He invoked his ancestral language when mentioning a nickname for their vessel: “ Chi Jeckin Agwiden, or Big-Ass Canoe.” The crew included members of four nations of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy and one self-described “white guy,” Freddie Wilkinson, a professional mountain guide who is writing a book, for National Geographic, about the history of the canoe, from birchbark to big-ass. Ranco is a member of the Penobscot tribe. It was day forty-one of a uniquely looping voyage, a fifteen-hundred-mile circumnavigation of the Northeast that had begun in Old Town, Maine, on the Stillwater branch of the Penobscot River. Ranco, a forty-two-year-old carpenter when not afloat, was recounting this at the Nyack Boat Club, where he and the other paddlers had tied up for the night after a seventeen-mile ascent of the Hudson, from Inwood. Ate a lot of hot dogs and went to the amusement park.” All these Russians are asking me who’s paying their tax. Soon, after a harrowing passage around Breezy Point, amid four-foot swells, they were at Brighton Beach. Undeterred, the paddlers proceeded west, eventually reaching Great South Bay, and paused at Fox Island, where a bolt of lightning struck the ground less than a mile from where they were huddled, beneath the canoe’s hull. Some of their gear-a pair of shoes, a VHF radio, a wampum sash worth several thousand dollars-now resides on the canal’s bottom.
He went far right, zigzagging, and as he went by us he, like, hit the gas-you could see his bow go up.” The narrow canal frothed like an ocean, and the canoeists were sent swimming. “We kind of had a little game of chicken going. “It was in our lane, on the left side of the canal,” Ranco said. A powerboat named Just Chillin’ appeared from around a corner. The speed limit on the Shinnecock Canal, in Hampton Bays, is five miles per hour, which a group of hardy paddlers in a thirty-one-foot canoe were improbably exceeding the other day, when “the shit went down,” as one of them, Ryan Ranco, recalled.
0 kommentar(er)
