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.
I suppose you could say it was my fault—mainly because it was. Dad put me in charge of packing and planning everything. He grew up in South Africa, where there are more baboons and poisonous snakes than canoes. He had camped in his Scouting days but there were a good few decades of intermission until the next time, which was this time. I don’t think he had ever even been in a canoe before, much less portaged one, but we’ll get to that later.
Besides, the whole idea of the trip was mine. Not that I was the experienced one, far from it. I was a thirteen-year-old kid, inspired by reading the wilderness adventures of R.D. Lawrence. The only problem was that enthusiasm, as I later discovered, is not a substitute for knowledge. But before I learned that lesson, I thought I knew it all, and somehow managed to convince my dad I had everything under control.
So he left it all up to me. The food, camping equipment, even his clothes. “Just go into my closet and pack what you think I’ll need,” he told me. A bold decision. Wise? I’ll let you be the judge.
This, as I said, was a long time ago, before you had to pay 200 dollars to buy pants to go outdoors. Back then you just wore what you had and didn’t mind getting dirty. I packed a pair of his jeans, a button-down Oxford shirt he didn’t wear much, wool socks, a neatly folded sweater. I’d packed my father’s wardrobe as if he were going to a poetry reading in a cornfield.
Shirley Lake was the goal. I’d read the trout fishing was good, and that was all the convincing I needed. Logistics? Minor details. At the outfitters, we discovered you could hitch a ride on a water taxi to the far end of Opeongo, skipping fifteen kilometres of hard paddling. From there, it was a winding route of lakes and rivers to the mythical Shangri-La of brook trout. My dad, displaying admirable wisdom, thought that sounded like a good idea. The guy strapped our canoe to a motorboat like a hood ornament and off we went.
We unloaded our mountain of gear and dumped it on the shore. It was an impressive amount of stuff. I don’t think I even considered whether or not it would all fit in the canoe.
“The ferocious bear was clearly just inches away, cunningly biding his time”
But such trifling details were not my concern at the time. I strung up my fishing rod and cast a lure into the black waters. Like something out of a movie, bam, a beautiful smallmouth bass hit the lure just as it touched the water.
Should we keep this one for dinner, we wondered? No, no. Why? It was just the first cast and the first fish and obviously the fishing here was amazing. We were going to have trouble keeping them off the line!
Turns out we had no trouble with that at all. That was the first and last fish we caught the whole trip.
It was also the first time either of us had slept in a tent in bear country. Or in deer-mouse country, for that matter, which was probably what we heard outside the tent that first night. Something was out there, no question, but I still had a good night’s sleep because I was a teenager and I valued sleep over life itself.
My father, on the other hand, did not sleep at all. Not an outdoors guy and suddenly very much in the outdoors, at night, in bear country, with very real sounds coming from the other side of the delicate nylon. Obviously he felt the weight of responsibility in protecting his only son, the dear sweet responsible teenager who was the reason for him being here in the first place.
So he lay awake, vibrating with fear in the darkness, gripping a hatchet in one sweaty hand, coiled and ready to leap up at any second to throw down with the ferocious bear that was clearly just inches away, cunningly biding his time.
So that’s how he slept.
The next day we faced our first-ever portage. Ah yes, that was a learning experience. Prior to going on the trip, I understood that you had to carry all your stuff to the next bit of canoeable water. But until you do it, you don’t understand what that entails, and if you do, you plan a different route. Unless of course you enjoy suffering, in which case you’re all set.
It was a monumental, heroic effort, a worthy homage to the noble legacy of voyageurs who conquered the vast wildernesses of Ontario and beyond. Yes, with pluck and determination and grit, we tackled the portage—almost the length of a football field. Or as seasoned paddlers might think of it, a ceremonial stroll from the car to the water before the trip actually begins.
“At least there were mosquitoes to distract him from the pain.”
We had bags and bags of stuff. Sleeping bags the size of hay bales, fishing rods, the tent, a tackle box, paddles, lifejackets, a round, flannel-sided canteen straight out of a John Wayne film, and sundry items of dubious necessity, to put it politely. It took us at least four trips to complete. I wasn’t strong enough to portage the canoe, so my dad got his first taste of that special joy.
And this was the early 80s, long before the concept of an ergonomic yoke was first conceived. (When an invention like that comes along, you don’t think wow, what a great idea this genius had, you think, how did these morons not think of this earlier?) Thanks to our canoe’s medieval yoke, my dad was able to precisely focus the entire weight of a seventeen-foot aluminum boat on his seventh cervical vertebra. On the upside, at least there were clouds of hungry mosquitos to distract him from the pain.
I saw him stoically labouring up the rocky, muddy trail with the pretty red canoe as I enjoyed the last rays of sun, taking a few casts in the hopes of a bite, admiring the light on the river. I thought he looked quite sporty in his white leather tennis shoes.
Then came the first serious portage—a full kilometre, approaching a bona fide respectable distance for real canoeists. Shackleton’s crew endured a polar winter marooned in a frozen hellscape, yes, and I bet that was equally challenging.
I did at least have a map and after that ordeal, my dad thought it was a good idea to take a better look at it. Turns out we weren’t anywhere near even getting off the river. Worse, there were two more epic portages along the route and it was already getting late.
So naturally, at the next portage, we looked downstream and thought, hey, you know maybe we just skip this one. There were no rapids to negotiate, although we didn’t know that at the time. There just wasn’t much water. So we had to wade with the canoe and drag it as best we could, scraping over boulders, slipping on the rocks, heaving and struggling over what at times seemed little more than a wet path.
It was seven in the evening before we reached the fourth portage, which we also deemed optional, and as bad as the resulting experience was, I stand behind our decision to this day. Better that than to portage all the stuff we had. At least there were some parts of the river that were deep enough that we could sit in the boat for a rest, though not many.
“We slept about three feet away from a dead drop into the water”
It was getting dark now. We couldn’t see the rocks anymore, so we fired up the Coleman lantern, and I leaned over the end of the canoe, knees funneled into the bow’s cruel aluminum wedge, and did my best to see the rocks in time to warn my dad. And on it went for hours and hours until finally, at long last, we were off the river and onto a lake, paddling in the faint moonlight.
It was probably around midnight. The campsite on Shirley Lake I had thought we might reach was so far away that the thought of making it was laughable, had we been in the mood to laugh. We could just barely see what looked like the outline of an island so that’s where we headed. As we approached, hanging over the bow with the lantern once again, I did my best to guide us to the shore. But my knees were in such agony that as I tried to shift them I lost my grip on the lantern and it fell into the dark water.
Down it went. I won’t ever forget the vision of it sinking slowly into the depths, glowing and fizzing madly, coming to rest about 15 feet down. It actually stayed lit for a few seconds as it stood still on the bottom, perfectly upright, and as I watched transfixed it went out with a puff. And then there was blackness.
Technically we had a flashlight, something like what you might clip to your keychain, about as useful as a Bic lighter. Unfortunately, I had no idea where it was.
We scrambled up a steep jumble of sharp, loose rocks by feel until we found a small square of bare granite big enough to lie down on. Setting up the tent was out of the question. As was eating anything warm. We were cold. At least I did manage to drag up a bag of our extra clothes. My dad asked for his sweater and I gave it to him, still neatly folded. Unfortunately, turns out it was a V-neck vest.
It was a long night. But I still slept a bit. I didn’t ask how my dad’s night was because, well, I was a teenager.
“My dad has the complexion of an Icelandic newborn”
It is nothing short of divine intervention that the next day dawned clear and sunny. With the light also came the discovery that we slept about three feet away from a dead drop into the water.
“I’m not sure we’re going to make it to your lake, Mikey,” my dad said. As you will remember, he’s fond of profound understatements.
I should have been thankful to be alive but instead I sulked about missing the trophy brook trout I thought were waiting for me in Shangri Lake.
Two days later, we saw the police boat. Maybe it was against protocol, but we later learned that the officer did not start the call with “Mrs. Randolph your husband and son are fine.” Instead, it was more like, “Mrs. Randolph, this is Sergeant so-and-so from the Whitney detachment of the Ontario Provincial Police and I’m calling about a situation with your husband and son on Opeongo Lake. . . .” The way I look at it, we all had an adventure, if you go by the old adage that adventure is something nasty that happened to somebody else.
Opeongo is a big lake, the biggest in all of Algonquin, and if the wind gets up it can get very, very rough. But not that day. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky and the water was like a mirror. Normally, that would be a blessing. But my dad has the complexion of an Icelandic newborn. The man burns in the shade. Yup, I really should have thought about bringing sunscreen.
It was blazing hot. But dad had no choice but to cover up as best he could. He wore his nylon K-Way windbreaker zipped up, hood on and cinched tight around his face, with my Blue Jays hat overtop. To cover his hands, he used the only thing he could—his nice and thick wool socks.
Hour after hour we plodded along under the hammering summer sun. The only thing to drink was the lake, which is what we did, ruined by adding some synthetic-lemon Crystal Light powder because I had some. Sitting in the furry canteen, it got so hot you had to sip it. Mercifully, at long last, we made it back to the car.
Not long ago I told the whole story of our canoe trip to some friends who also know my dad well. They laughed and winced and groaned in all the right places, and when I got to the part about the sunburn and the wool socks on his hands, one of them said, “I bet he regretted leaving a kid in charge of everything.”
He’d been cold and wet and bruised and blistered and sunburnt and wholly exhausted and, let’s be honest, pretty much duped into hauling half a hardware store through a mosquito-ridden labyrinth. But he didn’t regret it.
He knew what this trip meant to me. So he said yes. Because I wanted to go. Because maybe he remembered what it was like to be thirteen, with wild dreams of adventure swirling in your head. Because he believes that this is the kind of thing you do for your kid, and who knows, he might actually learn a few things along the way.
To understate it the way he would, I’d say he’s a pretty good dad.
Mike Randolph 