power and influence. We enjoy marking the passing of the grey days with rain-fires, sheltered under a spark-rav- aged wisp of a tarp, creating a rough comfort in the dampness and wind. It is, we think sometimes, for the water that we drive
for days and push the confines of credit limits to pay for floatplane charters. We are whitewater paddlers, and we travel in the company of fellow zealots, each infatuated with making the move, sacrificing the boats on the “Mouchie’s” rocky altar and scouting every wave of every set so that it can be played like a piece of music. The Mouchie has numerous stretches of water rated
beyond the limits of most open canoes. We run all the scary stuff for the camera and bounce out at the ends pumped with adrenaline. Spontaneous war cries leap out, euphoria finding a voice over the sound of moving water. Yes, this high could be the reason we do this. Finally, there is a stretch of river that drives the boats
to shore. The land falls away and the water begins to scream and consume itself. Like giddy children, we skip along the wide granite edge of its spring floodplain, pick- ing flat rock campsites, and then again and again finding better places, as we laugh into the deep rock rooms hid- ing under immense overhanging slabs. The river noise fills us and the water tears past so fiercely that the mind will not allow the eyes to look even for fantasy lines out among the madness. The hypnotic river draws us to its edge, sits us down gently and sucks our minds dry. At a time like this, we don’t ask why we’re here. We know we’re about to camp in Heaven. And it is for this reason that I am tempted to say it is
the campsites. For when our bruised canoes are back on their racks, stored for another winter, and our memories
whitewater
of the Mouchie are aged and mellowed, it is the camp- sites that we seem to most remember. It is the rolling Amazon forest of caribou moss that we sleep on again in our reveries and it is our dramatic camp in front of the dark and comforting rock rooms on the river’s floodplain that is always the first retreat for the mind. But isn’t it all these things and then some? The winter
dreams, the languor of river time, the adrenaline of whitewater, the campsites—all of this makes the river something we turn to each year. We paddle because we have come to know that a remote river always asks us who we are, and given a canoe, always answers by trans- porting us so far beyond the bonds and the shackles of
we simply need to feel something different, to escape a life lived on claustrophobic acres of windless office carpeting in some highrise centre of power and influence.
the ordinary. Our time spent together on the Mouchie is enough to sustain us for another year, until our hemi- sphere tilts back toward the sun, igniting the fire within us for another wild river.
Brian Shields is a retired sport-fishing guide who presently fritters away his life in his solo boat, trying to perfect his cross-forward stroke.
It is the campsites we remember most
Yes, this could be the reason
2004 Spring 49
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