RCanoe THE LAST OF THE angers BY BRIAN SHIELDS After 32 years patrolling Alqonquin Park by canoe,
Kirk McEathron can look back on a career most paddlers only dream about. But he’s not looking back.
He’s still looking out over his bow and around the next bend.
IN 1975 KIRK McEATHRON was a quiet and self-effacing city kid. He wore his hair in a woolly black Afro and spent his days doing soul-destroying warehouse work. Hearing about a job that of- fered a lot of sky, breathable air and adventure, he turned north and away from city life. The new job was not only brutally physi- cal and isolated, it was utterly life defining. Had a help-wanted ad for the job of Algonquin Park Canoe
Ranger been posted it might have read: “The successful applicant will be in excellent physical health. Duties will involve remote trail and campsite maintenance over long periods of isolation. The can- didate will be expected to actively engage any sweaty canoeist he encounters and act as an ambassador for The Park. Food, accommodation (state-of-the art canvas tents), canoe (for work transport), and chainsaw will be provided by the employer. Employment is summer-sea- sonal and re-hiring is at the employer’s discretion.”
Kirk signed up and became, at the age of 20, an Algonquin Park Canoe Ranger, as apt a job title as any ever invented by a bureau- crat. The woolly Afro quickly became a place where blackflies could hide and quietly enjoy him. His life became a succession of 10-day canoe trips from break-up to freeze-up, 100 days a season of endless physical work in a quiet world; it was a tough life spent sleeping under leaky canvas with the weather and the bugs as his constant companions. Jobs like that either make you or break you. It very quickly
made Kirk. 26 n C ANOE ROOT S summer 2007 “I knew this was a job…but it never seemed like one,” says Kirk.
“It soon swept me away. I developed a passion for the mornings, for the evenings. For just being out there.” Kirk and his partner would often rendezvous with other rang-
er crews at the end of those gruelling 10-day trips. Sometimes they met up at isolated cabins where they could relax out of the bugs and sleep under a dry roof for a night. But often the crews would gather on some dusty lumber access road for their pickup. Hilarious rides in the back of pick-up trucks would ignite four-day parties that would burn on and on until it was time to leave on the next 10-day trip. In those days there were 76 men who ranged through the al-
most 7,800 square kilometres of the park. They all soon became aware that the grinding dawn-to-dusk labour of a seemingly endless canoe trip created an intoxicating level of physical fit- ness that set them apart from ordinary beings. Kirk shakes his head as he recalls being overcome with a burst
of vigour 30 years ago. On their way back to camp one afternoon a group of rangers crossed a bridge over a creek and, on an im- pulse, they let animal exuberance take over and took the water route back to camp instead of following the trail. “ We ran jumping from rock to rock, leaping over fallen trees,
splashing our way full-tilt, on and on up the creek without even breathing. We knew we could have done it back and forth 10 times. We were always brawling with each other to prove who was the strongest. Some of us, cold sober and enjoying the ultimate fitness of our lives, felt that we could fly.”
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