Class Note 1995
April 30 marked the 100th anniversary of the Ledyard Canoe Club, a very special place. Jen Hee recalls “canoeing with Kate Chamberlain and Anitra (Auster) Birnbaum, paddling around and singing songs in three-part harmony. They always sounded most amazing under a bridge! Kum by yah, my friends!” Eric Waters loved “going down to the river after classes to take out a kayak or canoe and relax.” I will always remember summer pancake paddles with Brian Greenberg.
Brian was one of the cohort who participated in the Trip to the Sea, the epic journey down the Connecticut River that is a Ledyard senior tradition. Ten minutes into the multi-day trip, he remembers thinking, “How are we going to keep this up for a week?” But after a day or two, it became almost meditative. “We wouldn’t see other humans for hours at a time. I remember our makeshift sailing rigs fashioned out of tent flies and canoe paddles, multiple capsizing events with Joe Berger, composing lyrics for our limerick, and of course the famous paddle through Hartford with construction workers hooting and hollering from the shoreline.”
Gillian (MacLean) Growdon describes it as “an exclamation point in my Dartmouth experience! I’ll never forget the large canoe going under the bridges in Hartford with eight naked people in it—what a view.” The trip was a senior year highlight for Brian Wall too, who was amazed by how fast Walker Weed ’40 could paddle, the strongest of them all. Brian lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and works in data analytics at Asurion. No canoeing, but he enjoys family rafting trips!
Trip leader Justin Wells recalls: “We paddled a fleet of two-person canoes and the ‘war canoe,’ a huge, heavy craft built by Ledyardites decades prior. It took a dozen paddlers and boosted the party atmosphere all the way down the river.
“The stuff-of-legend story from our trip? Near the end of the otherwise perfect week on the river, Mark Andrews doubled up with a violent stomach flu, eventually curling into the bottom of the war canoe, shaking and sweating and scaring the hell out of us. We pulled ashore in Middletown, Connecticut, where an ambulance backed down to the edge of the Wesleyan University crew dock and they took Mark out on a stretcher.
“At that moment, Morgan Drmaj came walking around the boathouse, a duffle slung over his shoulder. Morgan had had to back out at the last minute. As we journeyed down the river, he worked like mad back in Hanover, submitted his thesis, and decided to join us after all.
“Morgan had nothing but a printout of our itinerary and some bus money. Alternately running, hitchhiking, and catching buses, he made his way along the banks of the Connecticut River looking for a flotilla of canoes. In downtown Hartford, when Morgan asked some construction workers if they had seen us, he got cackling in reply: ‘They came under this bridge a couple hours ago—buck naked.’
“So as the ambulance took Mark away, Morgan walked up and cried, ‘I found you!’ It seemed preordained. Someone handed him Mark’s paddle. The flotilla pushed off to resume our trip to the sea.
“The next day we turned the corner of the river mouth and triumphantly landed on a Long Island Sound beach, 200 miles downriver from Hanover. After loading canoes onto trailers and paddlers into vans, we swung by the Middletown hospital, grabbed Mark—still wearing a hospital gown but with color back in his cheeks—and returned to Hanover with one more paddler than we started with.”
—Kaja (Schuppert) Fickes, 2 Bishops Lane, Hingham, MA 02043; kaja.k.fickes.95@dartmouth.edu
