Carrying Canoes and other assorted Tom Foolery

People are familiar with the term "portage" - essentially you balance the canoe on your shoulders and carry it along. In the dacks, the term portage is not used, rather they simply refer to it as a "carry". There is a canoe trip referred to as "Route of the Seven Carries." Anyone that has done some canoeing is likely familiar with the standard Grumman Aluminum canoe. It is about 70 pounds, has very little paint, and is incredibly well built. Our camp used these canoes because much like a rented car, people did not treat these canoes very well. These canoes were often dragged across rocks, loaded carelessly etc. Typically they were fine, they may dent a bit, but they remained watertight. Carrying a canoe is relatively straight forward. The trickies part is getting it on your shoulders. You balance it across your thigh, grasp the thwart and lift it. Provided that you have some padding around the thwart it is relatively comfortable. Read is set up as three different camps, each located about a mile a part along a dirt road. Our camp was the furthest along the road. One day, when we had a bit too much time on our hands, my buddy Mike and I decided it would be fun to carry canoes from our camp, down to the next camp. Our purported reason for carrying canoes was becuase we had to make a phone call and there may have been rain expected. Roger was a pretty crotchety old guy who sort of volunteered at the camp. Mainly his work consisted of driving various vehicles around. He also did not find certain things as funny as we did. He was pretty upset about the carrying of canoes. It may have been because earlier in the day we had decided that we needed to shell some peanuts. By some, I mean thousands and thousands. We were not assigned to this work, and there was no reason that the peanuts needed to be shelled. Yet, we got together a group of 5 or 6 people and spent the morning shelling peanuts - and then we carried some canoes.