Every spring since I was a little boy my father and his buddies have rented a cabin at a fishing lodge, a four-hour drive north then another two hours west, smack in the middle of nowhere. It is a walleye fishing trip. A number of years ago I started going and this year I brought along my son, Doug.
We do plenty of family camping trips, wilderness canoe trips and family ski trips, but this one is different. It’s with Grandpa. We stay in cabins. We ride ATVs. No mother or sister. He misses school. And it’s all about fishing.
Motorboat fishing is not my cup of tea. Pull the rope. Zoom to the spot. Catch our legal limit of fish. Zoom back. Clean, cook and eat. It all seems too predictable. Too boring. And, I’m not that good at it. This year, I thought I’d mix things up. This year, Doug—I say while pumping a fist in the air—you and I will go on a real adventure!
“I’m going to ask Grandpa if he’ll take me fishing tonight. No offense Dad, but I’d like to actually catch some fish.”
I’d planned a 35-kilometer ride down abandoned mining roads winding through scrubby clear-cut forests. Where the road ends we’ll find orange flagging tape tied to alders marking the spot where we are to pull off the road. If we are lucky we’ll crawl the ATVs close enough to the lake we won’t have to drag the canoe and our gear too far through the boggy beaver meadow. Ron at the general store recommended bug shirts.
You get the idea. Real adventure.
From there we’ll paddle north into the Montreal River. Then upstream until it opens up again. If the water has dropped enough, our landmark is a lonely stick poking out of the lake about two boat lengths off the eastern shore. If we anchor right there the old boys say we’d be over the deep hole and it will be a slaughter. A true walleye honey hole. Fish, they tell Doug, will jump right into his canoe.
When old men say such things to children they are taken very, very literally.
Ralph Waldo Emerson famously wrote: Life is a journey, not a destination. Joy should be found not in finishing an activity but in doing it. Philosophers, poets, best-selling novelists and fathers say these types of things to children when they are selling them on great adventures.
Our journey had taken more time than I expected. We had to pull ashore for two thunderstorms. We forgot our anchor, which probably didn’t matter because there was a very slim chance of us actually being in the right spot—there were 13 sticks poking up around that end of the lake.
By mid-afternoon, Doug had renamed the Honey Hole, the Sucky Hole. He’d given up on fishing altogether and was racing minnows back and forth in the rainwater on the floor of the canoe.
Warm, dry and finally back at the cabins, I told Doug it didn’t matter that fish didn’t jump into our canoe. I told him that he should find joy in the journey; it is about the doing of the activity. It isn’t the destination that is important. What is truly important is the adventure, the ride, the river, and our time together.
He sat there at the kitchen table listening, eating the coconut shrimp we’d pulled out of the freezer. Then he got up and put on his shoes and sweater.
“I’m going to ask Grandpa if he’ll take me fishing tonight. No offense Dad, but I’d like to actually catch some fish.”
Scott MacGregor is the founder and publisher of Canoeroots.
Get the full article in the digital edition of Canoeroots and Family Camping, Summer/Fall 2014.Subscribe to Paddling Magazine’s print and digital editions, or browse the archives.
