For several years I have been unable to attend Living History Day at Fort Ross State Park. While I was gone they renamed it. Now it is called “Cultural Heritage Day”, a name that sounds so politically correct that it leaves a sickly sweet taste in my mouth. A new ranger is in charge of the Fort now also and she sent out an email to some of us expressing concern about having un-regulated people camping on the beach. The skin boaters have been camping on the beach during Living History Day for years now and I’ve never heard of them doing anything that particularly needed regulation. I assumed that this was the Fort’s way of telling us we could no longer camp on the beach during the event. I tried writing to a friend in the volunteer organization about this but he was out of town and didn’t get my message. I was furious, as usual, about being treated like scum by a ranger before I had done anything to deserve being treated this way. In the past the skin boaters arrive on Friday evening and have a big oyster bake on the beach. I have never made it to this, figured it was canceled and didn’t show up. On Saturday morning I met the rest of the skin boaters. Most of them had not received the email so they had simply showed up as usual. So I missed the BBQ for no good reason! I had tossed all my camping gear in my truck just in case, so I was able to join them for the second night camping on the beach.
I had brought a pile of wooden paddles, including the redwood paddle I had started on the beach here years ago. I had been saving my redwood paddle to try it out with my skin boat at Living History day for years. Until now it had never been in the water. It has narrow leaf shaped blades that are sharply pointed. Breaking from tradition I had carved a ridge on both sides. I also left the blades very thick in the middle so it would be extra buoyant for doing rolling tricks. I tried it out for the first time and found that it worked reasonably well as a paddle. Nobody knows for sure why the Aleuts made some of their paddles with such sharp ends. One hypothesis it to use them as harpoons when prey suddenly appeared. But the Aleuts had harpoons with articulated tips to catch in their prey and attached floats to wear seals out and keep the bodies from sinking. There must be some other use for pointed blades. I wonder if there was some hydrodynamic reason for them but I did not discover what it could be. I also had my black space-age carbon-fiber Greenland paddle which did fit in fairly well with the Aleutian paddles, some of which were traditionally stained black with charcoal dust.
During the course of the day we paddled boats out into the cove to amuse the people coming to see a day in the life of Fort Ross. I practiced my roll a bunch of times, several with the redwood paddle. The historians say that Aleutians did not roll their kayaks, so this was not completely authentic. The Aleuts did do the “Eskimo Rescue” which is paddling your prow up to an upside-down boat so the rescuee can grab it and pull himself right-side-up again. Ken Mannshardt and I did this a few times to show it to the visitors.
Steven Littlebear has been researching Saint Peter the Aleut in recent years. This was an Aleutian kayaker in the “employee” of the Russian American Company. Peter was captured by the Spanish who tortured him to death to try to get him to convert from Russian Orthodox Catholicism to the Roman Catholic Church. When the Russian Orthodox Church found out, they declared him a martyr and had him canonized. Until I heard this story I didn’t know that the Sonoma County area had a saint living here once. And the really cool thing is that he paddled a kayak in the same waters that I love so much. It turns out you can buy icons and prayer cards of Saint Peter the Aleut from Orthodox supply stores, so I now have an Icon of a Saint in my living room. Steven has contacted the Russian Orthodox Church in San Francisco and among other things arranged to have a priest come to Living History Day to bless the fleet of skin boats and to bless a copy of the Icon for the church in the Fort.
There was a long procession of priests in robes down from the fort to the beach. A lot of praying and singing in Russian. Gallons of holly water splashed around with a straw brush more vigorously than the waves were dumping on this day. Seriously! The holy water stung from the impact when sprayed into my face! The priest was an interesting fellow who does not speak very much English. He does love the ocean and went swimming in the cove for a minute later in the day.
Doug Huft was talking last year about how he would like to build another skin boat that was designed specifically for playing in the water. He was at Living History Dau this year with this new “play boat” in hand! It was shorter than most baidarkas with a lot of volume in the front and less in the stern. It was sort of like a skin version of a Coaster, my favorite boat! He let the rest of us try it out and I found it a joy to paddle, much more comfortable and responsive than the baidarka that I built. My skin baidarka is so unconformable that I only paddle it at Living History Day once a year or so. Ken Mannshardt took this play baidarka into the surf and I caught some pictures of him surfing it in the waves! Doug says that next he is going to build a skin boat designed specifically for surfing.
That evening as we were sitting around the campfire on the beach, a truck drove down past The Fort. Two guys came over and warned us that they had some leftover fireworks and were going to set them off. I warned them that “Fireworks are forbidden in the State Park System” but none of us were rangers and we didn’t mind. It turned out that these fireworks were professional quality, the kind that launches itself hundreds of feet up in the air then explodes into a giant dandelion of colored sparks. We had a great time and wished the two guys a safe escape past the gauntlet of rangers up at the fort. The next morning as I was leaving I saw the new head ranger on the side of the road. I stopped to assure her that it was not one of the skin boaters who had set off the fireworks, but two guys who drove in just for that purpose. It turned out that nobody had reported the fireworks to her yet. Apparently the fog had made the fireworks difficult to see from up at the Fort and none of the rangers had seen it happening.