Читать книгу Hap Wilson's Wilderness 3-Book Bundle - Hap Wilson - Страница 15

The winter snows piled up against the tiny, un-insulated shack as I scribbled out design after design, persevering, thinking of nothing but the coming spring, saving just enough to grubstake six months of canoeing. In May, when the ice was out, I would be gone.

Forty dollars was enough money to buy supplies each month, as long as I baked (actually fried) my own trail bread — bannock, or what the Anishnabek called buck-way-ja-gin. I would also have to fish every other day, eat fresh-water clams (I never liked the rubbery, gritty taste) and pick berries — a veritable feast. Trail fare was simple, life was straightforward and uncomplicated but nothing was prosaic or even predictable. In my early twenties I felt that I could do anything, except, and undeniably so, settle into a conventional lifestyle. After all, I had built cabins and spent the winter in the bush with a school friend, had near-death experiences, been shot at (shot back), been chased by grizzlies and Wyoming buffalo, mauled by wild dogs, climbed a mountain in my bare feet, lost the end of my toe to frostbite, survived a pub-night in Lourdes du Blanc Sablon, been a house-guard for singer Anne Murray, and worked only when I needed money. How could my life become any more idealistic?

But every so often in life as we amble down whatever path we choose to follow, there appears a door, slightly ajar, a shaft of light radiating from the aperture, mystery beyond, opportunity but not without circumstance. I could never resist. It was like discovering a new trail wending its way to somewhere and I needed to know where it would take me … the quest. In 1976 I banged on the local government forestry door in Temagami, Ontario. No longer the Department of Lands and Forests but conspicuously more officious, it was now the Ministry of Natural Resources office, buzzing with salaried timber cruisers, district foresters, game wardens, and lands and parks administrators. A woman at the front desk directed me to the lands supervisor, Reg Sinclair.

“You want to do what?” Sinclair smiled inquisitively. I was fully prepared to be rejected, or ejected from his office. “I want to produce a canoe guidebook for Temagami,” I explained somewhat timidly, expecting a quick dismissal. Sinclair spun around in his chair and looked out the window at Lake Temagami, taking an inordinately long time to proffer an answer. “And you would chart out all the canoe routes, portages, and campsites?” he questioned. I showed him what I wanted to do on a regional map — to compile all linear recreation trails and canoe routes in a book format that could be used for in-house management and service front-desk inquiries about canoeing in Temagami. But that wasn’t the real reason for being there; logging companies had begun accelerated clear-cut operations and were encroaching on my beloved wilderness. Temagami was known for its pine stands, a much valued timber resource. I had this grandiose idea that if I were to document all the threatened canoe routes and publish a guidebook, that backcountry adventure-seekers would flock to Temagami, thereby thwarting the wave of extraction-based industry intrusions. The environmental movement in Canada was picking up momentum, slowly, but some of the developments in northern Ontario gave lobby groups an added punch. The Ontario government, in its myopic wisdom, had slated Temagami’s Maple Mountain as a world-class ski resort development, seemingly oblivious to the fact that the mountain (one of Ontario’s loftiest peaks) was still revered by the Anishnabek of Bear Island Reserve as a sacred vision-quest and ancient burial site.

“It would make things easier in the office here,” Sinclair pondered. “Just sell people the book and that’s it — they’ll leave happy....” My foot was in the door. Sinclair was an opportunist and he wanted to look good; he knew my idea was a good one.

“When can you start?”

“Tomorrow.” I beamed.

I never asked how much money I would be making. Having a steady paycheque every two weeks was a novelty in itself, and I felt somewhat guilty about being paid for canoeing. The office regulars scoffed at what I was doing, but at the time there was money in the parks budget to be spent, and Sinclair had convinced the district manager that my proposal would benefit the province. My explorations, however, dipped outside the district and into three adjoining administrations, and none of these administrators were in the least bit interested in supporting Sinclair in the project. The excuse being that if they made any canoe routes known to the public, they would then be obliged to maintain the routes; and there was also the threat of conflicts between paddlers and logging companies to contend with.

Trails without boundaries; these were ancient travelways for the original people who cared nothing for political barriers on a map. Sinclair’s district was the heart of wilderness Temagami — all trails circled back to his administration. I had already paddled the majority of routes in and outside his domain. Anyway, it didn’t make sense to research water trails eviscerated by arbitrary precincts. I could accomplish all this in one year — one year. That was insane. I would have to paddle a total distance of over 3,500 kilometres in the next six months.

For some inane reason I turned a good paddling friend into a relative and married the girl next door. We would be working together, getting paid handsomely (two paycheques) for doing something we loved (canoeing), and experiencing pangs of guilt as a result. But the guilt didn’t last long. Ice-clogged lakes, gruelling portages, incessant biting insects, wind, rain, isolation, and deprivation managed to assuage any feeling of self-reproach. And we accomplished what we set out to do; the book was published, and even with its inherent sloppy first-run production, the book sold out to a demanding crowd of adventure-seekers in short order.

Sinclair was now in a dilemma. The district owned all this research information about Aboriginal canoe 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 somewhere between Temagami and Cobalt; it was an office joke 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.