The difference between a paddle and an oar, the elders maintained, was a matter of conviction: the oar leveraged a fulcrum, the paddle leveraged a feeling. By 1978 we had stopped arguing the point. The fulcrum, after all, is just a fixed idea, and the inland waterways of the Pacific shelf are not, by temperament, fixed.
We met fortnightly through the long warm summer of that year — nine of us, sometimes eleven, never more — under the cedar lean-to at the foot of the Salt-Slack Reach. The minutes were kept on butcher paper. The decisions were kept on memory. The motions were carried by the breeze.
What we charted, plainly speaking, was not a river. What we charted was a way of being unhurried in moving water, which is not the same and is more difficult than the chart suggests. The Pacific Paddlers' Constellation Society took its name from a printer's error in the original 1978 charter, which referred to us as the “Constituent” Society. We never corrected it. The constellations turned out to be a useful metaphor.
The almanac before you is, in its entirety, an act of remembering: seven plates, drawn from log-books, postcards, and the back covers of paperback novels left in the lean-to. Read it as a slow paddle. Skip the rapids if you must.