Let's see now. . .

Life has been pretty much a matter of writing and drawing and not much else recently, which is a welcome change after the last four months of running around the continent with my portable sales and exhibition booth.  ---Which was Fun, Profitable, and Enlightening, to be certain, but now that convention season is over, it's time to get down to doing the stuff I originally set out into the world of comics to achieve!

As I have mentioned earlier, I pulled the plug on this nine-week series of so-called 'weekly' comic strips, (due to the fact that the latest series, after I read over the finished inks, were really quite awful.  I decided to ditch them, and I re-wrote the scene material about fifteen times before settling on the more dramatic and less comic-strippy approach which will be featured in the upcoming issue #29.  I don't think there has been a scene which has caused me this much trouble since issue #3, which if I recall, nearly killed me).

Anyway, while reflecting upon the recent convention tour, a couple of interesting things became apparent.  Typically during a convention, I tend to find myself caught up in a several-day string of interesting conversations; with everyone from cab drivers to the guy sitting next to me on the plane, to the hundreds of people who circulate the comic book convention scene with the backs of their hands stamped or with silly little name tags dangling from their necks.  I enjoy a good conversation a great deal, and on a trip to a new place, there is rarely a moment when there is not somebody worth talking to.  Anyway, (and this is one of the interesting things I noticed), in order to answer a certain breed of question, or to express a singular type of thought, I found myself frequently making reference to canoes.

Yes.  Small water craft.  Let me explain.

I expect some of you who with whom I had the pleasure of talking, will recall that talking about canoes was one of my favorite ways to illustrate various points.  So for the benefit of those who didn't manage to get down to any of the convention stops, I've decided to commit to (paper?) my illustrative canoe anecdote as it seems to have been, on average, the most common thing those people who ran into me during conventions heard leave my mouth.  This way, hopefully, people won't feel left out.

(The other reason is that once I broadcast this, I might be compelled to come up with some new material.)

Here goes. . .

When I was young I went off, as many kids do, to a summer camp where we learned all kinds of nifty summer-time things, one of which was how to paddle around a lake in a leaky fiberglass canoe.  Later, during Jr. High, I went off again with all my class-mates for a week to a similar camp where we did even more canoeing.  The Jr. High school I was attending at the time employed an English teacher named Mr. Crease, (who, as chance would have it, first suggested that I might consider trying to become a professional writer). --While this was enough to make me feel good about going to class, I'd long before developed a profound admiration of the man. He was smart, noble and good natured. He was also one of those rugged outdoors enthusiasts who loved to cross country ski, and hike, and of course, to canoe.  On his steam alone, the school organizers had made into a yearly ritual a pigrimage to the same boy's camp of Mr. Crease's youth, (where he had eventually also become a camp councillor). So when Mr. Crease led us off for a week, it struck me that I wanted, a very great deal, to become an excellent canoeist and to enjoy the activity as much as he did.  (When you're 13 or 14, people like Mr. Crease can make you decide what sort of person you want to be for the rest of your life.)

And so I learned how to canoe!  I overcame my instinctive dislike of water, (which, when I was young, bordered on an obsessive terror) and I learned all the various paddle strokes and ways to manipulate a small, banana shaped boat.  I earned praise from the canoe guys working at the camp, and they paired me up with the weaker kids and made me demonstrate the stuff I'd learned to the rest of the group. 

Later, I actually went on to work at a summer camp where I became a canoe guy myself.  I did that for a couple of years, at the end of which, before I started focusing the bulk of my energies on animation and story-telling, a bunch of the other councillors I'd made friends with during that final summer decided that we ought to go on one of those really serious canoe trips to Algonquin park.  --Algonquin park, where all the really serious canoeists go, --with 10 km portages and bears and stormy nights and no-road access.  Just 'You and the Wilderness.'  One of those trips.

Well, we went and it was both exhausting and wonderful, as any adventure should be.  But here's the point to the story:

A fellow named Barrie was the leader of our group.  Realistically, while I was confident and well adjusted to the activity, I was still a novice out on my first trip.  So Barrie called all the shots and got to wear the coolest looking life jacket.  (For some reason there was only one life-vest made by a certain manufacturer which didn't embroider big "Buoy O' Buoy" patches on the chest).  Anyway, on the last day of our seven day trip Barrie, confident that everybody in the group had learned their stuff to a point where it was no longer necessary to pair strong and weak canoeists up strategically, we were finally able to get a boat to ourselves.  --And this was great, because all during the trip we'd been looking forward to sharing a boat together.  (When you spend the better part of your day on the water, it paid to be canoeing with somebody whose company you enjoyed.)

After a couple of hours, Barry began looking at me oddly, and I asked him what was up.

"Why are you fighting with the water so hard?" he asked me, indicating my paddle technique. "What are you doing?"

I blinked at him and looked.  I was performing something called a 'J' Stroke, which is supposed to propel you forward while also turning the canoe.  --You paddle as you would normally, but then at the end of the stroke you twist the paddle and lever water away from you so that you also affect a shift in course direction.  I was doing it exactly as I'd been taught by Mr. Crease and the canoe-guys, who explained that while the stroke was difficult, it was well worth knowing because of its effectiveness.  In my eagerness to become a canoe-guy, I had of course taken this to heart, and always poured myself into doing the 'J' stroke with all my might.

I'd not questioned anything about it during any of those years until Barrie asked me what the heck I was doing.  I replied, "The 'J' stroke?"

"Why don't you turn it more gently?  Don't push the water.  Carve it.  Use the oar like a rudder."  He thought for a moment.  "The water is already moving relative to the canoe, and it's a lot heavier than we are.  Just go with it."

Well, I tried and. . . Wow.  I got three times the effect with only a tenth of the effort I'd previously been spending.  Amazing!  But it was a great deal more than that; Every aspect of canoeing suddenly became elegant. --Sure, I understood fluid dynamics and hydro-foils and such, and the 'J-Stroke' I'd been doing was indeed being performed to the letter.  But I had been executing it in an intellectual manner rather than in an instinctive one, and in that moment it was like my brain finally connected properly with the paddle and the water.  It was like I'd just learned how to walk.

From that moment forth, canoeing was not entirely unlike flying.  It wasn't about work at all!  It seemed to me, as we moved, that we were doing little more than willing ourselves across the water.  It was marvelous!  I understood in that moment why Mr. Crease loved canoeing.  I'd had it wrong the whole time!  It wasn't about being a rugged adventurer, or about fighting the wilderness to achieve your place as its master.  I suddenly remembered all the other lessons Mr. Crease had tried to teach; stories of Iroquois and birch bark canoes.  And of the close, almost mystical kinships in both myth and everyday belief between a warrior and nature.  It was like magic revealed, and the feeling this revelation caused in me had me singing out loud like an idiot, ringing my voice across the empty lake and hearing it echo back, (possibly ruffling nature in the process.  --But birds sing when they feel like it, and this felt right!  I think nature might have approved.).  --Everybody else thought I'd lost my marbles, but Barrie knew exactly what I was on about and he grinned like a nut too and our voices rang out together as we glided across the lake.

Now, I believe that this sort of thing can happen in many areas of human aspiration.  At some point a version of this very process happened to me at the word processor.  --And I'm not talking about the craft.  I'm talking about seeing the greater motions of story and knowing that they are bigger than you, and that often the wisest thing you can do is to simply wait for opportunity, and then dip in your oar and twist it slightly while letting the overwhelming motion which is already there move you forward.  Some of the most sound connections in Thieves & Kings, which have seemed so well thought out and have made me on occasion look very clever indeed, were more than likely the product of me simply realizing an opportunity and jumping at it.  --The product of aimless writing with an eye for tying the right story threads to the right loose ends.  In this very casual way, with only a general stable of character designs and a good idea of where I need to end up, virtually everything in Thieves & Kings, from issue #1 to present, has been written without a net, so to speak.  All the very best ideas I've come up with have been examples far exceeding what my own abilities of planning and contrivance might have produced on their own.

The more I write, the more I realize that I am merely a passer-by whose job it is to simply document something which is practically there already.  The only mistakes I make are when I am not paying close enough attention, or when I have the audacity to force my intellect, (what there is of it), upon the work.  It always goes sour when I do that.  Like trying to force something meant to be dramatic into a series of four-panel humor strips.

And here's a nifty thing:

Every writer I have ever talked to on this subject grins at me and laughs.  If we were in a canoe on some distant lake, I have no doubt our laughter would ring clear across the water.
 
 

-M'Oak
 

Toronto
Thursday, October 14, 1999
9:36 P.M.