Nestled right near the heart of this attraction to canoe tripping is an essential laziness. Sure, there’s the love affair with water. The pace and rhythm and peacefulness of river journeys. The skills required to move through watery wilderness. But up there with the rest is the inescapable fact that it’s an easy way to travel, most times, and that much of the reason behind opting for a boat is that the craft is your mule. None of that backpacking drudgery. Why labor under a fifty-pound pack and succumb to a spartan backcountry lifestyle in the interest of saving every ounce of extra weight when you can load hundreds of pounds into a canoe and slip off downstream without breaking a sweat? The boat totes and the river floats.
And never more so than on a water trip free of portages of any significance. There are times, reclining in camp on such a journey, when I experience a twinge of guilt, just for a moment, over the way my canoe has been transformed into one of those behemoth recreational vehicles crammed with creature comforts. On trips sprinkled with portages I’m kept in check, but when the water is unbroken by trail or bad rapids I’m free to load up until it hardly feels like camping.
Call it the auxiliary equipment list, or the RV appendix to the main equipment list. Much of it seems to center on kitchen gear.
A roll-up camp table with threaded legs
A two-burner camp stove
A waist-high, lightweight telescoping stand for the two-burner stove
A cooler packed with fresh food, libations of choice, and ice (see this page for fresh food ideas)
A cutting board (lightweight plastic versions sometimes come along on more rigorous trips, but for these jaunts I just throw in the big wooden one from home)
A small backpacking stove (it’s handy to be able to boil a pot of water quickly without dealing with the bigger stove)
A folding camp chair or two
Solar shower (small versions can fit in on portaging trips too)
Bigger, heavier, more commodious tent
Only one thing threatens the decadent elegance of these luxurious pleasure cruises. At some point the extra gear becomes so lavish and uncontrolled that you find yourself spending all your spare time tinkering with this or that gizmo, fussing endlessly with camp furniture, and even breaking into a sweat toting all that stuff from the boat into camp.
Ever notice those folks in an RV campground who erect plastic picket fences around their site, hang a flag next to their door, and stake out whirligig birds and flamingos around their Winnebago? When you find yourself teetering on the brink of that dangerous abyss of campsite madness, it’s time to reassess.
A lavish camp on a no-portage journey.