Ferns Crack Me Up
“So many tangles in life are ultimately hopeless that we have no appropriate sword other than laughter.”
— Gordon William Allport
It seems to me that psychology professor Allport is another person I have proven right on too many occasions. Sometimes outdoor life presents us with such strange and unexpected situations that we just have to take them in stride and laugh. Once while simply canoeing along with my family on Ontario’s historic French River, we had to dive for cover between two short cliffs when a wild and whirling storm appeared out of the blue. We landed in panic mode and I quickly dragged the canoe onto shore and tied it to a rock. As the drops began falling on the violently shaking trees (and the violently shaking us), the only spot we could pitch the tent was right on top of a dense patch of poison ivy. Laughter took over as we tried to guess who would start scratching first. Trees toppled nearby while we supported the tent poles with our hands to prevent their breaking, and it seemed like the fabric protecting us would be torn to shreds. At the end of the trip, news of tornado damage informed us of our close-call. As for the poison ivy, we had wiped ourselves and our tent with Jewelweed juice, Impatiens biflora, a well-known natural prophylactic and cure for this ailment. We were fine.
While I was with my lady partner and sled dogs on the fourth day of a winter camping expedition, unusually hot weather so softened the deep snow that each snowshoe step felt like hoisting oneself onto a table, only to sink back down again. We managed to advance no more than half a kilometre that morning, and when forced to camp by mid-afternoon, chores such as tying the dogs to their chains or setting up the prospector’s tent transformed us into the sluggish actors of a laborious slow-motion film. The warm spell lasted six days and we were unable to proceed. We laughed and joked that we would still be there the next summer. When a cold spell finally liberated us from our soggy prison, we literally flew home behind super-excited dogs, enjoying a wild ride over icy hard surface.
Another time a teaching assistant and I were making an advance visit to the Laurentides Wildlife Reserve for a forthcoming winter-camping expedition with students. The blowing snow became so deep the dogs couldn’t break trail, so we alternated in front. After having spotted our campsite locations we retraced our steps, only to find the trail had been mostly refilled with powder in such a way that we snowshoed with one foot high and one low — backbreaking work. At minus thirty-five degrees we pushed on through the blizzard, letting ourselves get sweaty and exhausted with the knowledge we would soon toss the gear and the dogs into the truck and trailer I had parked on the shoulder of the highway. But when we arrived past midnight, there was no warm haven to be found. The police had towed our getaway vehicle! Bastards! We tried hitchhiking for a few minutes, but the occasional tractor-trailer trucks speeding by would only see us at the last minute and ignore our presence. We were freezing fast. And even if someone did stop, I couldn’t exactly slip the dogs into my backpack.
We had a good laugh as we overturned the sled to block the wind and stripped to bare torsos to quickly change into dry clothes. That was quite the polar-bear initiation! After performing dozens of jumping-jacks to regain heat, we clambered aboard the sled runners and I yelled to my lead dog: “Marche, Kilou!” Off we went down the highway and back toward town, some twenty odd kilometres away. Again we laughed when the first van passed us by, imagining the driver’s face as he encountered our unidentified sliding object. In fact, we giggled until we gained the edge of town. It was four a.m. When low and behold, there was my van and trailer locked up behind the gate of a towing firm’s lot. I picked the lock and took off without further ado. The next morning I phoned the police and criticized them severely for their action, raving and ranting that a less experienced person in that situation would have surely died. “Give me a stiff fine,” I said, “but don’t take away the vehicle I depend on for my safety!” As a reply, I was informed that my licence payment was overdue and the fine for driving without a valid document was three hundred and fifty bucks. Oh. Finally, the officer felt guilty enough to let me get away scot-free. I never heard back from the towing firm, either.
Other real-life mishaps seem so very serious when they happen, but give one great comic relief once safe and dry. Like the spring I wrapped my fibreglass canoe around a rock and watched helplessly as it was ripped to pieces by boiling current in the raging, flooded St-Jean River. I ended up on the snowy shore dressed in nothing but a wetsuit and only an emergency flint striker hanging around my neck. It was a long painful bushwhack back to the car. Or another similar incident, again during a pesky spring flood, this time on the Metabetchouan River when my canoe was engulfed in a hole the size of a bus. Climbing out of the canyon to go rescue my craft somewhere downstream, I grabbed at a boulder-sized rock with my right hand, which then unapologetically detached itself from the cliff and crashed onto the rocky shore below. I was left hanging from a root, holding on for dear life with my left hand, like something out of a movie minus the off-camera safety net. A very terrifying close call, but a great anecdote at parties, especially when acted out. I never did recover that canoe.
Another heart-pounding encounter with death occurred on the Mars River, after I had dropped my rope while lining a serious class 4 rapid. To reach the canoe wedged on a rock just above a two-metre drop, I had to fell a huge spruce tree and was quite pleased when it landed directly on said rock. I peeled off my wetsuit down to the waist, as my body had heated up from chopping, and unwisely simply tossed my lifejacket over my shoulders to cross over to my canoe on the trunk bridge. As I neared my goal, my weight bent the tip of the tree. When the branches touched the water I was swept away with the tree and down the chute. I was unhurt, but had lost my glasses. The freezing water filled my wetsuit and was dragging me down, especially since my flotation device was unzipped. To make matters worse, a ten-metre waterfall waited right around the corner for a victim. I reached shore just in time, petrified. Many years went by before I could laugh at that one.
Another incident that took a while to digest occurred on the Saguenay River, during a simple ramble to paddle around pretty floating ice blocks on a late sunny April late afternoon. I was teaching a friend how to paddle, and I admit, trying to impress her with my powerful bracing strokes. In a moment of exaggeration, with her sitting up on the bow seat, the paddle cracked and in we went. We were mere metres from shore and dressed in wet suits, so we laughed at my “bad stroke” of luck. But the wind pushed us away from the point of land nearby and down into the bay. No problem, we would just float down to the shore on the other side. This took longer than expected, and cold was slowly gaining on us. And then, suddenly, it was dark. In the far distance, spots of light dotted the horizon, and I started to wonder if the wind had shifted and was pushing us beyond the bay. Forty-five minutes later we became more and more hypothermic, the heat leaving our bodies. Just as I thought we were done for and considered using my last remaining strength to tie our wrists together across the canoe to extend our survival time, my feet touched bottom. I flipped that canoe over as if possessed by superhuman strength and we flopped in to start paddling to shore, laughing. Just then my friend started convulsing in the bottom of the canoe and screaming bloody murder. I tried to comfort her with useless words: “Don’t worry, stop yelling, we’re safe now!” But a minute later I was the one yelping in pain; our entire bodies were thawing out, and we were experiencing the pins-and-needles of the process. A warm, fully clothed shower in a nearby house put us out of our misery.
I couldn’t count the number of times I had felt the warning sign of those pins-and-needles on my feet. Every time I would smile knowingly: “Here I go again, playing a game of lose-your-feet-or-not with Mr. Frostbite!” The most painful occasion was during a ten-day backcountry ski trip across the Grands Jardins Park. We woke up one morning to minus thirty-eight degree cold and my leather boots were stiff as rocks, in spite of having placed them between two sleeping bags overnight. As usual, we all wore our boots inside our parkas next to our stomachs during breakfast, and when all were just about ready, we yelled “Boots on!” to signal our departure together. I was responsible for folding the group tarp and started slightly behind the others, having a helluva time slipping my feet into my hardened footwear. Then I skied as fast as I could in an attempt to increase circulation, but to no avail. Mr. Frostbite was winning the game for the first time, as I was moving beyond the tell-tale pain into the frightening doesn’t-hurt-anymore zone. With no one around to lend a warm stomach to lean my feet against, I seemed out of options. Then a benevolent birch tree appeared as saviour, with its miraculous bark. I tossed a huge pile into a heap and lit it. Sitting on my pack, I took off one boot and warmed my sock, then replaced it in the footwear. I repeated this with the other foot. Repeated again. And again. At last the pins-and-needles reappeared, accompanied by their excruciating but welcomed pain. After a few short minutes the bark was consumed, but I had won the battle and skied off to join my worried buddies.
The ways to get into trouble in the wilderness are countless. Never could we imagine all that can go wrong. It’s the famous Murphy’s Law and its corollaries: “Anything that can go wrong will, when least expected and at the worst possible moment.” You’ll get a flat tire when dressed in a tuxedo, in the rain, and late for your own wedding. Then there’s Bourbeau’s Law: “Murphy was an optimist!” When you get the flat, there will be no taxis or other cars around, and your cell phone battery will have gone dead. The jack will be missing from the trunk. And you will have locked your keys in the car.
On another occasion, I had just pulled what at the time I considered a great joke on my students. They were canoeing behind me, following me blindly during a leadership course. I had made them portage over an island, which they only realized it after I suggested to look back at where they had come from. So that evening I was half-expecting a practical joke as revenge. Then it hit me. I was sick. Oh, so indescribably sick. All night long I was bent in half with gastrointestinal cramps. Didn’t sleep a wink. Details unnecessary.
The next morning I could not face my class. No one could have done this to me voluntarily. My assistant took over as I lay motionless in the bottom of the canoe. That night I got better, and the next morning I was fine. Some kind of food poisoning no doubt, but I just couldn’t figure it out; I had eaten the same thing as everyone else, and we were all drinking pure river water. The answer revealed itself the following week as I was cleaning my gear room and happened to fall upon the wrapper of the new sponge I had shoved into my bailing bucket. The wrapper read “New! Pre-soaped sponge.” I had taken a drink from my bailing bucket, without removing the sponge. A swig of concentrated soap. Not revenge — karma.
Outdoor life so often points out our shortcomings, sometimes I swear Mother Nature has a mind of her own and gloats while teaching lessons. I have always loved designing my own gear or modifying that which already exists. Perhaps I coast on the slippery illusion that I will invent something important — wishful thinking at best, but you never know. One day, I had reasoned that there was no need to carry both a sleeping bag and a down parka with pants. In an effort to reduce weight I modified my down mummy bag by sewing in closable slits for arms and feet. I figured that this “improvement” would permit me to just get up out of bed and have breakfast with my bag still on, leaving me nice and warm. I tried out my idea during a winter camping expedition in the month of March. As luck would have it, the days were warm and the nights cold, leaving us with a solid snow surface to walk on in the morning. I exited the tent that morning dressed in my “outfit,” to the great amusement of my buddies, especially as I walked toward them penguin style. After a cup of hot chocolate, I waddled toward the designated pee spot, which happened to be at the edge of a hill. That’s where I tripped of course, and I slid down the steep incline at neck-breaking speed on my nylon shell, my penguin feet and arms flapping wildly as I tried to slow the descent. Luckily, I landed safely in a bushy fir tree, to the thunderous laughter of the audience. I deserved that one, I suppose.
Sometimes in nature, the most hilarious moments occur spontaneously, without need to have been provoked. Especially when my brother Michel is involved.
The phone rang in the GB Catering laboratory where I was busily inventing and testing tripping recipes. It was my brother Michel, and he was in panic mode.
“André come quick. My pigs have escaped!”
“What pigs? What the hell are you talking about?”
“I bought these four pigs a couple of weeks ago, I’m feeding them with warehouse leftovers. I built them a pen but now they’ve escaped into the forest! You have to come and help me find them!”
“Sounds like fun to me. I’ll be right over.”
Michel lived in an old run-down cottage on a piece of land south of Huntsville in Ontario. Twenty minutes later, I entered. In the one-room cabin there stood a loud fridge with six cases of beer leaning drunkenly on it. A beat-up couch slouched against one wall, and a bunk bed with tons of junk on top hid the other. Milk crate shelving acted as furniture. Oh yes, and a bird cage with some bats in it decorated the corner. But what really stood out was the brand new pool table smack in the centre. A real bachelor.
“Hey Ho! Michel, where are you?”
“Over this way. I’m at the pig pen.”
“Coming.”
Out the back door, I passed an abandoned tractor, a few car carcasses, and a huge pile of greyish wood boards, remnants of a fallen shed. At the newer shack beyond I found Michel with two of my other brothers, ranting about the intelligence of swine.
“They’re smarter than you, that’s for sure. They got away!”
We all laughed.
“I don’t believe it. I thought this pen was bombproof.”
“Now what?”
“We have to wait for my two buddies to get here, then we’ll go looking for them.”
A car screeched to a halt. Michel’s two scruffy buddies jumped over the doors of their convertible and joined us.
“Hi guys. What’s up?”
“We have four pigs involved in this drama here, all of which are more intelligent than Michel!”
We were cramped with laughter.
“Let’s grab a beer!”
“No no, this is serious guys. We’ve got to find those pigs. They’re expensive you know.”
I explained common search and rescue procedures to orient the men the best I could. The plan was to first cover the paths of least resistance, where it was easiest to walk — for pigs that is. Through the laughter, I could hardly keep the conversation serious; I had to wait for us to calm down.
“If we spot a pig, we try to keep it in sight and whistle loudly to get everyone else to gather round. If we get lost, we stay put and whistle three times in succession until the others find us.”
“Unless the pigs find us first!”
“Yeah, maybe when they see their Daddy Michel they’ll jump with joy into his arms!”
We left on our mission in different directions, chuckling our way into the woods. After a minute I slowed down, figuring I’d have a better chance of locating the pigs if I could find hoof marks and establish their direction. Scrutinizing the low holes, I finally found their tracks and placed myself in stalking mode, alternately advancing and stopping to watch and listen. Being domestic animals, it stands to reason they couldn’t have gone too far. I stopped at the edge of a large clearing where tall ferns abounded, forming a thick carpet of pale green colour. My eye caught a slight movement in the middle of the clearing, where fronds were waving unnaturally. They’re here.
When the buddies arrived, I ask them to surround the clearing. We slowly crept toward the pigs from all sides, and watched the tops of the ferns to detect their movements underneath. To no avail. As soon as we approached, they effortlessly zipped between us. Then they regrouped elsewhere under the fern patch, grunting. We tried again, with the same results. Soon we are all chasing down the pigs, attempting to grab them, but we couldn’t see them. Five of us cornered one. He passed right between my legs.
I got down on all fours to see under the ferns and gain the pig’s perspective. I heard the pigs grunting, without seeing them, and understood they were communicating to find each other. I tried to imitate them and spotted one coming toward me, only to turn at the last minute.
“Hey guys, get down and oink. It’ll confuse them and they won’t know where to go!”
It seemed to work, as Michel grabbed one by the tip of the leg. But it shook and wiggled so much he had to let go. We were encouraged now and we all went at it harder, each of us grunting and running around on all fours under the ferns. I got up to witness the scene. The ferns were waving all over with loud grunts emitted from all parts. I couldn’t tell the pigs from the humans. I broke up, cramped in half with laughter at the ridiculous scene. Then the next guy got up, saw what I saw, and joined me in roll-on-the-ground hilarity. Instantly we all grouped together in glee, holding each other up so we wouldn’t fall down, blind from tears.
Back in the cabin, the beer was cold, the pool table fuzzy, and the camaraderie priceless. An hour after we had given up and left the pigs in the fern patch, one of us went outside to notice the jail breakers had returned on their own, apparently satisfied with their escapade and ready to feed. A nice introduction to animal behaviour.
Over the years, nature has become a tender old friend with whom I like to reminisce. Be it wave-splashed boulders, a deep green bog, a trunk overgrown with oyster mushrooms or a bright, furry caterpillar feeding on a leaf, each and every wilderness scene reminds me of an adventure. Whenever I cross a patch of pale green Ostrich fronds, a vividly comical film of a natural human/pig pen instantly fills my screen, which leaves my unwary hiking partners perplexed as to why ferns crack me up.