One spring day at the university I spotted a note on the bulletin board in front of the Canada Manpower Centre. It was only a hand-lettered file card, but it changed my life.
Remote wilderness fly-in lodge in northern Ontario requires fishing guides. Must be skilled in boating and the outdoors, and enjoy working with people. Inquire within re. Bending Lake Lodge.
It sounded too good to be true. I went inside and scheduled an interview. A few days later I returned with my university chum Fariborz Tajidod, who’d grown up in Iran and had only a basic grasp of English, but shared an interest in nature and the outdoors. The lodge owner, a steely-eyed ex-military pilot named John Hansen, conducted the interview and seemed amused by our apparent willingness to tell him anything we thought he wanted to hear. “We have lots of white water on our river system,” he warned us. “Would you be afraid of shooting rapids?”
Fariborz, who with his doe-eyed and slightly apprehensive manner resembled the young Dustin Hoffman, assured John Hansen that he’d seen many rapids and wasn’t afraid of them. “In Tehran, my uncle shot a rapid in his garden.”
After our final exams, Fariborz and I drove three hundred miles to Ignace, Ontario, where we reported to the local floatplane base to arrange for our ride into Bending Lake Lodge. Our pilot looked like he’d slept in his clothes. His plane, a beat-up old Beaver, had sooty exhaust pipes and dented sheet-metal floors congealed with half a century’s worth of fuel oil, powdered milk, and moose blood. We climbed aboard and strapped ourselves into our seats and the engine exploded to life, trembling with a rough and guttural idle that sounded more like a tractor than a lighter-than-air flying machine. But soon enough we were roaring down the lake and lifting off, ascending a bumpy staircase of thermals into the extraordinary spring sunshine.
Down below the plane the country rolled off to the horizon, a patchy, rumpled mould culture of forest, rock, and hammered lakes glinting in the sun. What an adventure! I pressed my nose against the dirty window and drank it all in. Fariborz was sitting up front with the pilot, and at one point he leaned over and asked the pilot what would happen if the engine failed. The pilot gave him a grim look, reached over, and shut off the engine, and the plane nose-dived like a falling piano. After making his point, the pilot restarted the motor and we carried on. Eventually we arrived at Bending Lake Lodge: a rustic village of buildings on the south end of an otherwise uninhabited lake.
We were assigned bunkhouses and put to work. The guide contingent consisted of a few white university boys like us, and a dozen Ojibway men, most of whom had many years of guiding experience. It was early in May, and the fishing season wouldn’t open for another few weeks, so the boss’s priority was to whip the camp into shape and get the new rookies trained as guides. All day long we chopped firewood, repaired docks and levelled cabins, and went out to learn the river system with our Indian instructors. My teacher was Stewie, a thin young Ojibway man with Beatle boots, a pompadour hairdo, and a bad complexion. Stewie’s routine was to pretend to see the cheerful side of any misfortune. Even if it was a cold and miserable morning, he always came hunching through the sleet with the same absurd greeting. “Hey dere, boys! Nice morning dis morning!”
The Turtle River system sprawled off for many miles in several directions, and white-water rapids formed links between the lakes. Stewie took me to fishing spots in the different lakes and paused long enough at each spot to demonstrate to our mutual satisfaction that he could whip my ass anytime when it came to jigging lake trout with a spinning rod. (He could out-fish almost anyone in camp.) He showed me how to run down the rapids and how to get back upstream again – slewing and bounding the boat through the powerful waves, dodging boulders, climbing the muscular chutes of green water, and quickly killing the motor to prevent the boat from capsizing if it suddenly was overcome by the force of a wave and sent caterwauling backwards. Like a kung fu master, he’d stand up on the high, slippery rocks and watch me trying to reproduce his performance, waving and pointing to hazards I couldn’t see. When I swerved the boat sideways and filled it with water, he’d clutch his head in theatrical dismay, and when I did it right, he’d clap and grin, shouting inaudible praise across the roaring water.
Learning the rapids was nerve-racking work. Most of the rookie guides and a few of the less experienced Indian guides had close calls. One university student from Winnipeg reared his boat like a horse and flipped it back on himself in Number Six Upstream. He was pulled unconscious from the water and medi-vacced out to the hospital, where he eventually recovered and decided he didn’t want to be a guide after all. Another guide, named Sidney, an Indian but an inexperienced one, swamped his boat and almost drowned. I was sure that my turn was coming up next, and when it came to practising the more difficult rapids, such as the fearsome Number Two Downstream, I was sometimes so apprehensive that I’d go into the bush and retch before climbing into the boat. But gradually I got the hang of it, and by the time the guests arrived on the May 2.4 long weekend, I was confident enough of my boat-handling skills that the familiar bounce and kick of the rapids felt more like an amusement ride than a toboggan run to hell.
Every night there was a card game in the Swingin’ Teepee, the big bunkhouse where the Indians lived, and we white boys gradually got to be friends with the veteran guides, some of whom were walking encyclopaedias of knowledge about fish, animals, weather, and the bush. There was lots of wildlife around – moose were a normal sight along the river, and we had lots of problems with bears interrupting our shore lunches. The Indian guides knew these wild animals in a way that wasn’t abstract but specific – based on personal experience: spending long months at a stretch in trappers’ cabins with no company but a few squirrels living in the eaves, a car radio hooked up to a 12-volt battery, and the brooding silent forest right outside their door. A scientist might have known the Latin names of the local trees and wild animals, but old guides like Junior Robinson knew practical stuff, such as how a bear of a certain age, size, and gender would likely react if you tried to shoo it away. They weren’t reluctant to share the information either, as long as you didn’t mind a joke or pun included with the lesson. Spending days on the river with old-timers like Junior was like taking university classes in forest lore. And because the information was applicable to immediate problems at hand – like trying to preserve a campfire in the midst of a sudden downpour* – it was like studying French in France.
≡ Throw a large rotten stump on the fire.
I guided two summers at Bending Lake Lodge, then managed to get a job doing the same thing up in the Northwest Territories, on Great Slave Lake, where we had to sleep with blankets on our windows because it never got dark, and the great high rocky cliffs along the lake were constructed of the oldest rock on the planet. Great Slave Lake is tremendously deep and cold. The camp was, and still is, one of the most prestigious sport-fishing lodges in the world, with crisp white buildings arranged with military orderliness on the remote east arm of the lake. Except for a few white guys, the guides were mainly Dene, and the lodge’s guests were wealthy Americans, whom we took in pursuit of lake trout, which in the north grow to an enormous size. In frigid water, a lake trout grows only half a pound a year, and a fifty-pound trout is conceivably almost a century old. They look it too, ancient brutes with hooked jaws, battered heads, and the blank, stone gaze of a pagan idol. Great Slave is one of the largest lakes in the world, and we had to cross enormous passages of open water, not a pleasant experience in an open sixteen-foot boat. The water is only a few degrees above freezing, and when the wind started blowing, pushing fifteen-foot-high swells, it was like crossing the north Atlantic.
Sometimes we took the camp Norseman and flew side trips out to the barrenlands, to Artillery Lake, where the trout were black, or Lac Du Gras, a spooky place where the fish had enlarged heads and serpentine bodies, and were so desperate for food they’d almost chase the lure up onto shore. We went to the Thelon River, which is an arctic oasis surrounded by tundra, through which every autumn the tens of thousands of caribou of the Qaminurjuag and Beverly herds pour, and where the English eccentric John Hornby built a log cabin in 1926, determined to become this river’s white lord. Like Mr. Kurtz, he was a charismatic loner, and he brought along disciples: two English schoolboys named Edgar Christian and Harold Adlar. Hornby planned to kill enough caribou to get them all through the winter, but the caribou never came. Apparently they usually come, but sometimes they don’t. Hornby and the boys spent six months starving to death. Edgar Christian’s journal was found with their skeletons the following year, and all three are buried behind the decrepit cabin, their graves marked by three rotted wooden crosses.
Sometimes, while my guests wandered the riverbank and fished, I’d sit on a glassy-smooth hump of granite next to a thundering rapid, soak up the sun, and wonder what I could learn from this primitive landscape. Like most English majors, I was reading a lot of contemporary poets, trying to decide which ones I most wanted to imitate. I favoured the California bunch, particularly Robinson Jeffers, who wrote of ancient tragedies like the Christ and Icarus legends. As a boy he built home-made wings and tried them out by jumping off a roof, and as a grownup he often wrote of dangerous things – hawks, eagles, and other fierce-eyed flying creatures, symbols of the poetic impulse. He moved to Carmel, California, and on a hill above the ocean he built a stone house and an observation tower, from which he contemplated ‘the great blue eye of the Pacific’, imagining that, like all great bodies of water, it was expressing an eternal truth, and that he needed to learn the ocean’s own alien language before he could comprehend it.
These ancient rivers and lakes seemed to emit the same eternal message. But you’d have to be pretty naive to think that you could decipher the code by bombing into a remote location like this and spending a few hours lounging by the rapids in your sunglasses. I suspected that you needed to slow down and pay attention to the water. You needed to spend some time here alone, like Siddhartha. I liked to kid myself that I was exploring the edges, but remote camps like Great Slave Lodge were just divots of civilization dug up and transplanted to the wilderness. We could drink canned beer as we explored this river, play with million-year-old fish species on ultra-light graphite spinning rods, and know all the time that there was a great dinner waiting for us back at the lodge. It was so comfortable that sometimes it seemed that we weren’t in the wilderness at all. We were just looking at it, as if through protective eyewear.
Once I was back at school, cracking the books, I had to confess that my summer in the wilderness hadn’t changed me much. How could it? I’d spent the whole summer surrounded by all the comforts of home. I fancied myself to be a woodsman, but the truth was, I’d never even spent a night alone in the forest. It was just play-acting. And I was getting too old for that kind of thing. If I quit school, I had to roll up my sleeves and get serious about an alternative education. If I stayed in school, it was time to grit my teeth and make a long-term commitment to my Ph.D. program. Either way, I was tired of halfway measures. It was time to make a decision. For a few minutes I sat there. Then I shifted the van into gear and voted with my foot.