routes and portages, and none of it had been maintained, possibly for decades. There was no sense in advertising all these canoe routes if people couldn’t have clear portages and clean campsites. The district recreation trails were in a sorry state. There had been a sporadic canoe route maintenance crew sent out in the past but little, if any, work was accomplished. It was a standing joke in the district office — if you were appointed to the job of summer canoe route foreman, it was a summer of heavy drinking at the nearest campsite. Trusting that I could pull this off and make Sinclair’s gamble pay off, I was offered a job as chief interior ranger with a mandate to clean up Temagami’s backcountry.There are particular recondite outdoor skills one learns, sometimes by luck and oftentimes out of necessity. When I first started canoeing, mostly through Algonquin Park’s most remote regions, there were quite often no distinguishable portage trails present. It didn’t mean there were no trails at some time in recent history, it just meant that they weren’t obvious anymore. I was forced to look for less conspicuous signs of a trail, or anything other than a barefaced man-painted you are here sign, like those found in tended parks close to the highway.
Next to basic survival, the art of pathfinding was one of Canada’s first required occupational skills. Early explorers needed to know where they were going, and they entrusted this job to the most seasoned veterans of the trail, or to Natives who knew the way by familiarity. Since most traffic was restricted to linear canoe routes, almost all trails were dedicated to finding the easiest way around rapids or waterfalls. And sometimes these trails were not always apparent, or the route itself navigable for any great distance. Aboriginal people travelled lightly and left little trace of their passing, but did have an intricate collection of trails. The Ojibwa Nation had an elaborate webwork of summer and winter trails called the nastawgan, some dating back more than five thousand years. The only casual indications left to mark the trails were rock cairns (piled stones) or dolmen markers (large rocks supported by smaller rocks). Over the years the cairns get knocked over and scattered about by bears looking for ants and grubs, and dolmen stones don’t always reveal a trail.
I had spent almost ten years already, searching for trails along lake and river routes, getting used to distinguishing animal paths from those tracked by humans. It was a particular challenge to find the best route between lakes that were often kilometres apart; there was the euphoria of discovering a trail that perhaps was used for thousands of years. Many of the trails had been kept open by Ontario’s fire brigades — men hired in the early part of the last century to protect the forests from the ravages of wildfires. They travelled by canoe to the remote sections of the wilderness, manning observation towers constructed on hills like Maple Mountain, keeping portage trails clear to enable quick and deliberate movement of supplies and firefighting equipment when called to action. That was long ago, and their movements through the pinelands had been erased by time — axe-blazes grown over, portage markers rotted away, and the linear trough that guided footfall for years now covered deep with leaves, needles, and forest detritus.
Pathfinding, as the skill may have been attributed to early explorations, is all but a lost art. The GPS (Global Positioning System) has replaced our need to depend on basic, once inherent navigational abilities. Even the term pathfinding now refers to solving mazes and algorithms, tracing a trail through computer games, or exploring last resort techniques to reduce thermal noise of mirrors and suspensions in gravitational wave, cryogenic ferometric detectors. It has nothing to do with finding your way through the woods.
Temagami presented itself as the ideal place to hone this skill. There were over thirteen-hundred nastawgan trails to be found and, during the year of research for the book, I had managed to locate the majority of trails along all major linear routes, but not without some level of difficulty and frustration. Some trails had already been obliterated by clear-cut logging operations, while other portage routes had been altered by beaver activity; namely, having constructed dams that diverted water flow in a creek, or flooded the pathway so that a new trail had to be blazed. Wildfires had also played havoc while inventorying trails, leaving large areas of scalded, bare rock and blackened stumps, sometimes completely burning off all traces of organic soil. There were also blowdowns from “push-storms” or “micro-bursts” — powerful tornado-like gales that ripped through the district each summer, piling up twisted, fallen trees over the portage trails like giant scattered pickup sticks.
Trails skirting rapids or falls along the river routes were easier to locate than portage trails connecting lake systems. Springtime offered the best inspection of the forest landscape, before the foliage obscured the view; into June when the bush was thick with growth, I would have to get down on hands and knees to scrutinize possible trail configurations — the view a rabbit may have of the understory of leaves and a clear line of sight into the beyond. Oftentimes I would scrape away the top cover of leaf debris to find the cupped hollow of an old footpath that would otherwise be secreted away. Axe blazes on trees had grown over to mere slits; but there was always a signature of some kind, often incomprehensible at first glance, but humbly noticeable through close circumspection.
There were almost a hundred kilometres of portage trails to clear, including the traditional fire tower lookout trails on Maple Mountain and Ishpatina Ridge. For the first two seasons, the MNR district supervisors would not issue us a chainsaw to cut through the long-accumulated deadfall along the trails. It was all axe work — a sometimes dangerous undertaking, especially in blowdowns where fallen trees were suspended and under extreme tension. Communication with head office in Temagami was spotty, at best, since we were out of range with the two-way radio most of the time, and because of this the managers didn’t want us cutting off our legs with a saw somewhere back in the bush.
The work was demanding and camp was moved to a new location daily. Slowly, deliberately, and although challenging and arduous, the task of clearing trails was accomplished with unpredicted success. But something was missing. The expected honour and prestige of being an interior ranger did not come with all the anticipated esteem. Life on the trail did live up to the romantic imagery, but within the confines of the district forestry office the deference went to those cutting down the forests, not to those in favour of protecting it.
“If a man walks in the woods for love of them half each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.”
— Henry David Thoreau
There was no honour in working for the government forestry office. They were fucking everything up. Neil Ayers, a soon-to-be-retired bush pilot working for the MNR, explained it to me emphatically: “… there’s been a complete inversion of the bureaucratic triangle. The Ontario Forestry Branch of the thirties, and then the Department of Lands and Forests, operated with only a couple [of] men in the district office filing reports — the rest were out in the field working alongside logging companies, tourist operators, anglers and hunters … they were in touch with what was going on in the bush.”
Ayers was refuelling the Turbo Beaver aircraft, talking as he did routine tasks between flights. I asked him what the difference was today and there was an obvious, intentional edge to his voice: “We’re no longer the experts … there’s almost nobody in the field anymore … we’re out of touch. The office is full of forestry technicians plugged in to computers.”
So that was it. The forestry office was nothing more than a licensing depot for logging companies and nimrods. Their disorganized and detached management of publicly owned resources and incoherent decisions had catastrophic consequences.
In 1977, a seemingly benign May wildfire got out of hand because the fire crew “pushed” the fire in order to collect overtime pay. Winds came up suddenly and tempered the fire into a raging maelstrom, burning over thirty-five thousand hectares of pine lands. In 1980, a toxic defoliant was accidentally dropped from a helicopter
