From: "Gene Smith" <SmithFrow@worldnet.att.net>
To: "Baidarka List" <baidarka@lists.intelenet.net>
Subject: Re: [baidarka] paddling
Date: Sat, 25 Jul 1998 08:38:32 -0000
>Pacific paddles seemed to generally be leaf or spear shaped.
>One interesting difference - at least in Hawaii - is that the upper hand
>grip was different than "Euro style" or whatever you'd like to call it.
>More like a baseball bat grip, but with the bat (paddle) pointing down,
>rather than up.
>I don't have the least idea whether this is easier or not, but it goes to
>show there's nothing God-given about "how to paddle".
> Craig O'Donnell
I think Craig makes an interesting point...obviously one of the things you
have to deal with in any kind of antiquarian research is just what survived.
I'm going to bet that in some "tribes" there was a right and proper way to
make a paddle, from which you departed at your peril. In some other social
groupings, I'd also bet that it was a matter of "paddler preference" as it
were. From the more individualistically inclined, we will be limited to
what (or who) survived. Sometimes all conclusions may be based on one
surviving artifact. Other times we may have a group much changed by their
encounter with "civilization" - sometimes their methods and designs changed,
sometimes the only tribal knowledge resides in one or two individuals who
continued making things when no one else was interested.
About those "leaf" or "spear" shaped paddles...the idea that a taper toward
the tip to balance the more "solid" water the further away from the surface
makes sense...but that point bothers me. Stefano has suggested that it
might make the paddle more useful as a weapon - considering general human
proclivities, that's a tough one to disagree with - but what others are
there? Esthetics must figure in it, too, but why are so many aboriginal
paddles brought to a point?
Douglas Ingram, amongst a great deal of thoughtful and useful information
noted that "blades which are too small make you feel like a windmill." That
is exactlty the feeling I have when using the gearing on a bicycle in the
most efficient way, at least according to the bicycle distance racers. It
is one of the things I thought of while paddling on my vacation - that
perhaps we dig deeper and paddle harder for the same reason that it seems
"right" to an inexperienced bicyclist to be in a more direct gear, pumping
harder and turning fewer revolutions. The higher, "easier" (at least as far
as force applied) rpm urged on me by my experienced biker friends always
made me "feel like a windmill".
Steve Yahn's excellent post about intuitive learning has only one difficulty
that I see, and that revolves around one's own
ability to shut your conscious mind up and just "do it". This is pretty
much the basis of Zen, its precursors and related mystical practices. In
some ways, paddling is a good place to practice it. A repetitive activity
tends to lull the conscious mind into inactivity and allow the intuitive
mind to take over. I think Kirk Olsen's idea of "listening" to the paddle
is a very good one - and not just with your ears, either. "Listening" is a
particularly nice metaphor for the process because when the information
being transmitted is "quiet" it is easily obscured by "noise". What I'm
hearing from those who are much more experienced paddlers than myself is
that the paddle is constantly "talking" to you, and the trick is to learn to
"hear" what it is telling you.
Gene Smith