BUTT END
ARE WILD AND FREE. PHOTO: KEVIN CALLAN
ALL GOOD THINGS
Wild Child
My daughter, Kyla, met the paddlers be- fore me. We were on the last of half-a-dozen portages that measured over two kilometers each. She said she gave them a friendly hello and asked them how their trip was going. I caught up just in time to overhear their tales of misadventure, of choppy waters on Ope- ongo Lake and too many bugs on the trail. They said that they were thinking of turn- ing back or cutting their trip short. “How long you out for?” my nine-year-
old asked. They replied, “This is day one of three full days!” When they discovered this was our tenth
day, their jaws dropped. They simply couldn’t comprehend this from a young girl dressed in sneakers, Bermuda shorts and a tattered old t-shirt reading “I Paddle, Therefore I Am.” They were in full camouflage fatigues,
army boots, knock-off Tilley hats and each had a survival knife reaching past his knees. They looked like infantry scouts in a war. “That’s a long time for a young girl to be
out in the wilderness,” one of the men said. Kyla’s response was a thing of beauty. A cheeky statement that veteran wilderness paddlers would truly appreciate: “You guys obviously don’t get out much, do ya?”
62 | Canoeroots
STAYING UNTAMED IN A MODERN AGE BY KEVIN CALLAN
My daughter’s first canoe trip was at the
age of six weeks. It was just an overnight, but by the time she was two she advanced to 10-day trips. In a way, she had to go canoe tripping a lot. I wouldn’t see her much if she didn’t—a good portion of my job is spent traveling in wilderness areas. It wasn’t me forcing her out that made her
love it so much. Children take to the wilder- ness easily because it’s familiar—they’re a little wild themselves. And they love it for the same reasons we do: exploration, adven- ture and fun. The triad of gifts that nature provides
can be hard to find in the modern world. Our family lives in a small city’s down- town core where nature is the odd bird landing on the fence that separates us from our neighbor. It’s a convenient place to live, but certainly not a place to fall in love with the outdoors. If it wasn’t for our lengthy canoe trips,
Kyla and I might have ended up exactly like the men we met on the portage trail—so far removed from the wilderness that we enter it as if preparing for battle. Worse, we could be so immersed in our electronics, we might never care whether we slept in the woods.
For those tamed by the comforts of mod-
ern life, camping is full of the kind of haz- ards only military belt knives can protect against. American comedian, Jim Gaffi- gan, has a stand-up act about how danger- ous camping is. Kyla and I watched it on YouTube one night. I found his bewildered, city-boy act
amusing; a tongue-in-cheek routine mak- ing fun of hungry bears and claustrophobic mummy bags (the latter creates a burrito for the former, Gaffigan says.) None of it, however, made Kyla giggle and she gave a serious frown when the comedian said, “Do you know why my parents never took me camping? Because they loved me.” She demanded I turn the video off. “I feel so sorry for that man,” she said. Kyla gets it. The joie de vivre of childhood
understands what so many adults have forgotten—we’re all born a little wild. And when we go into the woods, we’re going home. Wilderness wanderer Kevin Callan’s own joie de
vivre comes from the road less traveled. Visit the happy camper online at
www.kevincallan.com.
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