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Story and photos by Bob Henderson Summer 2004 Issue If you were a place, where would you be? This passage by Scottish poet Norman MacCaig is worthy of long considHow is one possessed by a landscape? By a depth of familiarity, certainly, as we are deeply familiar with our But what about our remote travel destinations? How does one become possessed by a place rarely visited? Knowing the natural and human history is a solid start. But how do we begin to possess a land, and it us? How does the region enter your psyche?” Reading between the lines Reading trip accounts, both historical and contemporary, can begin an endless set of playful questioning. How did the canoe route look then? Was the group getting along? How was travel experienced then? First, the text possesses you. Then, travelling the route and re-telling the stories, so does the land. As the land has multiple voices, so the stories have different tellings. Simple re-telling becomes interpretation (as we put themes to the text) and then criticism (as we sense what is unsaid — perhaps suppressed, and weigh what is consciously or unconsciously asserted.) A simple reading becomes an involving exercise that can be truly knicker-gripping. Where no human being should venture My favourite passages in canoe travel literature are ones that help me possess the place. I will never paddle the Fraser River that Simon Fraser experienced in 1808, but I often think about his words. In the midst of his Fraser Canyon experience in June that year he wrote: “I have been for a long period in the Rocky Mountains but have never seen anything like this country. It is so wild I cannot find words to describe it at times. We had to pass where no human being should venture; yet in those places there is a regular pathway impressed or rather indented on the very rocks by frequent travellings.” I wonder at the extent of his unease as he placed his trust in local guides, not knowing what lay ahead. And what of the portages in these canyons, when the explorer and voyageurs carried their supplies and birch bark canoes? Fraser describes “… steps which are formed like a ladder, or the shrouds of a ship, by poles hanging to one another and crossed at certain distance with twigs and withes, suspended from the top to the foot of precipices, and fastened at both ends to stones and trees, furnished a safe and convenient passage to the Natives — but we, who had not the advantage of their experience, were often in imminent danger, when obliged to follow their example.” Now that’s some portage! I’ve used ropes on portages before, but my head spins contemplating these explorations. And what of his men? When paddling and portaging seem equally dangerous, but staggeringly different in terms of physical output, you’d expect some in the group to rebel. Sure enough, Fraser was roused from his tent to the commotion of canoes disappearing into the canyon’s waters against his Shuswap guides’ advice. It was a mini-mutiny that would end badly: swimmers clinging to a broken canoe, one canoe broken into two pieces, and a collection of voyageurs so spooked by the water that they were determined to walk the entire remaining shoreline if they had to. I wonder what course of action Fraser had to take to keep the men advancing? Did he have to threaten the men with a gun or with damaging their reputations as master hommes du nord amongst the voyageur ranks? What is missing? Words that drive you forward Fraser’s telling has possessed me, and I think of it when the going gets tough and I wish to be among the tough that get going. Exploration was his job; he was driven by commerce and politics, but certainly he would have asked the enduring question, “Why am I here?” Enter Katherine Suboch. For added fun I asked her to offer some of her favourite passages, and both have expansive “why am I here?” and “who am I here?” qualities. Katherine writes: “… I like to read accounts by travellers who have gone before me. Paddling for three weeks on the Thelon this summer I enjoyed Thelon: a River Sanctuary, by David F. Pelly (PC, 1996). Early in the book, Pelly poses the eternal question (and likely most frequently asked question on trips): “Why am I here? The question haunts me, even though on the surface the answer seems obvious. But why here? What is it about this place that draws me and many others back time and again on modern-day canoe trips? What is it about this place that moved the barren land trappers to call it ‘The Country’? What is it about this place that made it really the last frontier in continental North America, a place where explorers, mapmakers, and scientists only came in the course of this century? What is it about this place? Why, now, am I here?” If not here ... where? Katherine’s second passage also probes the essential elements of place that possess each of us. Curiously, the words are also well ear-marked in my own copy of Jill Fredston’s book, Rowing to Latitude, North Point Press, 2001 (pg. 170). If I were a place, I’d be Labrador: improbable, impossible, tempestuous, serene, thinly populated. I’d be smooth boulders carried by great rivers of ice, plopped down at random, and balanced precariously against the odds of gravity for thousands of years. I’d be spired mountains, crumbling ridgelines, and winds that literally make the water smoke. I’d be purple sunsets, bedrock that looks like marshmallows, and relentless green waves beating against the shore. I’d be dome-shaped islands with eider duck nests on the open tundra and puffin eggs concealed in the shadowed cracks between black rocks. I’d be clear streams flowing over pink granite, miles of imposing headlands, and icebergs of every conceivable shape making their way south from Greenland. I’d be Windy Tickle, Slam Bang Bay, Cape White Handkerchief, and Blow Me Down Mountain. I’d be sun one minute and rain like ping-pong balls the next, with rainbows that seem to span the world. If I were a place ... I love this question. Who would I be? Not so robust, I surmise, as Katherine or Jill. I’d be a healthy pocket of the Canadian Shield. I’ll go with the Quetico of northwestern Ontario — though Nueltin Lake in northern Manitoba on the edge of the tree line keeps calling. Thinking about Quetico brings Sigurd Olson’s The Singing Wilderness to mind, and my first introductions to the marriage of text and travel. I return to Sigurd often. In 1961, in The Lonely Land, he re-explores the Churchill River fur trade route in northern Saskatchewan and Manitoba. He closes the book with one of my favourite passages. I also knew there were some things that would never be dimmed by distance of time, compounded of values that would not be forgotten: the joy and challenge of the wilderness, the sense of being part of the country and of an era that was gone, the freedom we had known, silence, timelessness, beauty, companionship and loyalty, and the feeling of fullness and completion that was ours at the end. I repacked the outfit and placed each item carefully away. It would not rest too long. Sooner or later it would all come out again. The Reindeer country was waiting: Athabasca, Great Slave, Great Bear, and the vast barren lands beyond them all. Another year perhaps and the Lonely Land would claim us once again. Olson was “so-claimed” often. His dream-awhile, paddle-awhile passages started me dreaming and paddling and continue to inform and possess my life. I’m not alone here. On my Canadian Shield trips, I delight in the calm, charmed, gentle travel experience. My trips are far removed from that brand of outdoor literature called “adventure-porn”. Little or nothing goes wrong, and any danger is quickly forgotten as days pass and campfires blaze. On returning home, I have little to report. Again I think of Olson’s Lonely Land, and his conversation with newspaper reporters eager for a story: “we tried to satisfy them all but somehow our answers sounded flat and innocuous. There was really nothing we had done that was exciting or that would make a good story, no hairbreadth escapes or great dangers, nothing but a daily succession of adventures of the spirit, the sort of thing that could not make headlines. Our newspaper friends, I know, were disappointed. They had expected something sensational, but nothing we gave them sounded good.” Adventures, yes! Death-defying stories, no. Still, at the end of our days, it is “adventures of the spirit” that will allow us to send out a message of inspiration to future travellers, like the 1825 speech of an old voyageur, who had often camped at Tablerock campfire in the Quetico region. I have now been 42 years in this country. For 24 I was a light canoe man; I required but little sleep, but sometimes got less than I required. No portage was too long for me: all portages were alike. My end of the canoe never touched the ground till I saw the end of it. Fifty songs a day were nothing to me, I could carry, paddle, walk, and sing with any man I ever saw … No water, no weather ever stopped the paddle or the song … I wanted for nothing; and I spent all my earnings in the enjoyment of pleasure. 500 pounds, twice told, have passed through my hands; although now I have not a spare shirt to my back, nor a penny to buy one. Yet, were I young again, I should glory in commencing the same career again, I would willingly spend another half-century in the same fields of enjoyment. There is no life so happy as a voyageur’s life: none so independent; no place where a man enjoys so much variety and freedom as in the Indian Country. Huzza! Huzza! Pour le pays sauvage! Okay — likely he hadn’t travelled with Simon Fraser! But favourite passages like this are like mental maps for many of us. They are always close to the surface. We can only remember so much of what we read, but some passages are assimilated, guiding our interpretations of our own canoe trips and of life itself. We are, so many of us, possessed by the land, and in the hands of many fine writers the sentiment resonates through our paddling literature. I’ll close with a lyric from Jack Pine, a song by David Hadfield. South again and home once more, it’s day to day, and nothing more, And friends just smile about the north no matter what I say. And true enough I love my home and no one’s healthy all alone, But late at night I hear the wind — it never goes away. Bob Henderson, the KANAWA heritage specialist, teaches Outdoor Education at McMaster University. This spring, he is visiting professor at New Otago University in southern New Zealand, and intends to paddle the Clutha River. Email him at bhender@mcmaster.ca Bob’s Top Ten List (at this moment in time ...) P. G. Downes, Sleeping Island Sigurd Olson, Reflections of the North Country George James Grinnell, A Death on the Barrens James West Davidson and John Rugge, Great Heart: The History of a Labrador Adventure Robert Perkins, Against Straight Lines: Alone in Labrador Hugh MacLennan, Seven Rivers of Canada Albert Bigelow Paine, The Tent Dwellers: Sports Fishing in Nova Scotia in 1908 J. W. Tyrrell, Across the Sub-Arctic of Canada: a Journey of 3200 Miles by Canoe and Snowshoe Through the Barren Lands Sigurd Olson, The Singing Wilderness