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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 quality of tent and expensive canoe you supplied them with, they — the client - meticulously thwarted all your good intentions as an outfitter by not cooking any food at all (eating only the pre-cooked goodies), pitching the tent in a hollow so everyone got wet when it rained, and complaining vehemently that I had rented them a canoe with a hole in it.

There was the church group from Buffalo. Nice people. I rented them expensive Kevlar canoes and life jackets and off they went for a week in the wilderness. As my apartment was directly over the store, I could hear any movement in my equipment yard during the night. I awoke sometime past midnight to find the church group quietly unloading their gear on to the lawn and stuffing the life jackets underneath the canoes. When I confronted them (they were surprised to see me, not knowing that I also lived at my shop), they sheepishly explained that they had had a problem earlier that day. To my dismay, I noticed that the ends of the paddles were all burned and the life jackets were scorched and melted. Upon inquiry, the leader explained that they had to fight a fire, for which, on any normal occasion, trashing my expensive equipment would have been forgivable for having done a noble deed for the sanctity of the wilderness, and at great risk of injury to themselves. But, as it turned out, they had actually started the fire themselves. This was a somewhat common occurrence according to the church director, as all young campers were instructed to burn their toilet paper at the site of excrement (and not safely within the firepit as is normal), and that the odd fire mishap was expected to happen. I assured them that this was not the standard procedure in my woods; shitting incorrectly in the wilderness had its repercussions, and camper-related fires were taken rather seriously. When the government water-bomber and fire crews arrived, the canoeists quickly disembarked from the campsite before they could be held responsible. An entire island was destroyed. Not being a devout Christian, I passed on the name of the church group responsible to the local authorities. They never paid for the damages to my equipment, nor as I recall, ever returned to Temagami.

I was fortunate enough to get out on the occasional guided expedition, a break from the tedium of day-to-day outfitting and of watching everyone else head out on their respective adventures. On one such expedition, I was finishing up a trip on Diamond Lake; it was a nice campsite, quiet, in a sheltered bay. We had just finished dinner and were sitting on the sloped bedrock enjoying the evening calm. A group of six people paddled in and took the campsite across the channel from us — a stone’s throw away. I recognized them as a group I had outfitted the day before I left on my trip, Mennonites from St. Jacobs near Kitchener, Ontario. Nice people who booked an unguided complete outfitting package from me. We watched as their group set up camp. The canoes remained tethered along the shore, undulating against the rocks, wearing holes in the hulls. Two men brandishing axes approached a rather sizeable dead tree near the canoes and began chopping it down. It fell directly across the gunwales of a canoe, nearly folding it in half.

Now, I could have yelled out and warned them not to do this, reveal my identity as the owner/outfitter of the canoes, but I was more intrigued by the way in which they would explain this when they returned the equipment the next day. I also have a strict, personal policy not to yell out while on the trail. The purity of silence was paramount. When the canoe-crashers returned their rented gear to the outfitting base, they said nothing about the canoe incident even after being questioned whether the equipment met their satisfaction. I explained that I was the one camped across from them when the tree was chopped down over the canoe causing over three-hundred-dollars damage. They were mildly apologetic but refused to pay for damages contending that “they were renting the canoe, not buying it” and that my insurance should cover it. My insurance wouldn’t cover it, I explained, so I tacked the damages onto their bill. Their cheque bounced and I never recovered the money.

A group of jocks brought three new Kevlar canoes back almost completely destroyed. They had run all the rapids on the Temagami River in low water. It was also reported by another guiding company that my clients had filled their canoes with packs and skidded the boats over the rocky portages, not once carrying them across the trail. Since I always took a refundable cash deposit for canoes (usually not enough to pay for most accrued damages), I could at least hold back the deposit made. Not only did the jocks refuse to pay for damages, they insisted I give them back their damage deposit.

Tents would come back with knife slices in the floor, sodden with mud and with crushed mosquitoes pasted to the inside walls; pot sets would be caked with burned-on food, black with soot; packs missing straps that had been ripped off their seams; sweaty sleeping bags that needed dry-cleaning, sometimes too grungy to keep at all; broken axes and saws; lost life-jackets and paddles, trashed canoes … But it was the cavalier way in which all this gear was returned after the trip that really bothered me. Where was the sense of pride and care in the maintenance of equipment that was part of one’s essential kit — the survival material that one depends on? People just didn’t care anymore; they didn’t care because they knew their visit to the wilderness was transient, and that they would return promptly to their contrived and safe boxes in the city, and to their disposable-wracked lifestyles, dishwashers, and twice-a-week garbage collection. Trail lifestyle was hit or miss and lacked the finesse engaged by seasoned wilderness travellers, or those who cared. There were, on occasion, considerate clients who tended their rental outfit as if it was their own, but not enough of them to assuage the aggravation suffered through an almost constant barrage of malperforming neophytes seeking packaged adventure.

The Client would complain about almost everything, and it was usually about things in Nature that we have absolutely no control over — the weather, biting insects, the wind always in the wrong direction, the difficulty of portage trails and where was all the wildlife? As if they expected moose and bear and wolves to be lined up along the shores waiting for their pictures to be taken.

“When did you break camp?” I’d ask them.

”You mean pack up and leave in the morning?”

“Yes, what time?”

“Ten o’ clock or so, maybe later.”

As it turned out, most paddlers and other outdoor folk know little or nothing about wildlife habits or about the environment in which they live. Our modern expectations of the Wild — its nuances, patterns, complexities, peculiarities, and appearance, is governed by what the media feeds us — the Disney fixation — wildlife performing in unnatural ways. Actual or anthropomorphized animations of creatures fail to differentiate what’s real and what’s fantasy, and confound our ability to raise our consciousness about the outdoors.

Canoeists who sleep through the morning, the time when many species of wildlife are most active, miss out on a possible experience. Paddlers who bang their paddles on the gunwales of their canoes, or are inordinately noisy, also fail to “get the picture.” Campers who leave garbage or human excrement around their campsites, on the other hand, are sure to have a wildlife encounter sooner or later.

But not all outfitters are derisive about the business as I am. Some could overlook the slack-mindedness, almost innocent naivety of the modern adventurer and turn it into something positive. I tried. Times were changing. The backwoods trail attracted a new genre of explorer, bred from a narcissistic society and an ever-changing definition of wilderness. The good thing that came out of my occupation as a canoe trip outfitter was the number of people I would pump into the backwoods, and at a time when we needed to show strength in our own industry. And, in a way, that worked to the advantage of the environmental movement, at least to illustrate to the government that there was more to the woods than just stump value and hunting licences.