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Everyone paired off, the insurance man and the heart surgeon together in one canoe but sitting backwards in their seats, the bowman’s feet crammed into the tiny space behind what was supposed to be the stern seat. He complained about the lack of space for his legs until I corrected him as to which end of the canoe was to point forward. As it turned out, none of the ten men had ever run any moving water and only four had any experience at all.

“How hard can it be?” Bill the leader pleaded. John and I looked at each other in quiet consternation. It began to snow. We managed to nurse the first four client-canoes down the initial rapids, an easy class 1, but with one boulder in mid-channel to manoeuvre around. The doctor and the insurance man weren’t so lucky. Their canoe broached the only rock in the rapids, tipped upstream, and filled with water. The two men were able to step up onto the boulder but were now twenty-five metres from shore, stranded, cold, and wet. John and I beached our canoe and ran back up the shore. My new Kevlar canoe was wrapped around the boulder. John reminded me that the clients were more important than the state of the canoe — we’ d worry about the boat after we got the men safely to shore.

The two men were soaked to the bone, shivering in the cold, but we managed to walk them through the rapids back to shore, rescued their packs and instructed them to change into dry clothes. Extricating the wrapped canoe from the boulder would not be easy. It had to be done quickly as everybody was starting to feel the effects of the cold and we needed to get to our campsite before dark. I waded out to the canoe with a stout spruce pole and began levering the canoe off the boulder while John spotted from shore. Canoe rescue techniques had not yet been developed, such as the Z-drag rope method, and some broached canoes just won’t budge under that amount of hydraulic pressure. But I was lucky. The broken canoe slid off the boulder, taking me with it and down the rapids. John jumped into the river and grabbed my arm and helped me to shore and the two of us managed to haul the swamped canoe into shallow water. John took the clients ahead to the campsite downriver while I tried to patch the wrecked canoe as best as I could with duct-tape. By the time I reached camp it was dark but the group was in good spirits.

We were fortunate back then; it could have turned out differently. I made several mistakes, none of which were attributed to particular bush skills. My capacity to analyze the client, to judge their inherent capabilities, needed work — a lot of work. It was a harsh wake-up call. I was responsible for all these people, legally liable and potentially at risk from lawsuit if anything happened. I was relying on skill alone … and that was only a modicum of the talent that was required to be a good guide.

Everybody has their own brand of idiosyncratic weaknesses — baggage they carry with them — some more than others. But for the adventure-seeking client, it’s likely to spill out while under duress three hundred kilometres from the nearest road. And it happens for various reasons: exhaustion, isolation, fear, inability to cope, biting insects, weather, cold, incessant wind, and even personality conflicts with other clients. Put eight or ten individuals together in a tight social troupe, outside their familiar parameters, and vault them into the wilderness, and you have the making of one of two things; hopefully, what you get is unadulterated adventure but, if things go awry and the guide doesn’t have his or her shit together, you can stir up a dangerous mix of anarchy and mutiny, not to mention the potential lawsuits from gross fuck-ups.

Since my first commercial expedition in 1984, I’ve learned a lot about the human psyche and how it functions, or dysfunctions, under stressful conditions. Guiding skills, the hard-skills, like making a fire, setting up camp, negotiating rapids, are only a small part of what is required to be a proficient guide. A qualified guide (beyond the first-aid or other accreditations) needs to be a facilitator, a backwoods bon-vivant chef, an entertainer, and a teacher. But what about the remaining 75 percent of skill requirements? Basic skills are easy to learn, over time, but the most difficult facet of guiding (and the most underrated), is the ability to “read” personality traits. One learns to “read” weather or “read” rapids, but to adequately justify taking a group of neophytes into the wilderness and assaulting them with all manner of environmental conditions, the guide needs to be able to sense what’s going on inside everybody’s head.

When I book a full compliment for an expedition, say eight individuals, I know that at least two people will have sociopathic tendencies — it’s a given statistic and product of our social makeup in an aggressive, self-indulgent, consumer-based world. Two others in this group will have recently suffered through some kind of personal trauma — a death in the family or of a close friend, a break-up with a partner, trouble at work perhaps. An additional two clients will be rife with self-doubt, unable to make spontaneous decisions. The last two people will be well-rounded and competent, reliable and helpful but possibly short on patience because of the other clients’ ineptitude. The guide then has to make an assessment of each and all of these personalities before the client is even accepted onto the roster of participants. The guide, as booking agent, is often responsible for selecting the group participants, scrutinizing their abilities, and the general compatibility in a group function.

Before establishing a more rigorous screening process, I once booked four hardcore Marines from California and teamed them up, by chance, with four gay men from Toronto. Sexual persuasion is not something you ask about when signing up individuals for a wilderness expedition. Not that I would have turned either the Marines or the gays away from participating. I would have made more effort to match up such disparately different personalities with likeminded people. Composing a workable and companionable group of clients from the get-go ultimately makes the guide’s job easier. Unfortunately, some maladjusted and neurotic client may sneak through the selection process and the guide then has to meld this potentially explosive personality into the group. And it has to be done quickly. It’s like a foot blister. If it’s not dealt with at the onset, it could grow into a debilitating problem; and this will have a deleterious affect on the group.

Ben signed on to one of my two-week whitewater trips, a late arrival and a friend of a friend who met through an internet dating company. He was a lawyer. In all respects he seemed appropriate to fit into this group; he had experience in moving water, correctly answered all the pre-trip questions — there was no reason to deny his participation. I now had a full complement of clients to round out this expedition.

Ben was a Type-A personality — like many of my clients — like the majority of the more ardent adventure-seekers. These people can be described as impatient, excessively time-conscious, highly competitive, and incapable of relaxation; a lot of these people have free-floating hostilities that can be triggered by minor incidents; some may exhibit sociopathic tendencies, or dissocial personality disorder. Ben was a classic example. People with DPD generally have callous unconcern for the feelings of others and lack the capacity for empathy, disregard social norms, seldom profit from experience, and are persistently irritable.

There are those ostentatious individuals who insist on challenging the authority of the guide, especially on whitewater river expeditions — those people who think they possess skills over and above the leader. This is evident at the first set of rapids encountered. In most cases, allowing the “show-off” to screw up early on in the trip is enough to humble them back into the group dynamic successfully. With Ben though, having been allowed to run the first rapid unsuccessfully while everyone else watched, was not the self-effacing experience expected. He wanted another run at it. I declined his request. After a week of persistent challenges, running rapids without permission while everyone else portaged, and multiple rescues, I took Ben aside from the group and threatened to leave him behind on the trail — to wait for a floatplane to pick him up. His response was, “Try it.”

At a particularly dangerous chutes, on day ten, Ben snuck back to the portage trailhead and, instead of carrying his canoe and pack around the chutes, he ran the falls. A French guide drowned here a year later. Below the chutes we watched in horror as Ben’s overturned canoe tumbled over the precipice, followed by a canoe pack and then Ben himself, clutching his paddle. Almost swept into a hydraulic souse hole, a place where it would be impossible to rescue him, he was finally flushed into a recirculating eddy. Trapped, but safe, Ben arced around in wide circles while we watched from shore. The group had had enough of Ben by this time and the collective decision was to sit on the shore and eat lunch while Ben remained stuck in the eddy. We pulled his canoe and pack out of the river but left Ben floating for a good half-hour before rescuing him.

Despondent but compliant, Ben finally understood his boundaries; and after threatening to sue me, my heirs and assigns, calmed down enough to reintegrate (but not completely) back into the group. The outdoor adventure product trade panders to Type-A personalities, profits from their innate and insatiable appetite for gear, and is somewhat responsible for creating a new genre of adventure jockey — the Collector. The Collector hoards gear … expensive gear. And these people often sign up for the more exotic adventures because they have the money to do so. They have little interest in history, or geophysical attributes, spirituality, cultural amenities, or even the general aesthetic makeup of the landscape of a particular adventure destination. They choose a particular adventure for its notoriety. And they will do this trip once only and then move on to another, and another. Some people collect adventure trips like other people collect stamps. There’s nothing really creative or deeply enlightening about it.

I terminated the participation of a couple of collectors while guiding a Thelon River expedition. It was on the third day of the trip and due to heavy winds we had to be evacuated to a new location further upriver — a change in the itinerary. Although agreeable to the change, two participants began drinking heavily, became aggressively antisocial to the point I had to have them flown back to Yellowknife without a refund. As wilderness guide, I have the authority to make this decision — to change an itinerary for the safety of the group, and to remove any potential or disruptive influence that may compromise the group well-being. You can pay seventy thousand dollars to climb Mount Everest, but no self-respecting guide will guarantee that you will ever get to the summit. In my case, these two men attempted to sue me for changing the itinerary; they had paid money to paddle the Thelon River, and I took this trophy away from them.

Then there were the twins — two anorexic, neurotic thirty-two-year-olds who signed on to a whitewater clinic along with the “stalker.” The stalker was an attractive Jewish lady who was married to a doctor. The two of them wanted to join one of my whitewater clinics but she insisted on bringing her friend along, one-half of the twins. Only the twin wouldn’t come without her suicidal sister who was lamenting the loss of her lover by locking herself in her bedroom for a year. And the lover was the best friend of the doctor. The doctor wouldn’t come without his mother and another gentleman friend, and in the end, the two twins had decided to bring along a young man who they had just met. They were to drive to Temagami to catch the floatplane and I would meet them at a designated spot along the Lady Evelyn River. The water levels were high and as it was springtime, the black flies were particularly irksome.

In my opinion, Temagami is a rather unprogressive town. It prides itself in its ability not to attract business or tourists. The docks at the air service, though, did well and pandered to sportsmen who often milled about waiting for flights amidst skids of cased beer, coolers, and fishing paraphernalia. It being the opening of walleye fishing season, the air service was seasonally busy. When my group arrived they had a two-hour wait for their plane. To make the time go faster, the twins smoked a couple of joints to relax and had removed most of their clothing and, after a while, began fondling, caressing, and performing carnal gestures on the strut of the Cessna 185 moored at the dock, much to the amusement of the air service staff and patrons. In no time, half the men of the village had descended upon the air service for the free show. Upon the twins’ arrival in the Wilderness Park, they had still not dressed adequately to ward off the black flies which by now had zoned in on the promise of new flesh to alight on. As they stepped off the plane I made a mention that they may want to slip something on for protection but received a “fuck-you” look of contempt instead. In the least, I asked if they could put on a pair of shoes, which also was received with equal defiance. What they did next actually took me by surprise. They walked over to a slough of muskeg and began rolling in it, coating themselves liberally in the mud, which, of course, was their answer to the problem of biting flies. The trip was going well so far, I mused silently, thinking of how interminably long the week was going to be.

Things got more bizarre. The stalker had insisted that I was her soulmate and that we should be together, and that my wife should be with her husband. The husband by now was taking the brunt of criticisms from his wife, I was trying desperately to deflect the coquetry of the stalker, and the jilted twin who was locked in her bedroom for a year had slipped into a deep funk about life in general and took me to be some sort of power monger. While out gathering firewood, I had returned to the campsite to find a hundred candles lit through the woods during a time when there was a fire-ban caution imposed. Admittedly, I was a bit excited about a potential fire in the dry bush and had the candles extinguished promptly. I was thoroughly brow-beaten for this and paid the price. The one twin wasn’t dealing with the trip very well; the bugs, the heat, the work, the need to wear clothes and shoes, my authoritarianism. The stalker came to me and said her friend’s sister was going to commit suicide and what was I going to do about it. By this time I had just about had enough of the twins so I unsheathed my knife and handed it to the stalker to give to the twin. Nobody saw the humour in this but me.

Oddly enough, nobody died on this trip, whether by their hand or by mine; but some trips have a residual complexity to them, as did this one. The stalker called my wife up after the whitewater clinic and demanded that she get divorced — free me so the stalker and I could be soulmates. Unlike some other wilderness guides who would take advantage of such situations, I had a strong personal code of ethics not to get involved with clients. This situation, however, did nothing to consolidate that mantra with my wife.

People have different reasons for signing up for wilderness trips. Personal reasons, of course, such as being able to meet new friends they wouldn’t naturally meet anywhere else. There are a lot of lonely individuals who use this particular venue to eke out a new relationship, the guide often being the prime objective — married or not. And guides (generally speaking) have this cavalier disrepute of being womanizers. I’ve met other, younger, and mostly unmarried wilderness guides who imbibe in contests to see who can bed the most clients in a running season. The opportunity is rife with desperate, lonely women.

Late one fall I had a call to organize a long weekend canoe trip for a company that sponsored teenagers in transition. I was a little hesitant to take the group just by scanning through their list of requirements which included taking along a body-bag. Granted they had had mishaps on their trips, usually because of poor guiding and cut-rate costs, but I was used to late season guiding. It wouldn’t be difficult.

The counsellor was in her late twenties, a good leader and helpful. That was a good thing because one of the girls on the trip was eight-months pregnant, and teenagers at the best of times were high maintenance. It was an easy route that took advantage of large campsites, big enough to accommodate the twelve of us and four tents. The boys resided in one tent, the girls in the other, while their counsellor and I each had our own tent. After the first night out it became obvious that the counsellor had something else on her mind. I assured her that I was married and didn’t get involved with clients. She stormed off, practically ripping her tent from the ground, the bevy of teenagers consoling her (they were in on the whole affair), none of whom talked to me for the rest of the paddle out.

Invitations appeared more often than I like to relate and I never saw myself as the receptor for such activities, but I was astounded as to the level and extent some people would go to have an affair while on the adventure trail, either with the guide or with another client. It can present some uncomfortable situations and the guide — as perceived by definition of the career — is often deemed “available” simply by brandishing that romantic, free-spirited, and attractive lifestyle. My last marriage was founded on such notions that the guide’s social science was one of liberality and leisure. And it often is, except that a marriage with an ideal, or the promise of capturing that nomadic temperament and boxing it, is surely destined to fail. It’s the trail that is important to the guide, first and foremost; and when the guide comes home he is often temperamental, moody, unsociable, and happy only by planning the next expedition. And the trail beckons, always, as a conduit of freedom.

The wilderness trail either brings out the best in people or the worst. Thankfully, the majority of people I have had as clients made a connection with self, others, and the environment around them. But as forgettable as a string of sunny days, it’s the rogue storm one remembers. The guide does not have the privilege to go home after work; he is committed to these people twenty-four hours each day until the trip is over.

But to what extreme and by which drastic measure can a wilderness guide take in keeping a sense of order. A captain of a boat can throw a man in the brig and he’s safely alienated from the rest of the passengers. On a wilderness canoe trip, in comparison, the guide doesn’t have the convenience of a retention system. I’ve only once had an incident when a psychotic adventurer needed to be subdued. And he was my paid assistant. It was the only time in my career when it was necessary to use a firearm as a solution to a dangerous situation. This particular episode is covered in detail in “River of Fire” later on in the book.

But in some cases the guide is not always right. There are times when the guide is under pressure from time constraints, pure exhaustion, and even peer pressure. Younger, less seasoned guides are often more likely to make errors in judgment than the veterans. In 1977, while I was employed as park ranger, one of the worst canoeing tragedies unfolded on the Ottawa River, within my own district. A group of fourteen students and two teachers (acting as guides), upset in the middle of the river in June while making a rough water crossing. Twelve students and one teacher died of hypothermia. Instead of waiting for calm weather, or rafting their canoes, the guides made the decision to cross a deadly piece of water just to keep to a tight schedule.

Even experienced guides perish, and this is typically the fate of those who defy their own abilities and common sense. A good guide knows the limit of knowledge and physical capacity that sets personal and group boundaries. Venturing beyond this principle opens up a quagmire of potential tribulations. Climbers often attempt to push their personal limits. Climbing is a completely self-indulgent sport and there are a plethora of famous mountain guides whose bones decorate the fool’s abyss. This happens when the level of risk is greater than the guide’s capacity to mitigate the unknowns … and in the wilderness there are always going to be uncharted and enigmatic trails.

It is said that fear is the mother of safety, and it is fear that intensifies an adventure trip. It is our basic survival mechanism and is an instinctive reaction caused by rising adrenalin levels. On whitewater river expeditions the adrenalin pulses with the current flow; the sound of rapids ahead prompts the heart to beat faster and the sweat to bead on the forehead. The unknown looms ahead. But there is no adventure if there is no risk, and when we tempt fate and step closer to the edge, there will always be an element of fear. A balanced sum of trepidation makes us wary; too little or too much fear makes us stupid. Fear conditioning is a part of the guide’s expected competence as a leader. The guide is expected to be stoic, fearless, intrepid, and responsive to any situation. Anything less could have disastrous effect on the well-being of the group. When anything goes wrong, everyone looks to the guide for a responsible and quick solution carried out with proficiency. And there are times, even for me as a seasoned guide, when fear is overwhelming and you find yourself grasping for a way out that remains elusive and improbable. The once tight ship starts to list to one side and everyone grabs for the handrails. Luckily, there is always a Plan B to put into play to counter all of Murphy’s Laws, or should be, in the guide’s bag of tricks.

I like being a guide. Unlike the role of an outfitter where life can be prosaic and predictable, venturing beyond the line of civilization with a group of eager patrons has a particular appeal to me. It’s not about power, although in the eyes of the client, the guide is often revered as a superhuman empyrean figurehead. Ego aside, the task comes with no shortage of challenges. And it is the capricious nature of the business, the alluring changeable trail of discovery that is attractive. And to see the wilderness through the eyes of those debutants, the children of Nature who view the sacredness of the landscape for the first time, to feel their excitement, to share in the journey in the most primitive way, defines my rationale for loving the guiding life.