Getting to Grey Owl

by Kurt Caswell

  This early in the morning, the parking lot at Kingsmere Lake is empty. I park my truck, unload my canoe, and carry it to the put-in on Kingsmere River, the lake’s outlet. To get to Grey Owl’s cabin from here, I will paddle upriver a short distance to a rail portage around Kingsmere Rapid. It’s an easy two-thirds-of-a-mile walk, pushing my canoe down the tracks and through the woods on a rail cart. Back on the water, I will paddle a bit farther upriver and then out into Kingsmere Lake. From there, it’s about eight miles of paddling along the eastern shoreline to a trailhead at the north end of the lake, and then another two miles on foot to Grey Owl’s cabin on Ajawaan Lake. In Grey Owl’s day, there was no road from the village of Waskesiu to the parking lot here on Kingsmere River. To get to Grey Owl’s cabin, you had to paddle the length of Waskesiu Lake, another sixteen miles, or more, if the wind was up and you paddled the shoreline.

  I reach Kingsmere Lake at about 7:30 a.m. and follow the east shore, easy in my canoe. The water is quiet, like a library, and I hear loons calling, but I can’t see them, nor can I see any other boats. The sky is empty of clouds, and I am alone. Right now the wind is down, and I enjoy good paddling. I dig in and move my boat along at a good clip. It’s a bit like mountaineering, in that I want to get out to Grey Owl’s cabin and start back by 1 p.m. because the wind usually comes up in the afternoon, wind from the leading edge of the great billowing summer thunderclouds that crack open and let forth the deluge. If it comes at all, it always comes from the sky, a spectacular catastrophe for a little boat on a big lake. On Kingsmere it often blows from the northwest across the lake, which would push me back to the parking lot. That would be OK, if it doesn’t push too hard. I’ve heard that this lake, like any large body of water in the Canadian North, can become dangerous quickly, waves so big you can’t see the opposite shore. If I capsized out here alone, it wouldn’t be any fun, but, barring major injury, I’m pretty confident I’d be able to swim my boat and gear to shore, empty the water, and paddle on. And if I can’t get my boat to shore, I can get myself to shore, and then I’d walk the trail just there inside the cover of the woods five to ten miles back to my truck.

  I’m paddling the boat my father gave me when I finished my undergraduate degree: a solid all-around canoe, a blue Old Town Discovery 169. I’ve modified the outfitting with cane seats and installed tie-down eyelets under the gunwales with pop rivets. I’ve added a few stickers to the outside: permits from paddling in Yellowstone, one from my canoe club when I lived in northern Japan. The hull is faded and scarred by twenty years of use. I’m using a paddle I carved myself from ash and alder wood from my native Northwest. The blade is wide and squat, a good all-around touring design, and the grip is an asymmetrical pear shape. This is my paddle’s first voyage.

  Another source of carbon from my outfit is the propane I burn to cook inside the camper, run the refrigerator, the hot-water heater, and sometimes the heater. My Alaskan Camper comes with a 20-pound propane tank, and to get to Grey Owl’s cabin, I emptied it. A 20-pound propane tank holds 4.7 gallons of liquid propane. One gallon of propane will produce 91,690 British thermal units (Btus) of energy, and so 430,934 Btus for my tank. To put that into perspective, 1 Btu is the energy required to raise the temperature of 1 pound of water 1 degree Fahrenheit (usually from 39°F to 40°F). Another way to think about this is that 1 Btu equals about 253 calories, which is the potential energy in four medium-sized eggs. So my propane tank holds the energy equivalent of 1,723,736 eggs. Burning propane emits about 63 kilograms of carbon per 1 million Btus of energy. So this means I produced another 27 kilograms of carbon to get to Grey Owl’s cabin. My carbon total is now at 1,727 kilograms.

  I paddle on. It’s cool on the lake, and quiet, and still. Sitting in the kneeling position, my knees on the bottom of the canoe, my butt leaning against the seat, I keep my back straight as I plant my paddle blade forward of my knees and unwind my torso, flare the blade to correct the boat, and glide a moment before taking another stroke. It’s a good rhythm, and I like how it feels, almost better than anything else. I pass the Westwind campsite, conspicuously marked on the eastern shore, and think I’m making good time, but I can’t yet see the far shore on the north end. I hear an outboard motor somewhere off to the west—fishermen, probably, who would have come in on the same route that I did, pushing their aluminum fishing boat up the rail trail on a cart.

  Two loons fly by overhead, then a few more. I see ducks of several kinds that I can’t identify. I hear more loons, and then the sound of the outboard fades around a far point. It’s quiet again, and I dip my paddle, dip my paddle, dip my paddle. I listen to the water run from the blade between strokes, and I lean over the gunwale to look into the lake. I can see the bottom, the various algae and water plants, the flash of a few fish, likely northern pike—or jackfish, they call them around here—but not big ones. And the trees lining the shore are thick, so thick it would be difficult to walk between them.

  After arriving in Canada, Grey Owl made most of his living as a trapper, but he soon began to see the end of that life. A season’s work once easily netted him $1,500 to $2,000, but by the time he met his fourth wife, Gertrude Bernard, a nineteen-year-old Mohawk-Iroquois woman, who became known as Anahareo, or sometimes Pony to Grey Owl, he was bringing in less than $600 each season. Anahareo, whom Grey Owl describes as able to “swing an axe as well as she could a lipstick,” encouraged him to stop trapping. If she could in fact swing an axe, she probably learned it from Grey Owl. She was a town girl, raised and educated in Mattawa, in the Ottawa Valley, Ontario, and unused to life in the bush. She found trapping cruel and thought her husband should find a better way to make a living. He resisted for a time, until one day he trapped a beaver with two kits. Grey Owl collected the dead female for its pelt, as he had been doing for years now, while the kits cried and cried. As Grey Owl reports in his book Pilgrims of the Wild, Anahareo could not stand their suffering. “Let us save them,” she cried out. “It is up to us, after what we’ve done.” It was in this moment that Anahareo changed Grey Owl’s life. “And truly what had been done here looked now to be an act of brutal savagery,” he writes. “And with some confused thought of giving back what I had taken, some dim idea of atonement, I answered, ‘Yes, we have to. Let’s take them home.’” In taking them home—these two beavers that became known as McGinty and McGinnis—Grey Owl started down the path to world fame as an environmental conservationist.

  You may remember similar experiences doing as much for Aldo Leopold, and for an earlier American writer and conservationist, William Bartram. Leopold’s historic land ethic hangs on that moment he watched the “fierce green fire dying in [the] eyes” of a wolf he had just shot in southwest New Mexico. Before this moment, he believed ardently that killing predators was environmental conservation. And Bartram, writing in the late eighteenth century, a time when good biology always included killing and collecting species for later study, was “affected . . . very sensibly” watching a black bear cub bawling over the body of its mother killed moments before by a rifleman as they traveled down a river in the South. He charged himself “accessory to what now appeared to be a cruel murder,” and, “moved to compassion,” he implored the rifleman to stay his hand. But too late, as “[the rifleman] fired, and laid [the cub] dead upon the body of the dam.” Such moments are enough to unhinge a man, to change him, as it did these three, each taking a place in the story of the environmental movement in North America.

  According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, the average American produces about 19.18 metric tons of carbon per year. By comparison, the average Canadian produces 17.27 metric tons of carbon; the average German, 10.06; the average Chinese, 4.91; and the average Brazilian, 2.18. The average Afghan produces almost no carbon at all. One metric ton is equal to 1,000 kilograms. To get to Grey Owl’s cabin, I produced nearly 2 metric tons of carbon-burning diesel and propane fuels alone. But there is more, of course.

  The truck I’m driving has a carbon footprint too. The fo
otprint of building the truck is fixed (it is only built once), but each time I have the truck repaired, change the oil, or buy news tires and the like, the footprint grows. For now let’s stick to the fixed carbon cost of manufacturing. Energy is required for every step in the process: the extraction of ore from the earth, the manufacture of the engine and components, the various plastics and such that make up the interior and exterior, the shipping of parts from all over the world, the energy required to run the plants where parts are made and the truck was assembled, and then the workers while at work. Even the workers’ clothes and what they had for lunch have a carbon footprint. And after that is the footprint of the sales people and their facilities. It’s staggering, really. It’s hardly possible to calculate a precise carbon footprint for my truck, but it is possible to make an educated guess. Two journalists at the Guardian report that the carbon footprint of an average-sized car is about 17 metric tons. At the high end (the report cites the Land Rover Discovery as an example), the footprint is 35 metric tons. To build a truck like mine, surely the cost must be at the high end. The truck is ten years old, and I traveled in my truck for two months getting to Grey Owl’s cabin and back again. A simple calculation puts my truck at 292 kilograms of carbon per month over its lifetime, which means adding another 584 kilograms. My total now is 2,311 kilograms.

  And there is more still. My truck is carrying the camper and the canoe and all the gear and clothing and other supplies. All of this has a carbon footprint. The food I buy to stock the camper has a carbon footprint. Doing my laundry has a carbon footprint, as do the books I’ve brought with me, my laptop, even the beer. My source estimates 900 grams of carbon for a single bottle of good beer with a fairly extensive transport history. And this is what I have, good beer from Wyoming and Colorado. Let’s estimate two beers a day for two months, and so add another 108 kilograms of carbon in beer alone.

  So far my calculations have been fairly precise, and I’ve accounted for the big ones. The calculation of the carbon cost of getting to Grey Owl’s cabin breaks down from here into a dizzying complexity “too flattering-sweet to be substantial,” as Shakespeare said. I don’t really want to try to come up with an accurate number for every little plastic gizmo in my kit, and as with the calculation for the manufacture and upkeep of my truck, I’d then have to calculate the carbon cost of that plastic gizmo only for the duration of time that I use it to get to Grey Owl’s cabin. You would be bored to death, and I would never finish this essay. So to account for the rest that is nearly incalculable, I’ll double the total I have now and call it good. Let’s say that 2,311 kilograms doubled is at the very least the carbon footprint of getting to Grey Owl’s cabin: 4,622 kilograms of carbon. And then, double it again to get home, and add the beer. To get to Grey Owl’s cabin it cost me—no, it cost the world—9,352 kilograms of carbon, or 9.35 metric tons, plus or minus a kilogram or two. That sum is nearly half of the yearly carbon footprint of the average American, and nearly double the average Chinese. If I want to remain near the average for my country, there’s no room for travel for the rest of the year, and no room even to drink good beer. I can stay home well enough, but giving up beer is hardly American. It’s hardly even civilized.

  By the time I reach the Sandy Beach camp on the eastern shore of Kingsmere Lake, I am starting to hope for the end. The sky, clear and Canadian blue, leads me on, and my gaze drifts to the water, from sky to water, water to sky, until I hardly know whether I am paddling or flying. I paddle into a raft of loons that part and make way for me. I wave to two figures squatting on the shore next to a canoe. The wind hardly shows itself at all, and I can hear them talking. One of the good things about traveling in Canada is that most people speak American.

  “Is this Sandy Beach?” I call out.

  “Yes,” one of them calls back.

  “So I’m not far from the trailhead to Grey Owl’s cabin?”

  “It’s just on a bit farther. You see those reeds up there? That’s the trailhead.”

  And so on I paddle, stroke after stroke, winding up along the shape of the lake until those reeds come within reach, and I beach my canoe on the shore. I brought food with me to have a lunch, but I worry about the afternoon wind and storm. I drink down a half liter of water and set out on the trail. A few dozen feet from my boat, a sign welcomes the traveler with a few words from Grey Owl:

  Far enough away to gain seclusion, yet within reach of those whose genuine interest prompts them to make the trip, Beaver Lodge extends a welcome to you if your heart is right.

  Walking through the woods, I wonder if my heart is right, and how I would know. I climb a hill and come over it, head down into the basin of Ajawaan. At the top of a boardwalk, I find an old moose antler wired crosswise to a spruce tree. It is weathered, gnawed by mice, and green with algae at the edges. I wonder if Grey Owl himself put this up to mark my way. The trail takes me down to the lake edge and then comes away into a tunnel of trees. I stop to admire an immense bear shit in the trail, the bulk of which, could he produce it, any man might be proud of. It looks fresh, very fresh, a riotous cake of berry seeds and other dark matter. Alone and on foot, I feel a nervous energy rise up in my body, a light caution, a sudden alertness. I pick up a heavy limb to quiet my hand, and I begin to sing a little to Grey Owl’s woods, a silly song about trekking:

  Oh, I love to go a-wandering

  along the mountain track,

  and as I go, I love to sing,

  my knapsack on my back . . .

  It makes me feel better, and I think then that fear is a permeable membrane. One may walk in and out of it, but it is far easier to walk in. Walking out is a tremendous feat, and each time you make it out, you become a hero, however temporarily, however privately.

  I walk and sing and no bear comes, and the trail begins to feel too long. Just as I am tiring of the day, a loon cries overhead and Grey Owl’s cabin appears before me. I stop there at the portal from the woods. That, I tell myself, is Grey Owl’s cabin. I feel a little shy of it, the cabin, not like I’m an intruder really, but rather that I shouldn’t go right in. I stand a moment in its presence, the sunlight on the quiet lake, and though I do not think much or often of ghosts, I sense a spirit in the woods. Laugh at me if you want to, but some know what I mean. It’s like walking with the bear that isn’t there and singing to it as you go. And Grey Owl, after all, is here. He’s buried just there on the hill.

  Grey Owl died in the spring of 1938 after that impossible lecture schedule in Europe. At the height of his exhaustion on the tour he said to a friend, “A month more of this will kill me.” His chief desire was to return to his cabin at Ajawaan. “If I am to remain loyal to my inner voice,” he writes, “I must return to my cabin in Saskatchewan . . . and take time to think.” He did so. A park ranger checked in on him on April 8, reporting that Grey Owl “seemed all right, and very happy . . . to be back.” On April 9, Grey Owl called the park station at Waskesiu to report he was feeling ill. A party arrived to take him to a hospital in Prince Albert. Within twenty-four hours he developed a fever, and soon after he fell into a coma. On April 13, he was dead. Lovat Dickson writes that Grey Owl died of exhaustion, “exhaustion of hope and purpose which are born in the imagination and signal the heart when to stop.” His daughter, Shirley Dawn, was buried next to him near the cabin in 1984, and then Anahareo in 1986.

  Though he probably can’t hear me, I decide to say hello before I enter Grey Owl’s cabin. “Hello, Grey Owl,” I say aloud and then make my way to another signpost where he has left a few words more just for me:

  I hope you understand me. I am not particularly anxious to be known at all: but my place is back in the woods, there is my home, and there I stay. But in this country of Canada, to which I am intensely loyal, and whose heritage I am trying to interpret so that it may be better understood and appreciated, here at least, I want to be known for what I am.

  And what was he? To me these sound like the words not of a fraud but of a quiet, thoughtful man wh
o loves this country. Yet the public outcry against Grey Owl in the years since his death runs the gamut from “fake Indian” (which he was) to “wanton cultural appropriator” (which is arguable) to “pervert” (which I can’t believe). Scholar Albert Braz has pointed out that the “level of vitriol that Grey Owl’s ‘masquerade’ still attracts” is perplexing, and it “has been so unrelenting [as to overshadow] every other aspect of his life,” especially the simple fact that in the 1930s, he emerged from obscurity to become one of the preeminent voices for environmental conservation. He was one of the very few Canadians who publicly recognized that the nation’s natural resources have a limit. Some even credit Grey Owl with saving Canada’s national animal, the beaver, from extinction. In support of him, Major J. A. Wood, then superintendent of Prince Albert National Park, wrote that he cares not whether Grey Owl “was an Englishman, Irishman, Scotsman or Negro. He was a great man with a great mind, and with great objectives which he ever kept before him.” Canadian prime minister John Diefenbaker (1895–1979) echoes this sentiment, claiming that “Grey Owl was one of the most remarkable men Canada has ever produced. He was a genius; no doubt a charlatan, a poseur, and a faker, but no one in North American history ever left behind him such a treasure of concern for what he described as his furred brethren of the soil and his feathered brethren of the air.”

  Grey Owl, you might notice, did not look like an Indian so much as he looked like the Indian as imagined by white people, the Indian of Hollywood, the Indian of that Romantic vision of the New World unspoiled by European colonization and the filth of the Industrial Revolution. Grey Owl wore a costume of buckskins, dyed his hair black, colored his face with henna, and practiced his stoic scowl in a mirror to perfect this costume. Still, it is difficult to separate the costume from the man, as Grey Owl didn’t just wear it but became it, utterly, seamlessly, ceaselessly. Braz points out that N. Scott Momaday, himself a person of mixed heritages, has written that “we are what we imagine” and “an Indian is an idea which a given man has of himself.” Certainly Grey Owl possessed such an idea of himself, but does this make him an Indian? I don’t know. But I wonder. If a man can travel to Trinidad, Colorado, and change his sex to become a woman, why can’t a man change his heritage to become an Indian? Poet Gary Potts, a former chief of the Bear Island Anishinabe in Ontario, where Grey Owl first lived when he immigrated to Canada, points out that what troubles white people most is not the lie, but rather that one of their own went native. He argues that white people are not overly troubled by Indians who assimilate into their culture, but when it goes the other way, it “troubles them to no end.” Braz reports that the Canadian poet Gwendolyn MacEwen asserts “there is nothing necessarily nefarious about Grey Owl . . . since his journeys through the Canadian wilderness are really ‘in search of himself.’” And Anahareo, Grey Owl’s wife, writes, “He was an Indian, as I was.”