Saturday at the Canal

“Saturday at the Canal” is a poem that voices the constrained frustration of being a teenager in a small town, on the brink of the future where one does not quite belong but cannot yet leave. The poem is written as a remembrance of youth when the speaker was just 17, and moves from the superficial annoyances of school to the deeper longings of a young man who yearns to set out on his own and in experience more of life. Written in a first person conversational voice, like all the other poems published in Home Course on Religion (1991), “Saturday at the Canal” has an autobiographical feel and explores the juxtaposition of adventurous, energetic youth with the limitations and existential questions of youth itself.

The first part of the poem opens with a disappointment: the speaker “was hoping to be happy by seventeen” (Line 1), which implies not only that he is not yet happy, but he has not been for a while—and has been planning for some elusive future happiness for even longer. The following lines give the reader some insight into the source of that unhappiness. With school depicted as “a sharp check mark in the roll book” (Line 2), Soto evokes the way that high school can feel unstimulating and restrictive; it is a daily obligation in which it is less important to learn than to simply be there for the roll call. The young speaker is acutely aware that he is nothing but a number in a classroom just like every other student trapped at his high school. This daily grind is punctuated in the next line when “an obnoxious tuba” (Line 3) is playing at noon. A tuba typically ads a low bass tempo to music, emphasizing the tick-tock of the “sharp check mark” (Line 2) and the school sports games that come and go in the calendar year. For many, those games are central to the high school experience, but for others, like the speaker in the poem, they are merely a comical distraction where “our team” (Line 3) is so unimportant it is not even named. In contrast with the music and guitar the speaker later imagines in San Francisco, the contrived amusement of a high school pep rally is borderline insulting to his young artistic sensibilities. Soto emphasizes the claustrophobic feeling of being ‘trapped’ inside this high school life by mentioning out-of-touch teachers who seemed “too close to dying” (Line 5) to understand his unhappiness at school, while the hallways themselves “stank of poor grades and unwashed hair” (Line 6). In these opening verses of the poem, Soto’s image of high school is almost prison-like, where no one is thriving, and everyone is just going through the motions until graduation.

The claustrophobic feel of the high school walls is completely contrasted in the second part of the poem, where the speaker and his friend pass the time by the canal on a Saturday. Since there is no school on a Saturday, the boys are free to enjoy themselves outside but are still confined within the limits of their small, working-class town. Even out by the canal, in nature where they ought to feel the most free, there are boundaries, borders, and the invisible limitations of their youth. They sit by the canal together as the wind whips their hair, quietly watching the water as time passes and “just warming [themselves]” (Line 8) by throwing rocks in the sun. Their lives are still as aimless as they are in school, but here the reader encounters an active desire (rather than a simple aversion), illustrated by the speaker’s soaring imagination as he comes in contact with the whispers of the future in his own desires. The two boys are still “feeling awful” (Line 10), because “San Francisco was a postcard” (Line 10), meaning the city is still an idealized destination in their minds and not a lived reality. This awful feeling turns into longing as he writes “We wanted to go there,/Hitchhike under the last migrating birds” (Lines 11-12), and suddenly through this imagery these two teenagers are joining a larger, natural migratory pattern that leads them away and out of town. Even as they dream of escaping, there is a cherished sense of being part of something bigger; a community, a family, a wild flock. Leaving behind the comical puff of the marching band tuba, he envisions joining “people who knew more than three chords on a guitar” (Lines 13-14) or people who are more sophisticated and worldly than his small-town community.

In the third part of the poem, Soto shifts the focus to the wild and pure energy of adolescence, which runs as deep as the racing canal running through his town. This shift happens with his statement that “We didn’t drink or smoke, but our hair was shoulder length” (Lines 14-15). This crucial use of “but” in Line 15 serves to indicate exactly the kind of “wild” these boys are – not a rule-breaking or rebellious type of wild, but rather a pure, youthful sort of wild that is lonely, childlike, and grasping for connection to something bigger than itself. Their wind-whipped hair is doubled by their shadows, which seems to grip “loose dirt” (Line 17) with their loneliness. The desperation of their desire to escape this unstimulating and limiting environment is amplified as Soto lists the ways they dream of leaving: “By bus or car, / by the sway of train over a long bridge, / we wanted to get out” (Lines 17-19). In short, by any way possible. The motion of their imagined escaping is then halted with the line “The years froze/as we sat on the bank” (Lines 19-20), for they are still too young to go and still tethered to their high school lives until they can graduate. Until they can leave, they pass the time watching the water “racing out of town” (Line 21), which is white-tipped and wild from the wind tousling the surface, while the water itself remains dark underneath. That darkness evokes an unknown depth which operates as a metaphor for the speaker himself; he is a young man on the brink of adulthood grappling with deep feelings and difficult limitations in the face of numbing superficiality. Like the water, he is filled with forward movement and will soon be able to explore those unknown parts of himself in the larger world, rather than stew in stagnation and watch that water flow away from the canal’s bank.