When our four canoes carved into a Bloodvien eddy we were met by a wall of mirrors. Ten days into a three-week river trip, the eddy shore was alive with young women in well-beaten canoes. All sixteen of them stared at us, silently for a moment, as if we were creatures from Mars. And we stared back at their ancient gear, their wooden wanigan box nearly a metre high, battered wooden paddles that had pushed off a thousand rocks and clothes that seemed to have tripped several summers since their last ride in a washing machine. Then one of them softly said,“Oh, oh, oh, look at their canoes!” To them, spacecraft had landed. That was the moment that we saw ourselves mirrored so clearly in their eyes.
Our boats and our gear were as new as theirs were old. Our yellow and red canoes were packed tightly with food barrels and vinyl dry bags, hard cased camera boxes and bright lining ropes. We were strapped into whitewater outfitting, carried composite paddles and we all wore helmets. Our women were hard edged and tough and had lines even when they weren’t smiling.
THE PERFECT RIVER CHOICE
The idea was to paddle up and out of one watershed and down into another, as I recall. The Bloodvien River seemed perfect, rising in the open mossy parkland of Woodland Caribou Provincial Park and whitewater pool and dropping its way to Lake Winnipeg. Enticing six whitewater playboaters into this adventure was child’s play. No one even blinked at the mother of all car shuttles.The 725 kilometres, required chartering a Beaver on floats to bring the drivers back to the group, and demanded about three weeks of pulling a canoe past a paddle.
Upstream is a dirty word to most river paddlers. Tracking, wading, pulling and bug swatting up airless narrow creeks has a very narrow following and you never meet strangers. So our happy crew left Red Lake, crawled its way up Chinkuni Creek and in three days, crossed the height of land into the Arctic watershed. Not being in the least superstitious, we paused here for a tobacco ceremony for a moment and begged for the good graces of the spirit guardians of the land, the rocks and the rivers. No one scoffed as the tobacco fell to the water, it was so quiet you could hear your heart beat.
Usually downstream is better, but for us, the next few days felt just the same—wading, pulling, swatting, sweating and never a sign of another human being. The country felt untouched, except by fire. Large areas had been burned in various recent times, but the land regenerated with a ferocious intensity.The new forest grew back like a solid stockade of green along the bank.
Gradually, hour by hour, the river grew under us, often opening into lakes, then closing in again. Just before the Manitoba border, the river opened into Artery Lake, the site of perhaps the most famous pictographs in Ontario. Painted on an outward sloping rock face, a red ocher bison with a throbbing heart ran at eye level, fish swam, men and animals lived, and canoes with a dozen paddlers froze time and lowered our voices to whispers. It was cool in the shadows, like entering a church on a summer’s day. The drawings commanded our reverence.
CONSTANT JUDGEMENT
Woodland Caribou Park is joined by Manitoba’s Atikaki Provincial Wilderness Area at the border, and it is here that the river begins its serious whitewater, narrowing again and again to little more than the width of a canoe and always running in an ancient granite channel dressed and stained with lichen. For these are the oldest rocks in the world; they were here long before the river and have watched time go by for 2.6 billion Januarys. Following the faults and fissures of the Canadian Shield, the river makes countless right angle turns, widening and constricting, always changing and full of surprises.
We ran throw bag safety for each other, carefully scouting each set as individual teams. This was a low water July trip, with careful technical paddling and bow paddlers who were always wet from being the first over the sharp drops, and into the pools below.
The Bloodvien, with its more than eighty sets of rapids, imposed the need for constant judgement. Our days were filled with the concerns of canoe performance and water reading, the endless search for the perfect line and whether to run, line or portage.The knowledge, opinion and wisdom of companions built a team and formed a bond.
It seemed to be a river of eagles, for we were rarely out of sight of a bald eagle at any time, and they were there for the fish. After setting camp, we would paddle the designated fisherman out to the boiling eddy line. There he would make a cast, hook a fish generally a bit too big for eight, and then be paddled back to shore, the fishing complete for the evening. Simmered, not boiled, for three minutes in a vegetable stew, the fish was always served with a glass of Merlot from a bottomless box, making a day on this wild and generous river complete.
It is unusual to meet other paddlers on remote rivers; all of us move in the same linear experience at close to the same speed. But the sixteen bright-eyed girls were travelling against the current, a day ahead of their instructors, so they said. This was their forth and last year together as a group of camp kids, now near grown to adults, almost on their own and fired with their sense of freedom and independence. After they had completely devoured our gear with their eyes and filled the canyon with laughter, they paddled away with their sixteen year old map reader sitting high on her wanigan, her blond pony-tail waving as she talked. Would they, we wondered, carry away with them into their grown-up lives our pressing need to travel rivers, to take the path less traveled, to live outside where the water moves and dances? Did they look far, far ahead, and see themselves in us?
Brian Shields is currently pursuing a career in retirement. When not resurrecting battered boats, he can be found playing on any whitewater river that will have him.
This article first appeared in the Summer 2002 issue of Canoeroots Magazine. For more great content, subscribe to Canoeroots’ print and digital editions here.
