No Tourists Today
Paddling the Piscataqua

The Wire, January 7, 2004

I shiver as I rinse my cereal bowl under the cold tap. “Brrr, that's cold,” I think, before pulling my hands out of the water. It’s just a small taste of what’s ahead.

Downstairs, even inanimate objects seem to protest as I detangle and remove my 17-foot-long touring kayak from the dark confines of the basement, where it thinks it's supposed to be hibernating for the winter. It knocks over several bikes, a snowboard, and a big painting canvas on the way out.

I’ve done this a thousand times before in the summer: launch from Pierce Island in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and paddle out to the sea and back. I have paddled late into the fall and early in the spring, and on some fairly nasty, choppy, windy, bone-chillingly cold days to boot. But I’ve never actually done so at a time that could officially be called winter. Not surprisingly, my pleas to friends to join me have fallen on deaf ears.

The sight of me, driving across town with my kayak strapped to the roof rack and wearing a 3/2 wetsuit, booties, waterproof shell jacket, and a ski cap, earns a double take from a middle-aged man at a red light. In the summer I rarely wear a life vest, preferring to stuff it behind the seat instead. In fact, I don’t usually wear more than a bathing suit and a pair of sandals. But at Pierce Island, I add even more gear—spray skirt, PFD and neoprene gloves—and still get a shock as I stick my hands underwater to push myself off the bank. The surf report for Hampton has the ocean water temp at 42°F, but it feels colder than that. My thin wetsuit will not do much to keep me alive if I happen to capsize.
I paddle upstream around Pierce Island and alongside Prescott Park until I near Memorial Bridge. It is dead low tide at the coast, and accounting for the lag at this point up the river, I figure I can follow the tail end of the ebb tide out the Piscataqua toward the sea without feeling the adverse effects on the way back.

Entering the river with a quick sprint downstream, I join the current, which is pushing around multi-ton buoys like rubber duckies. The Portsmouth Naval Yard rushes by effortlessly, the contradictory eddies tugging my bow in ever-changing directions. The wind at my back intensifies the journey, and I have to paddle hard to the left to stay in the main current and avoid a rapidly approaching 10-foot-high buoy. Another minute later, I pull to the right under the Route 1B bridge and into calmer waters.

I am alone on the water—and not just because I haven’t been able to convince anyone else to come along. It’s a Saturday in late December, and the temperature is below freezing. There are no other kayakers out on tours, nobody fishing, and no one along the banks. In fact, I don’t even see one boat out on the water all afternoon.

A flotilla of great black-backed gulls sits motionless on the water in front of a mud flat in the low tide, like a fleet of boats on moorings, all pointed upwind. Overhead, a female flies with a small crab in her bill. I pass by a large rock where in September I saw a pair of great blue herons standing sentry as I passed beneath them in the midst of a school of kayakers in a race around Newcastle Island. I wonder if they are still in the area or if they have headed farther south down the coast for the winter, as my Audubon book suggests.

My fingers are frozen. They haven’t recovered from their dunking, and the blood throbs painfully through my frozen digits. The rest of me, though, is fine. The wind seems calm since I am traveling with it, and my knit cap is off. My wetsuit, however, is constrictive, and makes it just a little bit harder than normal to keep dipping the paddle into the water.
Ahead, a lone double-crested cormorant surfaces with a fish three times the size of its head in its bill: a slender, all-black silhouette on the glistening water. The bird immediately dives back underwater when it sees me, despite the fact that it is 50 feet away and I am hardly a genuine threat. Built more for swimming than flying, cormorants are especially skittish birds when it comes to human contact. In fact, all the birds that I want to see and identify are all fairly skittish, flying away before I can get close enough to be sure of what most of them are. Seagulls, a dime a dozen, don’t seem to care what I do around them, and a group of great black-backs—at the top of their food chain—can hardly be bothered to fly away when I glide up to their mud flat in an attempt to retrieve my camera from its drybox and snap a few pictures with my frozen fingers. On the bank, in the yard of one of those big, stately houses, a group of Adirondack chairs looks down at me from high above.

I push my way back to deeper waters and continue downstream. Around the next bend a solitary great blue heron stands on a rock to my left, but manages to turn my stealthy attempt to get close enough to take a picture into a Three Stooges episode.

I pass buoy 13, a green drunken sailor on shore leave stumbling down a street under the pull of the current, which has still not abated, despite my scientific calculations to the contrary. I cross under the bridge and emerge on the other side next to the Wentworth by the Sea Marina. So filled with life in the summertime, it is desolate now: a handful of boats securely tied and plastic-wrapped for safekeeping until spring. The outer moorings, usually peppered with sailboats, are gone, leaving a blank canvas of blue water.

At the jetties I pause and look out to the winter sea. Hidden from the westerly wind behind the jetty, the water is calm and peaceful. The sea is flat—no waves to speak of—and if my fingers were warmer I might continue out and around Newcastle. But I know that the current would be against me, the incoming tide not yet swelling upstream toward Great Bay. The wind, which has prodded me along so far, will be whistling in my face on the return. As I cross back under the bridge I put my cap on my head, over frozen sweat now crispy in my hair.

Smaller birds dart about here and there in ones or twos. A pair of brown ducks, maybe American Black Ducks, take off in flight long before I get near enough to see their identifying marks. With better luck I had hoped to see a puffin (I’ve never seen one in the summer, and I’m not sure if they even make it this far south in the winter). I am fooled a few times, like when a pair of mergansers on the water fly away before I can get a good look at their beaks.
I don’t see any common terns or black skimmers or laughing gulls—all common companions at other times of the year—and I don’t see any harbor seals, either, though they do winter in the area.

By this point I’m tired and cold and ready to get back to dry land. My fingers are still frozen, and I pull them out of the fingers of my gloves and ball them up in a futile effort to warm them. My arms, shoulders and chest are all bickering at each other, having become accustomed to the hibernatory routine of the past month or so. At a higher tide I would be able to paddle in a straight line back to my car, but now a mud flat lies directly ahead, with a field of blue mussels in rope-like formations scattered over this slimy island normally at the bottom of the river. I pass the grassy mudbank where in May I had seen a brood of adolescent red foxes playing, unaware of me, as their mother, just a touch bigger than them, locked eyes warily with me until the current pulled us apart.

Now that I’ve officially paddled the river in the winter, I can’t say I’ll do it again. Next winter will tell whether I’ve been imprinted with some new cycle of my own. My car comes into view, and I’m soon splashing the last step to dry land: happy to be finished, but happier to have gotten out and done something on a winter afternoon. I load up and return home to thaw my frozen fingers and, like any intrepid explorer, drink a nice cup of hot chocolate.