In addition to waking up in the middle of the night and repeatedly having to dump trapped mice out of the trash can, I woke up in the wee hours feeling like I’d swallowed a sea urchin, aching all over, and barely able to sit up. Steve woke up to me coughing and was moderately concerned until he shone his headlamp into my throat and immediately became very concerned; apparently it also looked like I’d swallowed a sea urchin. After choking down a cocktail of every painkiller we had in our first aid kit, I fell back into a fitful and wheezing sleep with Steve’s hand on my back in the hopes that if I stopped breathing, he’d wake up. (Steve isn’t one to worry about… well, anything, really, so his uneasiness made me more nervous than pretty much anything else on the entire trip.)
Morning was rough. Steve made me choke down two shots of scotch and gargle some Listerine, which made my throat hurt a little less, but I could barely swallow and felt like my head was attached to my body by a very long string. Despite Steve’s assertion that calling off the remainder of the trip and going to the hospital was completely okay, I’m nothing if not stubborn as hell and there was no way I was backing down from the last full day of paddling of the entire excursion. The prospect of canoeing across the Chesapeake Bay was also less daunting than trying to obtain access to health care with questionable insurance and an 18’ canoe in tow… which, for the record, might be a sign that our system’s not in great shape.
Kevin and Denise saw us off, and so began the slog across the Chesapeake Bay into the Aberdeen Proving Ground.
For those of you unfamiliar with the area, this involved a three-mile stretch of open water directly into America’s oldest active military weapons testing facility. Even though there was barely a breeze, the crossing of the Bay was a little unnerving; waves came at us from every direction, meaning Steve had to focus on steering while I provided most of the forward motion. (I’m sorry to say it wasn’t my finest work that day.) However, as unnerving as the Bay was, it was nothing compared to the lush forest forcing its way right to the edge of the beach of the APG that was dotted with large signs warning us not to put to shore because the terrain was littered with unexploded ordnance.
We paddled a fine line between being so far out in the bay the waves caught us and being so close to shore we came within striking distance of a series of small, suspicious buoys that could potentially be marking things that would blow us to smithereens. The bay was completely deserted save for a handful of anchored mid-sized boats that appeared to be marking the shipping lane, and the woods on shore echoed with a discomfiting variety of gunfire. Our normal workplace is located near a good-sized firing range in Vermont, so some of the sounds (machine guns, rifles) were familiar, but periodically the trees were rustled with the thundering PHOOM of something much, much larger. We nervously joked about the prospect of seagulls landing on shore and suddenly evaporating in a cloud of feathers. I hit a new low when I peed in our bailing bucket since we were unable to put to shore. The overall scene was eery- not at all what we’d expected from the area. Every time something exploded, we reassured ourselves that they wouldn’t possibly be firing live rounds over the open waters of the Chesapeake Bay. Surely that would be madness.
We stopped for a snack several miles in, and as we bobbed in the shallows one of the boats in the shipping channel unmoored and came speeding towards us. When the boat turned on its flashing blue and red lights, I completely lost my shit and started laughing uncontrollably. Here we were, floating off an island covered in explosives, me half-delirious with pain and fever, and we were getting pulled over. In a canoe.
As it turned out, they WERE firing live rounds over open water. The boats we had seen marking the shipping channel were actually a security perimeter, and they had let us paddle straight through because they thought we were “swamp weeds”. The officers were more horrified that they missed us than anything, and by the time they’d spotted us we had already cleared the target range.
Oops.
Fully stoked that we hadn’t had to test whether the kevlar of the canoe was bulletproof or not, we paddled onward looking for a place to camp. One island after another revealed “unexploded ordnance” signs and endless fields of poison ivy. Hours passed. I have vague recollections of my 17oz paddle beginning to feel heavy as an iron bar. As the sky darkened, we finally hauled ourselves ashore on Hart Miller Island.
The campsite was beautiful; right on the beach, fire ring, picnic table, and not a trace of other visitors on our entire end of the island. The stunning location was mostly lost on me since I could barely keep my eyes open, but we did enjoy dipping our toes in the surf while watching the sun set.
We set the tent up as far from the water as possible, and battened down the hatches for the impending rainstorm on our last night on the water.