Sorcha: Dad, with Scouts in the Quetico/Boundary Waters going over a rapid in a canoe...Paddle faster dammit, paddle faster! (became a 'family saying')

Flashback to a family canoe trip in the Quetico: Various aunts/uncles/cousins/Grandma in about five canoes paddling across Sarah Lake with a storm blowing in. The canoes were being blown sideways and whitecaps were coming on over the gunnels and you could hear my aunt (Sarah, named for the lake) shrieking about it all the way across the lake. It's still a running family joke when she's not around.

To be fair, there was a miserable storm that night--cold, howling winds, and heavy rain--and it was my brother's tenth birthday. We were all huddled under a shebang trying to keep dinner from blowing off the camp stove (fire was out of the question) when my brother looked at my father and said miserably, "This is the worst tenth birthday I ever had!" (It was bad, too. Our tents were blown flat by the wind and we discovered on the way back into Ely the next day that, had we not changed campsites, we might all have been killed. The campsite we had used the day before, which we had considered keeping for a second night because of the weather, had lost a lot of large trees, which had fallen over the clearings where our tents had been pitched.)