Walden on Wheels: On the Open Road from Debt to Freedom (15 page)

The five of us would live like the voyageurs. All our clothes and gear were “period correct,” meaning that they were made in the same style and with the same materials of the eighteenth century. We’d start our fires with flint and steel, sleep under wool blankets and cotton tarps, and live without toilet paper, bug spray, water filters, and backpacking stoves. We’d travel by paddling two very leaky and expensive birchbark canoes that had been built by a master craftsman in Quebec.

Of course, we could never live exactly as the voyageurs had: we’d be paddling next to houseboats; we’d have to use canal locks; and in the towns we passed through, because we hadn’t yet become impertinent and full of bravado, we’d be unwilling to drop trou in front of picnickers, instead favoring flush toilets at canal restrooms. We were forced by law to wear floatation devices around our waists that could be inflated by the tug of a cord. We also carried a GPS, a cell phone, and a camera to document our expedition.

Frankly, I didn’t know what the hell I was doing.
This was all just so weird.
Yet I knew the experience would be memorable. And I hoped the strain of the voyage might somehow fast-forward my development. The more miserable the voyage was, I figured, the more quickly I’d grow, as I had after my Blue Cloud climb. But this was no short daylong hike like I was used to in Alaska; this was two whole months of tireless physical exertion—a full-fledged adventure that I hoped would push my limits. Maybe I’d be able to do something gallant and manly? I had ludicrous fantasies of warding off black bears with my paddle, delivering momentous speeches when the crew’s morale was low, or saving a fellow voyageur in boiling rapids, bellowing, “
Grab my hand!
” before clasping forearms.

My parents and I arrived in Ottawa and spent the night in a hotel. In the morning I was supposed to show up at Bob’s home in my voyageur clothes, but I was too embarrassed to walk through the hotel lobby in my breeches, knee-high socks, and baggy cotton shirt, so I decided that I’d put on my clothes in the backseat of my parents’ car in the parking garage.

As I tried to roll my navy-blue breeches over my hips, I realized that I’d made an incalculable blunder. The pants that I’d ordered from an online reenactment store—I was horrified to realize—didn’t fit. (Why I hadn’t bothered to try them on beforehand is beyond me.) I scoured the rest of my gear and realized, again to my horror, that I’d accidentally left my other pair of breeches at home. With a final tug of the pants, one of the
buttons rocketed off and pinged against the ceiling. My mother was waiting outside the SUV, so I handed her the breeches, button, and my sewing kit, and asked, close to tears, “Mom, can you please sew this up for me?”

When we arrived at Bob’s, I met the rest of the four-man, one-woman crew.

There were Christian and Diane, both experienced voyageurs who, like Bob, had been members of the original
Destination Nor’Ouest
TV series, which made them minor celebrities in French-speaking Canada. Christian, thirty-two, was a cocky and crass Métis (half white, half Native American) who made a living doing voyageur presentations at elementary schools. One of the first things he said to me was “Looks like you have a little pubic hair growin’,” referring to the stubble on my cheeks. “If you smile just right, it looks like a pussy.” Diane was a fifty-one-year-old Quebecoise who spoke just a tiny bit of English. She was an expert cook and baker, skilled at finding wild greens to complement our diet of salt pork, pea soup, and bannock.

Then there was Jay, a tall, scarecrow-esque fifty-four-year-old retired substitute French teacher who was obsessed with the history of the voyageurs but, like me, had never been on an expedition of any sort before.

And finally, our leader, Bob, a wealthy fifty-four-year-old motivational speaker and self-proclaimed “World’s Foremost Voyageur.” Atop his cleanly shaven head rested a felt hat—Indiana Jones–style—that shadowed his long gray beard. He wore a loose hemp shirt and a pair of full-length charcoal denim pants, and around his waist was a frayed red sash: the customary garb of any self-respecting voyageur. Bob had planned and paid for the voyage.

We spent the next hour at Bob’s organizing gear and getting our first lesson on packing bedrolls. A bedroll is the finished product of all your gear properly “rolled” and ready for canoe travel that also functions as your seat in the canoe. In my bedroll, I carried an extra shirt, a toque (something that looks like a Santa Claus hat), a capote (a thick, heavy wool coat), an extra
pair of cotton socks, an extra pair of moccasins, two wool blankets, and a ground tarp that I’d sleep on every night. The bedroll was tightened with a leather tumpline that is strapped around your forehead, allowing you to easily carry all your gear when portaging over the trails we’d take to bypass rapids.

The rest of my gear included a wooden canteen and a white cotton bag the size of a large purse that held my sewing and fishing kits; knife; flint and steel for starting fires; tin cup for eating, drinking, and bailing; small frying pan for baking bannock; spoon made of bone; lye soap; ropes; journal; and brass pencil. Communally, we shared a seventy-five-pound bag of salt pork and two fifty-pound bags of flour and peas. We had salt, pepper, black tea, bars of maple sugar, bags of dried cranberries, an ax, a large pot, and canoe repair supplies: extra slabs of birch bark and a marine pitch to seal holes.

When Bob asked if I could help him move one of our two ponderous birchbark canoes, I bent over and felt the seams of my breeches strain. I paused. I had been here before. Another ounce of pressure and the seat of my pants would split open like a high school football team running through a paper banner.

“Bob, I hope I lose weight on the voyage,” I said sincerely. “I’m not quite fitting into my pants.”

He gave me a once-over, leaned over with a good-natured smile, and said, “Ha! You got them on backward.”

The pants episode was how the first couple of weeks went. The crew, before they’d met me, presumed that I’d be an able seaman and a competent outdoorsman (given my rafting experiences in Alaska), so they were surprised to learn that they were voyaging with someone who’d never even been in a canoe before. And, of course, I didn’t have to make a confession; my ineptitude became obvious when it was my turn to act as the rudder in the canoe’s rear, sending the canoe into frenzied figure eights. I also burned the pea soup, filleted my fingers when I tried to get a spark by smacking the flint and steel together, and pretended like I knew how to tie more than one knot, improvising
elaborate creations that no one could either mimic or untie.

I may have been inept as a voyageur, but no one had ever met so eager and so willing a student.

Bob focused on helping me fine-tune my paddle stroke. Watching me from the stern of the canoe, he’d say, “Reach for more water. Less arm, more torso. Keep the paddle parallel with the boat. Sink it all the way down. Stop at the hip. Slice the air. Hold your arms straight. Faster. We need forty-five strokes a minute!”

Christian—harassing me the whole time—taught me to sling up the tarps at 45-degree angles with our paddles, a half dozen important knots, and how to patch up and repair the canoes, which were so leaky they needed to be bailed out every hour and repaired each night.

Diane, with far gentler methods, taught me how to bake the bannock with maple sugar and cranberries mixed in and make dumplings from wild apples and tea from cedar leaves.

I tried to compensate for my many blunders by hauling as much gear as I could on portages and assuming all baking and pot-washing duties. And while I couldn’t read the weather or identify poison ivy (which I’d accidentally wiped myself with one day), I found that I could paddle just as long and as hard as the rest of them.

After my first week, I tore a page out of my journal and wrote a letter to Josh.

Hey buddy,

This is my typical day as a voyageur:

4:30
A.M
.—Wake up. Portage gear from camp to dock with a leather tumpline strapped around my forehead taxing nonexistent neck muscles.

5:00
A.M
.—Begin paddling.

7:00
A.M
.—Stop for pork and pea soup breakfast that was cooked the previous evening.

7:20
A.M
.—Continue paddling.

3–4:00
P.M
.—Stop paddling.

4:01
P.M
.—Roll out gear, usually soaking wet. Locate firewood, begin boiling salt pork and peas. Bake bannock.

5–7
P.M
.—Personal time: give attention to aches and wounds, sew up torn clothing, write in journal, etc.

7
P.M
.—Eat pork and pea soup. Sit by bonfire; drink ration of rum to dull senses for sleep.

8
P.M
.
–4:30
A.M
.—Struggle to fall asleep as every mosquito in the world tries to sneak under my wool blanket; worry that ants will spelunk into orifices like cave-divers; think about suffocating Bob and Jay in their sleep because they snore like elephants.

Despite the hardships, I’m happy to be doing this. It’s a test and I’ve never been pushed this hard. There is little-to-no “enjoyment,” but I feel that today’s sacrifice will be tomorrow’s reward.

Hope you’re doing well with the debt.

Later dude,

Ken

Life was good and simple. We woke up, paddled, cooked, sat by a fire, and went to bed. I had one tin cup that I would use for tea, for soup, and as a latrine when we were too far from shore.

I shat in the woods, wiped myself with leaves, and bathed in the river. I used sand for cleaning pots and twigs for cleaning my teeth. I drank straight from lakes and rivers, and I stopped caring about my smell and unsightly shoulder hairs and my physical appearance in general. We saw the sun rise and set every day. We sat by the fire and talked, or they talked and I listened.

When on the river, I couldn’t wait to get off. Yet by morning, I couldn’t wait to get back on, lured by the cool morning air that always smelled of sweet black tea. Or the soft gulp of the paddle plunging into water that would send two tiny water-twisters spinning behind each stroke. Or a pair of blue herons gracefully walking along the riverbank on stilts. Or the loon’s yodel. Sometimes, we’d paddle in silence through a blizzard of lime-green moths, feeling their soft flaps and velvet tickles.

While we were on the Rideau Canal and Trent-Severn
Waterway, we often floated through towns and alongside convoys of huge houseboats that were manned by portly, shirtless “captains.” But when we paddled into Georgian Bay of Lake Huron, we felt for the first time like we’d traveled back to the eighteenth century, wandering into manless, boatless, wakeless waters. We curved our way around thousands of small granite islands that rose up out of the water, plump and gray, as if some stone giant was flexing his muscles beneath. Here, the sea and sky were so blue and calm that it was difficult to tell one from the other. Bob and Christian, in the canoe ahead, looked as if they were paddling atop the wavy drafts of the stratosphere.

At night, we set up camp on one of these islands. I went to the opposite side, took off all my clothes, and went for a swim. I stood up on a large boulder, letting the wind pant against my naked body, taking in a sky that had been dyed purple by the setting sun, which, just below the horizon, projected a murderous bloodred spotlight into the clouds. I had an odd sense that I had been here, in this very place, long ago; that I’d experienced these very sensations in a different lifetime. I imagined an ancestor of mine, perhaps in this very spot, or in a spot like it, a thousand, twenty thousand, or a hundred thousand years before, thinking about how an ancestor of his might have been thinking these very thoughts.

I found myself daily shedding the traces of my century, leaving the comforts and conveniences and distractions of it in the wake of our canoes. After a month of paddling thirty-two kilometers a day, my arm and shoulder muscles had become taut and sinewy; my hair was greased to the point of waterproofness; my face, begrimed and sun-baked, took on a swarthy complexion; and on my chin and cheeks sprouted a bushy brown beard.

The relentless toil of voyageur life made me indifferent, even contemptuous, of what now seemed to be the frivolities of civilized life. Convention, decorum, proper demeanor—these things were useless out on the water. They wouldn’t help me get through nights when squadrons of mosquitoes would buzz
in my ears and creep under my blankets. Nor would they make the pains in my feet go away after mile-long canoe portages over outcroppings of sharp rocks in my thinly soled moccasins. Nor did they soothe my shoulders after twelve hours of almost nonstop paddling. When your life is all toil and hardship, the things that matter and the bullshit that doesn’t become easy to separate.

I started to feel less like a blundering suburbanite and more like someone who kinda knew what he was doing. I could tie an assortment of knots and I could start fires with my flint and steel on one swipe. I cooked all our meals, washed all our dishes, and never complained. I was even having some luck predicting storms by observing cloud movements, moisture, and the wind.

Christian, who was just starting his career as a traveling speaker, only joined us for about half of the voyage. He and I, toward the end of his stay, became canoe partners. He was flagrantly crass, singing French songs about taking a dump in–38°F weather, farting obnoxiously with the tilt of a hip, and once, when he drank a bottle of Madeira, showing his “specialness” by pulling down his pants and tucking his testicles into his closed thighs.

But one day, on the Mattawa River, he forgot to maintain his façade of crassness and self-absorption, unveiling to me just how spiritually sincere he was. In hushed tones he confided that he has a “gift.” During moments of deep meditation, he told me that he’s able to see into people’s minds “as clearly as the horizon before us” and that, in certain settings, he’d even had the power to view people’s dreams. He told me how his native ancestors would go on “vision quests,” which was a ritual that young men in villages would undergo when they reached a certain age. They’d venture out into the woods and starve themselves for days on end until they were granted a vision. What they saw during their quest would play a huge role in the formation of their identity. Sometimes they’d even change their name according to whatever animal spirit greeted them. It sounded a bit fantastical, yet I totally got it. The vision quest was like a
journey. When we are raised by institutions, we are fashioned, in ways big and small, to be like everyone else. But when we go on a journey—especially a journey that follows no one else’s footsteps—it has the capacity to help a person become something unique, an individual.