MCA HUT! Archive

Every canoe trip is gonna have its little ups and downs. It’s only natural. What seems a little unnatural is when someone views the trip’s highest points as their own lowest moments.

Years back, I decided I needed to take my brother, Paul, and his wife, Eileen, on a nice, long, Canadian canoe trip to save them from all that domesticity they’d been experiencing. You know, treat them to the balm of wilderness after too long an absence. Their kids were still little back then; too little for a Canadian canoe odyssey but big enough for a two-week adventure at Grandma’s house. Paul jumped at the chance to go paddling again. The girls jumped at the chance for some grandmotherly coddling. Eileen just jumped. But she went along with the scheme.

I took ‘em up out of Temagami, Ontario. It’s a beautiful place and big enough to wander around in indefinitely without havin’ to rope yourself into some grueling, gotta-make-it itinerary. Though some folks do insist on that. I was doin’ my best to keep it fun. It just never occurred to me that not everyone has the same definition of fun.

Of course, it rained all day the first day. And it stormed the next. We had to cool our heels for more’n an hour at the Sharp Rock portage just waitin’ for the atmosphere to become a little less charged. Lightning rod is a role I don’t lightly or willingly take on myself. In camp, we cooked over smoky fires and huddled under a dripping tarp. It wasn’t the most congenial way to start a trip. But it coulda been worse. At least Paul and Eileen weren’t the sort to get all unstrung over a little bad weather. So the emotional climate stayed sunny.

And then we had a hard time finding campsites. Temagami had clearly become common knowledge since the last time I’d been there. Back then, we seldom met up with any other voyageurs, aside from the occasional brigade of red canoes from some summer camp. Now there was a steady stream of fly-in canoe tourists comin’ down the north arm of the Lady Evelyn River. Competition for camp space around there was hot. But even my city-kid brother managed to keep his nerves from flyin’ off into some kind of rush-hour frenzy.

In fact, everybody in our little group was stayin’ on friendly terms with one another and havin’ a passably good time. We were all of us doin’ just fine until we started portaging around all those nice waterfalls on the Lady Evelyn. Then trouble reared its ugly head from an entirely unexpected direction. Turns out, Eileen is afraid of heights.

Now, ordinarily, this is not a major problem for paddlers, seein’ as how water faithfully obeys gravity and runs to the lowest available point in the landscape. But when the water you’re travellin’ on keeps flingin’ itself offa cliffs in its quest for sea level, you know that sooner or later, one way or another, you’re gonna hafta contend with the elevation.

And the Lady Evelyn does deal out elevation without reservation or apology. Or mercy, for that matter. The route has an amazing capacity for rewriting your definition of portage for you, even if you thought your idea of a portage was savage enough to begin with. The first time I paddled up that way, we were soon referrin’ to our outing as backpacking with canoes rather than as a canoe trip. But it had never before occurred to me that it’d be a heckuva place for an acrophobe.
It was occurrin’ to Eileen now. Frank Falls was her first check. Here the portage trail climbed bluntly up the exposed spine of granite the river came tumblin’ down over. It was a portage with a heckuva view, not to mention the river chattering melodically over the stone right alongside it. It was a beauty! But to Eileen, it musta looked like the Continental Divide. And I don’t think she was much appreciatin’ the scenery either, confinin’ her gaze as she was to the bedrock before her.

At least the Frank Falls portage was mercifully short. The next portage, around Centre Falls, was an entirely different story. This was a lengthy haul over numerous ledges of inconvenient heights, tumbled blocks of granite, and one, yawning ravine spanned by a bridge without rope, rail, or curb at the sides for the relative comfort of those fidgety about falling. It was a pretty piece of work. It required an agile, thoughtful pace and often left the portager wishin’ for mountain goat genes buried somewhere in his/her ancestry. Eileen mighta been wishin’ for wings instead. Or maybe a tunnel. ‘Cause most of it was pretty vertiginous stuff. While the rest of us were admirin’ the airy view from the brink of the falls, Eileen plodded on with her eyes firmly on the granite in front of her boots and miserably hoped for deliverance to flatter ground.

Her relief at bein’ back on the relatively sedate gradient of the river was short-lived. Seemed we’d barely gotten the boats wet again when we came to Helen Falls. Eileen took one look at the portage and balked. To the rest of us, the Helen Falls portage looked like a fairly steep ascent to a breezy ridge through open woodland. To Eileen, it musta looked like a knife-edged serac atop Mt. Everest.

At this point, she and Paul held a tense, marital conference to which the rest of us were not privy. And we weren’t about to interfere, either. ‘Cause these situations do tend to be highly flammable when they involve people who are willfully and voluntarily related by marriage. Don’t know if it’s truly necessary for folks to hurt the one they love or if it’s just human nature to find it easier to be civil to casual acquaintances or even complete strangers than to our own kith and kin. But this is where otherwise loving canoe couples all too often start to descend in tightening spirals of mutual recrimination and resurrected arguments. Old arguments are the ugliest kind. At times like these, it’s best to stand back to avoid gettin’ burned by other people’s passions, especially if they’re loud and agitated passions.

Now, I never woulda credited Paul with much talent in the tact and diplomacy department. But somehow or other he and Eileen argued this thing out to a successful conclusion. ‘Cause ultimately, Eileen again shouldered her load and set off up the portage, grimly determined to carry on. And Paul doggedly carried on right beside her. From then on, Eileen adopted a strict, one-trip-only policy on waterfall portages. I guess she could steel herself to face each dizzying height once and only once. Paul dutifully took an extra trip to carry what woulda been her second load. It slowed us down, but at least we could keep on goin’.

Eileen’s ordeal by altitude continued around some of the prettiest waterfalls on the planet. But I don’t think Eileen spent much time admirin’ the scenery. Some places she mighta even been walkin’ with her eyes closed. But I suppose she wasn’t missing anything she rightly cared to see anyway.

For a while everything was a challenge for her. At Cabin Falls we had to scramble down a scree slope and across a ladder-like log bridge at the bottom of a narrow ravine. Eileen musta loved that. At Twin Sisters Falls the portage took us up to where we felt like we were standin’ at the top of the world... about the last place Eileen would wanna stand. Then it dropped us back to the river over a slick, little, granite knob. Here even the most nimble of us stopped to hand the canoes down over the rock face like we were a bucket brigade or something. Eileen just sat and slid down the stone on her bum. But she did keep on goin’. Through all the steep parts she could be heard muttering "I’ll be a better person for this" as the mantra to steady herself.

Then came Fat Man’s, an acrophobe’s nightmare if ever there was one. Here the river cut its way down through a tumbling run in a narrow, sheer-sided canyon. The portage started out deceptively wide and flat. But after we passed through the narrow, granite gateway known as Fat Man’s Squeeze, the portage dropped almost vertically down the cliff to a dynamic little eddy at the bottom of the cascade. We had to lower the boats down the defile on ropes. And I had to wonder how the heck we were gonna coax, wheedle, or con Eileen down with ‘em.

Well, she did it. It took her quite a while to summon up enough courage, but in the end, down she went, more or less of her own volition. I suppose the thought of goin’ back over all those steep portages we’d already crossed musta seemed worse than goin’ on down this one. In any case, I think she and Paul did more hand-holdin’ on that one portage than they had in the last ten years of marriage put together. Who says canoeing isn’t romantic?

Happily for Eileen, that was the end of her trial by heights. I didn’t hear a sound outta her on that last descent. It must be kinda hard to talk when your heart’s in your mouth like that. And I don’t know whether she was a better person for it in the end or not. I’d always figured she was pretty close to sainthood already just for havin’ stayed married to my baby brother for so long. But I do know that by the time they got home to Chicago, they both thought they’d had a marvelous time canoeing in Temagami.

Selective memory is a wonderful thing. Of all the ups and downs of any canoe voyage, it allows you to forget most of the downs and remember all the ups... even if the high points of your trip don’t necessarily correspond to the high points of the portage.

Well, ‘til next time, keep your paddle wet. And keep in touch. Drop me a line c/o Rich Furman and Morgan MacBain, 901 East Geranium Avenue, St. Paul MN 55106 or editor@canoe-kayak.org. Let me know if you’ve ever been depressed by exalted terrain. Remember, Uncle Wally promises to 1) tell the truth so no one would ever believe it anyway and 2) never reveal your true identity to anyone, not even Sir Edmund Hillary.