My adventure in the Canadian wilderness

By Maddy Higgins

Over the summer I had the pleasure of going on a seventeen day canoe trip in Quebec, specifically in La Verendrye Wildlife Reserve. The trip was run by a canoe camp in Vermont called Songadeewin of Keewaydin, which I have been going to for six years. However, the Verendrye trip was different from any wilderness canoe trip that I had been sent out on, and it’s the longest trip that the camp runs. First of all, it was only the second trip I had been on that went to Canada, and the first one I had done earlier this summer, which was ten days, did not exactly go according to plan, and because of unfortunate circumstances we were unable to complete the itinerary. However, that just made me all the more excited to go to Verendrye. 

Our typical day was basically the same as it was on any other trip I had been on in years before, but as you get older the days get longer and more intense.  We usually start out at about 5:00 AM, depending on how long we expect the day to be given the fact that we have to be at our next campsite before the sun sets. It’s usually better to pack up camp earlier because the winds tend to pick up later in the day, which is absolutely not ideal for canoeing. We pack up what we have in the tent: our sleeping pads, sleeping bags, and our trash bags full of all personal items (e.g. clothes, personal gear, a book). We take down the tent and eat breakfast, which is almost always packets of instant oatmeal. Then, we load the boats and set out.

The rest of the day, we are out on the river paddling until to our next campsite. The day is usually broken up by sets of rapids that we have to run down, if we’re going downstream, or line up, if we’re going upstream. “Lining” is a way of getting upriver that involves holding on to the ropes attached to the ends of the boat and walking the boat up the rapid. We also usually have portages, which are stretches of land that we have to go across to get to our next put-in. Portages also occur if there’s a dam or a dangerous rapid in our way that we have to go around. Once we’ve reached our campsite for the night, we make a fire for dinner, clean our plates, bowls, and utensils that we’d used that day, and go to sleep.

The specific route that we took was called the Capitachouane. We went north up the river Camachigama for eight days, going through Lake Camachigama on the way, and planned to continue on until we reached the height of land on day ten. Then we would paddle south down the river Capitachouane until we reached the Dozois. However, things didn’t go exactly according to plan for our crew. On day six, one girl got a concussion and had to be evacuated. However, since there weren’t any roads, our organization had to call the Quebec Search & Rescue, or Recherche & Sauvetage, to pick her up in a helicopter on day nine. The evacuation went pretty smoothly, but since canoeing trips require an even number of people, we had to find some way to get a replacement up to us. Since there were no roads, we ended up having to go back down the Camachigama. By then we were so many days behind our planned itinerary that we just continued back down Camachigama until we got to Baies Des Rapides.

Honestly, in terms of the days, Verendrye wasn’t much different from any trip I’d been on, but it was very impactful on me, mentally if not physically. During the pandemic, like many other people, I lost connection with a lot of my friends. When we could meet in person it was difficult to get as close to them as I had been before, or even remember how to have deep friendships and connect with people. So in that way, coming out of that isolation and spending seventeen days alone in the woods with seven other people was extremely effective to re-learn how to build interpersonal connections.

See, we were very much out of the way. We’d go days on end without seeing another human person but each other, with the exception of the odd French-speaking fisherman. Being in the wilderness and not seeing anyone else for days on end, for one thing, made us all a tiny bit feral. More importantly, though, it brought us very close together. I barely knew a lot of those girls before our trip, but by the end, I was as close to them as any one of my closest friends from home. One example is one evening when we were camped on this little beach, eating dinner. We were somewhat in a state of shock, because that morning our aforementioned concussed friend had quite literally been airlifted two hundred feet in the air into a helicopter. Then, it started raining. I cannot stress enough how un-ideal rain is on a beach camp. Everything gets wet sand in it no matter what you do, the fire is near-impossible to start, and the tent stakes sink into the ground. By all accounts, the rain should’ve been the final straw. But then, somebody, I don’t remember whom, was like, “Guys, let’s frolic.” And she got up and grabbed someone’s hand and they started spinning in circles. And then, I swear to God, we all held hands and spun in a circle, barefoot on a beach, in the middle of nowhere, Canada, while it was raining like the world was ending.

I’m not sure I’ll ever experience something like Verendrye again, which makes me a little sad, but one thing that makes me feel better is thinking about this one song lyric from “Twinkling Lights” by Annalise Emerick: “we may not have it now, but we had it then.” Emerick actually wrote the song about a wilderness course that she did in Maine when she was in her early twenties.

I started writing a sonnet in the beginning of the summer. Came up with the first four lines, then stopped because I didn’t know what I wanted it to be about. When I got back from Verendrye, I decided to write the rest of it about my experience there. It’s called “In The Sky”:

If I can climb a ladder ten feet high,

Then surely I could even go beyond,

Until the world has vanished from my sight,

And meet you in the sky, I won’t be long.

Remember when we flung away the days,

When time was frozen in a sparkling gold,

When love was both a feeling and a place;

The sky, the laughs, the sometimes freezing cold.

And when the cold would redden nose and ears,

We sang and danced to fight off angry shivers,

And shouted loud for nobody to hear,

Our words belonged to us and to each other.

But that was a long time ago. I know

It’s been awhile, and you still haven’t shown-

Oh, there you are.