The man across the table laughs. The sparkle in his eyes belies his age while memories bring back youth. Memories of rivers, boats and camps…

A few photographs come skidding across the table. Black and white, serrated edges, old and battered. But the young man in them is handsome, proudly showing off his sleek closed-cockpit kayak in a braced turn. “I could roll, too”, he says, and that flash of pride lightens his face up again.

He watches me, waiting for a reaction. It makes him laugh. “And exactly when was this?”, I hear myself asking. “1932”, the reply comes promptly. More photos – tents, people, boats, a river. “Where was this?” We are getting into an interview… “That river is the Isar, not far from Munich.” He points to a woman in the picture – “my girlfriend”, with a smirk.

I am more fascinated by the boats. They look odd, open cockpits like K1s but wider, definitely not racing boats. “Ah”, the lecture starts, “that is a German invention. Foldable touring boats, very clever! Klepper did the best, but there were others, too. This is a Klepper, of course. You wouldn’t take anything less down the Isar, not in those days. She was a real river then!” He is referring to the hydraulic plant that was built later on, extracting most of the water at Kuetsch nowadays and making the river almost unrunnable except after heavy rains.

“Tell me more about this trip”, I demand, and the man across the table settles back into his armchair, his glance penetrating the wall in front of us, drifting back in time. “It was summer.”, he begins. “We usually did one big trip in summer, some 10-12 people, all friends from around Frankfurt. We would take the train and the busses to our chosen river. None of us had suitable cars...” That smirk again! “Foldable boats are good for public transport, you know. You can take them apart to a size fit for an average suitcase. It’s brilliant, it is.”

“Most years, we decided to tackle a river in the area, but that summer we had an invitation from a mate in Munich. Munich! The Isar! And the Alps! Too good to be missed... So there we were, squeezing into the train with our boats, paddles, tents, sleeping and cooking stuff, loads and loads. Things were bigger in those days, not so efficient as you get them now. And the trains weren’t such a comfortable affair either. If I remember right, the “D-Zug” – and that was the fastest you could get – would take the better part of a day to get from Frankfurt to Munich!”

“We spent the night in the youth hostel. Bunk beds, men and women separate, not like nowadays… But then, it was only for one night. We took a local train early in the morning to some little town, I forgot the name. It was paradise – brilliantly clear skies, fields with cows, pretty little village houses, the mountains as a backdrop… I can almost smell the summer flowers and hear the bees buzzing about.”

Break, staring past the wall. “Then we had to build up the boats. 20 minutes if you were good at it. I suppose these days they would have some snap-in-place mechanism… They were all wood and tarpaulin, and you had to make sure it was properly waxed. Then we had to stuff all the gear inside. They were spacious enough to hold everything packed tight but you had to make sure it was well-balanced. The more so since the Isar seemed to be a livelier river than the ones we were used to.”

“The paddling was superb and we managed to do our 5-day trip without swims. That would have been a problem, because foldable tourers are open cockpit boats and everything inside would have been wet through or even drifting out of the swamped canoes. But the only mishap occurred not on the river, but at our 2nd night’s campsite. We had been wondering where to put up the tents in a long stretch where the riverbed was huge as compared to the actual trickle of water running through it. Tired and worn, we could not be asked to carry all the stuff up to the far banks but pitched tents between the pebbles. And promptly we were woken up just after bedtime by the sound of water lapping against boats and other things. Eva and myself got out just in time to rescue our tent and clothes from the wet element. Others had not been so lucky and we spent the morning drying out soaked tents and making inventory of what had fallen prey to the river.”

“Only back at Munich by the end of the week did we hear that such drastic changes of water levels occurred regularly on the Isar in early summer due to melting snows… So you see, we had our adventures, too, in those days!"

He grins. “So you took up canoeing?” I am nodding dutifully. And with a smile, my Dad (then 90 years old) falls asleep in his armchair…!

by Petra Hudson, April 1999