Road to Adventure

The Path to the Boat
Alaska Sunday XI

The Road Goes Ever On

 The Road goes ever on and on
    Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
    And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it with eager feet,
    Until it joins some larger way
Where many paths and errands meet.
    And whither then? I cannot say.

    -- J R R Tolkien

The Path to the Boat
And the Road to Adventure

Since we arrived safely back at Coldfoot in last weeks episode, I am jumping forward in time in our travel adventure (Driving from Texas to Alaska and Back) and wanted to share this photo. I am still going through the 18,000 photos that we kept (of the ~50,000 that we took). This photo was taken in the North West Territory, Canada, on the banks of the Liard River at Ft. Liard. We ate lunch here and watched the clouds drift by, in hopes of catching a glimpse of birds flying up and down the river.

In viewing the photo, I was struck by the notion that the small path down to the boat, partially hidden in the reeds and grasses, may have been not only a fishing boat, but was a Conveyance on the Road to Adventure. This is akin to what Martha and I were doing. We were on the adventure road also.

If you enlarge the photo, you can just see the tie-up line to the post to the left of the boat. Do you think the young boy, or girl, stopped along the path to pick a few berries growing there? Since they were going in the boat, I imagine they had a rather large sack lunch and a thermos (or jug) of water for the day.

Did they go upriver and let the boat drift back. Did they fish in earnest while they drifted or just enjoy watching the clouds slip by? Maybe they used the boat to cross the river, where they had a secret path through the woods to other adventures.

What adventure waited down that path?

Alaska Sunday is a collection of photographic remembrances of our driving trip from Texas to Alaska.
18,000 miles, 16 weeks, 16 western states including Alaska and four Canadian Provinces.
No chronological order, just anything of interest that got in front of our cameras.

Troy and Martha