ERIK REECE
PHOTOGRAPHS BY
LISA M. HAMILTON
Notes from a very
small island
A practice in belonging to this world
With my solo canoe loaded down by camping gear
and a cooler full of beer, wine, and cold cuts, I paddle
out onto Lake Umbagog, a quiet eight-thousand-acre body of
water that stretches across the Maine–New Hampshire border. Spear-shaped >r, spruce, and white cedar frame the lake
in deep green hues. Otter, moose, and mink are said to prowl
the marshy banks. A solitary loon bobs in the distance. The
day is warm and bright, and a cool June breeze is combing
narrow furrows onto the surface of the water.
I balance the wind on the stem of my canoe with a paddle
stroke my grandfather taught me thirty years ago. Back then we
explored the coves and inlets near the Chesapeake Bay, where
my grandparents lived in a small stucco parsonage. Some years
later, my grandfather talked a >shing buddy into selling me this
canoe for one hundred dollars. My grandfather was a forceful
country preacher, and people had a hard time telling him no.
From the other room, I could overhear him saying into the
phone, “Well Bill, he’s just a poor graduate student . . . ”
By turning the paddle away from the stern at the end of the
stroke, I carve the letter J into the water, a kind of one-letter
poem that dissolves into a small eddy and must be reinscribed
over and over. As a kid, I remember watching from the bow
seat of my grandfather’s canoe as he performed the J-stroke
with a deft deliberateness. He handled his paddle with such
?uid ease, the water never even splashed around the blade as
he turned it into the curve of the J. I try to emulate that
artistry now, but out in the middle of Lake Umbagog I >nd
november I december 2008 ORION
