It’s the first time I’ve set my firstborn in a canoe, and it isn’t going well. We’re high up on the Yellowstone River in Montana. Eli is eight months old. The river is busting along with snowmelt. Eli seems particularly vulnerable and helpless when I hand him to Marypat in the bow. He hates the life jacket we strap him into. His lungs are in fine working order and operating at top volume when we shove off from shore for a twenty-five-day jaunt down the entire navigable length of the river, to the confluence with the Missouri, just across the North Dakota border.
I’m thinking, What are we doing? The river jostles us along. Eli continues his complaints. I look around to see if anyone is watching this peculiar form of child abuse from the banks.
What we are doing, I remind myself, is starting our child’s career in boats and on water. Great start. He’ll go on to be a real estate agent or stockbroker for sure, with this visceral memory simmering in his subconscious. He’ll move to the biggest city he can find as soon as he can escape our clutches and never again leave the security of pavement and air conditioning. What are we doing?
It takes us about two miles to start to cope. Eli is teething, and it turns out that the bananas we brought along, dried in long strips, are fantastic teething equipment. He’s busy masticating bananas for half an hour at a time, drooling all over himself, completely lost in the experience. The rhythm of the current eventually lulls him to sleep. Marypat lays him on a piece of foam between her feet in the bow, and he naps to the tune of rocking river.
By this time both of us are exhausted with the stress of insecurity and self-doubt, and we just drift along, letting the river do the work, avoiding even the little standing waves, relishing the quiet.
That shaky beginning isn’t the last moment of doubt—not by a long shot. There’s the sudden hailstorm, pellets of ice the size of marbles beating down on us while we cower on the shore and shelter Eli under our ponchos. There are accumulating diapers. There are days of unrelenting sun, way out in eastern Montana, when heatstroke seems like a fifty-fifty proposition. There’s the rattlesnake swimming the river down near Sidney, Montana. Handfuls of sand going into Eli’s mouth. A minor burn at the evening campfire. Long nights in the tent with a squalling infant.
Wilderness challenges. Not all that much different, when I thought about it, from the obstacles we faced at home. At home there were stairs to tumble down, table corners to fall against, bugs to eat in the yard, bad nights in the family bed. The stage setting is changed, but the problems are the same.
Eli, we discover, is at a pretty ideal age to go on a trip. We don’t know that at the start. We’ve gone because it’s the window of summer that works for us. He’s on the verge of his first step. He can hold himself up by the gunwale of the canoe, for instance, but he can’t climb out or really walk. He’s still breast-feeding, so he can eat our leftovers mashed up and chew on dried fruit, but most of his nourishment is carried inside Mom. He’s little enough to sleep between us without needing his own sleeping bag.
Our eldest son and his first wilderness baptism by canoe at eight months.
Logistically, the biggest problem is that he’s still in diapers. Our solution is to bring a diaper pail and about thirty cloth diapers. We have a small stash of disposables in reserve, but we never have to use them.
BABY FOOD
When you think about it, what a great thing breast-feeding is. Talk about self-contained! Not only that, but nursing is as sure a pacifier as there is when babies are unhappy.
Bring along some diversionary food treats, too. Crackers are good, and bananas dried the long way are fantastic, both as long-term sucking material and as a good teething food.
Take one of those old-fashioned hand-crank food mills. On the Yellowstone trip we’d just grind up some of our dinner (as long as it wasn’t too spicy) and feed it to Eli.
Instant baby cereal is a nice filler around or between meals.
Bring a backpack kid carrier, the kind that stands up on its own, and use it at mealtime as a kind of high chair.
Backpack and feeding station, all in one.
When diapers are only wet, we rinse them out in the river, then drape them over the packs to dry. The canoe looks like some sort of gypsy rig with laundry hanging out, but we’re not that proud. Soon as the breezes start picking up corners of the diapers, we know they’re dry. The rinse and dry cycle can be repeated four or five times before the diapers start feeling more like cardboard than cloth. Then we retire them.
Poopy diapers (that’s how you’ll talk when you have babies, too) are a different matter. The contents we dispose of the same way we do with adult poop. On the Yellowstone we dig shallow cat hole latrines (see this page). Soiled diapers go into the diaper pail in a plastic bag.
The Yellowstone River is, it so happens, a perfect cloth diaper sort of river. We didn’t know this at the outset, mind you, but it seems that a riverside town always turns up just when the diaper pail on board is brimming full and turning a tad toxic. We pull in to town and make our way to the coin laundry. About once a week we need to stop and refresh. About once a week a town like Columbus or Miles City or Glendive looms above the banks, and we try not to look sheepish with our sack of doodoo on the way to the washing machine.
Vanity is pretty tough to maintain once you have children. A run to a riverside laundry with a sack of dirty diapers will bludgeon that personality trait into submission within about two blocks. I guarantee it.
The other good thing about the Yellowstone is that it has fresh current without much in the way of whitewater challenge. Most of the watercourse flows along at a steady, strong pace, so we can stroke enough to stay on course and maneuver when we have to, but even just drifting along we cover twenty or thirty miles a day without much effort. Good thing, because whoever is in the bow with Eli tends to be pretty occupied with him. The stern paddler does most of the paddling each day, while the bow person pitches in when needed or when Eli succumbs to a nap.
For nearly a month we coast across the state of Montana. Eli becomes adept at standing in the bow, hanging on to the sides of the boat and exhorting the world. He points to geese and pelicans, leans over to touch the water, jumps up and down in the canoe hull. Once or twice bad weather keeps us in camp, but we have time, so we wait it out.
My parents join us for a five-day stint and give us relief with baby duty in camp and at lunch stops. Another friend with older kids comes along for part of the time too, and his ten-year-old daughter immediately takes on entertaining Eli in a series of riverside camps. The most consistent challenge is to keep sand and rocks and goose poop out of his mouth. Kids are pretty oral at that age, and Eli seems exceptionally so.
BABY TIPS
A folding camp chair works as a pad for the baby to sleep on in the canoe and a sleeping pad in the tent at night.
The backpack kid carrier is nice in camp because it allows you to carry your baby while you do chores or go for walks and keeps your hands free. Eli was quite content to hang out in a pack, but if we set him down on a blanket and went to do chores, he’d squall.
In warm weather, babies don’t need their own sleeping bags. Lay them on the camp chair between adults and drape your sleeping bags over them, or zip two adult bags together and keep the baby in the middle.
Haul the canoe into camp upright, throw a few toys inside, and use it as a playpen as long as your child can’t climb over the gunwale.
Bring a picnic blanket along to spread out for a crawling space.
Invite friends or relatives who like kids or who have their own and will share some of the chores.
Insects can be a real hazard with babies. Try to avoid high bug season. Dress young’uns in long-sleeved shirts, and if it gets bad, retreat to the tent.
Tents with sleeping bags laid out inside are fun playpens for infants as long as it doesn’t get too hot.
When shopping for the family canoe, think about having enough room in the bow for your legs and a baby, either standing up or napping.
In camp, a canoe becomes a playpen (right). Bring a picnic blanket along for safe crawl space (below).
We’re alone, just the three of us, when we finally slide into the Missouri River, some 550 miles downstream. It’s a victorious, and also melancholy, moment. We’ve done it. We don’t want to end it. We paddle into an eddy at the confluence of the two great rivers and just sit there in the midday sun, feeling the currents swirl past.
A fisherman is in a boat nearby, fishing higher up on the same eddy. He asks what we’re doing, where we’ve been. We tell him we’ve been a month on the river with our kid. Started up by Yellowstone Park, came all the way down without stopping.
He doesn’t say anything for a long time. He sends another cast into the quiet water, sits back, looks at us for a minute.
“Just your little family, huh?” he says. “All the way down the river.” He shakes his head. “That’s pretty neat. Just the family, all the way down,” he says again. “Pretty darn neat.”
INFANT SAFETY
Infant life jackets have a great deal in common with torture devices. In the interest of creating bomb-proof, head-up flotation, manufacturers make tiny life vests that could double as cervical collars. Ask yourself, when you go shopping, “Would I wear that thing?” My preference is to pick a vest that fits comfortably rather than one with great flotation and uncomfortable snugness. What good is a fantastically buoyant vest if your baby won’t wear it? Pick one the child will tolerate. One of the problems with little kids’ life jackets is that they can slip over the baby’s head in the water. Make sure it has leg loops! On the life jacket it should list the range of body weight it can handle. Flotation near the top of the vest, a head flap, or both is more important for infants than for older kids.
We added a body harness and tether rope on Eli. The tether is tied to the adult in the bow with the baby, who is wearing a life jacket, always. That way, if you go over, you can reel your child to you and get to safety. The only warning is to be careful not to make the tether too long (six to eight feet of slack between you and your child is plenty), and beware of getting entangled in brush or deadfall. It’s a good idea to wear a safety knife on your own life vest so you can cut the tether free if it gets tangled.
Remember that kids are much more susceptible to environmental stress than adults. It’s the surface area—body mass ratio. They get cold quicker, hot quicker, hypothermic quicker. And they aren’t working the way you are, so just because you aren’t feeling the cold doesn’t mean they won’t be. Dress them warmly and bring plenty of spare clothing. Protect them with sunscreen and good sun hats (ones with neck flaps are nice). Shade them while they nap, on board or on shore. If they get wet, change them into dry clothes right away. Plan plenty of extra time in your itinerary so you won’t feel pressured to push on in bad weather.
At least until you’re comfortable with your abilities, plan trips with escape routes (bridge crossings, towns, road access) at fairly frequent intervals.
Include infant supplies in the first aid kit (baby aspirin, Band-Aids, diaper rash cream, etc.).
Tether and harness systems allow you to retrieve an infant and get to safety together.