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We loaded our pregnant packs into the space between the thwarts, along with a food barrel, fishing poles, and a map tube as long as my arm. When Kocher stepped in, the canoe was precariously top-heavy.

José’s first attempt to step into the bow of the canoe was aborted after he lost both unlaced boots in the mud lining the lagoon. He hauled them out with a slurp, put them back on his feet, and entered the boat hauling an additional five pounds of muck. When I pushed off into the weak current and slid gingerly into the stern, Hawk’s canoe floated just a few inches above the murky waterline.

I thought of the opening line of Canoeing with the Cree: “We were off!”

But then we turned back not a hundred yards from the boat landing. José had left his glasses in the truck. Or so he thought, before discovering that they were in the pocket of his rain jacket.

Finally, we were off!

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Thirty minutes into our voyage, I made a shoddy command decision. As we approached the whitewater created by a low-head dam, I mockingly paraphrased the campy training video I’d seen at a program in junior high. Kocher had attended the same program, and now he joined me in imitating the narrator: