until trappers began reporting an unprecedented high death rate amongst the beaver population for no apparent reason. The two Junior Ranger camps were being run like detention centres or forced-labour gulags; seventeen-year-old boys were expected to perform all the distasteful duties that the regular full-time employees avoided. Unit foresters, whose job was to supply logging companies with marketable timber, were on the take, according to local mill field supervisor Doug Buck, who ended up working with the new environmental group, the Temagami Wilderness Society, as their personal licensed forester. The minister of natural resources instituted an “open gate” policy on all timber roads in order to beef up the sale of out-of-province hunting licences. But the most disastrous gaffe undertaken by the office was to install radio equipment in the fire tower on Maple Mountain, even after I had told them that it was a gross mistake to do so because of potential vandalism by hikers. It was also a sacred site with potent spiritual energy.
An MNR crew from Sudbury and another from our office were air-dropped on the summit. After they had installed the equipment and were waiting for pickup later that day the weather suddenly turned. Though fog had set in, the helicopter pilot insisted on getting the crews back to their respective bases before dark. Our crew went first but not without difficulty. Because of the high humidity, the windows inside the cockpit steamed over, so that the pilot had trouble orienting the aircraft during liftoff, nearly tipping the rotor blades into nearby trees. After depositing our team back in Temagami, the chopper took off once again for the mountain. He never returned and the fate of he and the four-man Sudbury crew remained a mystery for the next two days.
By the second day after the crash, bears had come to pull the ripe bodies out of the wreckage and started to feast on the corpses. The emergency locating beacon, found on all aircraft, failed to go off after the crash. The cloud and fog was too dense for Search and Rescue to even look for the downed helicopter, but once the skies cleared, it was easy to spot the crash only half a kilometre from the summit. An armed game warden was slung down by chopper to disperse the ravaging bears. Within the month, someone had tossed the radio equipment out of the tower onto the bedrock below.
After eight years I had had enough. My trail and campsite budget had been reduced to a mere pittance, even though the backcountry traffic had increased tenfold over the past few years. Government foresters, not to mention their allies in the industry, had become paranoid because of the rising concern for the environment and the push to create larger wilderness parks. I was disillusioned with a system that didn’t work, almost ashamed to be a part of it anymore. There was no glamour in the destruction of wilderness, and even in some obtuse way, I was attached to the organism responsible.
I try to remember my days as a ranger as one of the best times of my life, that I was doing something good for the wilderness and for the people who love to travel its waterways. It was one of the hardest jobs imaginable, but in the end we had cleared over a hundred kilometres of wilderness trails and flown out three thousand bags of packed garbage from campsites. Yet, after almost three decades of conflict, the establishment of token parks, and the shutting down of the Temagami District office, the fight still rages on with no apparent logical end in sight. The only absolute truth in all of this is that everyone is just getting older … the forest continues to disappear and we have not grown any wiser from our mistakes. My job as a park ranger and technician gave me a privileged view of the inside workings of a bureaucracy that failed Canadians. The deliberately skewed orientation toward the wholesaling of resources consolidated my mistrust of the “system” as a perceived company of experts. And I knew exactly where their Achilles heel was located.
The trail is not such a lonely place if you talk to ghosts.
TWO
CONFESSIONS OF A
WILDERNESS OUTFITTER
An outfitter is a company or individual who provides equipment and guidance for the pursuit of certain activities. The term is most closely associated with outdoor activities such as rafting, hunting and fishing, and trail riding.
— Wikipedia Definition
If you worship the outdoors; if you love Nature in all its splendour; if you are a devoted participant in canoeing, kayaking, hiking, or skiing … then my best advice to you is to not go into business as an adventure outfitter. Why? Because you become bitter, resentful, stale, cynical, jealous … eventually all of these things take over your psyche. Whether or not you admit it to yourself, it will happen. It’s one of the undeniable truths about human nature: We lust after other peoples’ freedom.
For me, getting into the business of outfitting people for personal adventures happened inadvertently; a kind of recoil occupation after being disenchanted with the government job as ranger. It was like falling in love for all the wrong reasons — a relationship doomed to fail even though the sex was great. Gear … it’s all about gear. And gear is like sex to an outfitter and the outdoor participant — you can never have enough of it. It wasn’t always like this. There was a time when outdoor enthusiasts (mostly men at the time) preferred to blend with the environment: clothing, boots, tents … gear, was always khaki or olive-drab or beryl-green, and equipment was purchased at local army-surplus stores for next to nothing. And it was all natural fibres like cotton, wool, or canvas-duck and leather. It was the adventure that counted and the experience of being out there — the journey.
When men met each other at a portage landing at the head of a trail, they would exchange salutations, share a pipe or chew of tobacco, talk about the weather or about fishing and how good or bad it had been. Canoes were heavy, usually canvas-covered cedar with the brand names of Chestnut, Old Town, or Peterborough tagged on the front deck. Glances were exchanged at a man’s canoe and how he handled it, carried it, repaired it with Ambroid and bandana and tin-can lid, judged the tightness of his gear load, the care of leather tump and wannigan (standard wooden box for carrying kitchen gear and breakables), his trail etiquette and backwoods manner. The constancy of gear and trail mannerisms was conventional, expected, and purposefully drab.
Technology has a way of introducing change and trends whether we want it or not; it’s those who market new products who control its success and how it affects our ability to “control” or adapt to the environment. Control being the operative word. In the outdoor trade we are constantly trying to control Nature by developing new gear. I know carpenters who are really bad at their trade, but they buy the most expensive tools and all the extraneous gadgetry in an attempt to compensate for lack of skill or knowledge. Technology in the outdoor trade has created a new breed of participant who relies on gear to counterbalance their inherent ineptitude in the wilderness. Gear sluts — people whose main interest in the outdoors is looking good, dressing hip, giving the impression that they actually know what they’re doing. Canoeists stumbling along portage trails today strut about as if they were walking a fashion show catwalk, and their gear remains scattered everywhere and always in your way. Talk, if any, is a brief exchange about the lack of signage, or garbage pickup by non-existent rangers, or if the government opened more roads they wouldn’t have to portage so much to get into the wilderness. Do I sound cynical? I’ve earned it.
I bought thirty Kevlar canoes and all the related equipment, built a small store, and started selling trips into the wilderness. People came. What I wasn’t prepared for was the type of person who typically conscripts the services of an outfitter. Generally, these people don’t get out very often so they need to rent equipment. And because they don’t get out, they tend to lack all or any of the required skills to travel in the wilderness, safely or efficiently. So they wing it, often getting by on random luck. And it didn’t matter how good a food package you concocted, or
