.

I phoned the seller immediately, confirmed my interest and drove out to Canadian Tire to buy four foam pads to carry home what would surely be a prize of advanced nautical engineering on the roof of my car.

I made my way to the seller’s house in Waterloo and found him waiting for me in his driveway, perhaps a little too eagerly. I soon learned why.

My prized canoe was not quite the treasure I was hoping she would be. The guy had left it plopped in his backyard sometime in the 1970s, evidently, and neglected to move it since. It was buried under a pile of rotting leaves. A family of raccoons had made a home inside it, using the hull liberally as a shared bathroom.

I also learned that “good as new” is apparently a loose term in classified advertising that means anything manufactured any time in the 20th century, somewhere in between the Second World War and the first Trudeau government.

In short, it looked like it had been to hell and back. But I was blinded by love.

When the boat was built, it clearly predated technologies such as fibreglass, Kevlar and ultralight plastic. The thing was made of heavy-duty plastic construction, apparently designed to take a bullet without springing a leak.

The Coleman’s frame was reinforced with bulky aluminum bars, too, so it weighed in at about 55 kilograms, which is great if you’re buying an icebreaker but not so hot if you want a canoe you can portage over land by yourself.

My first warning should have been that the owner said he couldn’t help me put it on the roof of my car because he didn’t want to throw out his back.

But in my mind, I was already paddling the canoe out on a river somewhere. I wasn’t even listening anymore. I overlooked the boat’s obvious flaws, and its awful smell, and quickly paid the man without haggling over the price.

I loaded the heavy beast onto the roof, tied it down and drove home, feeling like a voyageur about to leave on his first trip for the Hudson’s Bay Company. Raccoon droppings pelted my windshield as I went.

I’d grown up on the water, around canoes and boats. After moving to a new city and a new province, I didn’t realize how much I’d missed going out for a paddle. I daydreamed about adventures on the open water, cutting flawless J-strokes across postcard-perfect lakes in search of trout and fresh air.

I pulled into my driveway before I finally realized my purchase might have been more than just a little bit hasty. Back then, I was renting a top-floor apartment in an old house. In my rush to buy the canoe, I hadn’t put any thought into where I might actually store the thing.

The apartment was on a street corner, had no backyard and no obvious place on the property where a canoe could be kept. So I dragged it into the crawl space underneath the old house, down a flight of stairs, through a narrow cellar doorway and over the other tenants’ appliances and bicycles stored down there, adding a few hundred new scrapes as I went.

That weekend, I took the canoe out for its inaugural test drive. We were somewhere outside of Orangeville in a heavy downpour when a loud squeak and then bang rumbled across the car’s roof. I looked out my rear-view mirror in time to see the canoe bounce high in the air and then get dragged down the highway at 110 kilometres an hour.

Miraculously, she didn’t crack. But the old girl never did quite paddle right after that. There is a large dent in her hull that makes a strange sloshing sound as it limps through the water.

And all those planned adventures? They never really materialized, at least not with this boat. Life kind of just got in the way. Until The Record’s Watershed series gave me an excuse to get it out on the water, the canoe has been used a grand total of five times, which works out to about $70 a trip.

Today, she sits forgotten in my backyard, collecting leaves. I’m pretty sure a family of raccoons has made the boat their home again. Every now and then, I’ll catch a glimpse of her by the back fence and feel a little bit sad. Just a bit.

So if you’re in the market for a used canoe, I know where you can find one. For a fair price. And let’s just say it’s as good as new.

This column originally appeared in the May 2016 edition of Guelph Life magazine.

DAVID BEBEE RECORD STAFF Greg Mercer guides his Coleman canoe over a shallow rocky area of the Eramosa River outside of Guelph, as part of the Record’s The Watershed series.