A Machine With Two Pistons

In their prom formats, Queen Mary of Oscoda and Queen Ann of Grayling are beaming at the crowd across the AuSable River from the porch of Ray's Canoe Livery. It is 10 o'clock at night and the 5,000 people stretched along the bank are oddly silent. The 26 two-man racing teams have been introduced and have left with their canoes on shoulders to get ready for the LeMans-type start that will take place some 400 yards up the street in this northern Michigan village. There's even been a benediction by a local pastor. Now we are waiting for the fire-station whistle to signal the beginning of the AuSable Canoe Marathon, a 240-mile race from Grayling to the mouth of the river in Oscoda, nonstop, with a mere $1,000 held up as a carrot for the front-runners. The arc lights are attracting a great number of bugs and one gazes idly at the river hoping to spot a brown trout rising.

With the first low trill of the whistle the crowd begins screaming. Thirty seconds later the first team rounds the corner, runs full out down the dock, hurls the canoe in the river and scrambles in. Then at least 10 more teams arrive at once with an amazing show of splashing and shoving for position. Within a minute all the canoes have disappeared into the night—which is to be a night of unmitigated punishment.

I had reached Grayling the day before with a generalized sense of irritation brought on by a summer cold, a virus and a show-me attitude toward the idea of professional canoe racing. Almost everyone canoes at one time or another, and as a trout fisherman I had grown to dread the arrival of those clunking aluminum beasts on the river, scaring hell out of brown trout for half an hour after their passing. The passengers would smile idiotically and wave from a range of five feet as they crossed your line. "Catching any?" Not now.

And there was a slight sense of dread and nostalgia over the fact that though I had been born in Grayling I was spending my first night there in 34 years. The dread came on because I had come to realize that the northern Michigan of my youth with its Hemingway Nick Adams stories is now largely mythical. It seemed to me that every abandoned gravel pit with its green pond from Grand Rapids to the Straits of Mackinac has been developed and renamed Wee Loch o' the Woods or something like that. But this impression was to lose much of its ammunition in the next two days.

Ray's Canoe Livery is in the center of town, and the AuSable, which begins not far from Grayling, is very small here, not gaining the weight of its several branches until farther east. I introduced myself to some strange physical types lounging around the yard. They looked like a mixture of broncobusters, bulldoggers and gymnasts: small waists, slight hips and legs but with massively developed arms and chests, the sloping powerful muscles that one identifies with weight lifters as opposed to the bulges of body builders. These were, of course, canoe racers, not terribly friendly people, though they did gradually warm. Most of them seemed busy psyching themselves up and psyching their competitors out like 180-pound peacocks.

Late in the afternoon two of the racers who had been described to me as contenders, Al Robinson and Jeff Kellogg, asked the photographer and me if we wanted to join them on a short spin. The photographer was staring at the flimsy racing canoe and decided to take an underwater camera to be safe. A racing canoe, although more than 18 feet long, weighs only 40 pounds. It is made of laminated strips of redwood and lightly fiber-glassed inside and out. Al Robinson held the canoe steady at the dock, looking mournfully at my cowboy boots. I took them off.

It was like trying to balance on a cork and bore as much relationship to regular canoeing as speed skating does to walking. Despite my awkwardness with the paddle we fairly flew downstream, with Robinson in the stern deftly keeping us away from docks and overhanging branches. Racing paddles are outsized and canted for extra power so that the surface of the blade is kept perpendicular to the canoe throughout the sweep of the stroke.

The photographer and Jeff Kellogg disappeared on a trickle of water between two bushes to explore a location called the Spider Cut, a shortcut Al and Jeff thought might be legal this year. We headed into what looked like a small creek. It is known as the Moose Cut and was dug, hacked and dynamited across a long neck of the river years ago by a racer who wanted a secret time advantage. He missed it in the darkness of the race and now nearly all of the racers know about it.

We received some encouragement of the Bobby Riggs variety. Advancing age doesn't seem to be a negative factor among canoe racers. In 1971 Buzz Peterson and his son Steve from Coon Rapids, Minn. set a record for the distance. Buzz Peterson was 51 at the time, though certainly not to be confused with the average man that age. Peterson was the master of the psych, stopping his canoe for a cigarette and waving at his astonished competitors. This year Verlin Kruger, a 50-year-old plumber, is entered again. A few years ago he paddled with a friend from Quebec to Alaska, all 6,500 miles of it. This might strike one as insane but Verlin describes it casually as a "wonderful trip," though they had trouble with ice the first month and, after all, the first half of the voyage was upstream. Many top-seeded racers are in their 30s, and the best explanation involves stamina and the ability to withstand the pain that sets in after a few hours of racing. "Young men can't stand the pain" was a statement repeated over and over.

The night before the race I bought three rounds of drinks for a big table of racers at a local bar. The bill came to $5. Except for the favorites, Luc Robillard and Jerry Kellogg, they were fidgety and sipped ginger ale and Coca-Cola. You would have thought they were being sent to Vietnam at midnight. Robillard is a physical-education teacher from Quebec and Kellogg is an ironworker out of Twin Lakes, Mich. I asked Jerry about a light I had heard about and he spoke modestly about the fact that two years before he and his brother Jeff had mixed it up with half a dozen louts in a bar. The first five weren't bad but the last held a knife, explaining the scar on Jerry's face. Jeff got a collapsed lung from his stabbing but still entered the race a few weeks later. I reflected dully on how outmoded this samurai routine was except for a few backwoods areas of the country.