Some days you're the antibody, some days you're the antigen - D14

Just floating on through. . . Think I might be heading back up to camp next week for yet another looper.  There's no way this one's going to be desert oasis weather like the last one was.  The children are going to freeze.  I will no freeze though, because I did that once five years ago and I bought a lot of cold weather paddling gear since then.  It's amazing what loosing the function of your legs will do to you, even if it's on a three day trip around the muskoka area.  I figured if that happens down there, what's going to happen on a cold day on the 53rd paralell?  Yikes. . .   Want to know something funny?  I'm gazing out my window right now looking at this plant my parents planted.  That's not the funny thing, bear with me.  So years back my parents were hiking point pelee or somewhere down there.  There's a transition zone there to some carolinian type forest that doesn't really exist in many other places except maybe the carolinas.  They found a beautiful vine with blood red leaves (in the fall) that was clambering up a tree, and they thought 'let's take that with us'.  So they found a small one and dug it up.  They planted it at the base of the aerial ladder next to our house.  My parents don't like the look of fences and ladders and other unsightly latticeworks, so they have a habit of planting climbing plants at their bases to consume and aesthetically improve them.  Now, years later, we have this vine that just climbs the side of the house, obscuring the ladder.   Right now it's a beautiful shade of yellowpinkred.  You know what I mean.  It's funny because my mom broke out in some sort of rash this last year, around the neck area.  For the last decade or so my dad has also been getting some kind of strong reaction that only the strongest prednisone pills can kill.  It comes at roughly the same time of year each year, but no one knew what it was.  My mom went to the doctor with her neck rash this year and the GP told her without much tentativeness that it was poison ivy.  My mom had never had this before.  After weeks of sleuthing and drawing up mental timelines in a CSI type fashion, the boring and double-backing, step-retracing, concept-repeating details of which I won't bore you with, they came to a conclusion.  The carolinian forest posesses a special type of poison ivy, which grows in the form of a vine.  It turns a beautiful blood red in the fall, like most poison ivy.  I'm telling you though, this thing is mammoth . . I'm going to take a shot of it right now, remember I'm on the second story and this thing goes up to the damned roof.  Anyway I didn't know this, even though I wade through the stuff all summer, it's never the viney kind. . . and though I wade through it I try not to actually touch it, so I guess I wade around it.  Here's hoping I don't get it.  My mom is so paranoid now she tells me to keep my window closed, as if the vapors might kill me in my sleep.  I think she thinks I can catch it by looking at it.  They're going to spray round up on the bastard after the leaves drop this fall. . .  bye big poisonous vine.

Classic parents move eh?

So in the Moisie log you may notice the mountains starting to crop up.  this is where things got out of hand, scenery wise.  I wish I wasn't so damned tired at the end of every day or I'd've written more.

D14

                So today is two days in one.  We hit last chance eddies and ran chutes the width of our boats between boulders the size of toolsheds.  We carry loaded and unloaded boats over bog and granite, and we power out 13 k in an hour 15 more into moonlight to make it to Berny’s cabin.  Rapids in the dark.  Spiritual moment describes the feeling of these silent granite sentinels looming against the night sky, guarding the widening of the river Berny’s is nestled in.  We walk in, 

starved, cold and tired, but are not disappointed.  We will pit here.

D13

Went up to Kandalore to lead a looper, trees were changing colour, really nice.  That's all I'll say for now. . .

D13

                We crash down ledgy sets of foamy silliness.  Murielle tells the kids to run river right down a left bend 800m long and classically misjudges the size of some distant waves and a boat swamps.  Everyone is okay, and we all see how tricks of perspective happen on a river this size.  I ran river left. Heh heh heh.  The hills here are pointy, like dunce caps.  Thunder blows up and we boot it to a bush crash machete campsite.   Today we scheduled out the rest of the trip.  We are on track with an extra day which is great.  If  these village idiots would get moving in the morning we could have three 

extras like everyone else.  . . today hunger rears its ugly head.   People have gone from polite and considerate and have started grabbing from each other’s hands and genuinely pissing each other off.  They still play it off as a joke, but I can see how things could quickly turn if we didn’t have enough food.  William Golding eat your heart out.  We have till day 23 to get out of here, so hopefully no pigs will be decapitated before that time.  The Moisie surges past our lowland flat down to the valley.  I’m stoked to see what’s down there.  The maps promise some canyon 

paddling.  Also today a cloud formed that looked 

exactly like king kong reaching at us out of the sky.  I’m just saying. 

 ** That picture of foamy silliness is courtesy Murielle. . . thanks Murielle.

D12

D12

                The portages are getting steeper.  We end one in a sandy scree slope right down to the water today, and a refreshing swim douses the heat after.  That seems to be it for awhile which is good.  The river changes today.  We paddle through a valley flanked by steep sweeping hills and sheer cliffs.  The river flows broad and fast.  Today we start making fun of Michael Bublé because he is what I refer to as a ridiculous asshole.  The game is to make fun of his last album by paraphrasing its name.  Thing is, we can never remember what it’s really called.  For example. . . Bublé: “sorry my soul is so dark inside” (you have to say these with a brooding, 

pensive voice).  Bublé:”this relationship is one person.” Bublé: “Don’t worry, I broke my heart too.”  Try it, it grows on you.  Recent update: I just googled the actual title, and it is “Call me irresponsible”  I almost cried.  It’s so funny.  He’s sitting there brooding on this black and white poster looking like just an absolute sleezeball.  Like he’s got such a dark soul and he can’t help it.  Yeah I’m black inside, think I’ll sing some lounge. . .

We camp at an amazing waterfall cascading through hollowed out granite of epic proportions.  

Überdimensional as they say in German.  Sam comments that it looks like a skateboard park.  I end up pitching my tent on a rock wide enough for two, barely.  Murielle sleeps in a hole, I laugh.  We make a chocolate cake with rehydrated strawberries fried in marshmallow for icing. . . delicious.  

D11

D11

                Finally it seems we are in a routine .  Today we got to our site in enough daylight to get meals for tomorrow ready today.  Portaging is second nature, lining is a good alternative.  Nothing comes without a fight on the Moisie.  Today a sunset that splashed against the western sky stunned the kids into a pensive silence.  To know that no sunset will ever look the same to them makes me feel a sense of kinship if not pride at having had a hand in this.  I could almost hear the monologues of reflection, much like my own, that permeate every day after your life has been like this for awhile.  Today is the halfway mark.   

D10

D10
More ‘tajin. 2 k of punishment in boggy quagmires, up to our knees in places. Labrador tea is ripping my shins apart. The children portage like machines. We paddle hard and sun shines consistently for the first time in 10 days. We reach Pékans, and it is spectacular. White foam plunges through a narrow canyoneand pounds the granite walls, spraying us from a distance. A small percentage of Canadians ever get to see this, these kids are lucky.

D9

D9

Cloistre fook. Rain and freezing cold plague us. We paddle up to a 2 k portage, and the

fact that I can’t see what it circumvents drives me crazy. It takes about three hours too long because of me. I pace up and down the slippery boulders looking for an alternative, and I decide to line. 15 minutes in I decide to turn around. We have to drag our boats upstream through a boulder field and then portage the worst 2 kms I’d witnessed till that point. . .ever. Up a steep incline, slippery, windy, disappearing over ancient boulder deposits. While resting between trips a small abandoned duckling paddles up to us. After 10 minutes of giving chase to capture the little fuzzball, he is named Moses. We figure he might live longer than one more day with us. We portage with him dangling like a fuzzy football with webbed feet in my arms. We scale a huge portage over a canyon later than evening, and finally I see what the character of this river is.

D8

D8

                We awake to an entirely blue sky.  This is a first. No hellish mad old man sky?  Cinnamon buns are sizzling over a dug-sand fire pit as we hear the engine of a plane, 20 minutes 

early.  We throw up a tarp, wave paddles, and paddle out with a tarp.  Anything to be visible.  I wave a paddle frantically in wide arcs from shore, and after a pass the pilot comes about and dips his wing to me.  He cruises back over the center of the lake in a sweeping bank, suggesting an 

approach.  He barrels at us like he is going to light us up with a round of strafing, and about 100 m offshore a small package pops out of the window and falls to the lake.  He circles twice comically as Murielle paddles frantically not to lose sight of the replacement PFD the same way 

the first one was lost.  The pilot buzzes to the horizon with a final wing dip after we retrieve the jettisoned freight: a $9.00 canadian tire PFD.  Or maybe walmart.  A souvenir from Lab City.  We paddle long and hard, under incredible skies, riddled with white sun, charcoal sky, and rainbows all colours in between.  An esker presents a viewing platform from which to enjoy the surrounding weather and landscape, and a group picture is taken.  30 k later 

we can see the mountains through which the Moisie runs.  Tomorrow we begin.  Vôila! C’est une bordelle.  

Brown Spots on the Wall, by Hu Flung Pu - D7

D7

                The shit hits the fan and splatters against the wall like 80’s abstract art.  Remember spiropaint?  Luke absentmindedly takes off his PFD on a break from the wind and hell while we rest in a bay.  It blows off the stern deck of the boat as he’s not looking, and by the time he tells us it could be (and probably is) miles away.  The trip hunkers down in a mossy wood while Luke and I search a 10 k perimeter of this godforsaken lake for a floating PFD.  After 3 hours of dodging the wrath of God (biblical rain squalls), we are exhausted and roll into the mossy wood.  Murielle has called camp and they said to call back at 6:30.  They may have to send in a float plane – for a fucking lifejacket.  We watch idly as a water plane circles the lake.  We hope it lands 

so we can ask the pilot a favour.  Free PFD?  Lab city is close.  We call camp at 6:30 and are angrily told that our plane has come and gone.  That was us, we missed it.  Thanks for telling us guys.  We schedule another for the next morning, and this time we’ll flag it down instead of letting it fly away.  We paddle 2 k to an Innu cabin.  The stove heats the room to sauna temperatures as we cook on it.  Murielle makes a tofu stir fry while I drift off, exhausted , to the sounds of Luke’s classical guitar picking and a feeling of unfamiliar and welcome humidity.

Day 6 - Sounds doubtful

Well I received an answer from a sea kayaking company that works in a place called Doubtful Sound in Fiordland, NZ.  Hilarious.  Freakin' British.  So anyway they prefer to hire Kiwis but they wanted my info to "peruse" anyway.  So I gave it to them.  Work visas seem pretty on par with the red tape you would expect from any country in the commonwealth, so we'll see how that works out.  I'm not expecting too much from it, that I way I won't be disappointed.  Sound's doubtful anyway. 

Come on that was hilarious.

Also for those doubters (I just can't stop) my apostrophe was in the right place there, cause it's a pun, and

 as Stu knows, and maybe Willsy too, and Deb can certainly appreciate if she hasn't already 

heard: A good pun is its own reword.

D6

               

Opocopa sucks.  It sucks like a very small scorpion in your sandals in the morning.  It sucks like being the wrongful recipient of a sucker punch.  It sucks like getting blamed for someone else’s fart in a room of people you’ve just met.  It sucks like seeing a little baby chick in the egg you just cracked for breakfast.  It sucks like looking in your underwear drawer and – you get the idea.  Headwinds straight up a long 40 k lake throwing up 3 foot swells stay our progress to a crawl as we wrestle to move forward.  Some sections must be walked as the lake is a shallow glacial creation and even in our high water 3 feet is the average depth in this spot.  CRANBERRIES EVERYWHERE.

Little furniture making criminals and day 5

Laura and I ran the Elora Gorge, which was rad.  Perfect weather and good water levels. . . second day in Elora in two days, and as we pedaled away from the falls the day before there was a lot of laughing.  The second time I laughed it was because I saw a decal on a car that said villageidiots.ca  and I laughed my ass off.  I don't know what that is but I have to check.  Then 10 pedal strokes later on the other side of the road was a car with a decal that said offmyass.com or drunkoffmyass.com or something like that.  But this was all so amusing because I had the old laugher going from seeing the building pictured here.  I hope it works when you click this image because it literally looked like "Little Fucks Ltd: fine quality juvenile furniture"  My god I should send this into Leno.  Like really?  Even back in the day when it said "little folks" what the hell did that refer to?  Midgets?  Kids?  Were the kids making or using the furniture or both?  All I picture is juvenile delinquents making furniture until their term is up, and the mean grinch of a manager calling them "little fucks" as a novel approach to ironing out their kinks before they go down the wrong track.  Anyway, the new Elora Dialect of turning O's unto U's sure proved funny when pedaling up the next hill Laura almost couldn't get up when we saw the sign for the new casino/racetrack that said "Slots in Elora"

D5

                We paddle around a corner sheltered from the incessant wind and nobody’s ready for it.  A massive moose stands staring at us, a silly little velvety rack crowning its dumbfounded 

face.  We were upwind.  Eventually he turns and runs – bewildered – back into the tall grasses of the marsh.  Awesome.  The little windy river spits us out into a bay on massive three-and-a-bit-map spanning lake Opocopa.  We have no idea what the fuck lies before us and we obliviously enjoy our mossy campsite.  Game trails criss cross the moss here, and the story of every moose, lynx, and wolf are writ here for all to see.  We stay up late playing guitar and eating rogan josh.  The trip starts to gel.  

D4

D4

 

                A hypothermic slog through hellish headwinds gets us 14 k to a nice site.  I wish for northern lights.  The kids cook a bland pile of pasta and Murielle tells them it’s fine while I quietly drink haterade on the whole operation.  I know Stu, I’m a hate matrix.  At least they tried.  A trek up a burned and sparsely wooded sub-alpine looking hill reveals a breathtaking 

view of surrounding lakes.  Cranberries grow deliciously wild here.  I am too exhausted to recount more than this: bed time.  

NDP drum circle, geocaches and being lost in the woods at 2:00 AM. . oh yeah D3

So yesterday Laura (read post on housemate 1 year ago) and I went geocaching.  If you don't know what that is go to http://www.geocaching.com .  Anyway we did a couple of local easy caches and then went to this tent set up by the boathouse down on Gordon street and what did we find?  Local NDP candidate Tom King, reader and writer of CBC's Dead Dog Cafe, in a drum circle with two other indians, and federal candidate Jack Leyton.  They rocked the house.  Naomi Klein, author of No Logo, was there too to speak.  I'm voting NDP cause they're real humans and I don't like voting for robots.  Robots lie.  Thank you NDP for caring about the same stuff I do.  After the drum circle and some rousing words by Jack and Tom about the future of Canada, not to mentiona  stirring speech by Naomi, there was a celtic band and some dancing, where Guelph's finest earthy crunchies danced in jubilant circles to some great live music.  Nice vibe.  After dinner, Laura and I decided it was time to do a third geocache.  One about 20 minutes away, designed to be done in the dark.  With headlanp, GPS and water, we walked about 2.5 k of paths, 1 k or so of the wrong path with 500 slow metres of bushwack, before finding the location we sought. Some mastermind had set up an elaboate sequence of tiny thumbnail sized reflectors along a lonely path way in the woods.  We were to follow specific patterns of them till we found a birdhouse with another sequence inside, which represented a code to be interpreted as coordinates, which when put together would reveal the final location of the cache.  Some of the reflectors had fallen off and the trails led into inky darkness with just the orange light polluted sky of the GTA to illuminate the leering trees. . . it was creepy, kind of cool, and pretty exhausting around 1:45 to realise this puzzle had probably been sabotaged or just broken down on its own, cause we could find no birdhouses. . .  balls.  So we tracked back and drove home.  Here is day 3 of the Moisie. 

D3

                We cross the border into Newfoundland and Labrador.  A lady in a Wal-Mart is the first person I talk to in this province and I grin from ear to ear as I hear her accent call me “My love”.  The stories are true.  I leave without the long underwear I came for, but I’d love to come back.  Stan backs the bus into a muddy put in at the end of 35 k of dirt road outside the limits of 

Lab city.  We put in and the sky turns grey and stays that way.  We paddle until a marsh, and a leg swallowing slog through a wetland crosses the height of land between the arctic and atlantic watersheds and gets us back into Quebec.  Headwinds slow us down and we camp late.  Dinner at 1:00 AM sucks.  

Ohhhh you need weelchair access. . .here's an SI form. . .Go join the far queue. Day 2

Two for two since I got back. . . not bad.  Anyway so today I drove to the U and wheezed off the computer hub there.  I was uncomfortable because I was sitting at one of two or three wheelchair access terminals and there were one or two wheelchairs buzzing around my peripheral vision as I tried to concentrate on travel plans. . . I don't think I ruined anyone's afternoon though.  Pretty sure if they wanted to use the computers they were discouraged not by me, but by the 45 minute lineup right behind me.  The queue as it were.  Or the "far queue".  A nice little British pun I read not five minutes ago.  I imagine the far queue is what you tell asshole customers to join when you work sales and you're having a bad day.  You never have to go far to find commonalities in language and culture though.  This summer if a staff member was dense enough to ask about the trip schedule before it was done, they would be referred to Alex Gill, friend and tripping head, for an SI form.  What is an SI form you ask?  Well that's what the staff wanted to know too, so preparing for a long wade through miles of beaurocratic red tape they would ask Alex for an SI form, sometimes having taken over a day to track him down and then having to radio him first, only to be told "Suck It!"  by Alex, grinning from ear to ear.   Spite is the spice of life.  Anyway, I did my best and I managed to get a few leads on places I might like, but it's too early to give anything away, though I welcome suggestions/testimonials/anecdotes on jobs or volunteer positions on this little space rock we live on.

D2

                We drive thousands of km`s today.  We cross three lines of latitude and watch tree species change and disappear.  We buy a guitar in a pawn shop in Baie Comeau.  We see one of North America`s biggest dams: Manic 5.  Lac Manicouagan is a lake visible on any atlas or map of north America or even the world.  It`s  visible because it`s huge.  How big you ask? . . really big.  It was caused by a freaking asteroid.  It`s a giant ring with massive river flowing out of it.  The river has five dams, and Manic 5 is the biggest.  It`s the one right below the lake turned reservoir.  Manic 5 is so big 

that when you drive by it it looks like a city skyline in the sense that it doesn`t move like the trees in front of it.  It`s like the moon.  This morning we cross the Saguenay and see the fjords I would have paddled through if I had kept paddling after the Ashuapmushuan the year before.   The sun sets and at 1:00 there is still light on the horizon because it is 

less than 3 short hours away from rising again.  We look for a place to stop at 9:30.  At 1!:20 we think we’ve found it as after 10 minutes of trying, the GPS gets reception through the bouncing bus windshield.  Gagnon is approaching.  We lose reception but around the time we expect Gagnon the gravel highway becomes suddenly paved and split by a median.  A sidewalk emerges and is divided by curbs and driveways at intervals that lead into the cover of bushes.  They exist for their own sake and are crowded by plants.  The sidewalk ends as suddenly as it began and we are in oblivion going 80 km/hr again. The remnants of a boom town that never quite boomed.  

The northern lights and the railroad are our only companions, as we finally stop in the town of Fermont, the strangest  end of the line we could imagine.  A bleak landscape centered around 1.2 km of V shaped building designed to block the bitter winter wind and contain everything the residents of this remote mine town need.  We pull in and drive around in circles, dead tired until the cops find us and guide us to a gravel pit with a giant mining truck behind it for decoration.    They kindly offer us to sleep there.  We gratefully accept. Nice people in these parts.

I'm. . .back? (Day 1)

IS anyone out there?  Anyone at all?  That is a big gap . . .  although fairly common for me this time of year I guess, still a big gap.  So things have changed as they tend to do in fiv
e months.  I am single again.  I was in a relationship that was litterally shutting my life down one day at a time.  I won't bore you with the details but anger, blame, and lack of freedom are not the kind of dictatorship you want to live under with someone, especially when you're taking heat for a person's dark history.  That's over now, and I was cured of my ailment by a summer on the river. . . the cure for what ails you.  This blog is one of the things that suffered but I'm going to try to keep abreast of it now, especially since a bit of travelling should be in the works for me.  So without further ado, updates on what has been happening.  I went to spring camp after which I promptly left for the Moisie river.  One of the most visually appealing rivers I've ever had the pleasure of paddling  Let the trip log begin here.  I guess for the next little while I'll write in here like it's a diary until someone pokes their head out of the cyberbushes and Fred Penners their way back into my digital life.  Here's hoping!

The Moisie is a river that runs south from Labrador city 426 km through Quebec to the Gulf of the St Lawrence into the

 settlement of Moisie, which is about 30 km up the coast of the Gulf from Sept Iles.  We drove there over 2.5 days and 2 days back.  The river flows through the Laurentians and is known as the Nahanni of the East.  The trip took a total of 26 days.

D1

Stan has eyebrows that arch critically over his staring deep set eyes like Dirty Harry’s.  His walrus moustache completes the look who is the cowboy of his own school bus.  His lanky, capable frame ambles along with a confident poise that says he will, without a doubt, drive you to Labrador in a shaky 

school bus over three days of skittering, rattling fury – regardless of washboard gravel roads 

and frequent three point turns with a loaded canoe trailer.  Stan is a pro, believe that or he’ll kill you.

                Quebec City suburb Lévis is an unusual place to end up touring on an explorer trip, especially at your co-tripper’s house.  Murielle takes us around the lesser known but no less interesting parts of Lévis, showing us a beautiful night scape of sparkling lights against a foreground of twinkling water and a background of Chateau Frontenac.  All night people barely believe us.  We stop in at a local Ashton’s for poutine.  We are dressed like wild people, and when the girl at the counter recites our order of “Dix Poutines Regulaire” into the mic, the girl just behind her freezes in mid counter-wipe and asks “Serieux?”.  One of the other guys remarks that he’s going to frame our 

receipt and hang it on the wall.  No one has ever ordered ten of these  before.

                We step into an ice cream shop/chocolate factory to get some dipped cones.  A former senior girl camper is serving us and doesn’t believe Murielle is working at camp at the moment.  The girl could have been on the other side of the counter had she signed up for camp that year.  Life is just too weird. 

Stan opts not to sleep at Murielle’s house though her parents offer him a room.  Cowboys don’t accept charity.