was their Reindeer Lake. When we hit the treeline, the patches of trees reminded me of Warburton Pike’s 1892 barren ground travels to the east of us.[18] Such patches of trees provided great relief. Here, a fire could finally be had again. Often food and even a canoe would be cached in such locations to aid the return trip off the barrens back to Great Slave Lake. Franklin and his men were too far gone to enjoy any celebratory spirit in returning to the trees, and caches of food were not to be found. The Yellowknife families who had supported the expedition down the Coppermine River before returning home simply assumed the obsessed/confused travellers would perish. The stories of Hearne, Pike, and mostly Franklin lay below me as our flight advanced into the trees.
And what of the scenery I so enjoyed while on the river and on walks from campsites? As one might expect, there was for Franklin’s men, who wrote published journals, a range from desolate to grand. Richardson, while on an advance exploration party, wrote in a letter on June 9, 1821, to send back to Fort Enterprise: “Amongst these hills you may observe some curious basins, but nowhere did I see anything worthy of your pencil. So much for the country; it is a barren subject, and deserves to be thus briefly dismissed.”[19]
To the contrary, George Back wrote in his journal, later that same month:
… the scene was interesting and novel — a lake bounded on each side with high and almost perpendicular rocks, whose green summits were capped with large stones — and whose valleys displayed at certain distances a few solitary clumps of pines — claimed the first attention — whilst the continued ranges of receding blue hills — which the eye lost ultimately in the grey dimness of the atmosphere — was scarcely less attractive — our own cavalcade possessed the centre, and what with the total innovation of transporting canoes in such a manner — the singular appearance of the men and sledges — the positions and dress of the officers as well as the deep contrast between the perpetual silence of the place, and the animation of the party — afforded a most perfect view of a voyage of discovery.[20]
For me and, I trust, my enthusiastic comrades, the scenery was awesome. One person’s bleak or “barren subject” is another person’s “interesting and novel … perfect view.” Despite the fact that our summer travels did not correspond with the wintery conditions on the barren grounds for the Arctic land expedition, I could regularly place the men in certain aspects of the scenery slowly working their way south as I flew by. Once we landed in Yellowknife, I felt the relaxed calm of having exercised my imagination well.
I had enjoyed two weeks of a collegial canoe trip/conference. Our supplies were plenty, our time lengthy, the land welcoming with animals to view (not seen as our only food source), our purpose personal (not driven by the full force of the British Empire), and our ambitions modest. We had come together to learn from the land and share the varied attentions we each brought to the trip. Our story is a good one. It was a successful first wilderness expedition conference. Still, I cannot stop thinking about that darn Franklin story with characters such as Pierre St. Germain.
Conference delegates at Bathurst Inlet Lodge.
Photo courtesy of Burt Page.
Returning home after his distressing trip, Lieutenant Back told the North West Company’s representative, Willard Wentzel, at Fort Chipewyan, “To tell the truth, Wentzel, things have taken place which must not be known.” Wentzel already suspected as much. He had a year earlier written to his superiors, “It is doubtful whether, from the distant scene of their transactions, an authentic account of their operations will ever meet the public eye in England.”[21]
I hope our 2010 trip is promoted widely as an example of a successful idea, perhaps redefining outdoor education conferencing. That first Franklin expedition was to be promoted, but how truthfully? And that is why we need to pause and ponder when reading our Canadian travel literature. Often the truth has to be gleaned from the imagination.
The American poet Wallace Stevens in 1942 wrote: “Imagination is a liberty of the mind, a power of the mind and over the possibilities of things … we have it, because we don’t have enough without it.”[22] To imagine, we become open to ideas. It starts with a spark of possibility. The possibility is that the stories of the place, and indeed the stories we create in the present, become alive and bring meaning to time. The historical muse is a solid part of place-responsive pedagogy; a storied landscape leads beyond meaning to caring and perhaps acting on behalf of the place. All this is a sincere step towards cultivating ecological consciousness — part of an educative process. That is the theory.
The practice is to pepper the trail with stories that, for those who grab onto the imaginative spark of possibility, will render the past as a felt experience. It is not romanticism, but rather a widening of reality. The practice can lead to what novelist James David Duncan explores in The River Why. He writes of characters with “native intelligence.”
… it evolves as a native involves himself in his region. A non-native awakes in the morning in a body in a bed in a room in a building on a street in a country in a state in a nation. A native awakes in the center of a little cosmos — or a big one, if his intelligence is vast — and he wears this cosmos like a robe, senses the barely perceptible shifting migrations, moods and machinations of its creatures, its growing green things, its earth and sky.[23]
The big cosmos storied landscape I aspired to develop and share was that of the barren grounds. Franklin’s Arctic land expedition of 1819–22 was a primary source. Some might have felt that imaginative spark. Others were always more imaginatively driven towards the animals, the landforms, and the body in motion. All of these attentions were shared amongst our group in organized sessions and informal moments. There was a happy air of eclecticism as we bounced off one another’s primary interests. Much talent, much knowledge, much to share by way of theory and practice. We were on a canoe trip and at a professional conference. It worked! We were, in the words of educator David Orr, “re-educating people [ourselves] in the art of living well where they are.”[24]
2
Remote Persons and Remote Places:
Wendell Beckwith, Nirivia, and Others
“What is a hobby anyway? Where is the line of demarcation between hobbies and ordinary normal pursuits? A hobby is a defiance of the contemporary. It is an assertion of those permanent values which the momentary eddies of social evolution have contravened or overlooked. If this is true, then we may also say that every hobbyist is inherently a radical, and that his tribe is inherently a minority. To find reasons why it is useful or beneficial converts it at once from an avocation into an industry — lowers it at once to the ignominious category of an “exercise” undertaken for health, power, or profit. Lifting dumbbells is not a hobby. It is a confession of subservience, not an assertion of liberty.”[1]
— Aldo Leopold
Dorothy Molter, the Root Beer Lady of Knife Lake; Alex Mathius on the Obabika River in Temagami; the “ruling elders” of Nirivia; and Wendell Beckwith at Whitewater Lake — these are all remote persons dwelling in remote places. In each case there is a strong assertion of liberty.[2]
I have always had enthusiasm for the relationship of person and place. The two must go together, and therefore I had to go to the place to really get to know the person. Recently I have visited Whitewater Lake and Nirivia, so I will deal with these remote places and their charmed people: people who are brilliant hobbyists in Aldo Leopold’s meaning of the word.
I think this allure started with my 1970s university days, when in the winter I would
