We packed up the boat, layered up, turned on our navigation lights, and shoved off from Oromocto just as the sun was setting. The wind died down almost immediately, and by full dark the river was glassy calm.
Paddling in the dark is an especially eerie experience. We’re well-equipped for it; we have the required navigational lights and emergency visual signals, we have the maps, and by the river gods we certainly have enough caffeine intake. At this point in the river the shoreline is relatively well-lit by towns and roadways, and there are no rapids or obstacles to be concerned about save the odd buoy or bridge.
That said, no amount of preparation can truly brace you for the weirdness that is a nighttime canoe trip. The flatness of the river means everything is reflected- streetlights, taillights, stars, your own navigation lights. Aside from the ripple coming off your paddles, you begin to feel as if you’re floating in the center of a vast orb; the stars below the bow are just as bright as the ones overhead. After dark the center of a river becomes eerily silent, and if a fish jumps nearby it’s enough to startle you out of your skin. Time ceases to pass normally. The only truths left are the feeling of your paddle in the water and the presence of someone else in the other end of the canoe. Everything else is conjecture.
Coming into Coytown we passed under a substantial highway overpass that spanned a thousand feet of river. From a distance it looked like a small string of Christmas lights, and as we grew closer the arches of the bridge appeared to open like a huge maw as the actual bridge pulled away from its reflection. We had the weirdest feeling that we were paddling toward a portal ripped open in the side of an empty black sphere, broken only by the quick whoosh of cars passing by hundreds of feet overhead.
The buoys marking the shipping lanes of the St John at that point weren’t lit, so periodically we’d hear the gurgle of a stationary object in the river and snap on a headlamp to find ourselves within a stone’s throw of a massive metal can. We stayed as close to river center as we could reckon to avoid any flood debris caught on the shore, and for the most part this meant for incredibly uneventful paddling. The one exception was when we passed through a series of small islands and lost track of shore because the river was bordered by swamplands; we thought we heard a buoy, turned on our headlamps, and found ourselves floating in a foot of water over a flooded grassy field. Oops. We spotted the next buoy and made our way back into open water for several more hours of uneventful paddling.
After spending nine hours of unbroken paddling in a canoe in full dark, watching the sun come up over remote sections of New Brunswick was a stunning display that was mostly lost on us. We were a little addled by that point; despite the natural resplendence as soon as it was light enough to see we started looking for a place to pull over. Unfortunately, at this point in the river we were surrounded by empty swamplands full of birds (mostly angry geese) and soggy, silty banks barely a foot above the water.
Somewhere south of Queenstown we spotted one of the historic ferry piers that line the St John River. It appeared to be at the end of a dirt road with one or two houses nearby but no discernable town, and as it was the first dry landing site we’d seen we decided it was “good efuckingnough”. We dragged the boat ashore and locked it to a tree, threw down our sleeping pads, and were asleep in the sun within minutes.
If the locals had any objections to a pair of soggy vagrants taking a nap on their pier, they kept them to themselves.
Lacking any functional location for a campsite, we gave ourselves a REM cycle to recharge and then dragged ourselves back into the boat with a goal of the Oak Point Provincial Park another ten miles or so downriver. This proved to be a delightfully scenic but physically painful slog as the wind picked up, and we also had to contend with a new evil called a “cable ferry”. A cable ferry is exactly what it sounds like; there’s a ferry, and instead of having a motor it’s attached to a cable that drags it back and forth across the river. This means that when the ferry is moving, there’s a huge metal rope the size of your arm strung across the river at neck height. If you’re passing by in a canoe, this translates to waiting until the ferry has landed and is loading cars and then PADDLE LIKE FUCKING MAD to get past before the cable snaps up again.
Oak Point Provincial Park is located on a spit of land that juts out well into the river, which was nice in that we could see it from well upriver… but also terrible, because we had to stare at our destination for three hours while we battled the wind to get to it. It was bad enough that at one point we seriously considered just pulling the boat out of the water, attaching the portage wheels, and hauling it the remaining miles down the road.
Finally, arms aching and nerves frayed beyond the capacity for rational thought, we dragged ourselves ashore on the beach at Oak Point… to find an apocalyptic wasteland instead of the RV park of friendly Canadians we’d been expecting. Turns out the flooding had completely submerged the bulk of the park and it was currently closed to RVs. We managed to track down some staff members who were pulling debris out of the rec buildings; I’ll never know if it was my cheerful demeanor that persuaded them to let us camp there despite the closure, or if it was the sight of Steve lying face-down on the grass near the boat refusing to move any further.