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Canoes on Wheels(Police Ponder: Felon, Fool, or Fanatic?)By Roioli Schweiker Click on the photos to see larger images When I was 12, my father made me a sturdy set of wheels to trundle my canoe down to the lake from our not-quite-waterfront cottage. As a new bride addicted to rearranging the furniture, I moved things like refrigerators and hide-a-bed sofas around on dollies. Later when I started going on long canoe trips with another woman, children, or alone, the portages were a problem. Since carrying canoes around over my head never felt comfortable to me, my thoughts turned to wheels.
Before a trip down the Merrimack with Jane Jackson, I resurrected a dolly with industrial casters, and found a set of large plastic wheels from a child's tricycle in the river. This arrangement worked well on the pavement around dams, and on hard clay. A small company interested in manufacturing a canoe portaging system lent me one of theirs to try out, and a trip across Vermont seemed a good test. It worked well on rough going with small obstacles. Unfortunately it was quite large, weighed 46 pounds, and had a design flaw in one of the parts which caused it to self-destruct on the long portage from the Nulhegan to Clyde rivers. It was duly buried under a pine tree with a treasure map of paces on a bearing from a certain telephone pole for later retrieval. However I still had my trusty dolly! It followed along nicely on flat going carrying a full load of camping gear. When the road was crowned, the multidirectional casters tended to slide off into the ditch, although the plastic wheels helped to stabilize it in the correct direction. This led to easy, one trip portages, with only short carries to a hard surface. Another time when we were using the system, Dave Libby decided to try poling, which also worked well. When Mike Jacobs heard about this, he wanted to try poling a canoe on wheels too. After all if the skiers can ski on wheels in the summer... When we drove into the huge empty municipal parking lot in Plymouth early one Sunday morning, Mike and I decided "this is the place!" and began untying the canoe, to the confusion of the other participants who tried tactfully to point out that it was possible to drive all the way down to the water.
When the Plymouth police cruiser came by on patrol, Mike was happily paddling around the parking lot while I lay flat on the ground trying for the best camera angle. Since they could think of no reason this was illegal, they drove off scratching their heads and mumbling about "all canoeists must be nuts." [Mike, How many miles do you get to a paddle?] Copyright 2000, Roioli Schweiker. All rights reserved.
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