After a while I decided to return to the camp site and make some lunch. This time as I got out of the canoe to pull it back over the dam, my adventurous foot went partly through the bottom of the canoe itself. I got back to the site in a wet, leaking canoe and used duct tape to seal the crack that I had made and cleaned up the blood and mud.
Later on during my trip I was butter-fingered and dropped my paddle into the lake during a semi-heroic trip through stiff winds. I used my hands and arms to propel the canoe over to the shore towards the paddle and fetched it.
Both times I was lucky - I had been a couple of miles away from my camp - and downstream. It would have been a long, hard slog through the bush to get back. If this had happened to me now (fifteen years later) even in a more isolated spot, and had the broken canoe been more badly holed, and had the paddle become lost to the currents I would now know better what to do from the shore. I would repair the canoe with a thick glue made of melted pine resin and powdered charcoal, and employ thick birch bark as a band aid over the surface of the canoe. And I could carve a paddle from a split dead-standing cedar log.
Repair is as vital a role during camping as is enjoying the trip. And there's nothing really wrong when stuff breaks. Stuff breaks, you fix it. And that's part of your job.
I find that in my day job as a project manager, my role is to both guide projects through to completion, and to troubleshoot and repair poorly assembled projects or projects that have - through no fault of their own - been damaged. I suppose that's my job and that's your job - no matter what you're doing.
In case of emergency, you need to locate the pine, cedar, and birch trees.
Cheers,
Mungo