the water where you don’t want it. No axe or saw? After three or four days of cold rain in September you’d wished you had brought them along. But even if you did, you may not have known how to get dry wood, anyway.
I’ve passed many people on the trail in various stages of wretchedness, and their misery was most often the result of poor leadership and planning: forgotten equipment, trip was too hard, no protection from biting insects, lousy food, wet and cold — all things that are generally the responsibility of the trip leader to know how to remedy. But, in most cases, the appointed chief never admitted his shortcomings, whether too embarrassed, stubborn or indifferent. How hard can wilderness trekking be? Well, it can be very hard.
When I took my wilderness first aid course it was at a well-known canoe and kayak school. I was there for eight days. They call it a canoe school but their techniques are predominantly aggressive whitewater kayak that they’ve cross-pollinated with canoe techniques. On the last day of my course the school had bussed in a load of fresh kayak students, mostly older high-school kids, full of beans and high expectations. The first thing the school did was to perch them in front of a theatre screen to watch a film showing kayakers vaulting their boats off cliffs and waterfalls.
Now you have to ask yourself, first of all, unless you were vying for the universal Darwin Award, why you would want to kayak over a waterfall? But you could see such delight on the faces of these inner-city kids, watching as kayak after kayak plummeted over steeper and gnarlier precipices, shouts of “Right on!” and “Totally, dude!” resounding in the auditorium. Extreme films showing extreme stunts are slick marketing tactics of the gear companies, again, steering trends toward a particular mindset. And there are more people buying kayaks than canoes today, for two reasons: the younger crowd aspires to paddle over waterfalls and dangerous rapids (canoes are no longer sexy); while the more conservative market purchase the “sit-on-top” and sea-kayak because it takes little skill to get the boat to go where you want it. For most novices it is difficult to learn how to solo paddle a canoe and stay in control, especially in the wind; but with a kayak there’s no need for a “correction” stroke and you’re already placed in the appropriate position just behind midpoint. The first inclination of a would-be solo paddler is to sit in the stern seat, at the very back of the canoe where one would normally steer the boat from if there were two people paddling. This causes the bow, or front, to rise out of the water, which acts like a wind sail, destabilizing the canoe, causing the occupant to be blown down the lake, no matter how hard they try to fight against the wind. Yet again we find ourselves fighting against Nature instead of adapting to it.
Whitewater canoeing down rapids is a white, European phenomenon brought to this country by the likes of the Hudson’s Bay Company. Time was money; and to get men, equipment, and trade items into the frontier, and furs back out in a timely fashion, river rapids were often run with loaded canoes because it was far quicker than carrying supplies over the portage trails. Native Canadians watched the white traders in horror, beguiled by the insanity of such stupidity and lack of reverence for the power of the river. People of the First Nations were not driven by greed or time constraints and treated their bark canoes as the frail things they actually were. And along some of the historic trade routes, like the French River in Ontario, treasure hunting divers have located a surfeit of antique guns and trade items at the bottom of rapids.
But I get caught up in the water play, too; it’s dangerous fun, but less risky if you actually know what you’re doing and keep within the boundary of your experience. Unfortunately, many fledgling adventurers want to skip the formality of learning the basics, and jump right in to the more aggressive or “exotic” exploits. These people have money. And they buy their way to the summit of Everest even if they have to be short-roped by a Sherpa guide and literally carried to the top. The professional super-achiever type mainstreamers tend to sway toward the immediacy of return benefits from extreme adventure.
Once revered as a male-dominated sport, whitewater canoeing has attained a more balanced gender definition. And in my business I’ve noticed that not just men have raging egos and rampant testosterone. This was evident one summer when I booked four women on a private whitewater trip down the Temagami River. They were friends, all from the same legal firm in Toronto, and had taken up whitewater canoeing just the year before. They went to a couple of weekend clinics (actually the same kayak school mentioned earlier) where they learned aggressive techniques. The Temagami River is an intermediate class whitewater river and it would be the women’s first river trip.
They arrived at my outfitting store in two BMW’s (one would have sufficed), dressed in expensive outerwear, money practically oozing out of their pockets. I was to be their guide and instructor. They looked me up and down, glanced at the beater-canoes with the rippled hulls and cross-hatched gouges, a look of total disdain on their collective faces, and asked if “this was a joke?” I explained that I hadn’t yet succumbed to the outdoor garment industry consumerism (I still bought my army fatigues at surplus stores and wore a thirty-dollar rain jacket), and that my canoes were beaters because I wouldn’t take a good Kevlar canoe down a bony river with novice paddlers.
“We’re not novice,” commanded the group of well-dressed women. And I was eyed with suspicion. “We have our certificates!” Politely I explained that a weekend clinic running the same rapid over and over again, and having lunch in a cafeteria, was not quite the same as plunging down an entire river system, fully loaded with all your camping gear.
We began the river trip at an adjoining lake which I preferred because I like to see if a paddler has basic flatwater skills and steering strokes first before getting into any fast water. I’m a firm believer in starting at the most basic of skills and working up to aggressive water play once you’ve mastered the primary strokes. The four women were in two canoes while I solo paddled mine. I wasn’t at all surprised to see the two canoes zigzagging down the lake, out of control in the light wind. They had no idea how to steer their canoes in a straight line. And when I tried to correct them, they were impatient and testy, telling me that they came for the whitewater and not the open lakes. I was firm and explained that I wasn’t taking them anywhere unless they learned how to control their boats; and I told them this because I know that you cannot work the rapids if you don’t feel the nuances of your canoe on flat water first. Whitewater paddling is somewhat like dancing with a good partner — it’s disastrous if you’re out of sync with each other; but if you can communicate through motion and finesse, there’s a lovely symbiosis and fluidity of movement.
Aside from the few whitewater strokes they had learned at the clinic, they knew virtually nothing about canoeing, and had no interest in the trip as an enlightening journey. I knew they had preconceived notions of exercising their new-found talents and were on a high at the onset of the trip. But I dashed their spirit with a heavy dose of reality, and they did realize that their ignorance of the demanded skills could have cost them had they struck out on their own. It wasn’t a good trip for any of us; they felt a bit overzealous and embarrassed, and I had to crush their hubris for their own good. Usually, at the end of a trip there are tears, embraces, exchanges of addresses and emails, but after this river trip there was barely a handshake.
Creating harmony in an outdoor lifestyle, first and most importantly, is realizing and admitting to your lack of knowledge; this lack of knowledge, if exercised in the wilderness, then becomes your ineptness if things go wrong. And just as there are no real shortcuts through the wilderness, there are no shortcuts in the technical craftsmanship needed to master any skill.
Why doesn’t he answer his emails?
ELEVEN
BUSH PLANES
I realized that if I had to choose, I would rather have birds than airplanes.
— Charles Lindbergh (1902–1974)
“Meet the plane at the public dock just outside Yellowknife, I’ll be there at four o’clock,” the pilot chimed over the phone, not very