Banquet Time
“Who wants a world in which the guarantee that we shall not die of starvation entails the risk of dying of boredom?”
— Raoul Vaneigem
The late seventies and early eighties saw me shuttling back and forth from Colorado to Ontario, as I attempted to reconcile graduate work with family obligations related to GB Catering Service. To the despair of my graduate advisor and also my Dad to a lesser extent, I perceived both of these preoccupations as unwanted distractions from my real longing to be exploring the natural world first hand. As soon as either turned his back, I would disappear into the outdoors. In Colorado it was to the mountains I headed, not so much for survival as to hike and climb. Nevertheless, I vividly remember close encounters while stalking elk for fun, or smoking out ground squirrels just to see if it could be done. I also recall picking ticks off my body after camping beneath the stars. I learned a great deal from my experienced friends as I accompanied them on mountaineering hikes, such as our winter ascent of the 4,346-metre Longs Peak. But my climbing career ended abruptly one day as I was ascending the classic Bastille Crack and witnessed another lead climber overhead take a fifteen metre freefall, saved in extremis by the third hex-nut protection after the first two had torn away.
While in the United States, I also appreciated my humbling initiation to whitewater kayaking on the class IV rapids of the mighty Colorado River — which I mostly rode upside down in panic mode. Botany field trips into the Sonoran Desert of Arizona impressed me too, but not nearly as much as the one to Mexico’s Chihuahan Desert, my first contact ever with Third World poverty. What an eye opener, both on the human level and because of the new opportunity for experimentation it provided. I found out for myself how unrealistic survival skills such as obtaining water from solar stills or by mashing the inside of a cactus were. In the first case, after sweating profusely while digging a solar still and then waiting all day, it generated less than a quarter cup of water, and in the second, once I had struggled to slice open a cactus and squish its innards, it provided an unpalatable acidic paste with which I could hardly even wet my lips.
Back in Canada, canoe tripping in Algonquin Park and elsewhere quickly became my leisure of choice. I loved bushwhacking my canoe into the most remote lakes, where no one else dared go, where the big bass lurked. What great fun it is at night to catch crayfish by pinning them to the lake bottom with a Y shaped stick — the two tips cut to one centimetre in length — to use as bait for the next day’s fishing. And more exciting still to catch water snakes, bullfrogs, or snapping turtles for food, which was legal back then.
Sometimes I would go out for a day paddle and portage over to some unnamed lake to explore. I couldn’t help it — as the prospect of discovery pushed me forward I often went too far to return in time before dark. In a way I must have enjoyed the challenge of spending the night by a fire without gear, especially when some unsuspecting friend was accompanying me. Sorry for the cold rough nights chasing firewood I imposed on you guys.
As I was paddling along briskly one late November evening while returning from a multi-day trip in the middle of nowhere, the water gradually thickened with slush, so much so that I was literally stuck in the syrupy soup and couldn’t get to shore. Faced with no choice, I pulled out the sleeping bag and slept right there in the canoe. What a memorable night in my improvised million-star hotel. Come morning, I stepped out of the canoe onto solid ice, chopped it out with my axe, and finished the trip by dragging the watercraft over the ice to the portage. I was in heaven.
Less sublime were the survival experiments in biting insect season. On one blackfly-infested spring day, having no insect repellent or nets, my partners and I almost gave up within five minutes of departure. “Let’s just put up a quick tipi shelter with our ponchos,” I suggested while speaking through my handkerchief, unsure of why I wasn’t already heading back to the van. Lo and behold, we noticed that in the darkened space the flies would all congregate against the walls and we did manage to spend three days in a smoky environment.
On another occasion, I was bold and stupid enough to face ferocious forest mosquitoes while dressed in nothing but a swimsuit. I stopped running once I found a mud hole and plastered myself with the oozy stuff. To no avail. I was a sitting duck, a perfect Gulliver target for those thousands of Lilliputian darts. I surely broke a record while running back to the van and learned that when Mom Nature says “No,” she means “No.” That was the only time of my life I had not overcome a challenge I had set for myself. As I sat there in the van swatting at the remaining attackers who had followed me into my fort, with the dilemma of whether or not to get dressed over the caked mud, it occurred to me that I had always won simply because I had set the rules in my favour. When naked, no one can survive minus forty degrees for long.
After this incident, I definitely appreciated winter camping even more. For the rest of my life, every time I encountered cold, I would encourage myself with a loud and enthusiastic “No bugs!” But facing frozen wastes without proper gear remains the ultimate challenge, because it is deadly. Through winter camping, one learns to respect cold. Luckily I have never suffered frostbite, even the time I went with running shoes instead of boots. Or the time I pretended I had burned my boots by the fire and snowshoed back to the truck wearing mitts on my feet.
At this point in my life, I had always conducted experiments that were either short — two or three days — or, if longer, included at least minimal food. I now needed to determine how I would fare without this most fundamental element, and started going on trips without sustenance at all. I quickly discovered that the pleasure of a trip is directly proportional to food intake. And in a survival situation, especially without hunting or trapping gear, calorie count is often determined by pure luck of the draw. On some trips during clement weather, when the blueberries literally coloured my pant legs blue, or when I happened upon a porcupine, or when the smelts were running thick in the creeks, surviving was a piece of cake. But when nature closed shop, it was another story altogether.
I remember one time being so desperate for food I was licking the leftover salty crumbs of pretzels from the last outing mixed with sand on the tent floor. My brain lacking sugar and not thinking straight, I ate some Boletus mushrooms, with but a vague recollection that non-red pored species are all edible except maybe a few that turn blue upon crushing. Which is exactly what happened a minute after I had eaten them. I repeatedly tried to make myself vomit without success, a most unpleasant experience. The fungus did not make me ill, but I sure was sick from worrying.
On most survival trips, my staple food was usually the roots of Typha latifolia, the common cattail, which Euell Gibbons aptly named the supermarket of the swamps. It’s difficult to satisfy one’s hunger with this bland and stringy starch, but at least some calories are guaranteed.
Gathering cattail roots for food.
But what happens when no cattails dot the scenery ? I was about to find out first hand on another survival experiment with my pal Bert.
The super highway between Chicago and Detroit lives up to its name — super boring, that is. I’d been riding my Yamaha 750 motorbike from Colorado non-stop for over eighteen hours. I was tortured by noise. At least I was comfortable. The passenger seat was occupied by my filled-to-the-brim hundred-litre packsack, tightly cinched to the sissy bar with trucker hitches. It must have been illegal, but I installed a homemade cruise-control device, which was nothing more than a flat bar of steel wrapped and squeezed onto the handle just tight enough so it held the throttle when propped against the brake lever. Which meant I could ride no hands, with my arms crossed, leaning back onto my pack with feet up on the crash-bar foot pegs.
My only diversion had been my Teddy, dangling from the ape bars. He moved around a lot, but wasn’t too talkative, stuffed as he was. I couldn’t wait to see Mom’s face, because she wasn’t expecting me back so soon. I hoped she’d made chocolate cake. There were only six hours of hard driving left. Darkness fell. Yawn, felt like the drone had invaded my blood stream. Then it happened: I fell asleep. At one hundred and twenty kilometres an hour!
I was startled awake as I passed under a highway lamp, mere inches from the outer edge of the shoulder. “Tabarnak!” I screeched to a halt, trembling and white as a ghost. Raging and fuming, I ripped off my pack and jumped into the ditch. In the blink of an eye, I’d thrown down my foam pad and bag. I slept, avoiding the confrontation with myself.
When the roar of a speeding tractor-trailer woke me, I fully realized how incredibly lucky I had been to have survived that close call. Fair warning. I will never forget where the true dangers in this world lie. I headed off to some nearby park to complete my night’s dodo and imagined myself transposed into safe wilderness.
The next day I pulled into the familiar driveway in Scarborough, loudly honking my horn. Mom had no idea I purchased a motorbike. She barely peeked out the door, staring at the leather-clad, dirty biker with shoulder length hair and long bushy beard. She was obviously alarmed.
“Hi, Mom!”
“Eh, quoi? André, is that you? What the…? You know how to drive that thing? Isn’t it dangerous?”
“Not at all, Mom!”
A few days later, after being coerced to trim up, I phoned up my long-time survival partner, hoping he was free the following week.
“Bert, can you extend your Thanksgiving vacation by a couple of days? Let’s jump on the bike and spend a week out in the bush! Packing will be easy, we just won’t bring anything at all!”
The plan sounded great to Bert, so when the weekend arrived we donned helmets and rode up to Dorset via Highway 35, stopped for fried chicken, then headed into Lake Kawagama territory. We followed progressively narrower backcountry roads until we encountered an ATV trail, into which we partially drove and partially pushed the bike. From the top of a hill we spotted an isolated lake in the distance, which suited our fancy. We shoved the bike into the woods and covered it with branches. At the base of a nearby tree, a hole was dug to stash keys, wallets, and the rest of our pocket gear. We hiked off to the lake, wearing nothing but the clothes on our backs, all pockets turned inside-out, for the time enjoying fine mild weather.
Our first task, fire building, was accomplished by rubbing sticks — after over three hours of intense work carving the bow, board, spindle, and handle by splitting and grinding with improvised rock tools. Good job! We were in cheerful ecstasy as always after accomplishing the miraculous feat. Next it was shelter time. Anticipating rain, we wished to strip nearby birch trees of their bark, long ago having learned that evergreen boughs won’t shed any substantial downpour. Once hacked with sharpened stones, the bark from the small trees stubbornly refused to peel in wide sheets, since it split along the rough edges. Even a tiny metal blade would have been precious. It gave me the idea of trying to create one from the tab on my jeans zipper. I stripped to my underwear and managed to smash the tab between two rocks to remove and flatten it somewhat. Then I tied it to a wooden handle with a piece of shoelace and a constrictor clove hitch. After sharpening the tiny knife on a smooth rock, I was able to slice the birchbark from top to bottom and obtain the required shingles for a lean-to shelter roof. I marvelled at man’s ingenuity, who through the ages learned to transform minerals into valuable metal. At the same time, I felt somewhat guilty to have “cheated.”
By the time the shelter was completed and firewood gathered for the night, darkness had fallen. The only food I saw that day was a big cockroach-like bug that zipped out from under a log I had disturbed. It reminded me of how I once amazed my fellow prestidigitators at a convention when I held a deck of cards against a wall and the chosen card exited the deck, climbing the ten-metre high ballroom wall in a zigzag pattern. To this day, no one ever figured out how I accomplished that feat, probably because there was no secret — it was just luck. I had captured a huge cockroach in a damp corner of the washroom and had stuck a duplicate card to its back using magician’s glue-wax. My lovely cockroach-assistant sure put on a good show for me that day. With those buggy thoughts I flopped onto my bough bed and philosophized for a long while with Bert, prevented from sleeping by pangs of hunger until late.
Growling bellies woke us early. A morning soggy with mist greeted us. The rain intensified but the birchbark roof mostly resisted its onslaught. We spent the day huddled in our cramped quarters, profiting from breaks in the rain to fix leaks and gather more wood. There would be no meal that day, but with the stars speckling the sky like dots on a trout, we looked forward to a good food-gathering the next day.
As the first rays of sun painted our surroundings golden, hunger drove us out of the shelter and the exploration began. A hearty feed of cattail roots would be most welcome, but after circumnavigating the lake from shore, there were none to be found. In fact we found no other edible plants either, except a couple of old bunchberry clusters hardly worth gathering. We plowed back through dense shrubs to the shelter and revived the fire, silent and psychologically distraught.
I headed out once more and aimlessly wandered for a while in the hope that manna would fall from the sky. And as I peered up it eventually did, in the form of a nice fat Spruce Grouse. It was hunting season, so I felt justified in harvesting it. What a treat it would be! Grouse are generally not suspicious, which facilitates their capture. Come on Bourbeau, don’t miss your chance! Advancing slowly while keeping the future roast within my field of vision, I looked around for a long and slender pole. The live birch I chose to break seemed determined to remain attached to its trunk by wood filaments. I bent it over to the other side and twisted it with all my might, but having chosen it just a tad too big, the more I fought with it the more it resisted. I turned to a half-dead cherry branch that I barely managed to sheer off. Was the grouse still there? Yes, but it looked a bit nervous and was perched quite high.
The lace of my right boot would temporarily serve as snare wire. I fixed a noose to the end of the boom, but it kept closing itself or hanging limply. I finally tied the lasso a few centimetres from the end and tore a split into the tip of the pole with my teeth in order to wedge the lace loop open. That cherry bark tannin sure is bitter! Finally, I advanced with utmost caution toward the beautiful bird, undulating my body from side to side in rhythm with the wind. I did not approach it straight on, but rather at a forty-five degree angle until I was slightly past it, then repeated the process to get progressively closer.
Just a few metres separated us. I dared not move for a while. It was pecking at buds three metres above the ground. With great care, I raised my perch, a few centimetres at a time, nearer and nearer the soon-to-be barbecued chicken. Get the fire ready Bert! I elevated the tip of the pole. Just a tad more and the poultry would be mine. I managed to gently slip the collar around its neck and then purred to attract its attention, which made it raise its head to look around. I jerked down hard and quick. Damn! It flew away. How the hell did I miss it?
But it was still possible to get to it. I crept forward gently, as before. The bird was in view, but perched on a higher branch. On the tip of the toes, with arms outstretched, I tried to slide the noose over its head once more. But I couldn’t control the shaky perch. The grouse thumped its wings and flew away beyond sight, leaving but the muffled echo of a tambourine. I can’t say I was proud of myself as I returned to camp to cry on Bert’s shoulder.
Hunger hit hard. It wasn’t at all painful, it just made us lazy, so very lazy. Our bodies reacted to the lack of nourishment by falling into survival mode, enticing inaction. Lousy sleep didn’t help either. We napped and then lay there for quite a while afterwards before setting out in our quest for food again. That time an aquatic plant called Pickerel weed (Pontederia cordata) attracted my attention. There was plenty and I knew the seeds were edible. I removed my pants and socks, keeping shoes on to preserve my feet, and waded out in waist-deep water and muddy bottom to collect the plants. It was a waste of time and energy, as I soon realized the seeds were not at all ripe. I brought some back to try parching them on the fire, to no avail. Meanwhile, Bert had been weaving cedar bark into a fishing line and made a fish hook with his zipper tab, our new favourite tool material. He went off fishing while I tended to the fire to dry out my shoes. After an hour and some, he came home to the shelter empty-handed, as I expected.
Bert’s fishing gave me an idea. I went around to the tip of the lake, where the water seemed deeper and rocks gave me shore access without wetting my feet again. There I spotted a few minnows. I sacrificed my t-shirt and spread it over a willow hoop to improvise a minnow net. But the cotton material was much too tightly woven and I couldn’t pull the net through the water quickly enough to snatch any fish. Finally, through much patience, I managed to slowly raise the t-shirt from the bottom underneath the minnows to capture a couple. A dozen tries and nearly an hour later I obtained a grand total of five two-inch minnows, which I slit open and cleaned using my zipper-tab blade.
On the way back to camp, I managed to gather a half-dozen bunchberry clusters and a few violet leaves. As I let the small fry cook on a hot rock, I prepared two birchbark “plates,” two sets of automatic chopsticks, and then served up our minuscule supper of two and a half minnows each, delicately decorated with the violet leaves and berries. Banquet time. Bon appétit, Bert. Another occasion to philosophize with my good buddy!
The next day we used Bert’s fishing line to set a few rabbit snares, with no high hopes of success, considering few signs of their presence. We scavenged some more, but as the shadows stretched into long thin lines, it looked like we wouldn’t be ingesting any more calories that day either.
After another uneventful but chilly night of alternating periods of sleep-wake, I decided to head further away from the lake, back near the road, hoping to find food in the field-like environment found there. Indeed, I did find a few leftover raspberries spread out here and there near the roadside. After an hour, however, no more than a cup of the precious fare lined the bottom of my hat, and I wondered whether or not the calories they contained would outweigh my energy expenditure. I was slouched, pondering, intensely focused on my berry picking, when out of nowhere a loud grumbling startled me. A car! Instinctively, like a wild animal, I dove deep under the bushes to hide as the roar passed by and subsided, leaving a cloud of gravel smoke to fall upon me. I recovered from my emotion, laughing deeply at my new understanding of why we never see fauna while driving.
Returning to camp I shared my few berries and story with Bert, replacing him at fire watch so he could go forage too, effectively inverting our picket and picker roles. My weakness forced me to nap. Later, Bert woke me to partake in another half-cup of delicious berries. We spent the rest of the day exploring further still, trying every trick in the book to obtain food, but nature simply wouldn’t cooperate. The next three lethargic days just saw us get progressively weaker. We were no longer having fun. But it was our last night.
The sun lighting up the morning dew transformed the water drops into jewels as if to thank us for our visit and wish us well as we departed. Gleefully heading back to colonized land where fridges bulge with offerings, we concluded that wilderness survival is largely a matter of luck.