GRINDING UPSTREAM. N
ot to say Rob didn’t have his learning moments. The one thing they don’t have out West are the billions and billions of bloodthirsty mos-
quitoes that rise from the muskeg at dusk for their nightly feed. Our second night, Rob decided he’d go outside for a pee at 2 a.m. He
was abruptly mugged by thousands of the beasties, who then followed him as he dove back inside the tent to escape the onslaught. Brutally awakened, I joined in the slaughter of the ‘skitters until peace
returned. For Rob, the experience was like a kid putting his finger on a hot stove for the first time—he’d only ever do it once. He made sure he had a pee bottle handy inside the tent from that point on. By the end of the trip, Rob had picked up the paddling skills and
general river savvy that comes with time on the water, while my mind had been enriched by fresh observations of the Boreal wilderness. After two decades of expedition paddling, for the first time I was learning to pause my lust for kilometers and achieve a new level of intimacy with the wilderness. Twenty kilometers from our finish at Fort Severn, we spotted a po-
lar bear lumbering along the shore toward us. We stopped paddling and drifted slowly by it, stunned and delighted by the surprise sighting. It paused, looked at us, yawned, and then moved on. The bear was a perfect, awe-inspiring reward for Rob—an experiential
Stanley Cup he could hoist to mark the passage from newbie to veteran tripper over the course of 26 glorious days. Another summer is rolling in as I write this. Predictably, Rob got a
steady job and can’t go with me this year. However, since it worked out so well with him, I’m pretty open now to another fresh-faced partner. Any takers?
Frank Wolf is a Canadian filmmaker, adventurer, writer and environmentalist.
www.frank-wolf.net.
12:01 A.M. BOREAL FOREST LIVING.
ZERO TO HERO. BEARLY THERE.
40 | Canoeroots
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