Hurricane Fever

MISTER DEATH MAKES A PASS

This was not supposed to be a day when he could die.

It was summer on the river, after all. And just a few days before, in the spirit of seasonal optimism, he had launched his Arctic kayak for an ambitious trip: paddling the distance of the Columbia River. If successful, that meant a good twelve hundred miles, no small feat. Staring down the length of this vast and mighty river, dwelling on nasty weather could easily become suspiciously like a bad attitude, naysaying in the face of a task requiring something quite to the contrary: a tremendous show of heart. And so Harvey Golden set off, putting shoulder to paddle.

“To remember is to resist the silence that history imposes on the voiceless.”

Traveling by kayak is a distinct intimacy. The paddler rides immediately upon the water's surface, skimming along like a water bug across a pond. That's the thrill of it. But it is also a type of nakedness, a vulnerability to the water's temperament and the concert of elements at play upon the water's face. As Harvey paddled south on the river, the weather was punishing, and it only got worse. Eventually, rain and cold and wind overwhelmed the boat and its passenger. Numbed to the bone and suffering hypothermia, under assault by the wind and wave and rain that stormed through the surrounding canyon walls, Harvey was alone on the violent river. There was not another living soul, nor any chance of outside rescue. He searched for a place—any place—to land his kayak, before the cold overwhelmed him entirely. But the opportunity evaded him again and again.

Spotting an outcropping of basalt shoreline, Harvey struggled and managed to get himself onto the rocks but not the boat, which, as he clung to it, remained in the river, thrashing about in the waves. He desperately needed to get the boat ashore. But with all the provisions and gear the boat weighed over a hundred pounds, and the waves, meanwhile, were breaking onshore, buffeting the boat against the rocks.

The Sunday Harvey in his element . Photograph by Destiny Lane.

"I was standing in the water, shivering like crazy!" Harvey recalls. "I'm trying to hold the boat off of me, trying to reach in and pull stuff out of the boat, and throw them up onto the sage brush." Just then a big wave crashed into the boat. "The wave threw the boat right on me," Harvey moans in recollection. It hit so hard that, for a moment, Harvey thought that all was lost, that the hundred pound boat had broken his legs. "I think it would have been over," he sighed.
 "Especially with the hypothermia," he says, underscoring the dire necessity to get warm. "I had no way to start a fire."

Harvey's legs were smarting but not broken, and he was eventually able to drag the kayak onto shore. Things were looking up. Except, Harvey was now stranded among the rocks and sagebrush. And, as it turned out, he would continue to be stranded for the next two days. Meanwhile, there was still the matter of his freezing to death. For this, Harvey's solution was simple.
"I got in my sleeping bag. And woke up alive."

ALL ABOUT THE WATER
These days, you can find Harvey safely ensconced in a twelve hundred square foot building, a former grocery store circa 1913, where he is surrounded from floor to ceiling—a twelve-foot ceiling—by kayaks and canoes. With six rows of boats, the accounting totals more than thirty types of boats from all over the world. Even in this small space, it's more boats than one can immediately comprehend. Their shapes are long and slender, with some wider and shorter, yet each displays its own distinct approach to construction. The cockpit openings sometimes swoop gracefully up at the front, guarding against splashing water, while others are trimmed out straight up and down, at right angles, creating a crisp oval aperture.

None of these boats are recreational, per se. Each has its own sensibility and approach to fishing, whaling, and navigating icy water. All of them are designs from a bygone era, for this is a museum, The Lincoln Street Kayak & Canoe Museum. The boats here are historical reproductions of Arctic kayaks and canoes. The museum belongs to Harvey. And every boat in it, save four, he has built with his own hands.

"I like the idea of being around boats and being on the water," says Harvey. His voice is telling and modest. "I'm not like a handmade-wooden-boat snob, or anything like that. Even a two hundred dollar plastic boat is a great way to get out on the water. Kayaking is all about being on the water."
These historical reproductions are based on Harvey's own hard-earned research of the originals. It's data collected from travel research and trips to museums all over the world. A collection process that is more complicated an assignment than one might suspect. Many museums do not have most of their kayaks on display, forcing Harvey to talk his way into museum storage to see and interact with them. When there were no specifications from books or that the museum could supply, Harvey took his own measurements and developed his own specifications and blueprints. And from these specs, he built his boats.

“When I read these letters,” Jorge told me, “I don't just hear my grandfather's voice. I hear the voices of everyone who ever loved him, everyone who ever worried about him, everyone who ever wondered if they would see him again. Memory is not solitary. It is choral.”

“Memory is not solitary. It is choral.”

"I've studied two hundred kayaks in museums around the world. And only about fifteen percent of them are on exhibit. So, most of these kayaks in museums are not available for the public to see. There's many types where there's no place in the world that someone could go to a museum and see them, see the form."

Harvey's passion has given birth to something entirely unique. While there is a modest air about this former grocery—the museum is advertised solely by moderately sized, attractive window stencil, and the museum contents, the boats themselves, were created entirely by the drive of a single laborer—what you find after crossing the threshold and passing through the front door is the largest and most diverse collection of traditional Arctic kayak forms in the world.

It's a sight to see.

TBOATS, NOVELTIES, PHOTOGRAPHS, AND A PHONOGRAPH
The Lincoln Street Kayak  and Canoe Museum is situated on the corner in a residential neighborhood. The lawns and trees, bikes and cars, children playing and joggers puffing, all the sights common to the single-family dwellings on every side, lend to the museum the pleasant quality of a home-cooked meal. The museum itself is an unassuming presence, welcoming. It fits right in.

Guests entering from the street will find themselves standing before kayaks hung one directly above the other on racks. Front and center, as a kind of end-cap to the racks of boats, is a table with a nautical map of the Arctic Regions—with soundings in fathoms and heights in feet. There are two styles of self-guided tour, one quick and the other detailed. Take your pick. Often times, before you can even pick up a tour packet, Harvey has already greeted you from the back of the shop, saying hello and welcoming any questions.

Walking up and down between boats allows you to scan the white placards with black lettering that describe each and every boat. Kayaks are a vehicle of subsistence—an extension of economies not based on money, absence forms of buying and selling. This was true for the Koryak, Chukchi, Unangan (Aleut), Yup'ik, and Iñupiaq/Inuit, and Kalaallit cultures, all of whose kayaks are represented upon the walls. You could say subsistence is in the kayak's DNA. The kayak shells are a wash of brown and tan and black, stretched taunt, looking much like sea mammal hide. But they are in fact either nylon, which has been tinted with powder to appear authentic, or canvas. No dead animals and no cracking and rotting from the Pacific Northwest weather.

Interlarded between the boats are photos and postcards, alongside all manner of curios and novelty. All of it is themed to kayaks, their attending culture, or some seafaring motif. One long running shelf sports a stereoscope, a type of wooden 3-D Viewmaster from the turn of the 19th century. 
Next to it are a dozen or so slides that can be inserted into the stereoscope, tendering three-dimensional scenes of indigenous people fishing or paddling kayaks and canoes. Here and there on windowsills are models of both mechanical and sailing ships: barks, steamers, and hybrids that fuse wind and steam. In the spaces between boats, the walls sponsors framed and unframed photos and prints of paintings, in color and in black and white, depicting kayaking on the ocean, lake, and river. The overall suggestion is of the epic and the everyday of boating across time.

At the back of the room are wooden calipers, and blueprints for boats, hanging neatly on the wall. There is a drafting table, several glass display cases with model boats, and a gorgeous old wood-cabinet phonograph player—a Strand, circa 1921— that is butt up against a large wooden desk. Stationed before the desk is a single dark wooden chair. That's where you'll find Harvey.

The desk is the cynosure of the room, its soul. This is Harvey's writing desk. For in the midst of all the research, sailing, and hands-on construction, lives a writing project and a writer. For years and years now, Harvey has researched ancient kayak design; built replicas from those designs; christened each replica with a trial by water; evaluated the boats' performance and handling; and recorded the results for his book. The result is not only this exceptional museum of unique crafts, but also to be found here, perched at the desk corner on a small painting easel, is a large and handsome and solitary book: Kayaks Of Greenland: The History and Development of the Greenlandic Hunting Kayak, 1600-2000. By Harvey Golden.

ON THE ROOF, IN THE LIVING ROOM, ON THE FARM

"I didn't know anything about wood," Harvey says of building his first boat. "I bought mahogany, about the worst choice. It doesn't bend at all!"

Later, Harvey worked in a specialty lumberyard, a place with some eighty types of lumber, where four or five fellow enthusiasts all experimented with boat building.

"Which was kinda weird, cause I build boats outta junk wood," explains Harvey. Arctic tundra does not support the growth of trees; wood is scarce. Traditional kayak building is based on what you can find, driftwood and salvage. In the same spirit, Harvey builds his kayaks out of what he can find. Unable to afford wood when starting out, Harvey discovered that shipping pallets, spent two-by-fours, and other free recycled woods were perfect sources for kayak construction.

By the time he had mastered kayak building, and his historic reproduction project was in full swing, Harvey had developed a serious problem. Storage. Too many kayaks and no place to put them. Before the museum, Harvey had fourteen boats in his living room, fifteen in the garage, ten on the roof of his house, ten in a neighbor's garage, and three or four out on the coast at a friend's farm. The outdoor boats got weathered, squirrels would "poop in them." There were many issues. Among them, Harvey was forced to stop building full size boats because of space restrictions, and had taken to constructing small models.

"All these boats have been at my house for many years," says Harvey, gesturing toward the museum's full inventory. "And I've had people coming for many years over to my house to see them. Yeah, people from Germany, from France." All over. And when guests arrived, they would get a tour of the garage, living room, and roof. Then they'd get to meet the neighbors. Something had to be done.

MUSEUMS ARE WEIRD

While storage was reason enough to seek out another space, as far back as the 1990s, Harvey had a dream. And over time, that dream grew with the number of boats. "Having built all these, I want to display them," he thought. "I want people to see them. Even people who could care less about kayaks, they might appreciate the design variations. And the history."

Why not a museum? It was a strange thought, but a museum made a lot of sense. It gave an organizing principle to boat display. It was educational. It offered storage. It could also be a place to write.
 "I've always wanted to have a gallery—or just to exhibit all these boats—in some interpretative setting. Just to highlight all their variations… How powerful that is."
And so, in November of 2012, Harvey Golden opened the doors to a museum. His museum.

"I don't know," he says of the finished product, gazing about the space. "It's weird having a museum. Don't get me wrong, I love museums. But there's something odd about them."

HURRICANE FEVER

For a hard-core kayakers like Harvey, just being on the water means something a bit different than for the rest of us. Indeed, what Harvey deems entertainment with a boat might be considered somewhat more off-balanced than, say, owning a museum. While he nearly met his maker that day on the Columbia, Harvey has been in much worse, call it extreme, weather conditions. Conditions he met with enthusiasm, and which he deemed no less than "exhilarating!" For instance, a hurricane.

The high point of Harvey's paddling life came when he entered the Greenland annual kayak championship, on its first year accepting outside nations into this formerly national competition. One day, the championship was cancelled because of hurricane conditions on the ocean fjord. So a group of contestants—mostly Greenlanders and some folks from the contest—thought it was perfectly good weather to go out for a paddle. The forecast was for seventy mile-an-hour winds and ten foot swells. And among the paddlers was Harvey.
"The seas in these fjords really stack up—ten foot rolling seas," says Harvey of that day. "And, um, you're down in the trough—you're out of the wind—for probably sixty percent of the time. But it's topping these troughs in these light boats. You feel the wind hitting the boat as it's coming off the wave. And half your boat is in the air. You feel like it's gonna get blown off and back—and I've heard of that happening. And that's pretty exciting!"

Historically, Greenlanders would hunt seals with harpoons during storms. "Maybe not seventy mile-an-hour winds, but they would still be out stalking seals in it."

From a kayaker's perspective, the most dangerous part of such a day is carrying the boat down to the water. "You have this twenty-five pound boat and you're trying to carry it in seventy mile an hour winds and that—" Harvey pauses. "Is hard! It can be like a kite."
Listening to Harvey and watching him, you see someone quite calm, easy going, and reasonable. It makes you wonder about what drives each of us, that human spirit.
Harvey laughs. "I didn't take any good pictures that day."

KEEPING WATER OUT

There's a stubby boat at the museum, clearly not a kayak. It looks like a wooden washtub. "It's exactly the same function," Harvey declares, amused. "Only, it keeps the water out instead of in."

A few minutes later, a patron comes through the door of the museum. After wandering up and down the aisles for a bit, oohing and ahhing, the man addresses Harvey. First, the guest asks about the skins. Harvey directs him to the only boat that has an actual animal hide covering.
"My biggest nightmare is a boat with real skin," says Harvey in a voice typical of him, sweet and relaxed, yet smartly edged, obliquely humorous. Reflective but not shy. Pointing his finger along the deerskin, he continues: "It's not as good as some I've seen in the museum."
"Well—but you did it!" the visitor remonstrates, affirming Harvey's good work. "What is the germ of this?" the man continues, indicating with a nod of his head the entire kayak collection, which fills the room.

"Curiosity, really."

"Must feel good to be surrounded by your work."

"Yah. Yah… Sometimes I can't believe I've built all this."

When not entertaining museum guests, Harvey is at work on his second book, Kayaks Of Alaska. He is hoping it will take less time than his first, which consumed a good eight years. After that will be a third book, Kayaks Of Canada. Looking around the museum, one can hardly imagine where he'll find the room. Every book could be its own museum. This building is only book one. Yet, for all the demonstrable years of labor that has gone into the project, Harvey seems to take it all in stride, almost with a shrug.
A few days later, someone pointedly asked, why start a kayak museum? Harvey paused to snicker. Looking at the floor, he smiled to himself. Then, looking up, beaming, he had only this to say.

"It was either a museum or a bonfire."
FP