Are you the proud owner of a canoe, or a fleet of canoes? Great! So, where do you store your boat or boats? Not on the car’s roof rack, I’d wager. At least, I hope not. If your boat is stored where it’s exposed to the elements, you might be interested in Dave Birren’s solution. He’s built a clever shelter which keeps canoes off the ground, allows ample air circulation, but provides cover from sun and snow. Best of all, it’s constructed with easily acquired materials, and anyone with modest carpentry skills could adapt his design for their canoes—or kayaks and sit-on-tops, come to that. Check out Dave’s photos:

 
Deep snow doesn’t weigh down these canoes. How deep is the snow? Deep. Here’s the same set-up in summer:

 
See what I mean about the snow depth? The canoes are racked, with an awning built on a sturdy frame. Here’s a detail shot of one end:

 
To learn how Dave built the shelter and to see these photos (and more) at their full size, visit his website here.

 
Many thanks to Dave Birren for kind permission to reprint his photos and pass the word about his ingenious canoe shelter.

 
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Winter has much of North America in its chilling grip. But winter doesn’t put a stop to imagination, does it? As ice locks up the lakes and rivers, and as the snowbanks grow deeper outside our doors, we can still re-live past journeys and look forward to next spring. Even in the darkest, coldest days of January, we can hear the cries of the returning geese and see bare earth poking up through the melting snow, if only in our minds.

 
A Reminder  This is a work of fiction. With the exception of a few public figures, whose actions and utterances are the products of the authors’ imaginations, all the characters described in this work are fictitious. And, while many locales named in this work do exist, others are entirely imaginary. Even the geography of real places has been altered from time to time for dramatic purposes. This is a work of the imagination. It isn’t a river guide.

 
Chapter One

 
Brenna Trent leaned heavily against the scuffed wooden counter, sitting half on and half off her stool. She made swift, slashing strokes with a soft pencil in a sketchbook that rested on her knee. Every so often, she glanced up at the customer standing in the cone of light illuminating the narrow aisle between two of the shop’s floor-to-ceiling bookshelves.

The man was wrapped up in a wool greatcoat whose ragged hem fell below his knees. He was a terrific model for an artist, with his wild white hair and immense, straggly moustache. His jowls sagged in folds and bloomed with broken veins, framing a magnificent hawk’s beak of a nose. His eyes, too, were hawk-like, set deep in dark sockets. He looked like an Old Testament prophet who’d fallen on hard times, and he’d been browsing through the books for well over an hour. He gave no indication that he intended to buy anything.

Brenna smeared her little finger across the pencil line to enhance a shadow. When she looked up again, her eyes met the man’s. She smiled. He smirked furtively. He’d noticed her watching him before, and now he saw she was doing something—making notes, maybe?—in some kind of big pad. He started to feel nervous. He wasn’t much of a reader, but he’d come into The Book Locker to escape the chill March wind that was driving cold rain against the shop windows and rattling the bare maple branches outside. Maybe this lady knew he wasn’t going to buy anything, he thought. Even though she was smiling, her alert eyes scared him. He was scared of a lot of things these days. He grabbed a paperback off the shelf without looking at the title and took it to the counter.

“Will that be all?” Brenna asked pleasantly.

“Yep, that’s all,” the man said, rummaging for the tattered wallet in the deep pocket of his brown corduroys. Brenna set her pad down on the counter. The man saw the sketch.

“Hey,” he said, both startled and flattered to see his penciled likeness, “that’s pretty damn good.” The man grinned as he handed over two worn, one-dollar bills. “Where’d you learn to draw like that, anyway?”

“Oh, I taught myself,” Brenna said, giving the man a few pennies in change and slipping the book into a small paper bag. “Do you want the sketch?”

“Naw,” the man said, suddenly embarrassed. “Ain’t got no place to put it.” And he turned without another word and bolted for the door, brushing past the postman in the entry alcove. An icy gust blew through the stacks of musty old books. Read more…

 
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One of the selling points of fabric overshoes is their packability, but until recently I rarely packed my NEOS Trekkers®. When I did want to stow them in my pack, I simply rolled the uppers around the soles and shoved the package into a recycled plastic shopping bag. It wasn’t a tidy solution, nor did my haphazard folding method create the smallest parcel, but that didn’t matter at the time.

A couple weeks ago I wanted to take my Trekkers along in a small duffle with some spare clothes for an overnight road trip into the lake effect snow belt. Lake effect snow can cause whiteout conditions and dump many inches of snow in an hour (for more about lake effect snow, read this Wikipedia article). I didn’t want to get caught without a way to keep my feet and legs dry and warm if I needed to trudge through the drifts. I had to find a better way to fold my Trekkers, and as it happens, it’s as easy as one, two, three. Here’s how:

 
Work with one boot at a time. Compress the fabric uppers to expel all the air trapped inside the boot. Fold the top of the upper in half, bringing the top seam down to the ankle—the left side photo above shows how. Now roll the folded upper down like you would close a lunch bag—see the middle picture. Press the folded upper as flat as practicable and bring the ankle strap up over the roll of fabric—the right side picture illustrates this. Clamp the buckle closed, and repeat the process with the second boot.

 
The folded Trekker makes a tidy package, as the photo above proves. A more fastidious person could probably do a better job of folding, but I was satisfied.

 
Stack the boots sole-to-sole (be sure to brush off any crud first!), and place them into a recycled plastic shopping bag, expel the air from the bag, and you’re ready to pack the Trekkers into a duffle or rucksack. NEOS sells a foam storage case for Trekkers for about USD10, and while they’re classy, I like the idea of recycling the ubiquitous shopping bag.

 
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