High on the Big Stone Heart: And Further Adventures in the Boreal Heartland

By Charles Wilkins

High on the Big Stone Heart is a collection of vibrant and entertaining essays on the people and places of Canada’s Boreal North as seen through the eyes of one of the country’s most celebrated writers of non-fiction. Accompany Charles Wilkins as he ranges across the wilds of northern Quebec; ventures deep into the subarctic Yukon in search of caribou; and tracks the north coast of Lake Superior, the world’s most elegant and mysterious body of fresh water. Meet Murray Monk, trapper extraordinaire, and Barney Giesler, the king of the wooden boat builders. Trace the route of the Toronto Maple Leafs’ Bill Barilko, star of the 1951 Stanley Cup Final, on his last and fatal fishing trip to James Bay. Join Maurice "Rocket" Richard on the backwoods adventures that sustained him throughout his troubled career. Follow Wilkins himself as he embarks on a wilderness survival test with nothing but the clothes on his back. This is a book for anyone drawn to the magic of the North, and by the characters who inhabit that epic terrain.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dundurn
• Release date: Mar 2, 2009
• ISBN: 9781770705111

Charles Wilkins

Charles Wilkins is the author of eight books, including two national bestsellers, Paddle to the Amazon (with Don Starkell) and After the Applause. "Wilkins writes with flair and insight, and is not satisfied simply to relate what is obvious about his subject." -- Martin Levin, The Globe & Mail

Book preview

HIGH

on the

BIG

STONE

HEART

HIGH

on the

BIG

STONE

HEART

And Further Adventures in the Boreal Heartland

CHARLES WILKINS

NATURAL HERITAGE BOOKS

A MEMBER OF THE DUNDURN GROUP

TORONTO

Copyright © Charles Wilkins, 2009

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise (except for brief passages for purposes of review) without the prior permission of Dundurn Press. Permission to photocopy should be requested from Access Copyright.

Copy-edited by Allison Hirst

Designed by Erin Mallory

Printed and bound in Canada by Webcom

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Wilkins, Charles

High on the big stone heart : and further adventures in the boreal

heartland / by Charles Wilkins.

ISBN 978-1-55002-865-2

1. Thunder Bay Region (Ont.)--Anecdotes. 2. Thunder Bay Region (Ont.)--Biography. I. Title.

FC3094.4.W543 2008 971.3'12 C2008-903971-8

1 2 3 4 5 13 12 11 10 09

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and The Association for the Export of Canadian Books, and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishers Tax Credit program, and the Ontario Media Development Corporation.

Care has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright material used in this book. The author and the publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any references or credits in subsequent editions.

J. Kirk Howard, President

www.dundurn.com

Published by Natural Heritage Books

A Member of The Dundurn Group

Front cover photo: The Sibley Peninsula on the north shore of Lake Superior. Photo by Barry Wokciechowski. Back cover photo: The north shore of Lake Superior near Nipigon. Photo by the author.

for Margie Bettiol and Doug Flegel

and in memoriam Norma and Leone

CONTENTS

Introduction

PART ONE - At Large in the Boreal Heartland

1. The Survival of the Unfittest

Tips on Decorating Your Debris Hut

2. Where the Swamp Hags Live

The Redemption of the Back 31

3. A Kid with a Smile and a Fishing Pole

The Glorious Last Days of a Stanley Cup Champion

4. Riot Man

The Outdoor Passions of Maurice Rocket Richard

5. Getting Jaked

Canada's Finest and Funniest Fishing Writer

6. The Heirs of Barney Giesler

The Sweet Cedar Fragrance of the Boat Factory

7. Summers Built on Pine

The Family and the Forests of History

8. The Funkiest Monk of All

Canada's Second Oldest Profession

PART TWO - Short Takes

9. The Greatest Show on Earth

Wonders of the Night Sky

10. The Rinky Dink Rink

Not Having What It Takes

11. Fishing (Sort of)

Part One

12. Fishing (Sort of)

Part Two

13. Hot Metaphors from Dawson City

La Vie Bohème at Fifty-Five Below

14. Caribou Cops

Riding the Dempster Highway on the

Coldest Day in History

15. Second Wind

Blue Sails in the Sunlight

PART THREE - High on the Big Stone Heart

16. High on the Big Stone Heart

Running the North Shore of Superior

About the Author

INTRODUCTION

When I moved to Thunder Bay from southern Ontario in 1991, I found myself with an exhilarating new range of landscapes and subject matter for my books and magazine stories - the forests, the rock, the wildlife, the old mountains, the lakes. And of course the people, who are all but a subspecies in their adaptations to the wilderness and its distances; and to the requirements, both interior and exterior, of living half the year in a version of climatic distress, the other half in a paradise made all the more seductive by the perils and exhaustion of winter.

Perhaps more importantly, life in the North gave me a new model for my imagination, a way of seeing the world that nourished the sort of freedom and risk that become possible for a writer when the old context and self-expectations are removed, and suddenly there is nothing to lose by being oneself and by telling ones stories in the most open and honest of ways.

Not that I ever fully relinquished my attachments to the south - or to big cities and all they represent. It has occurred to me that I liked the cities more for not having to live in them, and I continued to spend my summers in central Ontario, and to work regularly in, say, Toronto and Montreal.

The stories and essays that follow are not all set in Northwestern Ontario or on the shores of Lake Superior - or indeed even in an area that people up here think of as the North. Some are set no further north than Muskoka, Ontario (which in Toronto may seem a subarctic landscape, but to people in Thunder Bay is considered barely north of the Equator). Other pieces are set so far north - on, say, Hudson Bay or in the northern Yukon - as to make my home turf on Lake Superior seem way down south.

Whatever the case, each piece has at its core some essential connection to the forests, the wildlife, the waters, the winters. Or to the mystique or idea of the North - an abstraction perhaps bearing little credibility in some parts of the country but held inviolable in these parts and significant to our perception of who we are.

What I am getting at as I bring this brief introduction to a close is that the North, while of course literally a geographic designation, is also a habit of mind. It is a perspective born not just of a proximity to wilderness, or of isolation or self-reliance, but of our deepest inner longings … for warmth, for light, for the satisfactions of attachment. Or, paradoxically, for separation and space.

It is a complex perspective inspired by a complex land, and my hope is that in one way or another it will be exemplified by the stories that follow.

Part One

AT LARGE IN THE BOREAL HEARTLAND

1

THE SURVIVAL OF THE UNFITTEST

Tips on Decorating Your Debris Hut

Ihave little to say by way of introduction to this story, apart from noting that when I got home from the sojourn in the wilderness that is at the heart of the piece and began to write about it, it occurred to me that I was probably a degree or two loopier than the average fifty-eight-year-old, and that if I ever achieved proper adulthood I should stop thinking of myself as someone who could survive anything up to and including hunger, solitude, morbidity, lunacy, and tick infestation. On the other hand, the experience reminded me that I still had enough jam and self-confidence to get up from my desk and go out and take a risk in the interest of adventure and self-awareness. The piece was written for James Little at Explore magazine, who urged me to attempt to be funny in describing what it was like to approach death via exposure and starvation.

One of the most persistent orthodoxies of the U.S. Army Survival Manual (internet version) is that a man should be in damn good physical condition when there is any possibility of being lost in the wilderness or exposed to survival conditions. So it was well-omened that, when my own test came, I had been on a fitness regimen that included long tough hikes, regular rowing, and two hundred push-ups a day.

My mental preparedness, unfortunately, was not at the same level. Never has been. The most revealing thing my late dad ever said about himself was that he wanted to be a better man, but not enough to actually be one. Like father, like son. While I might have wanted to be ready for what the wilderness threw at me when I walked into it on May 3, 2007, I had done nothing about it. The result was that through the first couple of days of my bedevilment, I suffered increasing doubts that I could accomplish what I had set out to do.

One of the few things buoying me by the middle of day three was the survival manual's declaration that When required to do so, you will tap into a reservoir of inner strength that you never knew you had.

Notwithstanding the sentiments of the Desiderata (U.S. Army version), what I really wanted to tap into by late that third afternoon was a heaping platter of burgers and fries, and a little warmth and comfort on a night that promised to be significantly colder than a man without a sleeping bag or tent - or flashlight or pillow or hat - is built to endure in the wilderness of northern Ontario.

The small miracle was that, as the sun settled behind the treetops, I did indeed tap into a reservoir that I did not know existed - a creative one. The resulting satori, a modest humdinger, led me to realize that rather than a mattress of moss and loose pine needles underneath me, an ever-disintegrating mess such as I had suffered until now, I should stuff the moss into my pants, so that my insulation from the cold and ground couldn't go anywhere and just might keep me padded through the night.

Which is exactly what I did. And for a while, it all worked brilliantly. Indeed, in my moss-thickened skivvies, I enjoyed the longest sleep of my six-day endurance test - an unbroken ninety minutes that ended abruptly when the noseeums and cooties that had apparently been dormant in the moss emerged warmed and voracious, making such an aggressive assault on my groin that within seconds I was standing outside my shelter, naked from the waist down, violently shaking out my blue jeans and underwear.

If I had any inclination to remain positive at that point (as the survival manual urged), I might have celebrated the moment by tilting my head back - still minus my pants - and opening my mouth for a drink of the uncontaminated and frigid water that was beginning to fall liberally as rain.

I am no fan of the pop psych of Christian fundamentalism, but it occurred to me to wonder as I stood there in the rain (and as the bumper sticker demands): What would Jesus have done? I recalled that on one occasion, facing a downer of a circumstance, Jesus wept. I could certainly have done that. At other times, he prayed - I believe for deliverance. I could have done that too.

I must admit, however, that at that point in my misery, if I had been granted one Christ-like capability, I would have saved it till morning and have turned the water of Greenwood Lake into wine. Not only would this have answered my fears about giardia, I could have spent the remainder of my six day dementia pickled and prostrate in my debris hut.

It was my own private version of Survivorman, and the rationale behind it was simple: Could I cut it in the wilderness for six days with just the clothes on my back? And would my attention to an old army survival guide provide me sufficient knowledge and courage to turn potential disaster into a modest triumph of the human body and spirit? (Even as I drove to my rendezvous, I envisioned myself coming out on the sixth day, bent but unbroken, my exit immortalized by the slow motion camera, and transformed by the voice of Michael Buble crooning a quiet version of To Dream the Impossible Dream.)

I chose Greenwood Lake as a test site, because it is close enough to civilization for easy getting but well away from hikers and boaters - indeed well beyond help should an emergency have arisen.

To get there, and to the seventeenth-century white pine forest that rises off the lake's south shore, you travel about a hundred kilometres west from Thunder Bay on Highway 11 and turn south on District Road 802. The latter, a once-vital logging route, has been allowed to deteriorate into a menacing succession of potholes, washouts, and half-extruded boulders. It winds and bumps over granite outcrops, through beaver swamps, and across extensive cutovers long since cleared of jack pine and spruce for the pulp trade. These days, the road is better suited to moose, bear, and lynx - all of which inhabit its precincts - than to human beings in motorized vehicles. But it was ideal for my purposes. And perhaps a dozen kilometres from the lake, I abandoned my vehicle and trekked the rest of the way in - the idea being that with my vehicle thus out of play there would be no temptation to do a twenty-four-kilometre round trip on foot in order to sack out for a few hours in the relative comfort of the back seat.

Well, actually, there would be the temptation. But by the time it arose on the aforementioned third day, I was too listless from lack of food even to walk along the lakeshore in search of a grub or two or a patch of poopinducing clintonia shoots, which might have formed the basis of a bedtime snack. Instead, I ate a pair of shriveled rosehips that I had overlooked in the bottom of my jeans pocket, plus my last square of dark chocolate, and cupped a few scoops of murky-looking lake water into my mouth.

My survival adventure was in fact a challenge from the editors of Explore magazine. And the rules were these: six days, five nights, with no more equipment or sustenance than I could fit into the pockets of my jeans. No axe, no cooking pots, no weapons; no tent or sleeping bag. I would add no joke, except that in the planning and commissioning of this febrile misadventure, I had the temerity to think that my chances would be improved if I could indulge in a laugh or two along the way.

My survival in the end was about as laughable as hemorrhoids. However, in its incipient innocence, I admit to finding a measure of levity in, say, the contents of my pocket larder: to wit, a half dozen morsels of beef jerky (stale), two or three ounces of cheddar cheese (squashed), a dozen crackers (busted), a McIntosh apple (bruised), and a hundred-gram bag of raisins. Oh, and a chocolate bar.

Not that I felt any great need for superfluities such as matches or a Swiss Army knife, but I brought those along anyway, plus a tiny kit of emergency supplies.

Your emergency kit need not be elaborate, said the manual, but it should be securely contained. To keep mine together, I chose a metal Altoids box about the size of a deck of cards, and, among other things, stuffed in twenty metres of monofilament fish line, a pair of fish hooks and sinkers, thirty 222s (codeine being a measure of survival unto itself), half a dozen Band-Aids, a tiny tube of antibacterial cream, and two condoms (not for the usual application but because they are recommended for water carriage and storage … in which case, because size really does matter where water storage is concerned, I brought along my customary XXXL French ticklers).

I spent most of the first afternoon of this decidedly unshapely mission constructing what the manual described as a debris hut, a name that, by the third or fourth day, would apply as accurately to the contents of my skull as to the loose heap of sticks, branches, and brush that went into my new home's lumpish construction. When it was finished, I crawled in, pulled the suggested ball of forest clutter in behind me so as to block the doorway (from what I wasn't sure), and sat considering whether I should continue just sitting there or get out and begin the more onerous task of figuring out what I was going to eat for the next six days. Or not eat, as it turned out.

On that score (which might