by David F. Pelly
Last summer, as is our custom with old canoeing friends, and as befits our stage in life, we set out on a very relaxed-pace canoe trip, where the paddling is gentle, the portaging enough to work up a sweat, but not to overly strain the aging backs, the campsites are well-appointed and picturesque whenever possible, and … well, you get the picture.
One of our unintentional habits, developed over years of tripping together, is that we each bring along a book that may be of interest to the others. We spend a fair bit of time reading. But we also have wonderful discussions about many things, including our respective books. It’s almost like reading four books at once.
I’m not about to share with you what my tripping friends were reading, but I do want to tell you about my selection, because it may well be the perfect book for your own trip next summer. It quite simply belongs on a canoe trip.
In the Wake by James McNamara was the ideal read for me, sitting in a folding chair, relaxed, after a short day’s paddle, with an outlook that embraced the lake, the granite, the tall white pines, and the scudding cumulus of summer. To be clear, I don’t know Jim, I’ve never met him, but after reading this retrospective book about the quite remarkable 80-day canoe trip he and his partner Laurie took in 1991, I feel almost as if I know him well. It’s less an account of a trip than it is an exploratory narrative of what drove them onward, at times a self-examination and at others a reflective study of place. Wilderness paddlers everywhere will identify with it.
Not that you need to know for the purpose of this review, but to satisfy curiosity, they paddled and portaged more than 1,000 miles from Wollaston Lake in northern Saskatchewan, across the northwest corner of Manitoba and then north to Nueltin Lake, farther north to Angikuni Lake, west to the Nowleye land-bridge, and then south as directly as possible including upstream on the Kazan River and eventually back to Wollaston. Most of this is country I am at least somewhat familiar with, but you don’t really need a map to understand the essence of their story. The line they travelled is not the point.
The front cover of the book sets the tone: a transcendent image of a red canoe being portaged through spruce toward a small patch of lake – we all know the inestimable joy attached to that moment when the lake comes into view. This photo grips us all, welcomes us into the author’s worldview.
This is not an exaggerated account of a random author’s “conquest.” Far from it. Nor is it a tiresome day-by-day account of an unexceptional canoe trip, the likes of which we have all experienced. It is not what outdoor educator and thoughtful writer Bob Henderson has called a “bravado-grunt narrative” with a “not-so-hidden, look-at-me you-can’t-do-this message.” It is a welcome relief from the contemporary style of “adventure-tourists” who document their trips (whether in print or on YouTube) as they claim the longest or highest or otherwise achieve a “first” of some sort, by their own account, or perhaps “discover” an unknown and unmapped waterfall on a route paddled by Indigenous peoples for millennia! As if. None of that for McNamara.
He writes with a humility and reverence that defies the current trend toward sensationalism and self-aggrandizement. The abiding mystery, which drives him onward, is a search for “the middle of nowhere,” to know what it’s like there.
“I can’t distinguish what I knew when we paddled across the lake from what I learned from books and journals later,” he writes about a special place I myself have written about at some length where, as he puts it, “the intersection of exploration, adventure, Indigenous history, deep wilderness, and the canoe elevate Kasmere Lake to iconic status in my library of special places.”
The man knows whereof he speaks: he has seen it with his own eyes, consumed its crystal-clear waters, walked its shores, felt the embrace of its history.
That “intersection” he speaks of is an apt description of his apparent approach in writing the book. While many other writers seem almost oblivious – sometimes resentful, or even blind – to their predecessors, McNamara revels in thoughts of those who went before, and delights at the slightest physical evidence of their presence. Yet, in his own words, “I crave remoteness and the profound satisfaction when I find it.” One senses that part of his satisfaction lies in the connection he feels, in a remote place, with those predecessors. “I know it’s not as mystical as that. It’s just that when I hold my paddle it mingles my experiences with the legends of the North Country and takes me to distant, wild places.”
Then he went there, for the first time, 35 years ago, as a young man, with his young love, and now offers us his “retrospective musings of age,” in an account of the experience he clearly dreamed about long ago. To a local man at the end of their trip, he explained his motivation: “… to connect to the lost times, to see in the wilderness the record of the cultures that connected through the waterways and portage trails of the North Country.” Only he knows if he achieved that goal to his own satisfaction, but the writing certainly provides an appetizing articulation of his search.
At the end of the day – actually the end of 80 days – I believe this monumental trip delivered to James McNamara much of what he hoped it would: new insights and affirmations. In the final chapter, entitled “Homecoming,” he quotes the well-known T.S. Eliot poem:
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
There seems no doubt that McNamara’s 1991 canoe trip laid the solid foundation for a life together with his paddling partner, Laurie. There’s every chance that reading his account will affect the path forward for you, if you give some thought to how he describes “the middle of nowhere.” When you finish reading this book, you will feel that you have completed a challenging but satisfying canoe trip (even if vicariously). You all know that feeling. Very likely, you will also be glad it was not this trip exactly.
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To order In the Wake by James McNamara, go to: Amazon here David Pelly, a seasoned barrenlands paddler, has been a member of the WCA for just shy of 50 years. He is the author of ten books on Arctic subjects, most notably incorporating Inuit oral history. Last year’s citation for his appointment to the Order of Canada began with the words: “Passionate about the Arctic since he first experienced the region by canoe…” suggesting quite rightly that a canoe has been instrumental in forging that Arctic career. www.davidpelly.com
David Pelly’s most recent, bestselling book, The Ancestors Are Happy has just been re-released in a new second edition by Dundurn Press. Order from your local independent bookseller or go to: https://www.dundurn.com/books_/t22117/a9781459758124-the-ancestors-are-happy
