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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 visit my summer camp friend and canoe tripping guide Joss Haiblen. Joss had built 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 snail structures would be spread over the island for invited individuals to engage in pure research. Once a week, they would get together at The Museum for a major think tank. This plan is in sharp contrast to what others who also claim to have known Wendell believe, which is that Wendell would have wanted the cabins to return to the earth naturally with time. Having read much of the available literature, conducted some interviews with folks who knew Wendell, and pondered the man and the much-revered cabins, I am confident Alice’s knowledge reflects his true wishes. That said, the cabins are returning to the earth slowly. I believe the humanitarian Wendell Beckwith, who called himself a “citizen of the world” when encouraged to seek Canadian citizenship, saw a legacy in continuing to support sustainable initiatives with the local people and furthering the virtues of pure science and environmentally sound living via his northern studies bush institute. What a destination such a research centre would have become for Wabakimi trippers. Certainly all would have been welcome in Wendell’s vision. In the 1970s summer heyday of Wendell’s years at Best Island, up to three hundred visitors per summer were noted. He was a hermit, yes, but not in the summer canoe tripping season. We were excited to read the cabin’s guest book. Not long before us in 2005, members of Wendell’s family, including grandchildren, visited Best Island. One granddaughter, age five, as I remember, commented: “Now I know where I got my brains from.” Long overdue guests, perhaps, but certainly it was a treat to see that a family visit was a part of the overall story.

Wendell’s vision for Best Island is now important to consider. In the early part of the summer of 2005, Wilderness Connection Outfitting operator Jim Pearson arranged for the Ministry of Natural Resources to cover the roof of The Museum with a large Fabrene plastic tarp. Two separate trees have fallen, destroying sections of the roof. Time to save the buildings is dwindling! Responsibility for the buildings is uncertain. A group was established in the 1980s. Energies were later channelled for a short while through Wilderness Connections operating out of Armstrong in the summer months. Wabakimi Park staff appear uncertain as to which course to take: serious investment towards permanent repairs, modest upkeep, or turning a blind eye, defended by a local view (that appears unsubstantiated) that Wendell would have wanted the cabins to return to the earth. Frankly, I don’t buy it! Perhaps some home refurbishing TV show should be brought into play.

Seriously, though, a canoe trip in the heart of the Wabakimi boreal forest, accented with a lingering tour of the Best Island cabins while being informed about the life and three pillars of Wendell Beckwith, is a rewarding and imaginative journey into how we dwell or might dwell in the Canadian north woods.

Wendell Beckwith was a true hobbyist. He expressed a committed “defiance of the contemporary.” He expressed strong values toward the development of ideas and personal development. He sought out his own brand of liberty. Aldo Leopold might have called him the ultimate hobbyist. This doesn’t sound right, given how the word hobby has come to be understood. But Wendell did exercise many of the hobbies of others with his environmental, scientific, and humanitarian work. I missed meeting Wendell Beckwith with a last-minute route choice change on a 1977 canoe trip. Too bad for me. I have only seen two pictures of Wendell. He has a big smile in both of them.

It would be a shame to lose the cabins, the critical link to the man and his story, because of short-sightedness at this crucial time. On August 16, 2005, twenty-five years to the day since Wendell’s departure, I sat and thought of my own dwelling on the earth amidst the aura of the Beckwith story. It was time well spent. I was grateful to Wendell and I am certain I am not alone in drawing energy from the site. Perhaps this is Wendell’s legacy: pure reflection for those canoe trippers who continue to travel and think in more primal ways.

Wendell’s way is not the only way to dwell well in remote places. Enlightened Nirivians will tell you that a touch too much Scotch, a crazy idea well played, and a commitment to encouraging the natural integrity of the place can go a long way towards dwelling well and inspiring a great story.

Nirivia’s main cabin.

We were on Lake Superior, sea kayaking in 2013, out for over a week travelling from Silver Islet to Gravel River (near Rossport). We had known about Nirivia from a fine area guidebook.[5] When Beth Foster paddled over to a nearby cottage and was greeted with “Welcome to Nirivia,” we knew that not only were we in the right place, we were in for a fine time as well.

Now Nirivia isn’t a cottage or camp name. It is rather a secluded self-styled nation state with its own commercial activity, national flag, national anthem, titled members, and certificates of citizenship. Russell Evans, a founding member and King of Nirivia, with his partner, Sharon Manitowabi, would be our host for the afternoon. We had a lot of questions, and lucky for us, Russ was the man.

First, the Nirivia story. In 1977, four Nipigon residents, including, Russ Evans, were camped on Lake Superior near present-day Nirivia. They had learned that the Robinson Superior Treaty — Lake Superior Native bands’ land claim between Michipicoten and Thunder Bay — did not include the many off-shore islands that had been their childhood playground. Russ at age thirteen had camped solo on the islands to get his Pathfinder badge. As the Scotch flowed, an older Russ and friends decided the group should claim a portion of the islands. Some loophole in the treaty allowed this process a degree of formality. Nirivia: what a name. Apparently the four may have been trying to say Nirvana, but it came out Nirivia, which, you have to admit, does have an exotic feel to it. They thought so too. Nirivians will tell you that Nirivia is more a state of mind than any serious sovereignty bid. That said, they do have an honourable declaration of intent for their fifty-nine islands (St. Ignace Island, at 132 square miles, is the largest among them).[6]

All the fun nationhood stuff — a flag, anthem, awarding of titles (Official Scribe, Commander of the Navy, and Cosmos Inspector, for example) — isn’t simply a joke. And the declaration is not just political theatre or fun. The Nirivian state held for decades an active licensed tourist establishment; the Nirivian Island Expeditions Ltd. Fishing was the mainstay. They had a healthy business supported by word of mouth and a great T-shirt. I’d give up a big Lake Superior trout for one of those T-shirts or a certificate of citizenship. Fishing and boating remain a big part of the Nirivian lifestyle. We felt right at home. Indeed, the day before we arrived Russ had caught a twenty-three-inch speckled trout in the Nirivian homeland.

The declaration also has some teeth. The focus of Nirivia’s state of mind is a proclamation focussed on preservation of the island’s integrity. There are three objectives: multi-use recreation, no heavy resource extraction, and preservation for future generations. When one thinks of the uncompromising 1970s resource extraction polluters in nearby Red Rock and Terrace Bay, it is easy to see the degree of serious attention needed. Nirivia in the late 1970s received treatments in the Toronto Star, the Globe and Mail, National Geographic, Reader’s Digest, the Minneapolis Star, and others.[7] I asked Russ, now sixty-five years young, what he thinks of it all over thirty years later. His response? “Well, look what it created!”

So what is Nirivia now? Beth Foster, Robin James, Liz Calvin, David Taylor, Margot Peck, and I experienced warm Nirivian hospitality. Russ and Sharon were generous with their time, and we enjoyed a very hot sauna and cold Superior swim. “Look what it created!” Glorious boating travel with well-forested islands, just enough safe harbours and pebble beaches, grand views out to sea, and an inland view peppered with islands and high forested hills.[8] It is a sea kayaker’s paradise … if the winds are calm and you have lots of time. The Nirivian state of mind would serve one well when travelling the many open water island hops out there: wait for the right weather, relax, take it all in, have a purpose, and don’t take it all too seriously. Russ was an exemplary Nirivian, and we felt blessed to be a small part of this inspiring Lake Superior story.

What does the future hold for Nirivia? Russ mentioned many times that the idea was spawned from the carefree 1970s lifestyle. Today, the Nirivian elders who remain are Jim Stevens and Russ. Both live in Thunder Bay. Both see in their time out on the Nirivian islands a “true life.” Jim, when asked about the true life of the islands, spoke of the spiritual impact of the place. As for the Nirivians’ playbook, Jim said, “Out there, time goes with the sun.” There are about a thousand certified citizens who have been touched by the “true life.” Here we have another of Leopold’s assertions of liberty — a hobby well played. Nirivia, a time for a clear “demarcation between hobbies and ordinary normal pursuits.”

The comfortable, well-hidden geodesic domes (built from the 1970s Whole Earth Catalogue) at the Nirivia home base are in good repair. The sauna is a gem. The land use permit is secure, and younger family members will carry on the torch.

When the Nirivian founders claimed the islands, they did so as an “enchanted country” because it was there to be claimed. They did so for the environmental protection, with St. Ignace Island as the centrepiece. Now much of Nirivia is officially designated as conservation lands. The Nature Conservancy of Canada in 2013 acquired part of an island cluster just offshore from Rossport. The resource extraction industries along the northern Lake Superior coast have cleaned up their act from the 1970s. Volunteer groups are maintaining campsites and remote saunas.[9] And Superior country is generally still revered for its spiritual impact, as Jim put it. Well done Nirivian elders, and thanks to Russ (the King) and Jim (the Earl) of Nirivia for the kind hospitality and joy of sharing some of the “true life” with us sea kayaking seekers.

A fitting way to close the Nirivian story would be to quote from the closing lines of the Nirivian national anthem, written by Nirivian citizen Norman Sponchia:

And the flag of Nirivia flies over all souls.

In the winds of Superior.

When the waters start to roll

The Nirivia spirit started to blow

Oh Nirivia, the island nation of Nirivia.[10]

If a fitting anthem for Wendell Beckwith’s Best Island were to have been written, it might go something like this:

And the cabins of Wendell’s Best Islands fills our souls with imaginative stories.

In the winds of Wabakimi when the waters start to roll

One can take comfort in the Beckwith spirit.

Oh Wendell, a radical hobbyist seeker of liberty.

Thanks, Joss, for my important early introduction to seeking out remote people in remote places. It is a valuable life enterprise.