Stefan Bechtel, author

This article was published in The Washington Post.

I’d come up here to the Canadian wilderness with the idea of inititiating my newly 13-year-old son, Adam, into manhood, and I was ready for something wild. If I’d wanted to play it safe I’d have stayed home. It’s a mother’s role to teach a boy to keep out of harm’s way, I reasoned; it’s a father’s job to show him how you play the game a little closer to the edge.

So at an outfitter in Ely, Minnesota we got loaded up with maps, tents, fishing gear and food for five days in the woods. Then we took a float plane up into Quetico Provincial Park — 1,700 square miles of blue-black lakes and woods haunted by wolves, loons and moose, just over the Minnesota border from the boudnary Waters wilderness.

At the Hilly Island ranger station, where the plane landed in a wooded cove, we loaded our gear into an aluminum canoe and pushed off. As soon as we rounded the first rocky point, we were completely alone. The afternoon was overcast, and slate-colored light shimmered off the tilting panes of the waves. Around us the rocky shoreline, a sort of inland Maine seacoast, held back a dark line of woods that stretched on into wildness in every direction.

We came to our first portage after a few hours of paddling — a short hike around Brewer Rapids, a churning chute of whitewater perhaps two hundred yards long, that droped maybe twenty feet in that distance. We carried our gear from the bottom to the top of the rapids in two trips, then the canoe.

“Why don’t we run it?” Adam asked suddenly, as we stood there at the top of the rapids with the now-empty boat. Momentarily suspending my better judgement in the interests of intiation, I responded, “Sure, why not?”

After all, it really didn’t look all that bad — we’d recently been whitewater rafting on the New River, in West Virginia, and compared to the New this looked tame. Class Three at most, no obvious hydraulics, nothing major. Adam reminded me to put on my lifejacket, and then I climbed into the stern, he in the bow, and we went for it. The tea-colored water sucked our boat into the surge.

“Keep to the left!” I shouted, trying to guide us out of the foaming tumult in the center of the rapids.

“Naw, let’s go straight for it!” he shouted back.

So we did.

And that’s when a three-foot dropoff that hadn’t been visible from the shore appeared directly ahead of us. In a flash the boat caught on the lip of the precipice, swung around broadside, and capsized. I saw Adam go flying over the gunwhale, and then I did too. I went under and came up choking, raking the water for a handhold. Then I went under again, dragged beneath the surface and tumbled over submerged boulders by the sheer tonnage of the torrent. My hiking boots, filled with water, instantly turned to lead weights. I glimpsed Adam’s purple lifejacket being swept away from me, but because I couldn’t seem to swim or get a footing in the roiling current I could get no closer to him at all.

“Adam!” I shouted, helplessly, but I couldn’t hear his voice. Then I went under again.

When I originally began planning this trip, death by drowning had not been my greatest fear. My greatest fear was that we’d have nothing to say to one another. That Adam would quickly tire of my company and begin longing for a pal his own age or (worse) his GameBoy.

When I talked to him about taking some kind of 13th-birthday adventure trip, he told me that what he really wanted was to walk to the bottom of the Grand Canyon and back. He basically wanted bragging rights to a good story. But I really preferred something slower and quieter; I wanted to show him the wilderness without having to prove anything to anybody. But most of all I wanted to reacquaint myself with my son, whom in the bustle of boyhood, Smashing Pumpkins, Nintendo, backwards ballcaps and all the rest of it I seemed to have somehow lost. I worried about all the deaths he’d seen, especially his grandmother’s. I worried about the drinking. I worried about everything. He was passing from the sweet vulnerability of childhood to the hulking sullenness of adolescence so fast I sometimes imagined I’d wake up to discover he’d grown a full beard overnight.

Like so many other fathers of my generation and my culture, I also longed for some sort of celebration, some rite of passage that would clearly delineate his child-self from his impending man-self — something, preferably, more spiritual than getting a driver’s license and less painful than circumcision. Kay’s wisdom on the subject was that this was a job only a man could do. Recently she’d come to feel that in some fundamental way she could no longer help him as she once could, that it was time for her to step back and allow him to walk away into the world of men. (Strictly speaking, most ancient cultures specify that male intitiation is the job of adult males who are not the boy’s father — but I just didn’t want to miss this one.)

We settled on a canoe trip to the boundary waters. To my relief, my worries about having nothing to say to each other proved absurd. In fact, he seemed almost famished for my company, as I was for his. I rediscovered the delightfully daft and ingenious mind I remembered from his childhood. A steady machinegun-fire of questions came back at me from the front of the boat: “What’s a hide-a-bed?” “What’s an epiphany?” “If you could be any swimming animal, what would it be?” Then suddenly, his voice filled with dismay: “Dad, I forgot the words to ‘Frosty The Snowman!’”

Paddling through those lovely, glimmering lakes, the two of us riding a slender vessel across the dark water, I was startled to discover how much the kid weighed — since in order to keep the boat from tipping over I was forever trying to strike a balance between the ballast of our two bodies. With a surge of sympathy I realized that his skinny little kid’s body was shuddering under the onslaught of testosterone, and he’d been packing on muscle mass by the hour.

I also became acutely aware that his movements were like a series of kinetic explosions — he’d abruptly rock from side to side, bang on the side of the boat, not paddle at all and then suddenly start paddling like fury. My job, I reckoned, was not to squelch that riotous energy, but to teach him to how to steady it.

In the back of my mind I think I’d also intended to use this trip to have serious fatherly talks about Growing Up, Taking Personal Responsibility, and about The Drinking Incident. A little speechifying seemed justified. Mostly, though, I just blew it off. My prepared text was boring and pretentious. When my own father took me aside and furrowed his brow like that, I didn’t listen either.

Instead, we just experienced five days in the north woods together — swatted mosquitoes, banged our shins, swam in the sundown, cooked walleye over a smoky fire, hunted for crawdads, and got so filthy we looked like a couple of atavistic schoolboys from Lord Of The Flies. Maybe just being there communicates enough of a message to a kid — that you enjoy and value his company, that you’re fun to be with and not perfect, that he’s somebody who’s worthy of your time and attention.

All this swept over me in a rush of panic and longing as the two of us tumbled helplessly down through the rapids. I glimpsed the purple flash of Adam’s lifejacket, and spotted him frantically dog-paddling toward me. Then, abruptly, we were both swept out of the main channel into a deep, still eddy. To my amazement, I could hear him laughing and shouting: ” Awesome, dude!” I was scared to death, but he was having a ball. In the way of all boys he seemed entirely unaware of the real peril we were in. Danger hung in the air over the water like a backscatter of mist, but he couldn’t see it.

Finally my feet made contact with the bottom and I was able to stand. When Adam gained a footing I looked over at him, still wearing a sopping wet Virginia Tech cap, and then we both started laughing and shouting deleriously, like two pals. The canoe, upright but so full of water only the tips of the bow and stern were showing, had drifted out into the cove and was now perhaps two hundred yards away. We’d have to swim across the channel, floating a log ahead of us for safety, then hike through the woods to fetch the badly banged-up boat and bring it back.

Only later did it occur to me that during the whole misadventure we’d been swapping roles of boy and man. It was he who made the boyish suggestion that we take a wild chance and ride the rapids in the first place; but it was also he who reminded me to put on my lifejacket. It was I who agreed to his ill-considered plan, then tried to play it safe, like a grown-up. It was he who laughed all the way downstream, and I who wound up desperate with worry, like my own father.

I was teaching him to be a man, but at the same time he was reminding me not to forget my own boyishness. After all, how can you possibly become a whole man if you’ve left your boyhood behind?

He was also demonstrating something else: That (when he reminded me about the lifejacket) he could occasionally be more sensible and grown-up than I am. That he could sometimes be right when I am wrong. That some small part of him already is an adult. I found this revelation both comforting and deeply unsettling. After all, inherent in the notion of initiating my son into manhood is the idea of own demise. I was training my own replacement.

In the end, my original high-fallutin’ notion that I was going to take my son into the woods to be initiated proved to be a bit too prideful, and a bit too simple. In truth, I seemed to have almost as much to learn as to teach.

We waded up out of the water onto the rocky shore, and for few moments we just felt exhilarated and supremely alive — soaked, baptised, awakened. We’d had an adventure together. We’d actually done something, been somewhere — maybe even to Eden. Something had happened to us, and we’d survived.

The journey had just begun.

END