During a pandemic, the bow of a canoe in a boiling rapid feels like a safer place to some than a bar in Montreal or Toronto.Illustration by Salini Perera
This summer Ian Brown explores how Canadians are reclaiming their lives from quarantine, whether it’s the thrill of a haircut, the risk of a hug or a chance – finally! – to jump in a pool again.
I always thought of myself as a solid bowman in a canoe. I like pushing and pulling a sliver of a boat around oncoming disaster. It feels like emergency medicine – triage and move on! – and offers the appearance of control in a chaotic situation. Even today, mid-pandemic, I would say the bow of a canoe in a boiling rapid is a safer place to be than, say, a bar or a private drinking party in Montreal or even Toronto – cities where COVID-19 infections jumped again this week as Canadians inch inconsistently back to normal life after four months of quarantine. Canada’s current COVID-19 fatality rate is 23 deaths per 100,000 people. The annual fatality rate for North American white-water canoeists is 0.86 deaths per 100,000 paddlers. Even bicycling is twice as dangerous as canoeing.
And so, when my pal, the Distractible Editor (though not at this paper) e-mailed me and the Antic Doctor and the Implacable Opinion Maker and the Solitary Former Columnist and asked if we wanted to take a two-day physically distanced white-water spill down the historic and rollicking Madawaska River southwest of Ottawa, we all said yes, instantly. It would be part of our emerging post-COVID re-awakening.
Camping during a pandemic isn’t as safe as camping when there isn’t one. But that hasn’t stopped anybody. As re-opening dates have stuttered and changed, campgrounds across the country have been beseiged. “It has been like having three separate opening days,” Keith Leong told me recently. Mr. Leong is the co-founder of CampReservations.ca, a company that oversees 50 municipal and private campsites across the land. In the months since shutdown, he has logged 15,000 bookings, roughly the same number as last year – despite the 2020 season starting a month late and operating, per COVID-19 regulations, at half capacity. Provincial and national parks are just as popular. “Most of the provincial parks are completely booked until September,” according to the BC Parks reservation service.
Serious canoeists feel compelled to get out on the water regardless. The Solitary Former Columnist, for instance, was once so keen to get paddling that he left the door of his car open, with its engine running, as he jumped into his canoe and floated off downriver. He didn’t return for five days (a stranger took pity and shut the car off). Being on the water is proven medicine against non-riverine life: you have to proceed consciously, step by step, which makes the numbing routines of city life a breeze by comparison. The river is about momentarily starting over.
To that end we invoked a battery of rationalizations to justify the trip. We had separate tents. We intended to keep our distance. We had gobs of hand sanitizer. The jumpy non-Toronto folk wanted the Toronto denizens to get tested beforehand: four of us did, all negative. We were going to be outside, where the risk of infection plummets. In any event, heading merrily down the stream turned out to be a dreamy decision. In two days and 20 kilometres of mid-week paddling through Lower Madawaska Provincial Park, we saw one other boat on the river.
The Distractible Editor and I headed northeast from Toronto in a car at noon, passed through Peterborough to pick up two canoes and the Implacable Opinion Maker and the Solitary Former Columnist, and met the Antic Doctor and the third canoe at a put-in point on the river just south of an obscure but locally famous spot known as Latchford Bridge. We were on the water by five.
The riparian wilderness comes as a surprise after living inside for four months. It is brighter and hotter and dirtier and more physically demanding but no less buggy than you remember. (Horseflies! They are made of rubber!) Within half an hour, we found a campsite. We erected our separate tents a luxurious twenty metres from one another, like barons with vast private estates. We were alone, but we could see each other – a non-existent state during lockdown.
The air temperature was 35 degrees and sweltering. The water wasn’t what anyone would call cold, but it was cooler by far than the air. Conversation was the usual campsite smorgasbord, intensified by the fact that we hadn’t seen each other in 16 weeks: COVID, Trump, Trudeau, books, writers good and bad, the Indigenous history of the river, the longings of our youths, various disintegrating and non-disintegrating personalities of our mutual acquaintance, and (especially) past canoe trip lore. The Distractible Editor and the Antic Doctor, brothers, taught themselves to shoot rapids as young men, and were famous for setting out on difficult rivers with six canoes and returning with two. Several years and many excursions later, they accidentally discovered the concept of back-paddling, whereupon their lost-boat ratio began to decline.
That’s the challenge of white-water travel, and of a pandemic: You prepare for every eventuality, but never know what’s going to happen. After four months of fearing the worst and living in the claustrophobic penumbra of the pandemic, hearing the water made me feel like a teenager.
We were in our tents by 9:30. Sleep came in batches. I was woken twice by torrential rain drumming the taut fly of the tent, as if inside a waterfall. But I stayed dry, a small and pleasant miracle, like testing negative. The dawn rose gradually through the scrim of my tent, from grey to faint blue to pink. Breakfast (coffee, bacon, scones) felt like a long-awaited reunion.
The Doctor and I were tandeming the red canoe. The canoe provided an automatic two metres of physical distance. I noted that the Doctor kept asking if I wanted to paddle in the stern. Being of limited experience, and having learned to canoe in the bow, and having read and reread The Path of the Paddle, in whose pictures Bill Mason, one of Canada’s most skilled canoeists, always sat in the back, I automatically assumed that the more experienced canoeist – the Antic Doc – needed to be in the stern, steering. We would scout a route, and I would make sure the bow of the canoe got there. I later discovered--from the Antic Doctor’s indiscreet brother, the Distractible Editor – that the Doctor doubted my bowmanship. I lacked – this is reportedly a direct quote – ”any intuitive sense of the water.” I was strong, but I took too long to make decisions.
We dumped on the first set of serious rapids we came to – the Snake Rapids, as they are known. I will spare you the details beyond saying that we – well, to be more accurate, I – shouldn’t have tried eddying out where we did. In a 10-kilometre-per-hour current, a canoe exerts a force of about 1,350 kilograms. It smacked my left leg hard into a rock before I got out from under the boat, and tore an olive-sized flap of skin away from the Doctor’s fleshy palm. Between 1863 and 1877, during which time 400,000 trees were driven down the Madawaska, two loggers (making $25 a drive) trying to break a logjam died at the rapids where we dumped: Their bodies were found 19 days later, 12 and 18 miles downstream, respectively. That was in spring, when the Madawaska rages. By August, the water can be too low to paddle. The Algonquin tribes who travelled the river for 5,000 years before Champlain showed up, before the Mohawks scared them further north, ran the river from early spring to early winter in fully laden 12-metre birch bark canoes. I cannot imagine how they did that. I wish I’d known them.
The Antic Doctor and I improved over the next few rock gardens. By the end of the day, we had switched positions, and improved more. I discovered that sterning is less about triage and more about aftercare; less about reacting, and more about responding. It’s a subtler, bigger-picture role. The Doctor was strong in the bow, but a bit of a flailer.
We made camp the second night on an island above Slate Falls, under two huge white pines. The heat broke at 3 a.m., when it was suddenly cool enough to slip into a light down bag. We talked about the night and the water for quite a while the next morning as we fussily packed our gear. The pandemic may have taken away our collective future, but the present bears up well in a canoe, especially under close examination.
We portaged around Slate Falls, leaving only a few swifts and the gorgeous eight-kilometre paddle to the takeout. I made four trips up and down the portage path: by then, I was atoning for having forgotten my car keys, which would have allowed us to drive back to the put-in in my car, instead of hiring a lift. Perhaps we will not discuss that oversight here. My pals were very decent about it, and insisted it didn’t matter. After the long and lonely shutdown, we were just grateful for each other’s company. The river let us admit it.
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