Lake Superior to James Bay By Canoe

A Woman’s Musings on Voyageur Culture, Gangster Rap and 400 Years of Male Shenanigans

Naked and squealing, my three male companions and I emerge from the cold water of Lake Superior, inaugurating our 450-mile-long journey to the arctic waters of James Bay. A brisk, early-autumn breeze empurples our extremities as we slide our two heavy-laden canoes into the water and begin our paddle northeast into the Michipicoten River, the first leg of our expedition. Fishing boats speckle the immediate swathe of silver-blue water behind us. Past the fishing rigs, the lake stretches on uninterrupted, the shore of my home state, Michigan, lying beyond the horizon.

I’m in the stern of the second boat watching my three motley companions. Stinkus is scrunched in the bow of the first boat, more gangly limbs and clunky feet than body mass, towering over the compact figure of Grizzly sitting behind him. Muscular and gruff, Grizzly, with blond hair, blond beard and blue, blue eyes, looks more like a Viking than a bear. Stinkus is looking straight ahead, quoting a black comedian I can’t identify, and Grizzly’s short, thick body is shaking with laughter in the stern. But the two guys paddle in sync, steadily pulling the water, never missing a beat. Weldon is in the front of my canoe straining to hear Stinkus’s monologue in the other boat.

Ahead of us lies the northern Ontario wilderness: thick boreal forests, sandal-absconding marshes, imposing gorges, portage-requiring waterfalls: home to bear, otter, eagle, osprey, moose, sandhill cranes and one particularly aggressive red squirrel. The route begins with an upstream paddle of the Michipicoten River, which connects to a chain of lakes, which lead to the height-of-land portage, and into the northern-flowing current of the Missinaibi River. The Missinaibi connects to the Moose River, which flows wide and fast and dumps into James Bay, the lower finger of the Hudson Bay. Today is the 19^th of August. The three guys and I plan to finish in four weeks, racing the cold, heavy rains of the approaching arctic fall.

As we venture north, I will sit close to the evening campfires, my sleeping bag draped over my shoulders, reading stories of the voyageurs: the feisty French-Canadian men employed during the North American fur trade during the 17^th, 18^th and 19^th centuries. The men traveled in 27-foot bark canoes throughout the northwoods trading with Cree and Ojibwa trappers for beaver, otter and other prized pelts. The two biggest corporate employers of the voyageurs were the French-Canadian Northwest Company (NWC) and its rival, the British-owned Hudson Bay Company (HBC). Both companies established forts and outposts along the route we are following, shipping furs to Europe, north by way of James Bay and the Hudson Bay, and south by way of the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence Seaway.

Already the strong, fraternal bond between Grizzly, Stinkus and Weldon is reminding me of the kinship the voyageurs created in the northwoods 400-hundred-years ago. The three guys are childhood friends from an all-boys summer camp, and I know from past experiences with them that the trio lives to tell long, drawn-out stories of adventures from their days as campers. The three comrades share with the voyageurs a determination to never grow-up or settle down. Most voyageurs never graduated from a life of rivers and exploration in the north woods, working in the fur trade from age 13 to over 50, endlessly proud of their occupation. My boy-men companions, ages 20 to 29, never graduated from summer camp, and return every summer to work as counselors.

I became friends with the guys the summer I worked as a counselor at their sister camp, which lies across a dirt road—and an entire cosmos—away from the boys’ enclave of cabins. On the boys’ side of the road, children learn to paddle canoes naked, and to tell heroic stories of their camping trips in the north woods.

As we paddle into the Michipicoten River, the three guys and I lean into our task like the voyageurs who traveled before us, prying deeply with our paddles and slowly moving upstream. We are paddling back in time, toward large tracts of protected and undeveloped wilderness. Perched on my nylon laced stern-seat, watching my companions with curiosity, I realize that with every J-stroke, I am propelling myself into a personal look at 400 years of male bonding.

 * * *

At seven in the morning, on the third day of our expedition, Weldon is the first out of the tents. Grizzly and I slowly join him. Our camp is on a sandy pimple of an island on the south end of Whitefish Lake. The damn we portaged around yesterday is a half-mile away, marking both the beginning of the Michipicoten River and the end of our upstream slog.

Weldon, six years older than Grizzly and I, is a veteran of the northwoods. He insists on preparing each meal for us, though Grizzly and I try to help. Low shrubs and our dew-soaked tents crowd the kitchen as we fumble to make tea and locate the granola. Sunlight fills the kitchen space, and soon it will spill over the bushes and dry our tents.        

According to the map, we will pass a railroad bridge as we paddle today, but a few days of northward paddling will turn the signs of civilization along our route into nothing more than archeological remains of the fur trade—the grown-over foundations of fur posts and scattered pieces of brick ovens. We saw a black bear with cubs, loons and an eagle yesterday. The northern wilderness is beginning to feel closer.

As the voyageurs traveled north, the men who had worked in the trade the longest, the voyageur veterans—known as the “hommes du nord” or north men—initiated the new members of the canoe brigades into their rugged wilderness lifestyle. Mock baptisms were a common initiation, in which the “hommes du nord” often plunged the new men in water, desiring to cause as much discomfort and humor as possible. The men also played pranks on each other, becoming more playful the deeper they ventured into the wilderness. Examples of pranks ranged from hiding lynx feces in the bottom of cooking pots filled with food, to telling ghost stories to frighten the uninitiated. Historians surmise the pranks the voyageurs played actually brought the men closer together, helping to create a sense of community in the wilderness.

As a family of sandhill cranes circles above the island, Weldon pours our tea.  Grizzly and I share a decaying, moss-covered cedar log and drink slowly from our mugs. The morning is quiet, except for the occasional sound of bass jumping in the reeds off shore, shattering the mirror-like water and sending isolated patches of ripples across the surface. The three of us communicate in gestures and whispered phrases, not wanting to break the tranquility of the morning. Eventually Stinkus pulls himself out of his tent and saunters into the kitchen, wearing the warm clothing he found at the bottom of his father’s closet back home in Florida: a maroon, polyester union-suit.           

Stinkus is a 20-year-old swamp boy from central Florida, afraid of the north wind like most fear alligators. This month-long expedition is his first time camping for more than a few days in a row. Somehow he stands confidently before us in his cold-weather survival uniform. Picture skinny legs in tight polyester, at one time fleecy but now pilling with age, a zipper all the way to the chin, and tight polyester ending just below the elbow, because his arms are too long for the unit. He is also wearing a hunter-orange hat lined with black fake fur. He gave a duplicate of the hat to Weldon before we left, but it somehow never made it into Weldon’s dry bag.

 “So Weldon,” he inquires nonchalantly, burying his head inside a dry bag pawing around for his bowl and spoon. “Let’s say I need to take a dump.” His voice is muffled inside the bag.

Weldon looks up from his tea and laughs.

 “I have to dig a hole?” Stinkus asks, standing up from the bag empty handed.

Weldon nods.

“And wipe with what? A leaf?”

“Or a stick, but not sand,” Weldon says.

Stinkus glares at him. “How will I know where you laid yours?” He pauses and surveys the small island, “I don’t wanna dig it up.”

“I marked it with a long stick,” Weldon says, waving toward the portion of our island containing his deposit. “You’ll see it. It’ll make a good wiping stick.”

Stinkus nods and moves slowly toward the bushes on the other end of the island.

“Weldon, how’s he going to use the stick if it’s in your poop?” I ask.

Weldon ignores me. Silently, the three of us begin to fill our bowls with granola and start eating breakfast without our Florida swamp boy. Then Stinkus pauses for a moment in the bushes, and realizing we can still hear him begins to narrate.

“So I’m looking for something to dig with. Got it,” he says in a loud voice. “Digging the hole,” he continues. “Hope that’s big enough. Unzipping my uni. Squatting,” and on he rambles describing the entire ordeal, while hot tea threatens to squirt out our noses.

Weldon and Grizzly exchange a look and I understand: this is the swamp boy’s initiation into the northwoods. Horrified but intrigued, I chew my granola quietly, listening to Stinkus.

After three or four minutes there is a short silence. Then we hear a loud shriek, followed by a stream of cussing and a splash in the water. Then Stinkus storms back into camp naked, dripping, and enraged.

“You didn’t tell me the stick was stabbing INTO your crap!” he says, standing in front of Weldon and waving his previously poop-smeared hands around in disgust. “Your insides were on my hand!”

           

Stinkus will probably not agree that sticking his hand in Weldon’s poop, followed by a self-initiated baptism in the lake, is making him feel any closer to us, or more at home in the Ontario wilderness. But I only met Stinkus last year and the incident, I believe, is expanding our group’s comfort-level together. For the rest of the journey, he will repeatedly complain about Weldon’s feces that once coated his hand, which in turn will solicit uncontrollable laughter.
* * *

The tenth day brings us to yet another island campsite, where the last red pines of our journey tower over us. Stinkus is sitting by the fire strumming his new backpacker guitar: Dr. Dre’s “Bitches Ain’t Shit” and 2Pac’s “Thug Mansion” are the only two songs he knows how to play. As the sun sets the words bitches ain’t shit but hoes and tricks rise to the tree tops, settling in the still air.

Darkness cradles our campsite, and Grizzly begins hanging the bear bags from two thickly canopied red pines. As he hunches over the food bags, with his shirtless back curled toward the top of the pine trees, a red squirrel attacks him. He is tying a bowline and then WHAM, a pinecone pelts him on the bare back, plummeting through the air from sixty feet above.

 “Ow,” Grizzly says. He’s tough, but the pinecone leaves a welt.

Then we hear scuffling up in the tree. Stinkus puts down his guitar and yells, “Grizz, watch out!” and down careens another pinecone. Grabbing his canoe paddle, Grizzly retaliates by baseball-batting pinecones back into the treetops.

Weldon and Stinkus close in on Grizzly and begin cheering. Prancing excitedly in the glow of the fire, they could be the voyageurs: restless males, captivated by a brawl in which one man’s power and skill will be proven against another’s—in this instance, against a red squirrel.

“Get him, Grizz!” Stinkus howls.

“Higher!” Weldon barks.

Our guidebook, written in 1994, warns us about a crazed red squirrel on this island: has she really been tormenting travelers for the past 13 years?  Snuggling into my sleeping bag tonight, I’m thinking—smiling—about the little red squirrel, defending her territory against the loud humans singing along to “Bitch’s Ain’t Shit.”
* * *

Thunderhouse Falls:  the egos of voyageurs thrived in places like this. Prefaced with a string of unforgiving rapids, the Missinaibi River splits from the Precambrian shield and rushes toward the Hudson Bay lowlands with a sixty-foot drop of three stacked, foaming waterfalls. The walls of the canyon, decorated with red and grey folds and striations, rise 100 dizzying feet out of the water. To the voyageurs, Thunderhouse Falls was a navigational challenge and another long, uphill portage: another opportunity to prove their skill shooting rapids and their strength in carrying heavy loads. The three guys and I reach this surging, powerful place on the afternoon of September third, the 16^th day of our expedition.

I’m fishing in the pool at the bottom of the last waterfall, below a pillar of volcanic gneiss called Conjuring House Rock, which the Alongonquin, the ancestors of the Cree and Ojibwa, believed looked like a shaman’s tent. The Alongonquin believed Thunderhouse Falls was a place of harmonic convergence between the spirit and material worlds, and performed ceremonial rites here starting sometime around A.D. 500.

The history of this dramatic gorge feels very present, as if I am wrapped in the voice of a mysterious storyteller, urging me to think about my role within my expedition family of all boys.

I cast into the middle of the deep, iodine-colored pool and repeatedly reel in plump bass and gold, bulging-eyed walleye. Within a half an hour I have enough fish for a feast. I fillet the fish on a slab of rock near the edge of the river, a half-mile downstream from our campsite. The sun is setting quickly, so I turn on my headlamp. The mosquitoes are enjoying my bare legs as I cut into the fish. But the fillet knife is now dull, so I’m actually hacking at the flesh, ripping and tearing at the meat. With every stab and yank of my knife, the work becomes more unpleasant. Tonight I will be the provider for my group, tonight I will be an important member of the fraternity: the dull knife doesn’t matter.        

I rinse the fillets in the river and turn away from the water. As I carry the sloppy, uneven, ghost-white hunks of fish meat up the trail to camp, a passage from a book on Ojibwa heritage I am reading plays through my mind: “No occupation was more respected than that of hunting and fishing, that is, providing food.”

Forty-five minutes later, the boys and I huddle around the campfire eating the fish with our hands out of a shared bowl. The firelight highlights the grease on our chins; we laugh and lick our fingers. It feels good to be a part of a group, to have comrades.

 “Damn good fish, Edwards,” Stinkus says to me.

* * *

We leave Thunderhouse Falls the following day around noon, after spending a pleasant morning exploring the foam-covered eddies and mossy nooks of the gorge. We paddle an easy stretch of swifts that lead to a Class III-IV, half-mile long drop, called Stone Rapids, which our guidebook warns not to run. But the water level is lower than usual this fall, and over the past two weeks, we have successfully run several rapids the guidebook recommends portaging around. We decide to scout this rapid, hoping again to avoid another lengthy portage.

“The guidebook says this is hard to scout,” I shout to my companions over the roar of the river as we boulder-hop out into the rapid, trying to get a clear view of the run. The guys don’t respond, knowing the roar of the rushing water would swallow their voices.

The first 150 meters look manageable: a shallow boulder garden followed by a sharp “S” turn, ending in a white, three foot, v-shaped drop. Due to the low water, we see well-defined channels, intimating safe passage from the boulders. We study the hydrology, each of us visualizing the necessary maneuvers, before nodding consent. Downstream, the river pinches through high, rocky banks and bends to the right. We can’t see around the corner.

“We can probably portage on the bedrock if it gets worse,” I yell to my companions. Again, they don’t respond.

We paddle past the portage trail and Stinkus and I make the first run. With his long, powerful arms he draws the bow through the sharp “S” turn while I steer, and grunt, in the stern. We hit the frothing, final drop straight on. The boat takes on some water, and Stinkus shrieks at a splash of water that soaks him, but he air-guitars his paddle in success as we pull into an eddy on river left. Grizzly and Weldon gracefully follow.

We scramble out of the boats and leap from rock-to-rock around the bend in the river to look at the rest of the rapid. What we see is at once beautiful and dismaying: a waterfall, consisting of yellow, surging water squeezing into a narrow slot, and tumbling over three, five-foot-high drops. The sound of the river pounds in our chests.

Stinkus and I immediately discuss a practical portaging route. The bedrock we are standing on, which is usually submerged during high water, is currently dry, but also incredibly rough and uneven. The obvious path across the rock is relatively short—cutting at a diagonal for 200 yards to the pool below the waterfall.

Grizzly and Weldon are still looking at the river.

“You’re not running it,” I say assertively, knowing that even an unloaded boat would swamp after the first drop.

“We know,” Weldon says.  He pauses, evaluating the moonscape portage, “We’re going to line it.”

Drag the boat by the bow and stern lines down the waterfall? The banks are too high above the water to walk along and still maintain contact with a boat sitting below, rocking on the aggressive current. So Grizzly and Weldon plan to traverse just above the water, along the steep rock wall on river right, clinging to the side of the wall with one hand, while gripping a rope tied to the boat with the other. If they let go of the boat, it will fill with water, and the current of the Missinaibi will pin it to the bottom, or the boat will emerge in the pool below, bent and broken. If either man falls in, it is the same story.

The duo is not the first to think of such a daunting act. The voyageurs often chose to line their canoes, especially when a rapid looked too dangerous to run, and the shoreline appeared too rock-strewn or thickly vegetated to navigate. One historical account cites examples of the lines tied to the boats breaking: sending canoes down rapids and over waterfalls, losing goods, and drowning men.        

I do not approve of the idea, and I look to Stinkus for support. We are over 150 miles away from the nearest town, in the belly of the Ontario wilderness. If the boat bends or breaks, or if one of them is hurt, it will be a long and unpleasant trek out of here. Stinkus agrees that tracking a canoe down the waterfall is an asinine idea, but he’s also not going to stand in Grizzly and Weldon’s way.        

The two groups eat lunch on opposite sides of the river. Stinkus and I watch the “hommes du nord” on river right, lounging on the ledge above the waterfall and laughing. The rushing water drowns out what they are saying.

I eat quickly and walk away from the waterfall. I am acutely aware of the pounding, mesmerizing sound of the river; as I hustle toward my canoe I feel the strength of the waterfall throbbing in my head, my chest and my stomach. Hoisting a dry bag onto my back and grabbing an armload of paddles, I begin the first of my shuttles over the rock to the pool below the waterfall. Stinkus stands on the edge of the gorge, taking photos of the two men choosing to pit their brawn against the river. For the next 45 minutes I continue to slowly shuttle loads of gear. I look at Grizzly and Weldon only once, and this is what I see: the boat is submerged and Grizzly is frantically trying to scramble closer to it, reaching into the angry yellow-brown water to reclaim his bowline. Weldon is desperately clinging to the rock wall, holding onto the stern line with one hand, as the boat bucks up and down in the current, trying to pull him into the water.

Stinkus sees my horrified face. “This has already happened once,” he says, trying to reassure me. Then I remember my fishing pole is in the submerged, floundering boat, and I wonder if it is securely tied down.

 “God damn it,” I mutter, stomp my foot, and waddle with another load of gear across the rock to the bottom of the waterfall.

Grizzly, Weldon, and their canoe make it to the pool at the base of the waterfall, humbled but not badly hurt. They are missing a paddle, but my fishing pole is strapped to the gunwale. If “Bitch’s Ain’t Shit,” I think to myself, then who is going to supply the common sense

* * *

Over the next seven days, we paddle out of the boreal forests of the Missinaibi River and into the expansive muskeg of the Moose River. The weather is cold, wet and grey. We spend several rainy mornings making tea in the vestibules of our tents, hiding from the relentless rain. We portage heavy loads, paddle long days, spend late nights telling stories, and take care of each other. The cold weather fosters our fraternity.

We reach James Bay on the 12^th of September, three days earlier than we originally anticipated. The leaves are turning color, and the weather is not improving. We climb out of our canoes in the small harbor of the town of Moosonee, proud of our journey and our shared experience. The people in this town, as well as the town of Moose Factory Island which lies less then a mile across the bay, are predominately of Cree heritage. The people we meet are friendly, but it is obvious we are not an anomaly here. To a group of people whose ancestors traveled the corridor 2,000 years ago, and whose great-grandparents probably worked for the HBC, we are just tourists.

Well, except for Stinkus. With his gangly limbs stuffed into a yellow rain jacket, big clanking boots on his feet, and an orange hat on his head, he might be an anomaly. He strides confidently through town, smiling at everyone, a proud veteran of the river and the northern wilderness. On the way to the train station, two middle-aged women walk toward us and pause at Stinkus, towering above them, his camera and his guitar dangling around his neck. The one standing closest to him looks him in the eye and says, “Hey cutie.” Stinkus grins, and the women walk away, giggling.

I laugh with my boy-men companions—the best laugh we have shared all week. Basking in a moment of fraternity, I realize there are elements of this contemporary voyageur-brotherhood I will never fully experience. For instance, I will probably never have Cree women hitting on me.

Essay Written Fall 2007

Photos Courtesy of Eli Sinkus


*Side Note: Special thanks to my sister, Cassidy, and to Grizzly's brother, Paul, who drove us to Canada in the Eurovan at the start of our expedition. The drive commemorated the Eurvan's last adventure in the Midwest before heading to the West Coast, where it currently carries me between Joshua Tree, CA and the North Cascades of WA for both work and play.