Growing up in pretty much the epitome of small-town America, my interactions with different cultures were limited as one could easily assume. So when I began working my summer job I was surprised to find out I will interact with other cultures quite often. My job you ask? I'm a canoe boy.
Fancy title, I know. I lift canoes from sun up to sun down. Not really but you get the point. Besides getting wet all day and fending off bugs I never knew existed, I have to constantly talk to customers and make sure they don’t get left behind. When I’m not telling them all what to do and where to go, I get to know more about my customers than one would think.
I often hear stories about the weekend camping trip with the family where dad left out the food and woke up to ten raccoons ambushing their campsite or how people have come from around the world to canoe on the little creek I swam in as a kid. These random conversations may seem insignificant, but they give me a glimpse into the everyday life of those from alternate backgrounds. Don’t get me wrong, sometimes the things you hear definitely sound weird, but it’s the lifestyle they pursue and love. It’s amazing to see how something as simple as a joke or a gesture can provoke a conversation that spreads to what we aspire to become as a person and even encouragement from complete strangers.
And yeah, sometimes things can get complicated due to misunderstandings or a language barrier, but that only reminds me that to these customers, I’m the foreign guy. I instantly become the outsider to these customers and receive the same curiosity and timidness that I myself have. After a few hours on a creek in ninety-degree weather, you’d be surprised how badly people want to talk to someone other than their paddling partner. I just so happen to be on the receiving end.
Though there may be people from multiple different backgrounds all crammed onto one bus, there is always a common ground between two people no matter where they came from or believe in. Let’s be honest, watching a canoe flip because a family’s dog got too excited and really wanted to swim never gets old. I see it almost every day and still get a good chuckle in every time it happens. Who knew that carrying canoes could be such a culturally immersive job? I thought I was just going to mindlessly carry boats back and forth from beach to beach, yet here I am, talking to a family who came from Bengal to visit family and decided to go canoeing just to fill in some down time.
From manual laborer to part-time cultural aficionado, I began to learn about the lifestyles and cultures of everyday people who decided to go canoeing because the weather was nice. I may go into a trip talking to the couple in canoe C-105 and come out knowing how their great grandma used to sing them a lullaby that has been passed down for generations in their family. Though my interactions with other cultures may come from almost random encounters,I learn a new aspect of someone’s way of life that I never knew about. Even on Sugar Creek outside of Crawfordsville, Indiana at a canoe rental business, I get as much cultural mingling as if I was in a big city. I may be born and raised in small town America, but I’ve been around the world through my conversations with first-time canoers.
