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Blogs by Joel Arnold
Flies, Flies, Spam, and Flies 12/3/2010 12:13:45 PM
I went on a 7 day, 120-mile canoe trip down the Namekagon and St. Croix Rivers (bordering Minnesota and Wisconsin) when I was 14 or 15 years old with a friend and his dad and uncle. We paddled about 20 miles a day, setting up camp each evening, and ate a lot of canned meat and crackers. It was one of the hardest things I've done - I wasn't the most athletic of kids - and also something I'm glad to have experienced. It was one of the first times I felt a sort of spiritual connection to nature.
But the hardest part of the trip wasn't the paddling (which was friggin' hard, especially the second and third days as my muscles screamed profanities at me with each stroke); the hardest part was dealing with the flies. There were so many frickin' horse flies, and yes they bit every once in a while, but what was worse was their constant buzzing around our heads. There was more than one occasion where I nearly knocked my friend's head off with my paddle in order to get at one of those flies. If they'd been interrogators, I would have confessed to anything just as long as they'd stop...buzzing...around...my...head. 'Yes, I was the second shooter on the grassy knoll! Yes, I sunk the Titanic!' I have never been so annoyed by something in my life before or since. And if killing one only caused two more to take its place.
But so I used a lot of those experiences in Northwoods Deep. I used the way the water in the Namekagon seemed to have little flakes of rust in it, the way that paddling over hours became comforting and hypnotic, the way that even the easy sets of rapids seemed to take control of the canoe, the way the evil entities beneath the old man's cabin gave us mind-blowing hallucinations, and - yes - the way the goddamn annoying flies made me want to scream until my throat bled.
