Todd is setting up camp when I double-back along a rough 1,100-meter portage on the Witch-
wood River. I hop fallen logs and zigzag through the forest as fast as I possibly can. It’s a game to test my speed and agility and see how quickly I can retrieve the last pack. Turning a corner, a knobby spruce branch wedges perfectly between my front and back leg, catapulting me headfirst into the moss. I curse the branch and look down to see a long, deep laceration on the calf of my left leg and an ugly gouge on the shin of my right. Blood pours instantly from both wounds. I get up and continue to run, first at a hobble and then at a steady, rhythmic clip. My clenched
teeth relax into a smile and everything clarifies. Blood, moss, spruce and movement in the heart of the Little North. Life is simple and I am extremely happy. I’ve been affected by a strain of madness perhaps, but on reflection it makes perfect sense. People
are hardwired for this—to physically struggle and push our bodies in nature for extended periods of time. Our ancestors ran down prey and traveled under their own power for most of the million years or so of human existence. If time is a gauge, we are only a blip apart from that way of life—a blip filled with La-Z-Boy chairs and cheesecake, but a blip nonetheless. Much like the artist whose need to create is passed to them from the DNA of prehistoric cave painters, our genetics retain that need to move. Canoe tripping is a portal that allows us to tap into this tribal call.
• • • T
BEDTIME READING ON OTOSKWIN LAKE.
PHOTO: FRANK WOLF
odd and I are in the Cree village of Peawanuck waiting for our plane to come and return us to urbana. In the meantime we’re hanging out at the house of the local Northern store manager, who generously
offered us accommodation. I’m in the dining room hunched over a detailed map of Ontario, tracing a line over the blue veins and blotches of our completed route. I step back and admire the curves of the fresh line with a visual record of every campsite, lake and river etched in my mind. I love making films about canoe journeys, but I realize now that making a film is simply adding another artistic layer to a thing that is itself utterly original and creative. Like an artist who is com- pelled to produce a painting on a blank canvas, the canoe tripper is compelled to step into a blank landscape, emerging at the end with the ultimate experience of a vision realized. If a film or painting is considered to be art then canoe tripping is, in every sense, art. •
www.canoerootsmag.com 43
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