Portage to Young Womanhood

By Meisha Rosenberg
(c) May 2003

Swatting horseflies, applying mosquito repellant, stopping to wipe sweat off my brow and munch on trail mix—that was my passage to adulthood. Not the Bat Mitzvah that I had a year or two later, which was an edifying, but not life-changing, experience. What changed me was the heft of the backpack and my own capable shoulders, the sound of loons crying out late at night, and the stillness of nature.

I lived with my mother in Boston but visited my father in Saskatchewan every year. During the summers, he and I drove past Prince Albert National Park and slept at campgrounds near the road, fishing, canoeing and whittling sticks by the fire. Each year we went a bit farther north. Finally, when I was ten my dad said, “you’re ready to help me carry the canoe.” It didn’t seem like a big deal then, but being able to portage into inner lakes gave me access to the quiet of the real wilderness, where, miles from the road, days passed without us seeing or hearing any other people.

A portage is a path, in this case a foot- worn, narrow trail over knobby tree roots and past dewy leaves that tickled my calves. After several trips back and forth sweating with paddles and sleeping bags, we found an almost untouched lake, smooth and timeless from centuries of only wind, water, earth, fire.

It’s important for children to have a sense of their own power, their own usefulness in the world. That’s what I gained that summer; the feeling that my contribution was important. North Americans increasingly delay maturity, in our children, pets and ourselves. The invention of the nuclear family, in which children must remain veritable property of their parents until college age, is a dubious one that often prevents the feeling of substantiality I gained that summer.

Withholding responsibility from children is a fairly new pattern. As an anonymous author wrote in his essay Confessions of An Erstwhile Child, “In colonial days many New England colonies passed laws imposing fines or extra taxes on parents who kept their children under their own roofs after age 15 or 16, on the sensible notion that a person of that age ought to be out and doing on his own” [The Little Brown Reader (c) 2000 eds. Marcia Stubbs and Sylvan Barnet; orig. pub’d The New Republic]. I’m not saying that we should farm children out for labor, but giving kids more responsibility—such as ‘help me with this’— wouldn’t be so bad. Every time I see another bored, depressed or rebelling teenager, I think that their main problem is not TV or the incidence of divorce, but the lack of an opportunity to contribute. They have not portaged, they have not been given their own weight to carry.

Work in the wilderness was an all-consuming task. I had to rest along the portage to catch my breath and drink from a canteen. I didn’t see my face in the mirror for days; how I looked didn’t matter. A few years later, in my teens, I would read Seventeen and wonder why I wasn’t blond and snub nosed like the models. Those camping trips inoculated me to some extent, giving me a memory of days without any mirror except the lake. I watched the early morning sun reflect off the lake, the mist making it look like there were two suns; one above and one below. These are my gods, and although I had no names for them, they spoke to me. What they said wasn’t complicated. I was an adult simply because I could carry my own food.

There were times when I felt unsure of myself. Would I slip as I disembarked from the boat? Would I be able to keep up with my dad as we carried things back and forth? Could I find enough firewood?

Children’s most subconscious fear—especially children of divorced parents, because their sense of abandonment is strong—is that their parents will die and leave them alone in the world unable to fend for themselves. Now, in a literal way, I was learning how to survive. I paid attention and learned to feel the difference between a weed and the pulse of a fish. I knew how to start a fire and my father showed me how to clean the Northern Pike we caught. I could smell the changing of the weather; as rain threatened, we started for our camp on an island. The lapping of the water at the edges of our island lulled me to sleep and I knew that the woods, with its creaking hemlocks and swaying poplars, was a place of strength.

My passage into young womanhood happened earlier than the time our culture calls the ‘teen years,’ the expected time of rebellion. While I went through that, too, I learned only negative lessons. My real coming of age happened without fanfare, without extended relatives and without stationery or announcements. Instead, trees were my witnesses, along with my father carrying the heavier packs and sweating himself, looking more like an equal than a formidable power.

Meisha Rosenberg teaches English and writing at the College of St. Rose and Siena and lives in Troy, NY. She is writing a book about dogs.
 

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