Mother Nature at rest. PHOTO: GARY MCGUFFIN
JOANIE McGUFFIN has logged tens of thousands of kilo- metres in a canoe, paddling across Canada, circumnavi-
gating Lake Superior and tracing a forgotten network of water- ways and overgrown portages in northern Ontario. Through their ambitious journeys, tireless presentation tours and photo-rich books, McGuffin, 48, and husband Gary have become some of Canada’s best-known adventurers and most active conserva- tionists. But it wasn’t until she became a mother and started to canoe-trip with her daughter, Sila, that McGuffin learned to truly appreciate her wilderness lifestyle. “One time we were canoeing in the old growth forests north
of Sudbury on Haentschel Lake,” she says, joyously enunciat- ing every word. “Sila was a year old and, looking at the trees, smiling and waving at the wind-shaped ancient pines.” For all the trees on all the lakes that McGuffin had previously paddled past, she says seeing that landscape reflected in her daughter’s wide eyes was like seeing it for the first time herself. McGuffin’s prim and proper English speaks to her upbringing
as the daughter of British immigrants. A red cedar-canvas canoe was a fixture in childhood summers spent at her family cottage on Muskoka’s Lake Joseph. She met Gary in college and em- barked on her first wilderness trip with him, spending two weeks on northern Ontario’s Missinaibi River. Later, while backpacking the Appalachian Trail, the soon-to-be-married McGuffins charted a life course that would involve huge amounts of time in the wilder- ness, including a two- year honeymoon canoe trip across Canada starting in 1983. The cross-country journey, with its popular weekly CBC Radio spots and ensuing best-selling book moulded McGuffin’s career
“Stopping what you’re doing because you have a child is terrible”
HAVING A DAUGHTER HAS CAUSED JOANIE McGUFFIN TO EXPAND, NOT CURTAIL, HER WIDE-RANGING ADVENTURES
McGUFFINTHE MOTHER JOANIE
as a professional adventurer. The couple settled in the Algoma Highlands north of Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, in the late 1980s, and used the area as a base for summer-long trips around Lake Superior and across northern Ontario. “We’ve always done these public things and then scurried back to our remoteness,” she says with her trademark laugh. Despite such a long history of ambitious trips, McGuffin says
the moments that best capture the essence of her lifestyle have happened since Sila was born in 1999. “Sila’s given us another reason to follow our passions.” In 2002, three-year-old Sila participated in the McGuffins’
2,000-kilometre canoe trip along the Great Lakes Heritage Coast, from the Ontario-Minnesota border on Lake Superior near Thunder Bay to Port Severn on Lake Huron’s Georgian Bay. McGuffin says she has “never felt paranoid” about taking Sila along. “You don’t need to worry about kids,” she says. “They’re pretty rugged. The idea of stopping what you’re doing because you have a child is terrible.” Last summer, Sila graduated to wielding her own paddle
in the bow of her mother’s canoe on a trip to Lake Superior’s offshore Slate Islands. For McGuffin, the experience was the culmination of parenting done right. “I remember when Sila was a two-week-old baby lying in the bottom of the canoe,” she says. “There was nothing that I could teach her that could compare with absorbing the sound of the water and the wind and all the smells in the air. Those are the moments that shape our sensory selves.” » CONOR MIHELL
www.canoerootsmag.com
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