The Last Voyageurs

by Lorraine Boissoneault

  Though the portage was technically only thirty-two miles, the weight of their gear—six unwieldy 175-pound canoes and 5,000 pounds of equipment—meant they’d be walking at least three times that distance for the multiple trips back and forth they’d have to make. The plan was to cover a half a mile with their gear, drop everything off, then go back for another load. If they put two to four men on every canoe and everyone carried the standard hundred pounds or so per load, it would still take them two or three trips back and forth to transport everything. That meant going four or five miles for every mile they moved forward, with cars zipping past and busy streets to cross and traffic signals to obey.

  Not that they had much of a choice. Authenticity demanded they make the trek through the Toronto Carrying Place. It didn’t matter that La Salle’s route hadn’t passed through a major city three hundred years ago; the logic of the reenactment regularly overruled the logic of the real world.

  The crew had one more day of respite before they had to set out. After a performance before a sizeable crowd in Nathan Phillips Square, the men had lunch and a tour at the Toronto Maritime Museum. Lewis, Cox, and Chuck Campbell left the museum before the rest of the group to do an interview with the popular radio host Warren Davis. When the fifty-minute show aired later that night, people around the city could listen to the unfathomable lives of the modern voyageurs.

  “Give us an example, what’s a typical day on Lake Ontario?” Davis asked his guests.

  “Get up at five o’clock, make breakfast—which they wouldn’t have done, they would’ve gotten up and paddled two or three hours then stopped and eaten their breakfast. But we’re just not that kind of life as far as physical health goes,” Campbell said. “We get to our camp at night, we set up camp, cook dinner, then we give presentations when they probably would’ve gone to bed, gotten ready for the next day.”

  Davis expressed his incredulity at their ability to do so much every day, wondering if they ever got any sleep. But he was even more surprised to hear about their upcoming trek through Toronto.

  “It’s thirty-two miles to Lake Simcoe, but we can’t do it all in one trip. Assuming we make it in two trips we’re talking one hundred miles,” Cox explained.

  “How on earth then are you going to keep up the pace in order to finish the journey on time?” Davis answered.

  “We’ve asked ourselves that many times,” Cox said. They’d managed to stay on schedule so far, but they were at a disadvantage compared to La Salle. The French explorer had only been concerned with moving forward and keeping his men alive. He didn’t have scheduled performances for more than one hundred towns along the way; no such towns existed.

  “Well, now you are traveling at the time of year that really is going to be the roughest weather that you could be traveling in through the northern part of Canada and the United States,” Davis pointed out as he reviewed their itinerary. He listened as the men explained their preparations for winter, then asked, “What motivates you? Why are you putting yourself through this self-induced torture?”

  Lewis gave his standard answer about the spirit of the voyageurs and courage and determination and the power of youth. Davis, though, seemed as if he was still concerned about the possibility of danger and the practical side of the expedition, eventually coming back to the “self-induced torture” aspect.

  “Do you think the trip on Lake Michigan is probably the most dangerous? What about the possibility of a canoe overturning? Someone being drowned?” he asked.

  “When we’re on the water we travel in groups of three,” Cox said. “Normally all six canoes would be close together, but we try to travel in groups of three so those three canoes don’t get more than fifty or sixty yards apart.” He didn’t mention the incident when Lewis’s canoe became separated from the others when they’d encountered big waves in Lake Ontario, or how difficult it could be to corral all their canoes, which traveled at different speeds depending on the day and the weather conditions. “If a canoe did tip over, one canoe rescues the crew, and we’ve practiced it . . . If there’s an accident, we just have to get to shore as fast as we can and get a fire started and get them into warm clothes.”

  “Because there’s a very great danger of hypothermia in those kinds of waters at this time of year,” Davis said.

  “We received some training in winter survival from the Naval Air Reserve, which gave us—made us aware, anyway—of what we’re involved with here. And we have gone through two winters with training . . . We have an idea of what we’re getting into,” Lewis responded.

  Choosing to end the interview there, Davis asked the three men to sing a few verses of a voyageur song for him, then bid them farewell and good luck. Outside, the sun was bright and hot, and winter seemed far, far away.

  That night, Bardwell was joined by Sharon Baumgartner at the fire in the yard of the barracks. Baumgartner was a sweet, good-looking girl who wore her hair in a blond bob and woke up early enough each morning to do her makeup, something the other three women of the liaison team normally shirked. Like Bardwell, Baumgartner had been recruited in the early spring of 1976 to join the expedition as part of the liaison team. She had already graduated high school at that point and was in her first year of classes at Elgin Community College, but her boyfriend Marc Lieberman was on the expedition and she heard all about it from him. Baumgartner decided she was ready to take some time off school and go on an adventure. She hadn’t known exactly what her duties would be until the trip started. Since then, she’d learned how to drive a green van with manual shifting, how to coerce city officials into finding the best campsites for the crew, and to deal with the sometimes conflicting personalities of the liaison team and the expedition members. She knew all about how hard the crew worked and why they expected some sense of order when it came to the liaison team’s side of the equation. Yet she also saw how much work Jan Lewis and Marlena Scavuzzo, the adults of the liaison team, did every day and night. Somehow, it always ended up being their fault when things didn’t turn out. This seemed to be the case yet again with the Toronto camping debacle.

  Marlena and Jan were sure Cox and Hobart, who had planned the expedition’s route through Toronto, had secured campsites ahead of time, so they hadn’t bothered with it. Cox and Hobart were equally certain they’d been told the liaison team would be coordinating their campsites. Somehow neither group had caught the other’s mistake until everyone arrived in Toronto. Now, the night before the crew’s first day on the portage, they still had nowhere to camp in the coming nights. Jan and Marlena were both peeved at Cox and Hobart and tired of being blamed for everything that went wrong, and it didn’t seem like the women had a plan for finding all the necessary campsites. Palmer and Baumgartner were going to have to tackle the issue of where the men would camp at night on their own, in addition to finding places where the men could deposit their loads in between trips. Baumgartner related all this to Bardwell, adding that both of the team’s vans were acting up. The red van, which Bardwell drove when he wasn’t paddling with the crew, had been in an accident a week earlier and needed repairs, and the green van’s brakes were locking. All in all, it seemed like the next twelve days were gearing up to be a test of strength and willpower for both the voyageurs and their support team.

  Weston Road, Toronto, Ontario

  September 12, 1976

  The man in the yellow Alfa Romeo Spider Veloce stared at the unusual characters who had just walked by his parked car. Two men’s heads were hidden beneath the canoe they carried on their shoulders down the sidewalk of Weston Road. Their torsos were bare and on their legs they wore dirty canvas pants rolled up to the knee. The driver watched as the canoe and its headless carriers trotted past the storefront of Meats and Groceries Delicatessen. In the shop’s open doorway a young blond boy stared just as incredulously at the voyageurs. Following the first canoe came another, and another, and more oddly dressed men with ludicrously large loads balanced on their backs. They trudged past shopping carts and bi
cycles parked on the side of the street, struggling under the weight of their packs. At bus stops more people stood watching, wondering who these strange men were.

  Despite not initially knowing where they were going to stay in the evening, the crew had managed to survive the first few days of the portage through Toronto. They survived, but they didn’t enjoy it. Whatever hardships anyone had envisioned in advance of the twelve-day carry paled in comparison to the reality. The walk was a more grueling ordeal than they could’ve imagined. Paddling a canoe for ten hours straight had in no way prepared them for the physical drudgery of moving all their gear through a crowded city, and the earlier portages they’d done had been much, much shorter. On the first day, no one could get their tumplines to work properly. The ropes hadn’t been a problem when they were going short distances, but now they were proving troublesome. The system, which had been used by the original voyageurs, was meant to spread the weight of their packs across the neck and back. A leather strap rested on the forehead and was attached to ropes on either side, which wrapped around the unwieldy wooden crates and other gear. A great idea in theory, but in practice it was proving to be exceedingly difficult. On the first day the ropes hadn’t stretched to the end of their elasticity, meaning the load shifted progressively lower down their backs. No one had yet figured out a comfortable rhythm for picking things up and setting them back down, since their previous portages had been significantly shorter and required less advance organizing. The canoes were hardest of all, and different teams tested out carrying them between two men, three men, and four men. The fewer the men, the harder the carry, but it meant more people were freed up to take loads of gear to the half-mile rest stop, so everyone made fewer trips overall.

  The oppressive fug of damp heat and car exhaust didn’t help anyone’s mood. By the end of each day, the crew felt so battered and exhausted it was all they could do to numbly eat their dinner and crawl into bed at their new campsites, most of which ended up being city parks that the liaison team found for them at the last minute. An incomplete list of injuries that occurred thus far during the portage included: a strained tendon (Sid Bardwell); the flu and a mysterious allergic reaction (John DiFulvio); pain in legs related to prior surgery (Bill Watts); and an ever-growing number of bruises, blisters, and falling arches of the feet (everyone). They’d also learned that not everyone enjoyed the 17th-century invasion occurring in the city. The police received numerous reports from residents complaining about a band of gypsies, and the men caused several small traffic accidents when drivers were distracted by their presence on the streets and sidewalks. But at least one citizen of Toronto was thrilled with the portage, telling a reporter that the men “should all be knighted by the Queen [of England].”

  For the crew members, each day was a repetition of the last, and the work wasn’t getting any easier. They began the morning with a stop at Stillwagon’s makeshift infirmary, where he taped feet and ankles and worried over their collapsing arches. He’d checked with a podiatrist, who said as long as the men could handle the pain, their arches would eventually rebound. After their visit to the infirmary, it was off on an agonizing march with a hundred pounds of weight pressing uncomfortably into their backs and shoulders, a walk back to get more gear during which they felt light as air, and then another painful march back to the drop spot with another load slowly crushing them. Cathy Palmer always made the first walk with the men to direct them where to stop, then stayed there until all the gear had been deposited and was ready to be hauled to the next rest stop. Oftentimes the hosts on whose lawns the men dropped their gear would offer the use of their bathrooms as well, and some provided snacks or drinks. The kindness and generosity was a spiritual balm in its own way, but it did little to alleviate the physical pain of such heavy burdens. Whenever the men were out of earshot of civilians, they let loose profanity-laden diatribes from beneath their heavy cargo. At one point, Hess and Kulick were carrying a canoe together and approaching a school. Rather than asking him to stop cursing, Kulick told Hess they’d need to switch their swearing to French. Despite the warning, Hess couldn’t stop himself from saying, “This is fucking merde!” as they continued past the school grounds.

  Palmer and Baumgartner had been working double-time to find rest stops and campsites for the crew as they crawled through the city like mules. Based on how far the men planned to go each day—anywhere from two and a half miles to four and a half miles—the girls would hop in the van and use its odometer to find the closest campground to the endpoint. From there, they had to backtrack along the crew’s proposed route for the day and find rest stops every half mile. This meant walking up to a stranger’s house, knocking on the door, introducing themselves, and asking if a group of sweaty, curiously dressed guys carrying thousands of pounds of gear could stop on the front lawn and maybe use the bathroom. At first, Palmer hated the process. Having grown up with six brothers, she was more than happy to deal with the crew and get them whatever they needed, but none of her earlier life experiences had prepared her for talking to strangers and asking them for things. Baumgartner had handled most of the publicity work from the start. She was always so put-together and never seemed nervous. She charmed everyone she met, with her huge smile and bright lipstick. For Palmer, going up to someone and saying, “Hi, I’m with the La Salle: Expedition II and we’re looking for a rest stop,” was a challenge, but what else could they do? Baumgartner was busy coordinating other tasks, securing permission for the men to camp in various parks and relaying all these plans to Jan and Marlena, who were staying in a hotel and were too fed up to deal with the crew.

  The Torontonians made the task much easier with their generosity and hospitality. The first night, when the crew was setting up shelters in Etienne Brule Park, Palmer and Baumgartner set to erecting their own orange tent. As often as possible, they camped out to help save money. There had been discussions earlier in the trip about getting rid of the liaison team altogether because of the cost of paying for hotel rooms and gas and the inordinate amount of pizza they seemed to consume (the last of which particularly grated on the crew members, seeing as they were stuck eating sludge-like peas and beans). That suggestion had been dismissed. Whatever tension the liaison team caused, their work was necessary. To minimize their expenses, the women sometimes slept outside in tents and asked for pocket money from home to buy shampoo and other toiletries. But that first night in Toronto, a married couple saw Palmer and Baumgartner getting ready to spend the night outdoors with twenty-three men and offered the two of them beds in their home. Every night afterward for the duration of the portage they were hosted by a new family. The families of Toronto adopted the women of the liaison team in much the same way they adopted the crew members.

  The random acts of kindness were as small as a Sicilian man offering Lieberman and Kulick a ripe tomato from behind a fence, and as large as a family allowing the liaison team to store all the extra gear that they usually kept in the van in their entryway while the van was being repaired. This latter bit of generosity was offered by Fred and Meryl Leslie, a couple who had taken a particular interest in the expedition. Not many Americans seemed interested in the history of their country before the Revolution. The Leslies appreciated these nice young men who were doing such a good job presenting living history. The two brought their children out to see the voyageurs tromp through town and planned a spaghetti dinner to celebrate the end of the portage. The expedition members were so grateful for the unanticipated support that they brought the Leslies into their fold, inviting them to come celebrate the end of the expedition in New Orleans in April. Everyone promised to keep in touch with the family via voyageur post (the liaison team made regular mail stops for the men as they went along their route).

  Countless others demonstrated Canadian hospitality, buying the men meals from McDonald’s or bringing them coffee in the morning, following them as they walked, listening to their stories about the trip. If not for such people, everyone on both sides of the expediti
on—crew members and liaison team—would’ve struggled even more to overcome the physical and psychological challenges of the portage.

  Sparrow Lake, Ontario

  September 25, 1976

  Dear Mom, Dad, San, and Rod,

  I’m sorry I haven’t written again, but time slips away so quickly up here. I just received a letter from Gram—boy was I happy! That was my 1st letter in 3 mail pickups. So far I haven’t heard from any friends except Jill and Dave.

  The whole of the portage went well although the first couple of days were madness. As the guys got it down to a system and we got arrangements made, things went pretty smoothly. Of course, Jan thought Ron made advance plans for those 12 days and vice versa, and that made for hard feelings between the crew and the liaison team (they thought we weren’t doing our job). In fact, it grew to the point where crew members made snide and sarcastic remarks about Jan and Marlena both to their faces and behind their backs . . .

  In a letter to her family, Sharon reflected on the two weeks she’d spent traveling through the city making last-minute arrangements with city parks and private homes where the men camped out for the night. It hadn’t been easy for anyone.

  I finally got infuriated with Clif and John D. and had a nice long “discussion” on what the liaison team function was. Not long afterwards John got sick and had to be with us. In 3 days time, he changed his tune and promises never to badmouth us again.