Oct 20, 2019:  22 miles, from Island Pond to West Charleston, VT, on the Clyde River

I launched my canoe with my friend Tierney this morning, full of excitement.  Our goal was to paddle all 32 miles of the Clyde River in Northern Vermont today, which would mark my official completion of the 700-mile Northern Forest Canoe Trail!  The journey has been a checkered patchwork of love and tears, beauty and hardship, and finishing it felt like a bit deal.  We launched in the pinkish dawn sunlight, mist still hanging in curtains over Island Pond.  This sweet little river wound through cattails, beaver marsh, and groves of silver maple and cedar trees.  The water levels were high from the past week of rain, making it much easier to push the canoe over the occasional beaver dam.  We talked and talked, as old friends will when they haven't seen each other for a few years, and the hours slid slyly by.  We had lunch after the first portage around Great Falls dam, with 21 miles already under out belts.

I always like to joke that Murphy's Law applies doubly to me:  If something can go wrong, it will!  That's one reason I tend to be so religious about things like always wearing my lifejacket and tying my gear securely into the canoe in case we capsize.  As we ate lunch I skimmed quickly through what the guidebook had to say about the river ahead, but only paid it half of my attention, since chatting with Tierney was so much more fun.  There was a mention of a few ledge drops that should only be attempted by expert paddlers, but the notation on the map didn't mention any such hazard, so I figured we could just follow the portage signs and they'd steer us in the right direction.

We jumped back into the canoe and paddled across Charleston Pond.  When we got to the dam the portage trail had no sign marking it, but the path was clear enough.  We loaded the canoe on the portage wheels and set off, and soon started seeing signs marking the portage trail at the intersections of the small roads we were wheeling along.  An arrow very clearly pointed us down a dirt driveway that accessed a small power plant.  Just where to put the canoe back in the river wasn't signed, but we scouted all the options and chose to put in just above a class II rapid.  After that the river seemed to flatten out, although we could not see too far around the a sharp bend in the watercourse, and the steep bank discouraged us from scouting further.  It seemed logical that the hazardous rapids mentioned in the guidebook were the ones above our put-in spot -- they sure looked like something only expert paddlers should attempt!

We launched back on the river and did a great job following the line we'd planned through the class II rapid, whooping with excitement as the very swift water carried us around the sharp bend in the river.  Then we stopped whooping:  ahead was a drop in the river far too steep for our watercraft, growling its watery roar at us, and we had no time to steer our craft to shore.  "Go Left!"  I shouted, "The left side looks better!"  But none of it looked good.  There was nowhere to go but down that ledge drop, and it was upon us in a moment.  We slid down the first stair-step of the ledge and only took on a small wave over the bow as we nose-dived towards the next part of the drop.  I'm not exactly sure what happened next, except that I was very quickly in the water, with the cold of the river on a 45-degree day seeping through all my clothes.  The canoe was overturned, and Tierney was stuck underneath it.  I let go of my paddle (which you are not supposed to do) and saw it shooting down the river's current as I tried to turn the canoe upright.  The force of the water on the hull was extreme, and I suddenly realized the whole canoe might push me over and sweep over me down the river.  I got out of it's way, all of us floating down the river and bumping into rocks as this kaliedescope pattern of canoe-and-human shifted before my eyes.  The force of the rushing water kept sweeping my feet out from under me, and I flung myself clear of the barreling canoe, floating downstream feet-first for a moment to gather my wits.  I was cold, but not paralyzingly cold.  The bank of the river wasn't far, but my abilty to steer my floating journey seemed poor.  My paddle was clearly gone forever.

Tierney managed to flip the canoe, and suddenly was on her feet in a shallow spot in the middle of the river, wrangling the canoe towards shore like some sort of badass aquatic cowboy.  I stood up on the slippery rocks and tried to help her, but every time I tried to take a step my feet were swept out from under me.  Noticing for the first time that there was ANOTHER ledge drop below us on the river and fast approaching, I decided to focus on getting myself to shore.  Tierney miraculously got the canoe to the bank, we dumped the water out of it, and hauled it up onto dry land.

"Are you okay?"  I asked.

"Yeah.  I thought I was going to die for a minute there, but I'm okay.  I'm really glad I was wearing my lifejacket.  You?"

"I'm fine.  Well, I guess this is the part where we hitchhike back to our car." I said sheepishly.

"Really?  You don't want to keep going?"  Tierney asked, genuinely surprised.

"Well, I wish we could, but we don't have any paddles!"  I pointed out.  Tierney had been so busy focusing on a)not dying, and b) rescuing the canoe that she hadn't even noticed our paddles were gone.  Examining the canoe, I saw that the wooden gunwales were busted in three places, and the tough Royalex hull had a three-inch tear in it where the gunwales had broken.  It's really hard to damage a Royalex hull, so that felt like it gave us some serious bragging rights!  It should all be repairable, but that craft will have a battle scar forever.

Addendum (Nov 6, 2019):
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I'm closing in on my thrupaddle goals!  Here are my journals of nearly 100 more miles of paddling on the NFCT in Vermont and Quebec.  The final journal about the Clyde River section will be added to this post in late October or Early November.

Here are my journals from the Maine and New Hampshire sections of the NFCT, which I canoed with many different friends (and some of it solo).  Enjoy the tales!

In part one of this series we examined the nature of cultural appropriation, and in part two we explored how the capitalist context we live in limits our ability to share ideas freely, and can even inhibit our ability to ethically act upon knowledge and guidance we receive directly from our plant allies.  In this third part of the series, we’ll look at some helpful questions for the constantly evolving process of navigating these tricky waters in a good way.
This teaching I received about cultural appropriation was from my friend Jude, who is a white pagan priestess of Jewish descent.  She told me that facing cultural appropriation is not about learning one clear set of rules and sticking to it, because nobody agrees on what those rules should be, and often each situation is unique.  Facing cultural appropriation is always going to be an ongoing conversation and self-inquiry about what you are doing, who it is impacting, and what is ethical. The three sets of questions she recommends asking are:

1. Am I sharing the accurate origin of the practices I am using when I practice them around others?  Am I giving credit and citing my sources? Did I actually learn them from a credible source? Do I need to do more research?
   
2. Am I in active and meaningful relationship with members of the culture that developed these practices?  Who will give me feedback if I am using them incorrectly?
   
3. Am I engaging in reciprocity by supporting the survival of that culture through activism, volunteering, monetary donations, or other means?  Is this an ongoing practice for me?
   

If your answer is no to any of these questions, you are probably not using the practices in a way that is respectful.  Because of the power dynamics inherent in colonization, you may feel like your practices are honoring the culture they came from, but they may actually be having a harmful impact.  The line between cultural exchange and cultural appropriation takes effort to discern honestly. Remember that your impact is more important than your intent.
    A complimentary insight that I received was from Darcy Ottey, a white woman who has spent most of her life leading land-based youth rite of passage experiences.  Darcy was one of my teachers in a class called “Before We Were White: Ceremony and Ancestral Recovery for Anti-Racist Action,” taught through an organization called White Awake.  Darcy has spent years uncovering the history and practices of her ancestors in Eastern Europe, and she gave me an eloquent understanding of cultural exchange. She explained that cultural exchange is possible only when both parties arrive at the table with gifts to share.  When a white person with no understanding of their own lineage goes to a pow-wow and comes home with lots of sage sticks to burn and native chants to sing, that is not cultural exchange, because the transmission of culture only goes one way. You cannot participate in exchange if you are a beggar with nothing to give, that is just cultural taking.  Once you have put in the hard work to research your own ancestral earth-based traditions, you come to the table with something to share. When an indigenous person offers to show you one of their practices, you can offer to share one of your ancestral traditions in return, and that is an actual exchange. It’s the difference between arriving at the potluck with a big hot casserole to share and arriving starving with only an empty bowl.
    Now, reconstructing the practices of your indigenous European ancestors is a whole lot harder than finding someone (indigenous or not) who is happy to teach you some version of North American earth-based traditions.  That is because traditional place-based European cultures have been repressed since the rise of the Roman Empire and violently enforced Christianity. Our practices have been suppressed for over two thousand years, so the trail of breadcrumbs is scanty.  However, there are many people, both in Europe and around the world, who are reconstructing these traditions from the scraps of lore and archeological evidence that have come down to us. If you are prepared to do your homework, much can be discovered. Learning about relatively intact earth-based spiritual practices from non-european cultures can help give us the skills of pattern-recognition we need to comb through our own ancestral traditions and see what is hiding in plain sight.  This is different from taking indigenous North American practices and pasting Europeans words or deities on top of the Native ones. What I’m talking about is familiarizing yourself with the spiritual technologies that seem to be universal to our species so that you can recognize their unique manifestation in your ancestral culture as you do your research.
    In the final part of this series, I’ll share an explanded checklist of questions to ask yourself about any cultural practices you are using that might be culturally appropriative, and share some key recommended reading for deepening your understanding of this topic.

​

In late August 2018 eight adventurers (including yours truly) set out to spend a year in the Minnesota Wilderness, harvesting all our own food, using canoes and snowshoes as our only modes of transportation, and building Queer Feminist community together in the wild.  At least that was the plan... the project lasted about 10 weeks.  We were beset with a number of setbacks, from a poor rice crop to the coldest and rainiest autumn the locals could remember, to floodstage waters on the rivers we were paddling up, to a very early Whitefish spawn that started much earlier than we had planned for.  Despite these setbacks, our team successfully ate a nutritious and abundant wild diet for the whole time we were together, and were in a pretty good position to meet our food goals for the year.  However, by the time we got to whitefish camp, exhaustion was high, morale was low, and we were realizing that creating queer feminist community in the wild requires a lot of skill and wisdom on behalf of all parties, not just a few of the members.   We made a consensus decision to disperse to other projects on November 6, 2018.  I'm transitioning from this group to a winter of hunting, writing, and planning an alternative 2-3 month canoe adventure that will start next May, building upon the lessons from this project.

The tale of our venture is told below in handwritten, scanned letters that I wrote to the world while I was on the expedition.  Enjoy!

​THE COMPLETE LETTERS:

Wild Rice and Community Building: Aug 31-Sept 9, 2018

Rice Processing & First Days of Paddling: Sept 11-Oct 3, 2018

Rain & Cold & No Bear Fat, Oh My!: Oct 4-14, 2018

Does, Cold Toes, and Beaver Feet: Oct 15-29, 2018

A Personal Truth & A Hard Group Decision: Oct 30-Nov 8, 2018

Many thanks to April Judd for receiving these letters and sending them out to the world.  

​~Murphy

A month and a half into the Wild Food Year already.  Murphy is in the Minnesota Wilderness with six others, harvesting wild rice, drying fruit and prepping food for a long winter.   The next journey will be a 200 mile canoe upstream to Whitefish Camp where they will fish, trap beaver and prep more food for their journey. 

Murphy has been prolific in writing letter and sharing her journey.  These letters are handwritten, mailed to me, the MSX office Gnome and Mail Maven, to scan and share with the rest of you.   Below are PDF's of all the letters Murphy has written to date.    

If you would like to get these letters in your inbox, sign up for the Mountiansong Expeditions Newsletter which you can find a sign up button for on our Class and Registration page!    

Thanks for following along on the adventure! 

wild_food_year_-_august_31-sept_1.pdf

​wild_food_year_-_sept_2-3.pdf

wild_food_year_-_sept_4-9_pdf.pdf

wild_food_year_-_sep_11-16.pdf

wild_food_year-_sept_17-24.pdf​
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wild_food_year-_sept_25-oct_3.pdf​

In a few days I leave for a year in the Minnesota Wilderness with six other people, eating only wild food we harvest ourselves and using only human-powered transportation (canoes and snowshoes).  Read all the detail here.  Sign up for our mailing list to get updates in your inbox (see the Trips & Classes page for the signup form).