The Education of a Would-Be Voyageur

A Father’s Day story about a canoe trip where everything went wrong, except what matters most

By Mike Randolph

When we saw the police patrol boat puttering along on the north end of Opeongo Lake, in Algonquin Park, my dad started shouting and waving wildly as if we were castaways down to our last mouldy crust.

The boat veered towards us on the shore. “We’ve been having a bit of a rough trip,” explained my dad, with a brave smile. (Outrageous understatements amuse him. The truth is he was close to pleading for a helicopter.) “Can you please call my wife and tell her we are going to be a day late?”

This was roughly forty years ago, when my dad was younger than I am now. The officer would have to wait until he got back to dispatch in order to telephone my mother in Toronto. “And can you please start off by saying that her husband and son are fine?”

That was a thoughtful thing to add so that my mother didn’t feel vindicated that all her fears and worrying had been completely justified, which of course, they were. But were we fine? The fact we had survived so far was something of a glitch in the laws of natural selection. We were so spectacularly unprepared we might as well have packed some bread, a tin of sardines, and a quote from Thoreau.

More

A place far, far away

My dehesa is about a half-hour drive from where I live in Madrid. It’s a wild pasture with scrubby oak trees and rocky bits and impenetrable thickets of blackberry thorns and two tiny streams that struggle to collect enough water to flow very far. I say my dehesa even though it’s not mine, or anybody else’s, but I go there a lot and I know it well so I’ve come to call it that. There’s a rock wall surrounding it but it’s low enough to scramble over, otherwise you have to go around to the iron gate down the hill and be mindful to shut it behind you so the cows don’t get out. 

More