Geologists vie with paddlers in their love of waterfalls. Back in my student days, I spent hours studying cross sections of Horseshoe Falls — also known as the Canadian Falls, it’s the largest of the three falls that make up the Niagara Falls complex — tracing the successive layers of dolostone (dolomitic limestone), shale, and sandstone. These strata vary in their ability to withstand the constant assault of rushing water, with the result that the resistant dolomite capstone juts out over the deeply eroded, softer shales below.

The riverbed, too, is shale, and a deep pool has been scoured below the falls by the turbulent current. Such pools can be found below all falls — though only a few falls are as spectacular as Niagara — and their name reflects their common origin: Plunge pools… Read more…

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Some folks like roughing it, or think they do. I did, once. My dream of a good time was hanging like an addled bat from the flank of a knife-edged ridge and snatching forty winks in a gale-buffeted tent, while waiting for the next avalanche to sweep down off the towering heights. So when my first long camping trip proved to be a never-ending ordeal of sodden clothes and blood-sucking flies, I shrugged off my misery, comforting myself with the thought that I was preparing for bigger and better agonies to come.

Here’s what happened. My brother and I pitched camp in a dank sag along a riverbank, right in the center of a dense tangle of alder, birch, and cedar. No hint of a breeze penetrated the thick, interlocked branches. We set up housekeeping in an Army pup tent, vintage 1945. It had no floor and no mosquito netting. Whatever the tent’s shortcomings, though, the blackflies and no-see-ums loved it. And they told all their friends. We were never short of company.

The weather was no help, either. Dense fog blanketed the ground each night and hung around through the early morning. Then the sun took over, turning our canvas shelter into a steaming sauna — just before the daily thunderstorm arrived to fill the sag with standing water. Finding dry wood in this postdiluvian landscape proved impossible. So we ate cold beans directly from the can, and made coffee by stirring powdered instant into tepid water. Our tent, soaked repeatedly by storm and fog and never given a chance to dry, soon developed a microclimate of its own, drizzling a fine mist down on our cotton-batting sleeping bags at all hours of the day and night.

But we were young and fit. We survived. And we bragged later about how we could take it. In truth, though, we’d have enjoyed ourselves much more if we’d followed Nessmuk’s advice. On the other hand, the self-described “limber-go-shiftless” dean of backwoods letters seldom strayed far from the nineteenth-century tourist track, and he often decamped to a waterfront hotel when the going got tough. You may not have this luxury. The longer your trip and the more difficult your route, the more likely it is that you’ll have to rough it at least some of the time. Nature deals the cards, after all. But this doesn’t mean that you can’t try to make the best of even a bad hand. Preparation, organization, and a keen eye for the lay of the land will always improve your odds… Read more…

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A confession first: This is not a book about paddling. It is not, at any rate, about paddling in the strictest sense. An oar is not a paddle, and Three Men in a Boat is about a fortnight’s holiday in a double sculling skiff, a small, clinker‑built craft that can be rowed — well, sculled, if we’re going to insist on strict accuracy — by two people, while a third person lounges in the stern sheets and steers. So it’s also the case that the boat in the title isn’t a canoe, however you choose to define that protean craft. And it’s certainly not a kayak.

Of course, an Adirondack guideboat is usually rowed, and most paddlers would recognize a guideboat as a close cousin of the canoe. For that matter, it’s not hard to design a rowing rig for a “proper” canoe — or even a kayak. There are often good reasons for doing this, too. Which brings a story about a trip in a double sculling skiff a little closer to home waters for readers of In the Same Boat. Am I making too much of these semantic quibbles? Quite possibly. Still, I wanted to avoid disappointing anyone who was looking forward to a tale about a canoe trip. And while we’re on the subject of finding the right word for everything, I should make it clear that Three Men in a Boat is about … er … three men in a boat. Women have only walk‑on parts in the narrative, and I must also confess that on the rare occasions when they do appear on stage, it’s usually as foils in some humorous anecdote. (That’s two confessions in two paragraphs; I hope there won’t be any need for more.) Then again, the aforementioned three men are themselves the butt of most of the book’s many jokes, so perhaps any women who read this will be indulgent.

Or perhaps not. Time will tell.

To begin… 1889 was a momentous year… Read more…

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