Annette luxuriated in another day of calm breezes, this one with partly sunny skies to lift the spirits. She deftly navigated island-studded archipelagos and vast open spaces of water, watched hawks and eagles float on currents high above as they hunted for fish, searched the shallows hoping to glimpse a moose. She reached the southern end of the big lake by noon, entering a bizarre Canadian Shield playground of dozens of islands and dozens more reefs and shoals fanning out around a huge peninsula whose rugged shoreline included countless bays and inlets and points.
She navigated west into a narrowing channel that would eventually become a creek. She stopped at an island to take lunch and give Chaos a chance to run off steam. He charged around the small island for several minutes and then plunged into the water to chase seagulls perched on a rocky outcropping fifty feet away. He sent them squawking into the air and celebrated by plunging back into the water to return to the island. After twenty minutes of madcap running and swimming, he lay beside Annette and panted while she ate.
Annette was deep in thought. She was looking at what seemed like a small lake, a kilometer long, a kilometer wide, but she knew it was a Canadian Shield illusion. When she paddled west, the seeming continuous shore on her right would open to a bay. When she entered the bay, she would see a narrow opening to the west. When she paddled through that opening, she would enter a short channel that led to what seemed like another small lake. That lake would seem to end in a reedy bog, but she would paddle through it to find a tiny, narrow creek that she would follow through a succession of small lakes until she finally portaged into her lake.
The impossibility of navigating this place without a map had always made her wonder how the first people here did it. The First Nation people would have had only crude mapmaking skills and equally crude canoes as they tried to find their way through this archipelago and the many others in Quetico, archipelagos that were deliriously confusing even with a map and compass. How long before they knew this was a creek? What caused someone to figure it out? Why would a hunter or trapper come into this system instead of using the river to the south?
She and Chaos negotiated the creek system without incident. It was still early afternoon when they reached a small lake. Its main body extended west-southwest, ending in a low, narrow inlet that led to a popular portage trail that connected trippers to a chain of lakes that offered beautiful journeys for the fit and adventurous.
But Annette followed the north shore of the small lake into its lesser bay and then to a short, obscure portage that led into her favorite lake, her special place. As she approached the portage take-out, she saw a canoe and a pack on the shore. For a moment, her heart skipped a beat. Could it be Pender? She had a flashing vision of them passing on the portage trail, recognizing each other. Him saying, “Are you . . .?” A smile playing softly on his face as recognition set in. Him pulling off his pack, embracing her in a tender hug, forty years later.
Two men emerged into the portage area, stopping her dream. One waved while the other shrugged on the pack and picked up paddles and disappeared down the portage trail. The waver easily lifted the canoe onto his shoulders and followed.
They were trippers, probably moving on through her lake on their way north. Few people ever stopped on her lake. In fact, few people even passed through it. That was part of what made it so special. That and its walled shoreline, rising steeply in great smears of green forest and earth-hued cliffs from blue water so crystal clear you could see a pike in twenty-foot depths. It also had intimacy. Even though it was a fairly large lake, it was fractured into small parts and dotted with islands, so every place you went, it felt like a small, hidden lake, and every moment seemed coddled and personal.
The trippers were out of sight by the time Annette finished the short portage. She boarded Chaos and floated slowly along a narrow channel through a canyon of granite and jack pines.
At the end of the channel, she paused for a deep breath and took in the sights. She was in a small body of water, maybe a kilometer square, that hid passages to four other bodies of water of equal or larger size. It was her Eden—a place of fused colors and soft light, pure water, and rarified air. Just sitting here was rejuvenating, taking in the air and the colors, sipping water dipped from the lake. It had been that way from the very first time she happened into this lake, on a somber late-September outing into an empty park. It was a time of chill air and changing leaves and a deep quiet as migratory birds began heading south. She had been a young woman in a marital netherworld then. Two young children, a struggling business, a husband almost permanently gone, not interested in northwest Ontario, not interested in the wilderness, only mildly interested in his children and not at all in her.
She knew the marriage was over but didn’t know what to do about it. Her mother drove fourteen hours to come talk to her and stayed for more than a week so Annette could paddle into the wilderness to clear her head.
Much of what she saw on that trip and all that she thought was filtered through a veil of sorrow. She was mourning her children’s loss of a father and her loss of a husband and especially the end of their innocence—a magical time so intense and deep, when they had been so committed to each other, when they would have sacrificed anything for each other, when no matter what they had, it was enough because they were together.
She cried because she knew that kind of love could never happen to her again. She was in a new stage of life. She needed to prepare her daughters for life and somehow preserve their ability to love like that someday, if only for a short time. For she knew now, knew for certain, that love like that doesn’t last. It can’t. It fades or morphs into something else—a different love, and a new one if you’re lucky.
And if you’re not lucky, it just dies and you have to start over again.
Annette had spent a day in the cold rain and a night below freezing just before she paddled into her lake the first time. She had been out for several days, making up her trip as she went along, trying to decide whether or not to move back to the U.S., live with her parents until she got a job. Get the kids into a good school, prepare them for great careers, success, maybe wealth. Atikokan seemed so barren for them, a tiny, hardscrabble town with endless winters, a high school located nearly a hundred miles from the next-closest school.
But something in her gut was holding her back, and she didn’t know what it was until she paddled through that very same canyon a quarter century ago. The day had started cloudy and cold, but as she paddled through the canyon, sunlight seeped through cracks and crevices in the diminishing cloud cover, and when she sat at this very spot in the first bay, the sun poured out of the sky, touching the rocks and the trees and the pristine water with the kind of luminescence ancient painters used for religious art.
And for Annette, it was a religious experience. It was the moment she discovered what she believed in. She believed in this place, its beauty and grandeur, its innocence and solitude. She believed in Canada. She believed this place and her children were the things in life that touched her soul and that her children and this place belonged together.
She camped in an established campsite that first time, but while exploring the lake, she stopped at an island that seemed almost impervious to canoeists, with vertical rock-wall shores rising from the water like the walls of a citadel. The single dent in this natural fortress was a narrow beach of sorts, strewn with boulders and rocks and ending with a sheer rock cliff. The cliff had calved many times over the millennia, each event producing hundreds of boulders, large and small, that the ices and winds and rains and floods of thousands of years had pushed and pummeled all over the lake. What was left was a grotto guarded by a treacherous shoal of boulders extending fifty feet out from the shore.
For no particular reason, Annette decided to lunch there. She eased her canoe through the boulder garden but could only get within ten feet of shore. She secured her boat, then boulder hopped to shore. She picked her way through the rubble to the base of the cliff and saw red-leafed scrub trees in one corner of the grotto and wondered how on earth enough soil could have accumulated there to support leafy growth.
When she was close enough to touch the leaves, she saw another one of Quetico’s miracles. The soil that sustained the scrub trickled down from the heights above, curling around the towering rock facade like a spiral staircase.
Annette ascended the hidden trail to a forested plateau high above the lake, found a stand of old-growth red pines on the southwest shore. There were several places to pitch a tent, and the bluff overlooking the lake was solid rock, perfect for a fire ring. She moved in that afternoon, carefully jumping from boulder to boulder with her packs and canoe.
It was a magnificent perch from which to experience Quetico, like an eagle’s nest, looking down on blue waters and vast forests as far as the eye could see. It was hidden and private. It was secret and personal. She sat on a rock wall fifty feet above the lake that afternoon and let the majesty of the Canadian Shield infuse her body and spirit. She thought this must be what musical people feel in a concert hall when the sounds of Mozart fill the air and overwhelm the soul. She lost all sense of herself that afternoon. There was only the forest and the water and the bogs and hills, the pine-scented breezes, the call of the eagle, the rocks, the vast sky, and the colors. The great silence—she was part of it, and it was her. That was the very time and place where Annette understood that this was not a place she could leave. Quetico was part of her soul. Her children would be educated in the ways of the world, but they would also know about natural things, they would know the wilderness, and they would learn about self-reliance. They could pick up atom splitting and brain surgery somewhere else along the way.
Annette stayed in Atikokan, of course, and got to the lake every year or two after that, always making small improvements in her private campsite. She kept the fire pit out of sight and placed her tent well back in the woods so it wasn’t visible from the lake. She found a better approach to the shore through the boulder garden, one not requiring her to boulder hop with gear.
She never found a single trace of another human being on the island, not even a charred rock. The only other people in the world who knew where it was were her daughters—and now Pender.
As she approached the island, her heart beat harder. She wondered if he was there already, his gear up on the bluff, his tent set up, maybe a pot of water boiling. But when she made shore, there was no trace of him, no footprints, no canoe left on the rocks, no gear in sight. She tried not to be disappointed. It was still early in the day, and who knew where Pender was coming from? But it would have been nice to be greeted by a warm smile from long ago.
Pender’s spirits were buoyed by the clear morning sky and its promise of fair weather, even though his body ached after a long night sleeping on a lumpy ground in cool, damp air. As he grunted and groaned through his morning ministrations, Pender decided that his injury was a ruptured disc, not something dire. He laughed silently at himself: the diagnosis of a great restaurant editor. How could it be wrong? At least his sense of humor was coming back.
He boiled water for coffee as he tore down his tent and packed his gear. He had his coffee and granola as the eastern sky lit up, and was underway minutes later, with miles to go before he would sleep.
As his body warmed and his muscles loosened, he upped his cadence and lengthened his stroke. He would never make it to the island today. It was forty or fifty kilometers away—twenty-five to thirty miles—with fifteen or twenty portages and God knew how many beaver houses and blowdowns to surmount in the creek system he was on. He hoped his body would last for twelve hours of hard paddling and crossing mostly flat, short portages. That would get him to the island by noon tomorrow.
Surely she’d give him a half-day benefit of the doubt. He tried to think of reasons she wouldn’t. Maybe she had to get back for business reasons. Or maybe it would just anger her, him being late, being a warmonger Yankee capitalist and late to boot. But she didn’t seem hostile in their e-mails. In fact, she sounded mellow.
As he paddled and portaged, Pender thought about her e-mails—about how she described her kids, especially the daughter living with her now, and her grandchild. And how easily she wrote about being abandoned by her husband. Pender shook his head as he pulled on the paddle. What a mind fuck. You give up your country to start a new life with this pseudo-idealistic windbag, and he’s gone after one winter. And he’s the first one to go back to the U.S. when amnesty comes, leaving you behind for better money and a younger piece of ass.
Pender couldn’t fathom how Annette dealt with that so matter-of-factly. If it were him, he’d be deciding between beating the man to death or cutting off his balls. Of course, Pender had to admit, he wasn’t exactly a model of rational thinking these days. But still, even in a contemplative mood, just shooting the bastard wasn’t adequate punishment.
His thoughts moved to people he had known in business. His replay of the final drama with group vice president Charles Jamison Blue got him through a particularly nasty bit of creek littered with logs and boulders and beaver houses that required pull-overs and walk-arounds, wading in cold water and slipping on wet surfaces.
His mental focus helped his body withstand a withering pace, and by midafternoon he portaged into the big lake that marked the home stretch to Annette’s island. His remarkable progress came at a price. His body ached again. He was hungry and so tired he was starting to feel faint.
He pushed on for a few more kilometers, taking care to hug the shoreline in case the fat boys were looking for him. If they were going back to the U.S. from the Falls Route, they’d use this lake to get there.
Eventually he entered a narrow strait formed by a large island about fifty yards off the mainland shore. There was an empty campsite on a bluff overlooking the strait, and his body told his mind to take it. He landed at a well-worn beach, loaded himself with a pack, paddles, and his water jug, and headed for the trail leading to the campsite above. On his second stride he stepped in a pile of dog poop and cursed.
Pender found neatly stacked and sorted materials for a fire by the fire ring, a welcome gift from a thoughtful camper.
He decided not to have a campfire, though. Physically, he was too sore and too tired to go fishing, so the only cooking for tonight’s dinner would be boiling water to rehydrate something. Plus, the fire ring was very visible from the lake. He didn’t want to risk having the fat boys find him or having a ranger come calling, since he was without a permit. All of his encounters with rangers in Quetico had been on popular lakes like this one, and most people moving from one end of this lake to the other would come through this narrows, would come right by this campsite.
He boiled water over his gas stove back in the tree line, out of sight from the lake. He ate reconstituted stew from the package it came in and sipped hot chicken broth while sitting on a log that gave him a view of the waterway and the island. As he wrote a journal entry for his daughter, he checked periodically for paddlers on the water, but there were none. It was late in the day. Most people would be in camp now.
Later, as he rinsed his dishes in the dim light of evening, he stood at water’s edge and watched a lone canoe meander along an island a kilometer southwest of him. It wasn’t the fat boys or a ranger. It was two people out for an evening paddle, their canoe riding high in the water without the weight of their gear aboard. He thought they might be husband and wife or boyfriend and girlfriend, and that made him think of Annette. He wondered how she was handling his absence. He could see her face in his mind, how it would look sad. He could see loneliness in her eyes. He told her he was sorry, and, for the millionth time that day, he hoped she would give him another day to get there.