Paddle to the Sea

Chris Stevens

Episode 3.20, "The Final Frontier"

I made you, paddle person, because I had a dream: A little wooden man smiled at me. He sat in a canoe on a snowbank on this hill. Now the dream has begun to come true. The sun spirit will look down at the snow and the snow will melt and the water will run downhill to the river, on down to the Great Lakes, down again, on at last to the Sea. You will go on with the water and you will have adventures that I would love to have. But I cannot go with you because I have to stay and help my father with the traps.

That's Paddle to the Sea, folks, the story of a little Indian boy who sends a toy canoe on a journey that he himself is too young to take.

We do the same thing, you know -- Pioneer, Voyager, Galileo: our standard bearers in the eternal human crusade, exploration. And now we've hit the cosmic trail. Why? Well, because earth's played out.

You know, less than a hundred years ago, Amundsen could have been the first human being to reach the south Pole, Falcon Scott could have died trying, and now . . . well, last year China had to close down Mt. Everest, too much litter. The world's become a fragile place. It's not to be conquered, it's -- it's to be protected, coddled, nursed like a little baby. What do we do now? We launch our surrogates into interstellar space, dreaming of that one fine day when we ourselves can go.

The lower half of the falls was hidden in mist with a rainbow across it. Paddle fell through the rainbow and went on falling. Paddle had ridden rapids. He had ridden the Mad River and seen the rapids at the Sioux, so big that ships went around them. But these rapids -- thirty foot waves rushed on shooting stars turning inside and out at every jump. Paddle flew up on a chain of wet volcanoes and plunged deep in submarine dives and took sudden trips toward the moon in green rockets.

There's probably a lot of folks out there saying, "Man, I'm never going to have me a rush like that. Earth's a parking lot and outer space's just too pricey." Let me tell you something: there's lots of ways to blaze a trail. I always think back to those unsung heroes of the past, like that prehistoric gourmet who looked at that lobster and said, "I'm going to eat that," or the first healer who picked up a knife and said "Let's operate, boys." You see, adventures come in all kinds of shapes and sizes, like -- getting your hair cut, falling in love. Even getting behind the wheel and backing out of the driveway can be a sublime act of fate -- as well as a monumental act of courage.

For that instant, he looked like his own paddle. There was a song in his heart. It crept to his lips but only the water and the wind could hear. You little traveler, you made the journey -- the long journey. You now know things I have yet to know, you little traveler. You were given a name, a true name in my father's lodge. Good medicine, little traveler. You are truly a paddle person.