the book changed when I heard about the recent drownings at Thunderhouse. I was on the river at the time, near the headwater, and heard about the tragedy in the riverside village of Mattice while picking up supplies. Two days later I was camped at Thunderhouse, trying to picture what had happened to the Ohio men. Beaching my canoe below the falls and canyon, I hiked up to the pool where the non-existent portage was marked on the map — the portage the Ohio men tried to reach. The pool near where I was standing (where the portage was supposed to be) was relatively calm, streaked with river foam and slowly recirculating; the rapid entering the pool was dramatic and tightly wound with a sharp decline toward the first falls. Even a good, strong paddler could not exit the rapids and get across the pond safely here, I thought. My eye caught a flash of sunlight from an object pushed up along the shore rocks. It was a waterproof, disposable camera, probably belonging to the Ohio men that dumped in the rapids. It was a strange feeling to be holding the record of the last hours of the two dead men in my hand.
A year earlier I was paddling the upper Missinaibi with a girlfriend and had pulled over at an open bedrock island in the middle of Albany Rapids for lunch. A Search and Rescue helicopter landed a quarter of a kilometre downstream and unloaded several men and a small boat. We thought this was just a training exercise. Packing up, we pushed on, paddling the rapid in front of the SAR group and exchanging casual waves. When we reached Mattice and dropped in to sign the river guestbook at Nancy’s restaurant, owner Doris Tanguay mentioned that someone had drowned upriver at Albany Rapids about a week ago and that the rescue squad was having difficulty getting the body out of the river. I realized we had paddled directly over a dead man that was wedged in rocks underwater and that the SAR members we had passed were still trying to extricate the body. The log book showed that over a hundred paddlers had passed through in the last four days, and they, too, had paddled over the body in the rapids.
After the two Thunderhouse drownings and the one at Albany Rapids, I was beginning to wonder if there was a trend or pattern to the deaths. I was also curious to see if there were any other deaths along the river in the past years. I was already suspecting inaccuracies with the topographic maps and well knew their faults and failures, but I wanted to find out if any other deaths had been the cause of errant maps. I had appealed to the Natural Resources regional office for funding for my research and was turned down, but I was determined to continue my investigations.
Requesting the appropriate access to information documents, I was finally approved and allowed to visit the Ontario Coroner’s Office in Toronto. I was given a cubicle and instructions how to use their filing system. I’d search back to 1977, or seventeen years of records, and isolate only those boating deaths that had occurred anywhere along the Missinaibi River Heritage route, from Lake Superior to Moosonee on James Bay — a total distance of about 650 kilometres. It was a daunting task, time consuming and unsettling. For the next three days I would leaf through over five hundred police and coroner reports, isolating all the deaths that had occurred along one Canadian river system. Thankfully, there were no photographs in the reports, except in the last file I examined. Leafing through a file dated June 1981, two crisp glossy photographs flipped out on to the table. My stomach lurched at what I saw. I took in a deep breath and stared at the pictures. I couldn’t take my eyes off them. There were two young men, obviously dead, stretched unceremoniously on stainless-steel gurneys — a morgue photo. Both still had their lifejackets on. The cold water of the Missinaibi had preserved their bodies, at least from bloating, but their skin was bleach white, eyes vacant and darkened by death. The whiteness of their skin accentuated cuts, contusions, and fractures; broken necks, crushed skulls, limbs twisted out of symmetry. One dead youth was wearing my brand of lifejacket with extrication knife attached. It was weird; when I first saw the picture it was like I was looking at myself, dead. Both young men were twenty-three years old, from Brooklyn, New York, and had belonged to a whitewater paddling club. They were experienced paddlers. There were four in the party; the survivors reported that their friends had been “sucked” into the rapids and couldn’t get out of the pull to the falls. They were headed for a non-existent portage, just as the Ohio men had done. It was the very last of the five hundred files. I quickly packed up my research material and left the building. I found a quiet park bench and sat down and wept, deep sobs, for the parents of these boys who were probably spared the pictures I had just seen. Then I got angry.
It was even hard writing about this incident fourteen years later without feeling emotionally charged. There had been thirty-five drownings in the time period I had researched, or an average of about two deaths per year. Eleven of those deaths occurred within the boundaries of the Missinaibi Provincial and Heritage Waterway Park; twelve of the drownings, about one-third of the total, were American tourists. Seventeen of the drownings could have been prevented. Five died at Thunderhouse Falls because the topographic map told them to portage at a spot on the river that was virtually impossible to access. Twelve of the sixteen Federal topographic maps covering the river corridor had gross errors. Thirty-five of the ninety-three rapids were unmarked and two dangerous falls were not on the maps at all. Twelve portages were missing and six were marked in the wrong location. I had chosen the figure of seventeen years of research into the deaths because it backdated events to the last map update in 1978. Ontario Hydro at that time had plans of building a dam at Thunderhouse Falls and the topographic map had needed updating for official proposed plans. I interviewed the librarian at Western University’s research facility. She actually knew of the incident where government cartographers had argued over where to insert the portage on the Thunderhouse map. It was arbitrarily affixed to the map at what looked like the shortest route around the falls. Since the map was from a series of “white” sheets, any correction done would now show up highlighted in purple on the black and white maps. The Canada Map Office produces 12,150 of the popular 1:50,000 scale topographic maps most widely used by adventurers — ninety percent of the charts cover “undeveloped” regions above the so-called “wilderness-line,” and are in dire need of revisions, particularly along rivers having park or heritage status.
During the winter of 1993–94, I retreated to a cabin on Lake Superior to write my book. The research was unsettling. I appealed to the provincial coroner, James G. Young, to call for an inquest into the high number of deaths linked to poor maps and misleading advertising by both the provincial and federal governments. I had interviewed Peter Andrews from the Canada Map Office in Ottawa and was told that “… we (Energy Mines and Resources) don’t recommend that canoeists use just the topographic maps for reference.” Andrews also stated that EMR would never advertise in a strictly canoeing or outdoor magazine; however, their full-page “All roads lead to roam” ad, a crowing statement that EMR maps “will lead you in the right direction,” did, in fact, find its way into Canada’s national canoeing magazine, Kanawa, and other American adventure-oriented magazines, as well. The Ontario Tourism Ministry had just spent close to $100,000 on splashy full-page, colour ads in American magazines touting the Missinaibi as a Heritage River you could paddle from start to finish, across the breadth of Ontario, and cross only two roads — the same year the two men from Ohio died at Thunderhouse Falls. Many provincial and federal departments aggressively market to back-country travellers, pitching Canadian wilderness, a product the bureaucrats know very little about. Ad hype and hastily packaged materials continue to lure adventurers to provincial parks and remote rivers.
The Canadian Federal Department of Indian and Northern Affairs “Wild River Survey” was carried out in 1971–73, in which sixty-five rivers across Canada were surveyed for recreational potential. Mike Greco, past secretariat of the Canadian Heritage River Board and Foundation says of the survey:
“… the ten published booklets, although available to the public, were never intended for navigational purposes … some were withdrawn because of inaccuracies — mishaps were occurring, especially in British Columbia because much of the compiled information wasn’t field-truthed … anyone canoeing in remote regions should be extra careful using 1:50,000 maps and avail themselves of any professional literature before heading out.”
Legal counsellor for the Canadian Recreational Canoeing Association, John Eberhard, had told me that “canoeists may have cause for legal action against both the provincial and federal governments
