by Peter Ferry
DATELINE: QUETICO, ONTARIO, CANADA
by Pete Ferry
The real importance of the [Quetico-Superior wilderness canoe country] lies in the values we find there and that we take with us when we leave, although we may not quite understand them.
—Sigurd Olson
I MET TOM MAURY at the Candlelight for some beers and asked him about Quetico. "The mosquitoes are as big as hummingbirds," he said, "the water's as cold as Dick Cheney's smile, and it's the one thing I've ever done that wasn't overrated."
Quetico Provincial Park is 1,500 square miles of carefully regulated, damn-near-pristine wilderness territory in southwestern Ontario adjoining Minnesota's equally extensive Superior National Forest. It is an uninhabited tract of water, woods, and granite in which the only travel allowed is by canoe. At that, permits must be arranged weeks in advance to discourage casual or frivolous visitors. No cans or bottles are allowed in the park and everything else that is packed in must also be packed out. The name itself may be an old Chippewa word, or it may be an acronym for the Quebec Timber Company, which once held leases in the area. Whatever it once was, it is today one of the least-spoiled, most-assiduously-guarded preserves on the continent. It is the land of sky-blue waters.
Our outfitter's base camp was a mile and a half across Cedar Lake by canoe, I suppose just to give us the flavor of the thing. We zigzagged there on a warm June evening.
We ate ham and beans in a dining hall that took me back to the Boy Scout camp of my childhood. Then there was talk of what to do and what not to do. Hang food bags eight to ten feet up out on a limb. Don't swim without tennis shoes; a cut toe can be a serious problem in the wilderness. Don't leave any fire unattended, even briefly.
Our guide was not a wizened, pipe-smoking Finn as half-anticipated. Rather, he was a nineteen-year-old named Mike from Bosnia by way of Romeoville, Illinois. His parents fled the war at home, and although he was given to braggadocio and double negatives, I decided to trust him on the assumption that he knew something of survival.
We took a swim test after dinner, and I plunged right off the pier, hoping, I suppose, to prove my mettle or some such thing. The icy water literally took my breath away, and I dogpaddled twenty yards gasping and choking.
Then we each learned how to hoist the remarkably light (70 pounds) canoe onto our shoulders. We packed and repacked our knapsacks, each time designating a few more necessities as frills to be left behind. And, finally, we crowded around a picnic table and studied maps by gaslight. There was much route tracing and wonderful guide-talk about This Man and That Man Lakes, Poobah Creek, the Wawiag River, the Bitch and the Bastard, Chatterton Falls, and Have a Smoke Portage.
Day One, June 6:
I was awakened at 5:00 by the soft gray dawn, mosquitoes in my ears, and rain on the roof. I lay there for half an hour thinking about cigarettes. I had been smoking twenty of them a day on and off for almost twenty years. Now I had five Merit Ultra Lights that I bummed in a moment of panic to last me nine full days.
I covered myself with insect repellent and wandered out. It was drizzling. I interrupted a girl kneeling with a towel across her bare shoulders at the lakeside, trying to wash her hair.
I found a seat in the dining hall, read a story by Kathryn Shonk about feeling far from home in Russia that seemed eerily prescient, and impulsively smoked all five Merits before the others arrived for breakfast. Cold turkey.
There were seven of us in the three canoes (I was the only smoker) with provisions to last nine days. Among us we carried nine large backpacks, seven life preservers, and seven paddles. All of these things had to be transported by hand when we portaged, or traveled overland from one body of water to another.
Three of the packs contained all of our personal things, from clothing to flashlights to sleeping bags. One held a nine-by-twelve–foot canvas tent that, in turn, held all of us. Five packs contained food and cooking items. They were labeled breakfast, lunch, supper, staples, and bread. Included were seven fresh steaks, seven bratwursts, two pounds of bacon, some smoked sausage, some processed cheese, peanut butter and jelly and, of course, bread. Then there were the dehydrated foods ranging from Chicken Tetrazzini and Beef Flavored (?) Stew to Apple Brown Betty.
The first half of the day we paddled toward Canada, most of us spending more time in a canoe by noon than we had in all our lives. We went along quietly for the most part; the little adventure we had planned looked somewhat foreboding from this vantage point. In my head I was humming the old Eagles tune "Take It Easy"; I always thought the line about the women ("four that wanna own me, two that wanna stone me, one says she's a friend of mine") was really a fairly transparent bit of braggadocio, but for the moment I was very happy to be in a canoe heading to Canada away from two women who had been making my life complicated. One of these I once drove several miles out of my way to call from a phone booth "standing on a corner in Winslow, Arizona," but that was a long time ago.
At the border there was a picturesque little waterfall, a tiny customs office, and a ranger station right out of Yogi Bear that was manned by the businesslike but grandparently Mr. and Mrs. Mike O'Brien. I wondered if there was another international checkpoint in the world where the only traffic was canoes. (Waiting for our papers to be processed, I bought a cigarette from a teenage girl. I felt quite criminal.)
Mike had been complaining all morning about the motorboats that are allowed on the American side of the border. "Maniacs," he called their drivers contemptuously as they hummed by. I imagined that he was trying to impress us with his Sierra Clubbishness, but after gliding a few miles north, he had us stop our paddles and listen. We could hear a tiny brook that looked to be half a mile or more away. We could hear the voices of two people in a canoe just approaching the brook. We could nearly distinguish their words.
Our first campsite was just as I had imagined it. There was a clearing, a small, thick meadow. There was a wood of birch, cedar, and spruce, the rocky bank of a clear, cold lake, and even enough sun for a sunset.
We ate our tough little steaks and hash browns from metal plates as we stood around the fire. Coffee was brewing over the flames. I felt for my smokes.
Day Two, June 7:
The land of Quetico is primordial. Geologically, it is nearly infant. The last ice age ended a mere 10,000 years ago. During it, huge glaciers some two miles thick ground and ground at the earth until there was nothing left but its skeleton of stone.
Then life began anew. The melting ice supplied the endless lakes and waterways, but the land lay skinned. Even now, the soil is so thin that it is often impossible to dig a hole of more than four or five inches. But remarkably, from this fragile epidermis has grown one of the world's great forests.
As a kid, what impressed me about Manhattan was not the size or distinctiveness of its skyscrapers, but the number of them. So it was in the North Woods. From the middle of Lake Agnes, I could see thousands, hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of trees. They were all I could see. They stretched several miles behind me, several before me, and half a continent beyond me.
We had our first real portage. It was across a long, steep trail littered with boulders that ranged in size from bowling balls to suitcases. It was exhausting and discouraging. How many of these lay ahead?
But then we crossed placid Lake Agnes to Louisa Falls, where the waters fell thirty feet into a swirling caldron and then forty feet more. We stripped, plunged in, washed our hair in the foam, got very clean, ate cheese and salami sandwiches on the pine-needle forest floor beside the water and even the mosquitoes left us alone. (The Quetico skeeter is legendary and a local joke was that it's the provincial bird. Portaging with a canoe over your head, you sometimes had to hold your breath to keep from inhaling the infernal bugs.)
Hale and renewed, we paddled hard up Agnes with the sun on our backs. We stopped early, camped on a pretty island across from hundred-foot bluffs, dried our clothes on the rocks, fished, climbed the bluffs, sunbathed. Just as the trav
elogue said.
By quirk of circumstance, there was not a watch among the seven of us. In the past two days, I had never known the exact time. There was some sense of liberation about this, but it was unsettling, too.
Day Three, June 8:
Physically this was perhaps the worst day of my life. We were off early under low, fast clouds. A strong wind at our back moved us quickly, but churned Agnes as well. Where we crossed her, she was nearly a mile wide and running with whitecaps. I was frightened, but we made it without mishap.
We then leapfrogged from one back lake to the next, trying to reach a special rookery and fishing ground. We crossed seven portages in all, the last especially long and rugged.
By now it was raining. We headed for our last portage, one of more than a mile, but were driven back even on this small lake by the wind and slashing rain. Mike said we had better wait out the rain at the first campsite we had seen in hours, but the rain came harder and colder and didn't let up. We crouched pointlessly behind rocks and finally struggled to put up the tent. Those of us who had dry clothes put them on, and we all got into our sleeping bags. It was late afternoon, and the tent swayed and sagged with the water and the wind. We were all asleep within minutes.
I am a city boy at heart. I like baseball parks and public transportation. As a rule, I take my nature in small doses such as postcards and summer cottages. This dose was clearly too large.
I awoke and it was the same gray light it had been all day. My dreams had been phantasmagoric and my mind raced. I distrusted my vision, but there were no straight lines in the tent against which to test it. I wanted very much to know the time. I imagined myself at home with one of the two women I mentioned earlier, entertaining our friends. We were serving roast chicken, wild rice, and fresh asparagus; there was white wine on the table and good music in the air. But I wasn't at home. I was in the opposite place. I was a grown man approaching middle age who was desperately, painfully homesick.
I wrote this the very next day, but already that night had all run together in my mind. There was a jolly period, I remembered, when the rain lightened, and we told dirty jokes and even sang a song. Then there was more heavy rain, and we realized that we wouldn't have a hot dinner. The tent began to leak. The rain dripped, seeped, ran in rivulets, stood in puddles.
Mike said that food in the tent might attract bears, and we knew that there would be no dinner. He told us to press together for warmth. Our soggy bags squished as we did so. We were seven men in the middle of Canada lying back to belly like spoons. We dozed, started, twisted, and shivered all night long.
Several people had spoken the word "hypothermia." I had come along on this trip because it was free, I was free, and I thought I might get a story out of it. I had no idea that it could ever become dangerous.
Day Four, June 9:
Dawn, and it was still raining. Then, shortly afterward, it stopped. Three of us raised our heads and looked at each other. We crawled out into the wet gloom.
We huddled to assess our situation. We had not seen any other people since the previous morning. We had crossed seldom-used portages to a remote lake in search of walleye. We faced a mile-long portage through a swamp and an all-day paddle before there was any chance of meeting other campers. And, if it rained, they would be able to do little for us, anyway.
We studied the sky. It looked as if it would rain again any moment. The least-wet things we had were thoroughly damp. Everything else was sopping. We had to dry out. We had to build a fire. We had to eat. We had to try to dry some clothes.
We all whittled away at wet branches until we had created a small heap of dry tinder. We skinned twigs and raised a smolder, a flame. It was an hour before the fire was truly established. It had not begun to rain.
On a graph, the day was an upward parabola from there. We cooked up eggs with bacon bits and hash brown potatoes. We built a bonfire after breakfast and rigged up clotheslines hither and yon, threw sleeping bags across bushes and tree limbs, dangled wet socks from canoe paddles, roasted tennis shoes, heated rocks and put them in the tent to dry it out. And all day long we moved back and forth deeper and deeper into the woods dragging logs and fallen trees, sawing them, breaking them, building our woodpile.
Our fire roared. A mist rolled in and left. It did not rain. That thing that happens to people in common need had happened. With each dry piece of clothing folded and put away, our spirits rose. We joked freely now. Someone got together a softball game with a pair of rolled, wet socks. We made popcorn and hot chocolate and stood around the fire eating, feeling our drying pants and socks, telling stories.
After one task or another, I reached for a cigarette. It had been three days, and I had had little problem. No swollen extremities, raw nerves, or temper tantrums. But I expected to smoke. I expected to with coffee, after food, when I wrote. Because I simply couldn't, I did not miss it terribly. But had I been able to, there were many times I would have without hesitation.
Later there was even time to fish and canoe to some nearby Indian pictographs. We read and wrote by the fire. Someone shouted in celebration of a patch of blue sky. We ate a huge, hearty, awful dinner of turkey supreme, green beans, and pineapple cheesecake. The west was pink. I predicted the next day would be wonderful.
Day Five, June 10:
Through the wet early days, we said many times, "At least it isn't cold." The next morning it was raining, and it was cold. It was easy now to understand why people who live outside have often worshiped nature. At home if it rained, I closed the door and turned on the tube. Here, so much depended on the weather that was rolling across the sky. Everything. If only because there was no place to escape it. It may seem silly since it was nearly summer, but the question of survival had already arisen. It did again this day.
We packed up and ate a cold, quick breakfast in near silence. Then we paddled away. Our long portage was difficult, sometimes through muck that was waist deep. It took most of the morning. The long paddle that followed was just as hard. The temperature was around fifty, and we were all wet. Lake Kahshahpiwi was choppy, and it continued to rain.
We were looking for an abandoned fire watchtower high on the hills above. Mike claimed that he did not know there was an abandoned ranger station there as well, but in retrospect, I was not so sure.
Anyway, we rounded a bend and someone said, "A house!" We all repeated the word. It was a little white cottage. It had been four days since we had seen a house, a car, any sign of civilization but those we carried; anything but water, trees, and rocks.
Mike approached tentatively, read something on the door, turned the handle, and went in, was back in a second, shouting, "Come on up!" We cheered and suddenly we were very cold. We could barely grip the packs to carry them. Inside we struggled awkwardly with knots and buttons.
There were three rooms, and right in the middle, a wood-burning stove. Soon we had a fire blazing and clothes drying. We cooked up chicken-noodle soup and a huge batch of grilled-cheese sandwiches.
The sign on the door read, "Please replace what you use with something else. Leave the place clean." It had many reciprocating messages: "Saved from the rain. Dorth of the North," "Replenished wood supply. Thanks, The Wassons," and, incongruously, "Où est le boeuf?"
The rain stopped. By late afternoon there was a line of blue across the northwest. Then slowly the clouds were rolled away above us like the lid of a sardine tin, and it was lovely again. Mike, I thought, felt a little guilty about staying over here. The rest of us enjoyed it thoroughly. I tried not to think what we would have done had this place not come around the bend. We had made our long detour in search of fish, but it was here that we found them. We were out in the canoes and on the little dock until well after dark. One of us caught a twenty-two–inch lake trout.
Day Six, June 11:
The day we had been waiting for. We were up early and were instantly busy like the Seven Dwarves whistling, cooking, sweeping, cleaning, sawing, and drying. We replenished the cot
tage's wood box and its larder with macaroni and cheese, dehydrated fruit, and some encouraging words.
Each of us polished off four pieces of French toast and syrup, and then we were off into this cool morning of pure, bright colors. I am a practical person. I do not consider billboards the ultimate proof of society's decadence, nor moderate air pollution a threat to my life. I am willing to put up with some of the trade-offs that modern times demand. I think that people who care more about baby seals and sperm whales than other people are just a little warped. And if the wilderness is sacred to me, it is so in the lower case. After all, none of us will ever really live in it again unless all of us do, and I know that we would not want that. Quetico is a laboratory. Still, I should note that in six days, I had not seen one discarded can or gum wrapper, one cigarette butt, one old matchbook, used condom, or pop-top. And when the sun shined, you had to blink your eyes because so much beauty seemed impossible. And the whole country smelled like Christmas.
We traveled all day through half a dozen lakes, across nine portages. It never got hot, but the sun was warm. Finally there were the McIntyre Falls, sharp, bubbling cascades, and the long, winding McIntyre River, beaver territory with one dam after another. We walked our canoes down it in sometimes-chest-deep water, just like Bogart in The African Queen, and if the setting wasn't as exotic, the mosquitoes were certainly as big.
But by evening, the sky had clouded. It began to rain as we fixed dinner, and we went to bed feeling fairly defeated, despite the day.
Day Seven, June 12:
Rain again. It had rained each day. We found it tiresome and oppressive, but I would have thought it impossible. It was not. It was only uncomfortable.
Like most people, I make fun of weather forecasters. It was only in the absence of their prognostications that I realized how much attention I paid to them. There were times this week when a good forecast would have given us much-needed hope, and a bad one would have crushed us.
In addition to weather forecasts, we had now spent a full week without each of these for almost the first time in our lives: any broadcast, any recorded message, a newspaper, a phone call, a shower, any electrical appliance except for flashlights and cameras, a toilet, a mirror, a letter, a roof (save one), and a spigot. Around midday we passed two fishermen and paused to exchange a few words. They were the first people other than ourselves whom we had seen in over four days.
