j DIGITAL EXTRA: Click here to see Ray Mears in action in We Belong To It, a short documentary filmed during this trip.
ALLENWATER BRIDGE HIJINKS.
Art & Soul “If
36 | Canoeroots
One week in the wilds of Wabakimi’s Boreal forest with Ray Mears, the world’s leading bushcraft expert
I were to paddle with a carbon fiber blade I think I’d develop a palsy,” Ray Mears tells me as he carefully axes another cedar chunk from a six-foot-tall board. We’re camped by the shore along the southern edge of Wabakimi Provincial Park’s sprawling 8,920
square kilometers in northwestern Ontario. There’s drizzle in the chill Sep- tember air. Hunched under a forest green sil-nylon tarp I’m watching the almost lost art of carving using only axe and crooked knife come alive. Thunk. “I want a wooden paddle because it’s not perfect,” continues Mears, sur-
rounded by an increasingly large pile of wood chips. “The grain will lift when it gets wet, and one day I will have to throw it away.” Thunk. Thunk. “But when that time comes, I can throw it back into the
forest, where it came from and nature will reclaim it without any further in- tervention from me. The canoe leaves no trace and neither does the paddle if it’s made of wood.” He stops to consider the shape he’s made—what was a section of tree just
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