ROCKS AND CURRENTS.
A few remarks may now be made upon the principal cases in which rocks and currents have to be dealt with by the canoist.
Even if a set of rules could be laid down for the management of a boat in the difficult parts of a river, it would not be made easier until practice has given the boatman that quick judgment as to their application which has to be patiently acquired in this and other athletic exercises, such as riding or skating, and even in walking.
The canoist, who passes many hours every day for months together in the earnest consideration of the river problems always set before him for solution, will probably feel some interest in this attempt to classify those that occur most frequently.
Steering a boat in a current among rocks is not unlike walking on a crowded pavement, where the other passengers are going in various directions, and at various speeds; and this operation of threading your way in the streets requires a great deal of practice, and not a few lessons enforced by collisions, to make a pedestrian thoroughly au fait as a good man in a crowd. After years of walking through crowds, there is produced by this education of the mind and training of the body a certain power—not possessed by a novice—which insensibly directs a man in his course and his speed, but still his judgment has had insensibly to take cognizance of many varying data in the movements of other people which must have their effect upon each step he takes.
After this capacity becomes, as it were, instinctive, or, at any rate, acts almost involuntarily, a man can walk briskly along Fleet-street at 4 p.m., and, without any distinct thought about other people, or about his own progress, he can safely get to his journey's end. Indeed, if he does begin to think of rules or how to apply them systematically, he is then almost sure to knock up against somebody else. Nay, if two men meet as they walk through a crowd, and each of them "catches the eye" of the other, they will probably cease to move instinctively, and, with uncertain data to reason from, a collision is often the result.
As the descent of a current among rocks resembles a walk along the pavement through a crowd, so the passage across a rapid is even more strictly in resemblance with the course of a man who has to cross a street where vehicles are passing at uncertain intervals and at various speeds, though all in the same direction. For it is plain that the thing to be done is nearly the same, whether the obstacles (as breakers) are fixed and the current carries you towards them, or the obstacles (as cabs and carts) are moving, while you have to walk through them on terra firma.
To cross Park-lane in the afternoon requires the very same sort of calculation as the passage across the stream in a rapid on the Rhine.
The importance of this subject of "boating instinct" will be considered sufficient to justify these remarks when the canoist has by much practice at last attained to that desirable proficiency which enables him to steer without thinking about it, and therefore to enjoy the conversation of other people on the bank or the scenery, while he is rapidly speeding through rocks, eddies, and currents.
We may divide the rocks thus encountered in fast water into two classes—(1) Those that are sunk, so that the boat can float over them, and which do not deflect the direction of the surface current. (2) Those that are breakers, and so deflect the current, and do not allow the boat to float over them.