WHAT GOES UP...
...MUST COME DOWN.
“ 87 BOTTLES OF BEER ON THE WALL...”
TURNS OUT ROB IS A REAL FUNGI. A
couple days into the trip we came upon a hearty clump of orange- yellow colored mushrooms along the riverbank. Rob stepped out of
the canoe and crouched down to inspect them. “These are chanterelles,” he told me. “Really? You sure they’re not poisonous?” I asked. “I pick the same ones back home every fall.” I’ve walked by these delectable morsels countless times during
thousands of canoe tripping kilometers in the Boreal, but it took Rob’s keen eye and curiosity with forest edibles to make me see them in a differ- ent light. In the past, the threat of mistakenly eating toxic wild mushrooms had made me steer clear of them, but the scrumptious addition to our bland freeze-dried food that night turned Rob into the hero of the day. It was just one of many moments where Rob had me seeing things from
a different perspective: Under a hot sun we dragged our canoe through swampy shallows in a thicket of cattails. When the canoe lurched to a stop I looked back to find Rob knee deep in swamp water, cutting a stalk of one of the cattails and stripping it down to its core. He snapped me off a piece. It tasted like a combination of carrot and celery—a refreshing and unexpected bog snack. Suddenly, cattails were more than something just to grind through; they were sustenance. Another time, fishing off an island on the Black Birch River, Rob
pointed out some algae-like sacs attached to the rock underwater, billow- ing in the current. This underwater windsock was something I’d often paddled past, but never considered. Rob turned one inside out to show me the larvae of the trumpet-net caddisfly. His wide-eyed curiosity was showing me something fresh in an environ-
ment I thought I knew so well. And the eight days we’d just spent grinding upstream on the Bloodvein River? Rob just breezed through it like he was sipping a Mai Thai at the Royal Hawaiian on Waikiki Beach.
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