It's Elementary
The Four Pillars of the Paddlers World
Part 2: Earth, Fire, and Air
By Farwell Forrest
farwell@paddling.net
January 23, 2007
What do canoeists and kayakers have in common with the
academic philosophers of ancient Greece? More than you might think. Despite the 25
centuries that separate us, we share a common worldview, one that takes modern
paddlers very far from their familiar workaday world of traffic jams, shopping
malls, and cell phones. Or at least that's what I suggested two weeks ago. Is
this too much of a stretch? I don't think so. In brief, the world of the ancient
Greeks was constructed from only four elemental building blocks: water, earth, fire,
and air. These are very different from the 100-odd chemical elements known to modern
science, obviously, but the Greeks understood the world only through their unaided
senses. That's one of the things we have in common. Whenever we put our binoculars away and
shut off our GPS receivers,
we're transported to a world not too different from Aristotle's, a world in which
all knowledge comes from direct experience, a world that's always up close
and personal. Of course, we paddlers interpret the evidence of our senses in the
light of 21st-century understanding. We can't help that. But if we only step back a
bit, we find ourselves in a world much like the world of the ancient Greeks, a world
of water, earth, fire, and air.
Last time, I took a look at the first of these building blocks: water. It's
arguably the element that's most important to paddlers, but it doesn't stand alone.
So let's continue our exploration, beginning with…
Earth
If water shapes the landscape — and it does — the land endlessly
returns the favor, channeling the moving water, sending it twisting back on
itself and turning it round, creating eddies and
plunge pools and holes. The eroded earth, in the guise of sediment, even gives
water the cutting tools it needs to shape the land. Water and earth are like two
partners in some cosmic dance. Each moves the other, sometimes by means of subtle
nudges, sometimes by brute force. And each is moved in turn. The Greeks didn't have
an analytic understanding of this hydrodynamic interplay, but they certainly had a
seat-of-the pants grasp of its implications. This was summed up in a wry observation
by the philosopher Heraclitus to the effect that "you can't step in the same river
twice." In other words, the river that wets your feet today is different from the
one that wetted your feet yesterday, in ways both small and large. Most paddlers
share this instinctive grasp of water's dynamic
nature, and while we'll never grapple with the intricacies of the van Karman
equation or study kolk generation, we can move our boats into midriver holes (and
out again!) with an easy grace born of long practice — and deep understanding.
Earth also greets the paddler everywhere he turns, an infinitely varied boundary
uniting water and sky. From the dramatic cliffs of Maine's ironbound coast to the
seeming sameness — and the sameness is only seeming — of the James
Bay Lowlands, this endless spectacle of the mutable earth is one of the reasons why
we paddle. Few canoeists or kayakers would be content to thrash in circles around
the margin of a flooded quarry for very long. We thrive on the change and variety of the
wider world, the world beyond our immediate horizon. And many of the changes
that confront us as we travel are mediated by the third of Aristotle's four
elements:
Fire
Paddlers are no strangers to duality. After all, water erodes the land in one
place while it builds it up in another. And fire, like water, is simultaneously creator
and destroyer. The immediate effects of wildfire on ancient forests are terribly
familiar to many paddlers from first-hand observation. But fire's constructive role
is no less important, no less sweeping — even if it is less obvious. The
all-consuming flames liberate nutrients locked up in mature trees, enriching
impoverished forest soils and stimulating new cycles of growth. Long before modern
science began to unravel the mysteries of nutrient recycling, early farmers
exploited this paradox of nature, using fire to clear fields in the middle of great
forests, fields which invariably yielded bumper crops. Nor is wildfire always an
instrument of total devastation. Many fires sow the seeds of regeneration even as
they destroy. This isn't a metaphorical flight of fancy. It's hard fact. Not until
they're heated by fire do the cones of lodgepole and jack pines open to release
their seeds. And what of the groves of birch and aspen that offer welcome relief
from the monotony of cedar, spruce, and pine on so many northern rivers? These, too,
are often the children of fire, the work of pioneer species whose only chance at
light and life comes when flames open a window in the everdark, evergreen canopy.
Fire also lifts
paddlers' spirits on cold, gray days in spring and fall, and sends
shadows dancing through the long half-light of northern summer evenings. The
flickering flames of the campfire warm us, cheer us, and entertain us. And that's no
surprise. From the ribald story of Raven's theft of the sun to the cautionary tale
of Prometheus, myths and legends remind us that the conquest of fire may well have
been the watershed event in man's evolutionary history. This much, at least,
is certain: Where not prohibited by regulation or precluded by common sense, a fire
remains the social center of any riverside or beachfront camp, a place of warmth and
joy and camaraderie. A fireless camp can be a chilly place indeed, even when no cold
wind blows.
Ah, yes. Wind. And what is wind, but moving…
Air
The last of our four elements. The Greeks were a seafaring people, sailors whose
lives were shaped and circumscribed by the wind's compass. Today's canoeists and
kayakers also keep a weather eye on the
wind. Not many of us sail — though more of us could,
and should — but as John McPhee once observed, we're united by a hatred of
headwinds. Few things do more to blight a day on the water than a strong,
relentless, contrary wind. The 19th-century voyageurs feared the wind more than
anything else, even going so far as to invest their invisible enemy with a malign
persona, the fickle, evil-tempered crone they christened la Vieille, the "Old
Woman." When they spoke of her at all, they whispered, hoping to get their canoes
safely across the big lakes before
she turned against them. True, the Old Woman sometimes smiled, swelling the square
sails that each canoe carried in hopes of just such a lucky break. More often,
however, she scowled — and not infrequently she raged, sending icy waves
crashing over the gunwales of any overloaded canoe she caught in the middle of a
northern lake.
The Old Woman. La Vieille. The epithet is French, but the Greeks, whose
square-sailed triremes were no more weatherly than the voyageur's big canoes (or the
York boats that
replaced them), would have recognized her immediately. After all, they, too,
ventured out on the shining, shifting interface between water and air. And so do we.
The world of the ancient Greeks was a world of water, earth, fire, and air. And
this is the modern paddler's world, as well. It's a place that's best understood
— and best appreciated — by direct experience, a world that's open to
anyone, anywhere, requiring no passport other than a paddle. If canoeing and
kayaking are a form of elective anachronism, a voluntary return to an earlier and
simpler way of life, then the Greeks' four elements are enough for any paddler.
Canoeists and kayakers have no need for more.
Copyright © 2007 by Verloren Hoop Productions. All rights
reserved.