a cabin in the tall pines on a quiet pond set apart from the active summer canoe routes of Lake Temagami. It was an idyllic place for cross-country ski touring. We would travel over to Gull Lake and hook onto the abandoned logging road network. Beyond Joss’s cabin, we set up a base camp in an abandoned logging cabin. It still had a wood stove. For me, between 1976 and 1979, these two cabins were magical. Joss was my Grey Owl, my Beckwith. He was living many peoples’ dream: liberty, independent, and intimate with winter. My beloved hobbies seemed to be his normal life. He worked as a canoe tripper in the summer and did his own trip in the spring. In the fall, he visited his parents in Manhattan — the juxtaposition is not lost on me there. The Temagami cabin was home through the winter and its shoulder seasons — ice freeze-up and breakup.
From Joss, I saw the best of remote living, and my hobbies turned to “an assertion of liberty.” There might be another side to the story, but I didn’t see it. Joss had a comfortable lifestyle of winter chores and outings. Guests were more than welcome and all thrived on day trips out from the cabin. Mostly, though, Joss was comfortable with himself. I learned many things from my visits. If I had to condense this down to a few central ideas, they would be the joy of simple, efficient technologies and of staying put somewhere where one can pursue one’s central interests.
Joss, the squatter, was eventually found out when logging moved in on those tall pines. He was forced to take down the cabin, but given he had been there over five years, he was allowed to stay there under canvas. A teepee did the trick, but the logging encroachment, the loss of the cozy cabin, and mostly a new partner (Trish MacDonald from Australia) sent Joss packing to Australia to work in its parks services. Joss and I have kept up regular contact with trips here and there, every five years or so. However, I’ve kept hunting out remote people in remote places. I attribute my enthusiasm for this to those still evenings warmed by the wood stove in Joss’s cozy cabin. I will always be content to be a part of his tribe, and many others, too, as I’ve travelled with friends in Canada.
Wendell Beckwith in Wabakimi is one fine example of remoteness. “We came, we saw, we sawed.” That’s how veteran canoe guide Phil Cotton describes Wabakimi canoe tripping. Portages aplenty have fallen spruce that make a day’s pre-planned destination dubious at best. Wendy Kipp, Deb Diebel, Margot Peck, and I had experienced one such late afternoon portage and therefore arrived at Best Island on Whitewater Lake too late to visit the much-anticipated Wendell Beckwith cabins. Saddened, we camped nearby, excited for a full day of exploration to follow. The next day, August 16, 2005, we paused to start our tour of the cabins with a reading from a healthy volume of Beckwith literature penned mostly after his death. Surprisingly, we read that Wendell Beckwith had died at this site on August 16, 1980, twenty-five years earlier to the day. This fact added a haunting aura of his presence to our quest — a quest to understand the man in part by the wondrous cabins he has left behind. Here one can really feel the remote peace, but also a remote, radical person.
A friend, Alice Casselman, who had visited Wendell in the summer and winter several times while working with Outward Bound in the late 1970s, told me there were three central pillars to Wendell’s life at Best Island: environment, science, and humanitarianism. Environment was our main interest.[3]
Wendell learned over time how to live comfortably alone through the seasons of northwestern Ontario. Two of his cabins, The Workshop (later called Rose’s cabin) and The Snail, are packed with environmentally wise designs to maximize comfort in six months of cold weather. There is a thirty-five-ton parabola-shaped fireplace in The Museum, his first cabin (which didn’t work out as a year-round dwelling despite the fireplace). The Hobbit-like Snail faces south and is built into a sand hill as a semi-subterranean dwelling to maximize the thermal mass of the earth. In The Snail, Wendell figured he used twenty times less wood per day than in his conventionally shaped and sized Museum cabin. The Snail’s ingenious teepee-like central fire had a ceiling opening and an underpad of rock to maintain heat. How Wendell evolved his understanding of living comfortably through the seasons is a detailed study on its own. A 2005 Globe and Mail column called the buildings “one of the country’s most inaccessible architectural treasures.”[4] Ironically for the canoe tripper, the fairy-tale setting, rather than being inaccessible, is in a choice location, easy to plan
Wendell’s snail cabin built to maximize winter warmth.
into most Wabakimi canoe routes. I suggest you keep in mind my friend Jon Berger’s sentiments for the environmentally intriguing cabins: “They do not fit the main patterns of the land but have their own intrinsic story and value.” Wendell established his own unique patterns with this landscape, and his story now is part of the place and deserves to stay with us.
The cabins are still a showcase of Wendell’s environmental design even now after thirty years of minimum care. Though all signs point to the need for regular maintenance to preserve this gem in the bush, little has been done.
While the hexagonal wooden tile flooring, the wooden crank/pulley drop fridge (into a pit), the remarkable drying racks, and The Snail’s structural shape all speak to legendary architectural abilities, Wendell the scientist is equally compelling. The patented inventor arrived in Canada as an illegal alien, cutting the roadblock lock at a border crossing on the Pigeon River (between Minnesota and Ontario) and leaving his wife and five kids while he pursued pure research in a remote setting. He had a financial backer who wanted a wilderness retreat property that Wendell and the local Slipperjack family would build. Pure research means, in Wendell’s own words, “You start from scratch and live in a primitive way until your mind clears.” You sit with a blank sheet of paper and pencil. Again in Wendell’s words: “Simplicity comes from depth … from deep penetrating views and the simpler you get, the broader your concepts are going to become and that’s what’s necessary in basic research.”
Wendell Beckwith at Best Island.
Photo courtesy of Moon Joyce.
Wendell was interested in many subjects. He was a wizard with trigonometry. His calculations dominate his journals: thousands of pages concerning the importance of the number pi; the alignment of the pyramids, Stonehenge, and Best Island (he once built a cedar log replica of Stonehenge on the lake ice); the measurement of local ice and spring breakup; eclipse studies; and plate tectonics. You might say celestial and global mapping captured his main interests. These interests led to the following theories: the distance around the world is within a quarter of a mile of the square root of pi; the moon was more important than the sun for pyramid builders; northwestern Ontario is a geophysical keystone oddly connected, given calculations of latitude (measured with a slide rule), to Greenwich, Stonehenge, and the pyramids. Finally, pre-1980, he determined a returning ice age would ultimately solve our global population explosion and related issues. All this from a man who was involved in the invention of the ballpoint pen, became the caretaker of a wilderness retreat on Best Island, and left a warm legacy after touching the lives of many canoe trippers with his welcoming presence and curious and compelling buildings. Did I mention that the Dutch doors to The Museum are carved to show specific measures of gravity?
Wendell Beckwith’s humanitarian side suggests he was far from a hermit. Alice Casselman told me Wendell was part of an elaborate scheme to help the region’s Native peoples financially with an arguably ahead-of-its-time ecotourism project. A canoe trip guided by the Slipperjack family would bring tourists from the rail line to an upscale Whitewater Lake fishing lodge. En route, canoe trippers would stay in pre-established camps progressing from rustic lean-tos to canvas wall tents to cabins and finally to the main lodge. Sadly (and typically), only the upscale Ogoki Lodge was built.
Alice told me Wendell had shared his humanitarian vision for what to do with Best Island following his death: he wanted to form a northern studies institute. A series of single-dwelling
