Author Adam Shoalts paddles during a rainy day in Labrador.Courtesy the Author
Throughout the entirety of Adam Shoalts’s 3,400-kilometre voyage from Lake Erie to the Arctic, he experienced a pleasantly surprising phenomenon: the unexpected kindness of strangers toward a guy with a canoe.
Police officers shut down a stretch of road so he could portage safely around a heavily trafficked part of Niagara Falls. A woman in a Quebec trailer park served him a steaming bowl of French onion soup while he escaped the rain on her porch. A caretaker at a closed-for-the-season camp left a cabin unlocked for Shoalts, a kind gesture that proved to be a lifesaver when a destructive derecho swept through.
And then there was the hydro worker in Labrador who brought a “half-famished” Shoalts a bag of food – and provided insight into just why people were being so generous.
“I had said, ‘I guess in spite of it all, on the inside, most people are just good, kind-hearted folks despite the perception of the world being such a bad place,’ ” recalls Shoalts, who wrote the interaction down in the journal he was keeping. “And he said, ‘No. It’s because you’re doing what we all dream of.’ ”
A self-described “full-time adventurer” who has campaigned for environmental protections and led Royal Canadian Geographical Society expeditions, Shoalts shares more about the epic journey in his latest Canadian bestseller, Where the Falcon Flies. After “seeing a part of the Arctic” – a peregrine falcon – in his backyard, he had an impulse to follow the migratory path of the bird from Ontario to its eventual destination in the Far North. The trip would take Shoalts, equipped with little more than a backpack a canoe, three months to complete.
And while not everyone would fantasize about spending weeks on end in a canoe, Shoalts’s professional life is certainly one of extraordinary freedom and immersion in the natural world, catnip to the armchair explorer in all of us. He is also the author of four bestselling books chronicling his journeys. Beyond the Trees is about his solo trek across the Arctic; Alone Against the North tells tales of “the world’s last unexplored places”; and The Whisper on the Night Wind delves into the legend of mysterious creatures that are said to have terrorized a Nova Scotia hamlet. He’s also traced the country’s cartographic backstory in A History of Canada in Ten Maps.
“I get quite a bit of messages and e-mails, or people will tell me at my book talks that they like camping or canoeing or hiking but either they’re older or their career has gotten ahead of them,” he says. “So they say they enjoy it vicariously. I think everyone engages in a bit of escapism.” (For Shoalts, that takes the form of books about sailing around the world.)
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It may sound a bit self-aggrandizing (if not downright problematic) to identify as an “adventurer” in 2024, but for Shoalts, it’s far from an outdated, redundant calling.
In fact, he says, the terms covers more scope than ever before, thanks to technologies that allow us to peel back previously unreachable layers of our world. He cites the “archaeological renaissance” of new finds uncovered by novel methods, and that scientists believe the vast majority of insects are still unknown to scientific taxonomy.
“The only limit is our imagination,” Shoalts says.
Part of the adventurer mindset, he explains, is simply a matter of perspective.
“Someone else may well have done a journey from their doorstep from the Arctic, but probably not from my doorstep. That’s partly why I think the book would appeal to so many people, because every single person could think, ‘I could do that, and it would be an entirely new journey no one has done before.’ ”
And, as he points out, history shows that while we may covet the adventuring opportunities of the people who lived centuries before us, we will likely be the envy of those 200 years hence.
“They’ll say, what is there left to explore? If only we lived in the year 2024, when there was still so much that was unknown. Adventure was everywhere, you could just step out your door and go to the Arctic.”
Case in point, he adds that this journey was motivated by a desire to experience certain pockets of wilderness before urban sprawl made it almost impossible. “It’s astonishing how much green space we’re paving over every year.”
And while Shoalts’s books focus on nature, they’re often also about the human history that overlays the landscapes he travels through. In this case, that meant paddling past endless reminders of Canada’s often violent past, from forts to battlefields and shipwrecks.
“We don’t think of Canada being a war zone … but if you travel by canoe, you’re going to discover pretty quickly that the Canadian-American border wasn’t always the peaceful border we take for granted today. And all along it, you can find relics of this almost forgotten history.”
Fort Erie, now expensive real estate, was “some of the most blood-soaked ground in North America,” where thousands of casualties fell during the War of 1812. The ruins of Fort Mississauga – built to replace the fort burned down by the Americans when they occupied Niagara-on-the-Lake – now sits on a golf course.
“That’s the other beauty of travelling on your own power,” Shoalts says. “So much of our lives are now at such high speed, and you just whiz by these places. You never notice half of what’s there.”
That said, if you’re hoping to follow in his footsteps and turn your own love of adventure into a living, Shoalts – despite his success as an author – sounds a cautionary note.
“As far as career choices go, this is not something you would choose if you want to make the big bucks. There’s not a lot of money in being a Canadian non-fiction bestseller. It’s a very small market. My passion is my life, and I can’t do anything else. In retrospect, if someone asked for my advice, I might tell them, ‘I hear real estate is a good career right now.’ ”
Still, he adds: “I don’t have any regrets. I do consider myself very lucky and very fortunate to have had the success that I have had. I always think when I do an adventure or write a book, ‘No one is going to read this thing.’ I’m always astonished that people do.”