Up North
Reflections on Mystique, Reality, and Magic
By Tamia Nelson
tamia@paddling.net
May 1, 2007
Up North. To a girl with a hankering
for adventure, growing up among the hardscrabble farms on the borderland
between New York and Vermont, those two words meant escape. "My" mountains
were only low hills, the nearby woods had been managed till they were
little more than thickets, and the local streams were fouled by the waste
of hundreds of cattle (not to mention the raw sewage from small towns too
stingy to invest in treatment plants). It was just too "sivilized" for me,
and like Huck Finn, I longed to light out for the Territories — to go
up North, to a place where there were no Holsteins, no fences, and no
cornfields. I wanted to lose myself in a land of infinite forests, to scale
stony cloud-capped peaks, to stand on a beach and feel the chill swash of
an arctic sea swirl round my feet. I tried to assuage my hunger by
consuming every scrap of information about the North I could find, but
nothing really satisfied. My appetite grew with eating. Still, I
persevered, and the more I read, the more I fell under the sway of the
North's…
Mystique
I wanted excitement. I wanted adventures. I wanted thrills and drama.
But I was only a kid, compelled to live life at second-hand. Books and
magazines were the best I could do. So I quarried explorers' tales from
among the scanty offerings in school and public libraries, and rummaged
through musty boxes and dusty shelves in my grandfather's house, in search
of back issues of Outdoor Life and National Geographic. Most
of the time I was disappointed, but now and again I struck pay dirt.
Slowly, nourished by the work of a handful of writers, artists,
and photographers — not to mention a myriad of anonymous cartographers
— my imagination conjured up a Northland that met my every
expectation: a vast, wild country untouched by the hand of man. A region
impossibly rich in wildlife, with flocks of waterfowl that darkened the
sky, and a grazing moose or fishing bear around every bend in countless
free-flowing rivers. A land where pioneer virtues endured, open to anyone
with sufficient strength of mind and body. A rugged country of forbidding
peaks and ice-fed torrents.
My imagination didn't function in a vacuum. It had a lot to work with.
Grainy, black-and-white pictures in the sportsmen's magazines. Carefully
composed color compositions in National Geographic. And maps. Above
all, maps. Here, too, National Geographic set the standard. The
magazine's canny editors understood that maps and dreams
go hand in hand. I was only a kid, but I could still trace the great rivers
as they wound their way up North on paper, and I dreamt of the day when I
could follow them for real. But the best dream-fodder of all were the blank
areas on the maps in the oldest magazines, the places were the rivers
became dotted lines and mountain peaks were labelled "Not Surveyed." Much
later, in my teens, I came across R.M. Patterson's Dangerous
River. I hadn't read very far before I knew I wasn't the first
person to be intrigued by the blank spaces on a map:
The Yukon-Mackenzie divide [Patterson wrote], land of my boyhood
dreams, was shown as a dotted line, named (inaccurately) "Rocky Mountains"
and running vaguely between the heads of dotted rivers, themselves vague
and their courses only guessed, north to the Arctic Ocean. Reaching up into
the southern portion of these so-called Rockies, and rising near the heads
of the Pelly, which are the furthest heads of the Yukon, there was a river.
It was (inaccurately) shown to be a straight line and it had a couple of
tributaries; it seemed to be about two hundred and fifty miles long, and it
ran southeastwards into the Liard which, itself, is the West Fork of the
great Mackenzie. The river led into the country that I had always wanted to
see, … and its name was the South Nahanni.
Heady stuff, this! It was enough to make my arms twitch and my blood run
hot. It still is. Of course, Patterson was a gifted storyteller, as well as
a real-life pioneer. Yet he hadn't been born to the pioneering life. He,
too, was influenced by earlier writers, among them Michael H. Mason, in
whose Arctic Forests the map that inspired him first appeared.
Clearly, the link between maps and dreams is one of long standing. But
dreams aren't enough in themselves. And as I grew up, I came to realize
that romantic visions, however cunningly wrought, are no substitute
for…
Reality
My Grandad, a
sometime Adirondack guide, was a taciturn man, and a supremely practical
one, as well. He could spin a good yarn when he chose to, but he was at his
best as a teacher. And he taught, not by words, but by example. As I
approached the age when I could begin to adventure on my own, I knew he
could be counted on to give me the straight skinny. After all, a
forthcoming summer visit to his Adirondack cabin was going to be my first
extended excursion up North, a journey to a world of trackless woods,
populated by wolves and "painters" (the local name for mountain lions). Or
so my parents told me. In any case, I was dizzy with excitement. But when
the great day finally arrived, and I found myself on the threshold of
Grandad's cabin, he brought me down to earth in a hurry. "Never seen a
wolf," he said. "Not once. Nor a painter, neither. Most likely, it's only
summer people that sees 'em." And that was that. Romance had collided with
reality, and reality won the day. Oddly enough, though, I didn't mind a
bit. Grandad's Adirondacks were my training ground. I explored the
cliffs along his river, hiked (and biked)
into his secret
fishing holes, paddled remote beaver
ponds, discovered rotting cabins and old root cellars hidden deep in
dark spruce woods, and learned the survival
skills I'd need when I went up North for real.
And then, at long last, in a single golden year, I made the leap. After
a month in northern Washington's Cascades — not quite up North, but
with plenty of honest-to-God snow-covered peaks — I was off to
northern Québec. We left the road behind us, loading our canoes and
packs aboard a bush train. Then we found seats wherever we could in the
sole passenger car. It was crowded with whole families, ranging from
nursing infants to great-grandparents, all returning home to a Native
reserve further up the line. Our traveling companions welcomed us with shy
smiles, then continued conversing among themselves in a sibilant patois
that melded both Québecois French and Cree. This was the real thing, I
thought. I was up North at last. Soon, however, the first discordant note
intruded. The train juddered through a landscape scarred by recent logging,
waking an old man from his fitful sleep. Farwell was seated directly across
from him. The old man looked at Farwell in silence for a minute, then
gestured at the slash piles and said something in a voice only a little
louder than a whisper. But Farwell, much to his embarrassment, couldn't
understand a word. He could only shrug his shoulders. The old man repeated
what he'd just said, raising his voice till it boomed. Farwell still didn't
grasp the meaning of a single word. He grinned nervously and shrugged his
shoulders once more. Now it was the old man's turn to smile. He rummaged
through his memory for words that his seatmate would understand. "Too many
Frenchies," he said at last, gesturing again at the logging slash. He
paused. "And not enough moose." And he tapped Farwell gently in the ribs
before they both exploded in laughter.
Later, we unloaded our gear from the train and paddled off into a
northern wilderness. In some ways, it was the stuff of my childhood dreams.
I thought we'd left the loggers far behind. Unbroken forests stretched
before us, seemingly endless. The rivers ran free. Yet the illusion didn't
last for long. We saw no beaver — not one — and we spotted few
active lodges. The "endless" forest ended abruptly when a portage trail
disappeared into a tangled hell of fresh logging slash. Our riverside
campsites were invariably scarred by apparently random ax work
and inevitably littered with multiple can dumps. And new survey tape, fresh
and bright, was everywhere. It was a sign of things to come.
There was still plenty to see, of course. We paddled through millions of
acres of black spruce and muskeg, waded rills, ran miles of wild river,
and crossed great, island-studded lakes.
There was plenty of wildlife, too, though some of it hadn't figured in my
map-inspired dreams. I'd reckoned without the swarms of mosquitoes and
blackflies, for example, and I'd failed to anticipate the ruthless
persistence of the saber-toothed bulldogs (aka deerflies). By the time we
flagged down the bush train that would bring us back to our starting point,
I felt like I'd endured a sanguine rite of passage. But if I was bloody, I
was also unbowed. In other words, I was hooked. So I returned to the North
again and again, whenever the opportunity presented itself. And yet…
Each trip ended with me convinced that I still hadn't found what I was
looking for. The wilderness retreated before me as I paddled. Or so it
seemed. I felt a little like a character in one of Arthur Ransome's
children's books — Ransome was a journalist and author, and he may
have been a spy, as well — a young girl who, when she discovers that a
supposedly secret retreat has been visited before, laments that all the
discoveries in the world have been made already. I came to know this
mixture of exasperation and disappointment well.
It wasn't news to me that the blank spots on the maps of my youth were
rapidly filling in, of course. But the advance of "sivilization" was
nonetheless alarming. Every river I ran, however remote, had been charted,
and every lake was named. Somewhere along the line, Hudson's Bay lost both
its apostrophe and its historical connections. Floatplanes replaced canoes
as the dominant form of transport. "Traditional" hunters traded their teams
of dogs for snowmobiles and never looked back. Remote bush towns boasted
bigger supermarkets than the little farm community I once called home. In
short, the mystique of the Northland was gone. Reality had triumphed.
Yet something more remained. What was it, I wondered? Then I found the
answer, and curiously enough I discovered it in words that Arthur Ransome
put into the mouth of the very same little girl who bemoaned the relentless
pace of discovery: "Any place is secret," she observed in another of
Ransome's books, "if nobody else is there." I guess this is as close as any
of us will ever get to…
Magic
At first glance, it's obvious that there are no secret, undiscovered
corners left on this earth. Anyone with a computer and an Internet
connection can view high-resolution satellite images of just about anyplace
on the planet's surface. But this isn't the same thing as being there.
Computers can only make us spectators — voyeurs, if you prefer. We're
outside the frame, looking on from the sidelines. But paddling is
different. Like hiking and cycling, it puts us in the picture. We're no
longer spectators. We're participants. It doesn't matter if you're paddling
in waters that have been "discovered" by thousands of folks before you. If
it's your first visit, it's new to you. And if nobody else is there?
Then it's your secret place, for as long as you're alone.
This has important practical implications. Nowadays, when the urge to go
up North becomes overpowering, I don't need to clear my calendar for a
month or more. I can discover new waters right on my doorstep. So can you,
though if you live in an arid part of the continent, you may want to
enlarge your idea of "doorstep" a bit. And later, when you go up North for
real, what then? Don't let the contrails in the sky or the scars of seismic
survey lines on the land distract you from the important things. Things
like the sound of a brisk north wind sighing through the rushes. The gabble
of a flock of wavies taking flight. The crimson glow of leatherleaf in the
autumn twilight. The tremolo of a distant loon. The slap of a beaver's tail
at dawn. Or the roar of a nearby falls. Loren Eiseley said it best: "If
there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water." And that's magic
enough for any paddler.
The North has called to a lot of people down through the centuries. Its
mystique has lured explorers to push beyond the limits of the known world
time and time again — to probe deeper, climb higher, and travel
further than those who came before them. Now, however, there are no more
blank spaces on the maps to tempt explorers. Or are there? The
cartographers may have finished their work, but the human spirit defies all
attempts to map it. And as long as we can find any corners of this world
that are new to us, there's something left to tempt each of us onward.
Up North. Don't look for it on any map. You can only find it in your
heart.