Crack! A fiery strand of lightning lands just three canoe lengths ahead of me. How did I get into such a scenario, you ask. Well, let me give you the full story.
My family had decided to go on a canoe and camping trip at Umbagog Lake in New Hampshire. We had driven up with all of our gear, and with our luck, we arrived in a downpour. To pass the time we ate lunch at a diner that displayed various trophies from hunters – the fruits of their labor or, in other words, a lot of stuffed animals. I ordered a burger. My mother, on the other hand, had made sure not to order meat. She wasn’t very fond of the diner’s decorations.
After eating, we headed over to a warehouse repurposed into a store, to wait out the rain. It sold all types of hunting and fishing gear, sort of like Kittery Trading Post. What I was really interested in were the gag gifts. They had the normal gags like phrases imprinted on signs and politician toilet paper. But what really caught my attention was the “hillbilly phone” – two pieces of wood fashioned to look like a flip phone. The trip into that hunting and fishing store was the best amusement we could find in that rural town about an hour from the Canadian border.
Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, the rain let up. We rushed to our CRV, that looked like it was going to be crushed by the two canoes on top. All the gear haphazardly piled inside seemed the only thing allowing it to keep its shape.
We continued our drive to Umbagog Lake, the anticipation building up inside me making it feel longer than one hour. Soon we left the last mark of civilization on the map and began to see nothing but boring yet beautiful trees. We finally arrived, checked in, got a map, and located where our campsite was on the long and rambling Umbagog Lake. Our next task was to relieve the car of its burden of canoes and camping gear. Of course, as the older brother, I had to help my dad tediously remove the canoes from the car. We then lowered them onto the boat ramp, while our hyper husky, Suri, and my baboonish brother, Mason, ran round and round making it much harder to complete our task. Finally, after they had released their energy and the canoes were filled with our supplies, we set off.
In the beginning, everything was terrific. I was in the faster, lighter canoe with Suri and my mother, while my dad and Mason had the sluggish canoe with bulky supplies weighing them down. We set it up this way because it’s a job in itself to attend to Suri in a canoe. Huskies are, by nature, always either running or sleeping, and she had just slept in the car for four hours. I’m sure you can imagine what happened. Suri couldn’t and wouldn’t stop moving. She was constantly either attempting to drink the lake or trying to climb over me. Her father was the lead of a sled dog team, so it’s in her genes to always want to be in front.
As we continued our journey to the campsite, we passed islands shaped as if a cat had scratched them out of the water. After an hour or two, we realized none of the islands we had paddled by were marked on the map we had been given. Just then, the wind began to pick up, and we heard the rumbling of thunder.
Immediately, our fun, leisurely canoe trip turned into a mad rush to find the campsite. As we paddled frantically, we passed some other campers already enjoying their site. They offered us shelter, but we refused due to their dog snarling on the shore.
As our quest continued, the sky opened up and poured down on us. We were immediately enveloped in soaking, chilling rain. The thunder got louder, reverberating off the lake so one rumble became many.
We paddled and paddled while I tried to convince my mom that we should go ashore and wait until the fearsome storm had passed. But we continued on.
All of a sudden, I heard an ear-splitting crack! To my amazement and fright, a shard of lightning touched the surface of the lake just a few feet from my brother. My first panicked thought was, What if the next bolt strikes a canoe? At least the canoes were made of fiberglass, not conductive aluminum. I wanted nothing more than to get off that lake. I kept begging my mom and dad to bring us ashore, but instead we continued on.
After my brother’s close encounter with death, he was frozen with fright. It took my dad many minutes to get my brother’s mind off the storm. He did this by asking him questions like “What is the capital of New Hampshire?” Finally Mason started paddling again. Eventually, we found our way to the campsite, shaken and soaked from the journey, but alive.
From this experience I have learned:
To never canoe in a thunderstorm, or even rain, for that matter,
That you can’t always trust the maps you are given, and
How quickly the weather can change from calm and cloudy to a raging thunderstorm – especially in bipolar New England.