Family Canoe Trips

My Dad was and is an outdoorsman at heart. With his father he had learned how to canoe and camp, and how to hunt and fish. All of these things (except the hunting) were things that he has passed on to us, his children. And seeing as how he had 5 children we were generally pretty close to broke and so out of doors trips were the grand vacations of our youth.

It is probable that I was infected with the outdoors bug directly from my father. I certainly spent about 80% of my time in my childhood thinking of the outdoors, reading survival and outdoors themed books, or actually hiding out in whatever wooded lot happened to be handy. Most summers when vacation time came along I looked forward to our annual canoe trips to famous outdoors spots.

We really did canoe around a lot of far off parts of Ontario. Several times we went to Algonquin park. We spent two weeks in the interior of Quetico National Park. And there were several other places whose name I can no longer remember but whose waters and shores I will never forget.

Having said all that I have about how often we canoed one might get the impression that we were experts and were also organizational geniuses. Far from it! As I mentioned earlier we were a big family without much money so our equipment was pretty basic. And the trips were often planned not long in advance by my workaholic Dad.

Sometime in the early spring my Dad would start thinking about where we should go in the upcoming summer. Seemingly out of his head he would pull the name of some far off place and would then order the detailed terrain maps of the area from whatever government ministry was responsible. This is how we learned about far-off places like the Missinibi and the Magnasippi Rivers. Or the French River. Or North Bay and Wawa. They would show up and we would see these places for the first time in the pleasant green of the topographical maps. He had long ago started teaching us how to read them so we could pick out the routes and see where the portages were marked and I would start dreaming of being out there in the wild nestled into a canoe.

Of course then my Dad would get busy with work and wouldn't even think about the trip for quite a while except maybe to call and order canoes from an outfitter before we finally bought our own. Eventually his vacation days would start arriving. In those days you couldn't yet buy granola and trail mix in the stores so we would have to make our own. So in the kitchen my mother would be baking up honey covered oatmeal and mixing it with dried fruit from the. Ulk store and then bagging it. Ziplock bags hadn't been invented yet either so these were bags big enough to hold a full size chicken that were closed with wire twist-ties. Once in a while we would also buy pre-packaged freeze dried meals from the Outdoors Store (a chain store long since faded into the past) but generally not.

I should mention packing here as it was done a little differently than one might expect. We would have been told to get ready and for me I would have packed a week in advance and used the best napsack. But as I was one of 5 kids (and a Labrador retriever) the others weren't always ready in advance. So then Dad would pack for them and their napsack would be a garbage bag!

Our mode of transportation was one of those big old AMC station wagons with the wood panelling on the sides. No matter how one tried to pack that to maximize space it wasn't going to happen. Especially when some of the suitcases were made by the good people from Glad! Imagine the front seat with both parents and one kid, probably my sister Gillian as she was the smallest, jammed into the front seat. Behind them in the bench seat were my older brother Andy, my older sister Nancy, myself, and my younger brother James. Now imagine the it dog laying at our feet. The back of the car would be packed floor to ceiling with sundry supplies. It was like a scene from National Lampoons Vacation movies!

As a small digression you will recall my mentioning the haphazard way that we had of packing? On one trip deep into the heart of Quetico park we realized far too late that we had forgotten to bring food for the fat old dog. Lady would have been about 8 years old at this point. Anyway we figured that we could always feed her left overs from our meals. In the end there really weren't too many things we didn't eat and so the dog started losing weight. At the start of the two week trip she was big and slow moving. It by the end she was much lighter and faster! I think she started eating the odd squirrel or chipmunk at that time and one day she even barfed up a bass that she must have caught and swallowed whole in the shallow water!

Being that there were so many of us and only two adults we always we in two very long canoes that were packed to the gunnels in much the same fashion as the car had been. As I recall when we were launching for these trips people would often come down to watch us pack and to speculate on our odds of survival. Crazy as it sounds we never ever had a canoe tip! My dad was far to good an outdoorsman for that!

One thing I remember about those trips is how drawn I was to the fishing. We went in to such wild locations that the fishing was often fantastic. I had a habit of getting up at 5am or whenever the day broke at which point I would grab my fishing rod and run to the water. I caught so many incredible fish on those trips and they often turned into breakfast!

I don't want to bore you with all the details of our camping experience especially when the whole purpose of bringing it up was to point out how significantly I was influenced by 'the wilds'. In those days fishing and camping and making snares and other survival related things were my everything. I had some hidden vision of being 'the boy against the wilderness'. I suspect that is because in our home I always felt so powerless. At school my ADHD and the fact that we moved every 2 years meant I was an outsider and did not feel accepted. And as a boy the only place that I felt I could go and be in control of my own destiny was in the bush.

I am going to leave off here for today and will probably get back to writing about Kearl and the job for a while. Thanks for reading!