Glickman - The kayak companion: expert guidance for enjoying paddling in all types of water from one of Americas top kayakers

Expert guidance for enjoying paddling in all types of water from one of Americas top kayakers

Joe Glickman

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Edited by Michael Robbins
Designed by Wendy Palitz and David Armario
Cover photograph by Jim Gipe
Illustrations by Rick Kollath
Text production by David Lane, Karin Stack, and Jennifer Jepson Smith
Indexed by Susan Olason, Indexes & Knowledge Maps

2003 by Joe Glickman

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Printed in the United States by Versa Press
10 9 8 7 6 5 4

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Glickman, Joe.

The kayak companion : expert guidance for enjoying paddling in all types of water from one of Americas top kayakers / Joe Glickman.

p. cm.

Includes index.

ISBN 978-1-58017-485-5 (alk. paper)

1. Kayaking. I. Title.

GV783 .G555 2003

797.1'224dc21

2002151302

Foreword by Greg Barton

I FIRST MET JOE GLICKMAN IN 1993 AT THE START OF the inaugural Finlandia Clean Water Challenge, a tough Chicago-to-New York race that was offering the richest prize in paddle sports at the time. (I didnt compete that year and was there simply to help with the start festivities). Joe struck me as a typical jock enthusiastic with a lot of outdoor experience but very little of it in a kayak. Despite his lack of time in a boat, Joe finished a respectable 6th in the month-long event.

The following year, I arrived in Chicago to compete in the Finlandia Challenge and, there again, was Joe; only this time he was sun burnt, unshaven and a fair bit thinner. Apparently three days earlier, hed completed a two-and-a-half-month long trip down the Missouri River. To state the obvious: battering your body all day, often in the frigid cold, is not what I would have done to prepare for a race billed as the worlds longest and toughest kayak race. However, I had to respect the way he jumped in without hesitation and paddled 2,600 miles to the start of a month-long race.

Joe didnt do very well that year; probably because he kept falling asleep in his kayak. But the following year, his third in a row, we both did the race again and you could see that hed worked hard and improved a lot. Over the next eight years, this enthusiastic guy from Brooklyn, N.Y. a place not normally known for its stellar paddlers honed himself into one of the premier paddlers in North America. Hes sharpened his paddling technique and learned to train efficiently and effectively. Through numerous types of paddling, hes gained expertise in flatwater, open ocean, and touring styles of kayaking. Hes spent countless hours doing it all, and learned tremendously from his time on the water.

During a 30-day event like the Finlandia a great amount of camaraderie develops among the competitors. Numerous evenings were spent camping side-by-side, commiserating about our sore bums, terrible blisters, fatigue and other appetizing stories of the days activities. With his humorous style and willingness to poke fun at himself, Joe always had an eager audience for his observations and stories. Joe Glickman has learned the finer points of kayaking the hard way, and now you can share in this knowledge with his entertaining guide, The Kayak Companion.

GREG BARTON
Two-time Olympic Gold Medalist in kayaking

On the power of water and the rewards of paddling

IN MONTANA, I ONCE WENT NINE CONSECUTIVE DAYS on the Missouri River without speaking. For a nonstop chatterer like myself, living in one of the most populous cities in the worldI speak, therefore Iamthis was a rare and profound experience. With no one to talk to, a poor memory for song lyrics, and a shaky singing voice, I was forced to hear the voice of nature.

Before I set out on that long, solitary trip my first big kayaking journey, a 77-day stint on the Missouri, Americas second-longest river I suspected that my dormant spirituality was tied to the great outdoors. Long before I returned home from that watery wilderness, I agreed with Frank Lloyd Wright, who once said: I believe in God, only I spell it Nature. During one trip down the Wisconsin River, I took the time to paddle up to Wrights spectacular home near Spring Green and stop in for a visit. Living and working in a location like that, surely the great architect had to have designed a kayak .

A beautiful river can make a believer out of the staunchest agnostic. Several hours after starting our 12-day paddle down the Wisconsin, my partner and I cruised under a low railroad bridge, rounded a tight bend, and came upon the Land O Lakes Bible Church, situated a short Hail Mary from the left bank. A hymn wafted from the church, and we stopped paddling to listen as we drifted. As we basked in the muted sounds, a boy with tonic-slicked hair and a stiff white collar rushed toward us. Why arent you in church? he shouted.

We are! I yelled sanctimoniously. He hollered something back, but the current carried us out of earshot.

For millennia, people have considered rivers to be magical and holy. In literature everywhere, a river is a metaphor for change, spiritual reflection, and the cycle of life. As Rachael Carson wrote in The Sea Around Us: For all at last return to the sea to Oceanus, the ocean river, like the ever-flowing stream of time, the beginning and the end. For my part, I found the Wisconsin so sublime that after I returned to New York I immediately paid a parking ticket I had angrily been planning to contest.

Once I started paddling, my relationship with rivers deepened significantly. The face of the water, in time, wrote Mark Twain in Life on the Mississippi, became a wonderful book a book that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it uttered them with a voice. After 77 days on the Missouri, and a few on the Mississippi, I felt that I too was beginning to understand some of what the water had to say.

The kayaking phase of my life began with a week-long trip in the Everglades. Soon after, I signed up for a 30-day race from Chicago to New York that leapfrogged across three Great Lakes, the Erie Canal, and the Hudson River. Then, the following spring I decided to paddle the length of the Missouri.

Armed with a lot of desire and precious little know-how, I started alone in early April in the very shadow of the rugged Bitterroot Range of western Montana. The Missouri provoked my deepest insecurities, forced me to confront my fears, and punished my mistakes. I began to see that river as part mirror and part sage. The Big Muddy didnt give me a chance to define it or judge it; it was just too capricious. Brutal cold would be followed by a stunning rainbow. Empty, monotonous plains would suddenly be graced by a herd of antelope. At daybreak, after a long, cold night, my loneliness would be transformed to a blissful sense of solitude.