Bear Sense

About one week before we left to run the upper Missinaibi from Missinaibi Lake to Mattice in 2007, I discovered an article on line about a fatal bear attack at Missinaibi lake the preceding fall.  We love to canoe and wilderness camp, but basically that had involved hiding the M&Ms from thieving chipmunks and an occasional moose spotting.  Not only were we bringing our 9 year old daughter, Hannah,  our neighbors were letting us take their 10 year old son, Christian.  I kept imagining the phone call home:  "Sorry a bear ate your son, but if it is any consolation, the bear ate Hannah, too."  I decided to do a little more research.  After all, information is power.  Turned out that the Chapleau Wildlife Preserve through which we were paddling is home to the largest population of black bears on earth. When I called the outfitter to ask him about this, he said the bears weren’t a big problem if we carried a 12 gauge.  Given how tensions go up between family members on these trips, we couldn’t risk carrying weapons, so we called our Canadian friends, Dwayne and Mark because being Canadian in our minds automatically makes you an expert in all things outdoors, especially bears.  Dwayne suggested we purchase bear spray and bear bangers, which are like little fire crackers/bullets you wear around your neck and shoot at bears if they get too close or aggressive.  It took us 20 minutes to figure out how to work a bear banger - just enough time to make any bear die laughing or die from boredom. So we turned to Mark who knows us even better than Dwayne and he suggested a simpler solution to the bear problem:  Just out run the next person or simpler yet, trip ’em. 

Note bear spray, ax, saw, fire, (bear banger under jacket) and a cup of whiskey.

We were 10 days on the river and never let down our vigilance.  We wore bells on the portage trails.  We ate away from our tents.  We traveled in groups, and carried the bear spray and bear bangers.  We even dumped all our dishwater down the makeshift latrines.  And that is how we met some more Canadians on the Missinaibi. When we were forced to share a campsite late one evening, I had to cut through their campsite in order to dump out the dishwater in the thunderbox.  Perhaps I should have paid more attention because as I threw the water down the latrine, I saw three bowls and half of our eating utensils fly out, too.  I did debate about mounting a rescue operation but in the end decided no amount of washing would make me use those spoons again.  In retrospect, I think that should have been a sign -a warning of sorts.  Later that evening, the Canadians came down to gut their fish next to our tents and we started chatting in the manner that all canoe trippers do when they met a new face after enduring the same company day in and day out.  We talked about our trips, our canoes, our routes and finally about the BEARS.  They informed us that all this bear neurosis was BS - which of course was why they were unconcerned about all the fish innards washing back up toward our tents.  I mean not only were these guys Canadian, they really, really knew how to fish whereas we hadn't caught a thing.  More proof if you ask me that Canadians are experts in all things outdoors.     Given that we were on the same river, we figured that we would run into each other over the next couple of days. They were good guys, and promised that when we met up again they would teach Christian how to nab some Missinaibi fish. 

But, by the last night when we reached Glassy Falls, they were no where to be seen.  Christian was really disappointed and I wondered if they had deliberately avoided us the rest of the way down the river. I mean between three adults, two teenagers and two kids, we were really loud.  It didn't really matter though because we had Glassy Falls to ourselves and we now knew those Canadians were right.  We hadn't seen hide nor hair of a black bear since we started the trip.  Besides, Glassy Falls is like a slice of heaven with a large white sand beach on which we camped and played.   So, we tossed caution to the wind. After the kids swam all afternoon, we ate at our tents and dumped our leftovers into the fire next to us before crawling into bed to weather out a sudden rain shower.

Glassy Falls from the edge of the beach.  Does it get any better than this?

In the morning as we packed up the boats, Hannah and Christian wander off by themselves down the river.  Just as we finished packing the boats Christian ran back all excited because he found fish teeth at the edge of the river.  "And there were bear tracks all over" he said as we paddled off.  It took me about 10 minutes to realize that these were fresh tracks laid down after the rain, but the kids were fine and we were headed home.  When the outfitter pick us up that afternoon in Mattice, the first thing he said was "Did you have trouble at Glassy Falls?"  When we asked him why, he said that a group of Canadian paddlers traveling down the Missinaibi had been chased out of the campsite the day before by black bears.  I am sure the technical moral of the story is that not all Canadians are experts in all things outdoors, but I like to believe that it is equally true that being noisy Americans does occasionally pay off in the wilderness as well.  

It's mid February in Upstate New York and all the snow is down in Baltimore, Texas and North Carolina.   Too barren to ski and too cold to canoe, so I sit at my blog and wonder what should I do?

Temporarily Out to Lunch

Sorry, I am temporarily employed and this is causing significant interference with my blogging career. Besides it is prime canoe season. Tomorrow I am going with my neighbor, Ann, up to Canada for a weekend of whitewater!

Another Poem

The Slot Canyon


Afterwards, I was shaken.

But even when water poured over sheer cliffs,

Filling the gully with branches and stones,

Grinding the walls away,

I was never afraid of drowning.



Later as the sun warmed red rock with dim light,

I rubbed my palm across the canyon wall,

So dizzy I leaned against the sand stone face.



I should have tried to swim.

Instead I climbed a crumbling ledge to

Gather grace like small stones

Embedded in the soles of my shoes.

Canoe Tripping: Costs

Canoe tripping is a relatively inexpensive way to spend your vacation if you can ignore the cost getting to your destination or getting home. That at least is what my husband, Brian, and I tell people every year when we come up with some new piece of equipment that we just have to have. One year it was custom made rain tarps in rainbow colors. Another year it was a barrel harness and dry suits. This year we got another canoe because well….you can never have too many canoes. Each time we blow our savings we justify our actions as an “investment”. If the value of my 401k was tied to the amount of outdoor equipment I have in the garage, I could retire.

The truth is all you really need is a canoe and paddles and perhaps a strong back. At least that is how the voyageurs used to do it. In this day and age, however, the list has grown a little longer. PFDs, for instance, are considered a great way to prevent drowning. I personally also recommend rain gear, sleeping bags, tents and squirt guns.

Even if you would rather invest your money in stocks and bonds instead of spending it at NRS or Campmor, you can take a canoe trip with very little investment. First of all you don’t have to buy anything. That is why God made Outfitters. You can rent anything from a boat to a spatula. And then of course, if you decide you want to become an owner, most Outfitters turn over their equipment regularly, and you can get some good buys on used equipment. If the idea of used equipment makes you squeamish, just remember after a week in the woods, there is no such thing as “new”.

Outfitters are also the best deal in town for another reason. They are a great source of information about where you are going to paddle, weather, water levels, campsites, and what to bring. All you have to do is call and ask them. It’s free.

Don’t feel guilty about asking for all that free advice either, because believe me, when it come time to pay them to shuttle you to the put in or meet you at the take out, you may have to mortgage your house. Originally this coming summer we thought of paddling the Dumoine River in Quebec until we discovered that it cost $300 per person to take the sea plane 70 kilometers to the put in. Next we looked at the Noir River – and discovered that we could save about $20 per person. When I discovered that the shuttle for the Upper Missinaibi was ONLY $690 for the first vehicle and half that for the second, I felt like a true bargain shopper. I can’t really complain that this is highway robbery either because the alternative is to walk home.

When I talked to outfitters about shuttling our cars for our Missinaibi trip, I got a little confused because the Missinaibi runs north. That means that the Upper Missinaibi is down south and the Lower Missinaibi is up north. We are running the Upper Missinaibi north to take out down river at the beginning of the Lower Missinaibi.

As you plan your first canoe trip remember that a good sense of direction is priceless, but for everything else, there’s MasterCard.

Canoe Tripping: Quick Tip on How to Identify DANGER

You are probably wondering about how we deal with the constant dangers of the wild. Thieving chipmunks, kamikaze mosquitoes, blood sucking leeches, disease ridden ticks, rabid wolves, hungry bears, axe murders, big foot and swamp creatures just to name a few. Well, first of all, you have to clearly identify the danger.

Here's a helpful tip for bear encounters. To determine whether it is a black bear or a grizzly, take a large heavy stick, sneak up behind the bear and whack it as hard as you can on its backside. Run to the nearest tree and climb as though your life depends on it. If the bear climbs the tree to get you, it is a black bear, and if the bear simply uproots the tree to get a hold of you, it’s a grizzly.

Four Poems

1. Aubergines


The heat undid us,

Leaving our purple bellies swollen and soft.

Can you smell the clouds heavy with salt?

Hurry. The wind is rising.

Bring lime juice mixed with honey.

Rake this flesh with oil

And wait

While the rain pulls back our skin and melts away.


####

2. Hang Zhou


I arrived in late August when the days were heavy with heat

On a steam locomotive,

Rocking back and forth through the hemp fields and mulberry trees.



The place smelled of rotting watermelon rinds and lotus flowers

Of cooking oil and sweat soaked cotton sheets.



Behind me the peasant women arrived on pilgrimages to LinYin Temple.

Toothless and illiterate, they encircled me,

Touching my hair, holding the cooper strands in their fingers,



We were all awestruck.


####


3. Last Rites


Scatter my ashes in the evening

On the shore of an Algonquin lake.

Remember the time the two of us

Watched the stars come out by the thousands until

The Milky Way was sleepy

In a night so dark

We could only smell the outlines of the trees.

Scatter my ashes into the cold water and watch them float

Among the last reflections of the clouds.

Smell the hemlock and white pine.

Say my name one last time and

Rest

Under the garden of the stars.

####


4. Afternoon in Idaho



Clouds are unruly here.

Completely disobedient.

Rolling onto each other, stomping across the sky

With a boldness just short of defiance.

But the day seems sure of itself,

Convinced that no matter what,

The sky will open up again

Bluer than before.


###

The Canoe Diaries: Chapter 1

Fish Head Soup

My love affair with canoeing began after a bowl of curried fish head soup in a small open air restaurant on the far northeastern corner of Singapore sometime in January 1997. I had been traveling around Asia on business and met up with an old colleague, Dick Isherwood, who just happened to be in Singapore on business, too. When Dick asked me whether I wanted to have lunch and then go hiking on an abandoned plantation somewhere in the middle of the Straights of Johor over the weekend, I should have realized what I might be getting into. Years back when Dick and I worked for the same company, everyone had a Dick Isherwood story - How he convinced another colleague to bushwhack up the side of an unexplored volcano in Indonesia or how he swam to Ellis Island when a freighter heading out of Manhattan swamped his sea kayak.

Dick started with the company years before I did, but took a hiatus for 10 years to trek and work in Nepal. It wasn’t until he found himself married and the father of a Bengali girl and a Nepali boy that he returned to resume his corporate existence somewhere in his late 40s. By the time I met Dick, he and his family had worked and traveled across the world. But, he had settled in northern New Jersey with his kids in middle school and photographs of the Himalayas filling his office walls.

After we finished our curried fish head soup, Dick led me to a rickety dock, to an even more rickety wooden boat which took us, along with about 10 local residents, across the rolling sea to an island several miles distant.

“If only” said Dick looking longingly across the swells, “I had my sea kayak”.

“Ummm”, I replied, thinking “If only I had taken two Dramamine.”

The sky was warm and blue and the breeze finally convinced me that eating fish head soap was not such a bad idea after all. We landed at another old wooden dock at the edge of a ramshackle village. As we disembarked, I was struck by how different this place was from Singapore, with its rusty old cars and chickens and dogs roaming freely.

Dick and I wandered through the streets of the town to the far side of the island with its white sand beaches and unidentifiable rusty machine carcasses. The weather was warm and clear, and I asked Dick a million questions about his adventures. Even if Dick were by nature a boring or stogy person, which he is not, his adventures are so enthralling, I could listen to him for hours. I was not his captive audience. Rather, he was my captive storyteller.

Somewhere after Dick reentered corporate life, he started taking his family canoe tripping, a term I had never even heard of. I wasn’t interested in canoeing, but I found vicarious pleasure listening to Dick’s adventures. As we walked along he told me how the summer before his family paddled a river up in Canada all the way to a place called Moosonee on the St. James Bay. His kids had flipped paddling through one of the rapids and they had a fire sale of wet gear floating down the river. After paddling north for nearly two weeks without meeting a soul, they arrived in Moosonee – a town filled with tourists who had traveled North by train on the Polar Bear Express.

As we were walking along, Dick told me that in the coming summer he was heading to a place I’d never heard of called Algonquin Park. To get there, he would have to drive from his home in New Jersey, through Toronto and on up into Ontario Province. When I realized that he would be driving through my hometown of Rochester, I invited him to stop on his way north.

We made our way back across the Straits of Johor, Dick looking longingly at the occasional sea kayak that we would pass and me looking longingly at shore. On the taxi ride home, Dick explained that the old cars littering the abandoned plantation were exported from Singapore where driving rusty or damaged cars was illegal. As the taxi sped on, we passed Changyi Prison.

“You know why crime is so low in Singapore, don’t you?” he asked.

I raised my eyebrows in a blank response.

“Well”, he said “they hang all the criminals.”

A Proper Upbringing

I grew up in Utah and like most local residents only went to the Great Salt Lake under duress – usually entertaining out of town relatives – who were simply dying to say they’d floated in the salt waters – or who had just overstayed their welcome so long that there was absolutely nothing else to do with them. Wilderness wasn’t foreign to me. Fresh water was.

In Salt Lake City in the 70s, the most accessible alternatives to Church activities were smoking pot and hiking. You either fell in with a Good crowd or a Bad one because there weren’t any other options, like, for instance, band camp.
I had my first marijuana brownie, spelunking somewhere in the Uinta Mountains on a school outing in Eighth Grade.

As a teenager, I would walk out the front door of my house, up the foothills of the Watch Front and into the canyons and ridges of the surrounding Mountains. Neither of my parents went camping, but they were happy to let me backpack in Southern Utah with any family friends that would take me. Routinely, they let me hike off into the Wasatch Mountains to camp unsupervised with several boys I knew from high school. I spent one summer working for the forest service and another at wilderness survival school. By the time I graduated high school I had hiked all over the Rockies, wandered the canyons of Southern Utah, backpacked in the Uintas, smoked a little marijuana and somehow managed to maintain my virginity.

All that changed my freshman year in college.

When I turned 18, I made a beeline for the Utah border and headed for the east coast. By my junior year, I had transferred to school in Boston to study Chinese, and from there I went Shanghai and then to New York City. Perhaps with a broader range of social options, I went outside a little less. Don’t get me wrong, I always loved to be outside, but I got distracted. By the time I first met up with Dick Isherwood in Singapore, 20 years had passed since I’d spent a night outside under the stars.

Why Not?

Several months after Dick and I made it safely back to the shores of Singapore, I called Dick in New Jersey, to see if he and his wife, Janet, would indeed like to stop for a night on their way to Algonquin Park.

Dick said instead, “Why don’t you just come with us?”

Twenty years is a long time to be inside. And my sole canoe experience at the age of 17 had been less than stellar. For hours my mother and I fumed at each other’s incompetence as we paddled in circles down the Delaware River. I wasn’t sure a week long canoe trip was for me.

“Well”, I said, “I’d love, too, but I don’t think my husband, Brian, will go for it.”

I know. I know. I can’t always be expected to own up to my own shit, can I? Besides, Brian is a nice Jewish guy, born in Miami and raised in the suburbs of New Jersey. I wasn’t expecting a whole lot of enthusiasm about this one from him either.

But I called Brian at work because I told Dick I would.

When I explained to Brian what Dick and his family had invited us to do with them, he paused and said “Sure, why not?”

“Why not?”

Next time you are at the edge of a quiet pond, drop a pebble in and watch the water ripple. See how the minute waves stir up the silt at the edge of the pond. Maybe a seed pod resting at the shore is pushed over just a little, so that the sunlight and the warm earth take hold and the magic that is encased within the seed swells up. Over the next week a small sprout pushes through and then, the first leaves unfurl. Return each year in spring and look again as the sapling takes root. Over time you will watch the trunk strengthen and the branches open to the sky. Remember this.

“Why not”. These two words changed everything.

Canoe Tripping: The Company You Keep

As my close friend, Carolyn, so eloquently observed about canoe tripping:

"Its not the physical activity; it's the company that wears you down."

Deciding with whom to venture into the wilderness is the most important decision you make in planning a canoe trip. Believe me. You have to spend 24 hours a day with these people, and it is not considered acceptable protocol to abandon, beat or dismember other trip members, no matter how annoying they can be. This is especially true for family members.

When we paddle down the Upper Missinaibi River this summer, that will be about the forth or fifth year my family has ventured into the wilds with our friend, Pete, and his kids. Last year Carolyn and her son, Kai, joined our ranks as we all paddled through Killarney Provincial Park. We’ve paddled the Allagash River in Maine, Quetico (the Canadian Boundary Waters), and of course we’ve been through Algonquin a couple of times. The point is that we have gotten to know each other well – for better and worse.

So, to give you a feel for what it is like to be in the middle of the woods with the same few people for days on end, here are a few snippets of conversation, most of which my husband, Brian, recorded in a little spiral notebook on our last canoe trip through Killarney.

1) My 8 year old daughter Hannah speaking of something she did wrong to my husband: “It’s already happened. It’s passed. Deal with it.”

2) Pete instructing the kids on how to obtain firewood: “Look for a beaver dam and steal from the damn beaver.”

3) Martha, Pete’s daughter: “Dad, DAD, DAAAD, What the hell is the matter with you?”

4) Five year old Kai looking off across the still waters that surrounded the island we were camped on and casually asking: “Pete, is that your boat going down the lake?”

5) Me in response to comments on the rain tarp I set up: “I did it a 4 o’clock in the morning, so don’t give me shit.”

6) And Brian then placating me: “Next time you look for a wife, not only check her teeth, but make sure she sleeps with one eye open to track the weather.”

7) Joe, Pete’s 16 year old son on learning from the best: “I wish Brian was my Daddy.”

Then there are my two favorite instances from our trip to Algonquin in 2004:

At the end of the day, I walked up behind Pete and Brian who were washing dinner dishes in the lake and caught Pete remarking “God, your wife is a bitch, but man can she cook”.

Several days later, I accidentally knocked one of our two rolls of toilet paper into the thunder box, only to come back to the privy the next morning to find a note from “Forest Ranger Gump” suggesting that I dive in and retrieve the rolls if it happens again.

These are the voices of my canoe family. We definitely irk each other at times, but we’re found a rhythm that makes each day in the wilderness rejuvenating and fun.

I’ll conclude with a final quote from my husband Brian who remarked after we spent 10 hours in the pouring rain paddling and portaging through a place called Kirk Creek in Killarney:

“Canoeing in the rain is better than a good day at work” – especially when you are with the people you love.

Good Advice

My grandma: Always use a butter knife.

My dentist: Floss.

My father: All you have to do is one thing and eventually everything will be done.

My grandpa: Two lovers can find room on the edge of a knife.

My mother, curtsey of my grandmother: Practice your wiles.

My father: It’s better to be a Harvard MBA than marry one.

My mother: It’s good to get married because then you’ll know it makes no difference.

My friend: A lady always swallows.

My grandma: Love is hard.

My sister: Dating is affordable.

My mother: Everyone should be allowed to throw away their first born because that’s

the one you screw up.

My sister: Never buy cocaine, but never turn it down.

My mother: Never Tell.

My friend: If you can’t be smart, be careful.

My father: If it flies, floats or fucks, rent it.