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strong enough. I grabbed the far side of the overturned canoe and flipped it over onto the grass. A bigger guy would have carried the whole thing to the lake upside down on his shoulders. But I gripped the deck and dragged the canoe slowly across the mud and into the water.
    “Watch the rocks!” Grandma barked. Scratching the bottom of the canoe was considered a major sin in our family. Grandma always shook her head and made an audible
tsk
if we ever passed rocks streaked with the colors of lesser paddlers’ boats.
    “I won’t hit the rocks, Grandma,” I said. Amazing. This was my first day of freedom, and my grandmother was already ruining it.
    “Get in, get in,” she said.
    I zipped up the life jacket and stepped into the canoe.
    “Now,” she said, “are you feeling a little chicken?”
    “There’s probably a nicer way to say that,” I mumbled, but my words were lost in the wind.
    “It’s easy,” Grandma said. “You’ve paddled your whole life. You’re strong enough to cart that canoe around. You can do this alone.”
    “I know I can, Grandma,” I lied. I sat down in the stern, then pushed off the side of the dock. I pulled a few strokes on the right side of the canoe, then a few on the left. The bow of the canoe rose high above the water, listing back and forth like a bloodhound that had lost its scent. I wasn’t going to win any style points, but at least I was getting somewhere. I pulled past the end of the dock and hit the harder waves. Almost immediately I felt what it was like to lose control. A strong wind caught the bow and shoved it hard to the left. My heart started racing. I dug the paddle in a few times on my left, but I wasn’t doing it well. The wind still had me beat by a mile. I listed back toward the shallower water, made a couple of quick strokes on the right side, and managed to turn myself back fully around. Luckily I was out of the harder waves now, too. I slowly brought the canoe back to the dock.
    I glanced up at Grandma. She was smiling knowingly. “Is that how your parents taught you?” she asked.
    I shrugged. Truth is, I didn’t remember anyone teaching me anything — just Max and Rocky and my other cousins showing off their skills and expecting me to watch.
    “Let’s start at the beginning,” she said.
    My heart sank. This could go on for hours. Why couldn’t Grandma just leave me alone? I had my whole life to learn how to solo canoe.
    “First off,” she said, “what are you doing in the stern?”
    “What?” I asked.
    “Your weight back there is what’s lifting up the bow. That’s why the wind could fling you around like a plastic bag.”
    Grandma sure had a way with words.
    “You sit in the bow seat, facing the stern!”
    Of course. I’d seen this done before. No wonder the paddling had felt so hard.
    I climbed into the bow seat and faced the middle of the canoe.
    “Now,” she continued, “you can paddle on both sides like you were doing out there. That’ll work easy in a solo canoe. But you might want to pick a side and do your J’s and draws, just like you’re steering. See which works better for a kid your size.”
    I ignored the comment about my puny stature and gave it a try.
    J strokes were just what they sounded like: you pulled the paddle along the edge of the canoe, then finished with a twist, making a
J
shape. The twist of the
J
turned the paddle into a rudder and kept the bow straight. For a draw stroke, you pulled the paddle toward the canoe before finishing your stroke. That made the canoe turn toward your paddling side. Both of these maneuvers worked easily with a partner, who was usually paddling on the opposite side as you. A little J could even out the power, which was greater in the back than the front. Without anyone paddling in front, though, I didn’t know if I could really control the canoe just by executing these moves. Grandma made it sound so easy.
    I made a few attempts to paddle as Grandma had instructed, but I preferred