Getting to Grey Owl

by Kurt Caswell

  We walked on, and on, until our path turned sharply up, the final hump to the saddle of the pass. We ascended, pushing up the pathway to the top, 515 vertical meters from our camp. At the summit pass the wind pushed and beat us, coming cold out of the mist and dark. At my feet I discovered fox droppings set down in a little X on a stone in our path and, next to it, a collection of tiny white flowers, bending in the summit wind.

  Walking is difficult, I have learned, not so much because we are weak but because it re-creates the original pain of birth and the inevitable separation from the mother. It’s dying that comes easy. Each time you set out on a walk, you must sever your ties to home. You don’t know—not really—when you’ll be back, or even if you’ll get back at all, because you don’t know what might befall you on the road. So the pain of birth is experienced again as you leave your warm house for the bright world, the unknown, walking that edge between awe and terror. And really, dying is much easier. For that, you just stop doing anything at all. You retreat as far away from the peopled world as you can and wait, and wait, and one day you are no more. But why do that when you can go for walks, which, despite all the difficulties, take you from place to place, and with each new place is a new possibility. Of all else, this is what hominids desire most, new possibility: a new day, a new chance, a new place. “Wayfaring,” writes Merlin Coverly in his book The Art of Wandering, “is the fundamental mode by which living beings inhabit the earth. . . . The act of walking becomes a means of reading a landscape.” So Scott and I walked and read out the signs that would lead us through the dirty tracks over the snowfields, the thick, squatty sentinels of the cairns in the mists, the swirl and spin of the clouds we walked inside, which led us out onto the other side, where we descended at an angle across a steep snowfield, down, down, until we dropped below the clouds at last, and a blue sky greeted us in a bright day. From here, as yesterday, we could see our way out ahead, down the long slow slope across the boulders to the waters at the head of Veiðileysufjörður. My heart warmed and felt at ease, as it appeared that we were almost home. “He who enters it is lost,” writes Ibn Battuta, that twelfth-century prince of travelers, “and he who leaves it is born.”

  And yet the way seemed to resist our going, for when we hit the rock at the bottom of that sharp, snowy descent, we found no more cairns to lead us. The problem was not that we would not find our way, as the waters of the fjord were in sight before us, but that we would not find our way very soon. The cairns marked the easiest passage, the way most walkers would go. We struck out across the pathless lands, keeping watch for piles of stones. We skirted around great boulders, over streams and their companion patches of mud and swampy grass, and back to the boulders running out before us. In time, a pile of rocks that looked like a pile of rocks became a cairn, and, back on track now, we followed the faint path down. Behind us, the storm and cloud descended, spilling over the pass and filling the void below, pushing us down the fjord to the water. Out of the distance, a younger walker overtook us—a Frenchman with a big camera—and he beat us in to the safety of our camp.

  We found a little depression in the land at the camp and pitched the tent, tying out the wind anchors, setting them firm in the ground. We cooked and ate as the sky grew darker, and just as we’d finished up the dishes, the rain came down the fjord on the wind. It blew, forcing the rain at the fly, bending the tent poles in.

  One subject of every poem, one of my teachers taught me, is the poem itself, and so seated there in the tent in the wind, I made my notes on the day and the unfolding events of the moment. The journey is not over until you have told its story, I wrote. Then I sketched a little picture of our tent in the wind and regretted the angle at which we had pitched it. If the narrow end were facing the wind, we would ride out the storm a bit better. But no matter. Scott woke from a troubled sleep and said, “Here, I’ll just press my big ass up against the tent so we don’t blow away.” I scribbled down my page and thought of the Welsh writer Arthur Machen, who made walking one of his primary arts. “For the essence of this art [walking],” Machen writes, “is that it must be an adventure into the unknown, and perhaps it may be found that this, at last, is the matter of all the arts.” The storm raged on, and I slept fitfully, if at all.

  Rising to the light of day, it was not raining anymore. I stepped out of the tent to find two new tents in the camp, late arrivals in the storm last night. A seal lifted its head from the waters of the fjord. I watched it bob away in the waves. After coffee and hot cereal, Scott and I retreated from the cold to our shelter—“It is best to leave up the tents,” Jon, the ranger, had told us. “The boat can be delayed for many hours”—until we heard the voice of the man himself. Jon had arrived, a little pack on his back, still wearing those rubber boots.

  “Did he walk in in those boots?” I said.

  “Shit,” Scott said. “I bet he did.”

  Jon told us he departed his Höfn cabin at 8 a.m., and it was now 10:30 a.m. What had taken Scott and me all day to walk, he had accomplished in two and a half hours.

  “Now that’s walking,” Scott said.

  I wondered what the Hornstrandir felt like to Jon, who negotiated its steeps and boulders and snowfields with such ease, its stream crossings and marshes and bogs, the beach sands, the grassy swales running up the fjord bottoms, the winds and rains and snows of summer. Did he feel perfectly at ease in the land, and if so, did that feeling come from outside, from the place itself, or from somewhere inside, a feeling he created? If the land out there was empty, if nature is indeed indifferent, perhaps it is still possible to love a place, to love a landscape, when that love is projected onto it. We cast the net of ourselves into the void, and instead of drawing it back, we leave it there so that next time, there is a there in that place to go to.

  The boat appeared in the fjord, a white line in the waves drawn out behind it. Scott and I broke down the tent and packed it away. We still had a good string of days to explore the north and east of Iceland, and as the boat pulled in, I was ready to be moving on.

  *Bronowski is writing here specifically about the Bahktiari tribes of Persia, who were and are nomadic pastoralists, hence the reference to summer pastures. I have taken some liberty with Bronowski’s work to liken some of the cultural characteristics of these modern pastoral nomads to Neanderthals, who would not have kept sheep and goat herds but would have hunted wild game herds wherever they found themselves.

  GETTING TO GREY OWL’S CABIN

  Saskatchewan, 2012

  On the Kingsmere Road west along the narrow arm of Waskesiu, I drive with the window down. Nine cow elk with calves graze the summer roadside grass, their mouths moving together in easy time. A little farther on, two bulls as big as dump trucks, racks spreading like the branches of oak, silent, soft in their eyes, watch me as I watch them. The sun is coming up off the tree line, and in the glowing track of the road, two wolf pups explode from the barrow pit. Was that dark presence at the corner of my eye their mother? But my gaze is forward, pushing hard on the brakes to slow the heavy truck. One of the pups breaks right and vanishes in the underbrush. The other runs right down the middle of the road. It’s a little fur ball bouncing along on its big feet, loping like a teenager, its ears pinned back in terror (I would be terrified too). I’m coming up fast, still pressing hard on the brakes, harder, harder, hoping it will move out of the way before I push through, and then it does, cutting right to the cover of safety. I count myself lucky to see them—these elk, the wolves—and drive slower now, sunrise flooding the north woods, an eagle at the jaggedy edge of the spruces and larch and pine. Though I know this is a national park, where elk and wolves are safe from hunters, I’ve traveled in the boreal forest before and didn’t see so many big animals. Maybe this is going to be a good day.

  When I mentioned to a Canadian friend that I wanted to make a journey to Grey Owl’s cabin, he said, “Really? Why? He was a fraud.” I suppose he was, at least in part, an Englishman who co-opted an Indian identity.
He was born Archibald Stansfield Belaney in the seaside town of Hastings, southeast of London, 1888. He immigrated to Canada and cobbled together a living as a trapper and seasonal job-hopper. He took on the name Wa-Sha-Quon-Asin, Grey Owl, He Who Walks by Night, given him by the Anishinabe, and buried his past so deeply that it came to light only after his death in 1938 from pneumonia brought on by heavy drinking.

  By his own count, Grey Owl was the son of an Apache mother and a Scots father, and he spent his boyhood in Mexico. His father, he said, was a close friend of Buffalo Bill Cody. After arriving in Canada, Grey Owl settled in with the Anishinabe at Bear Island, Ontario. There he learned a great deal about hunting and trapping, perfected his skills at knife throwing, and became a crack shot with a rifle. He was regarded as a heavy drinker, a sometimes brawler, a man of “dark moods.” He got into trouble with the law. But he was also a welcome traveling companion and a man with a sense of humor. He could play the piano and sing. He quoted Shakespeare. During the First World War he enlisted in the Canadian army, where his independent spirit and expert marksmanship made him a top-rate sniper. He was married five times, however loosely he interpreted that word, and had two daughters and one son, each with a different woman. Anahareo, his fourth wife and the mother of his youngest daughter, Shirley Dawn, was the love of his life, but their marriage dissolved a couple years before he died.

  The problem with Grey Owl is not that he was an Englishman living among First Nations people in Canada, but rather that, over the final eight years of his life, he became a notable writer and one of the preeminent conservationists of the time. He sold his four books, along with his Indian persona and his message that human beings are not above nature, but part of it, to an impressionable public in Europe, the United States, and Canada, nations on the brink of the Second World War. Lovat Dickson, Grey Owl’s publisher and eventual biographer, writes in Wilderness Man: The Strange Story of Grey Owl,

  His appearance in London in October 1935 created a sensation. Not only did he look romantic, he spoke pure romance. His thrilling voice brought the wilderness and its inhabitants, animal and Indian, alive to his audiences. . . . In contrast with Hitler’s screaming, ranting voice, and the remorseless clang of modern technology, Grey Owl’s words evoked an unforgettable charm, lighting in our minds the vision of a cool, quiet place, where men and animals lived in love and trust together.

  As his fame grew as a writer and conservationist, Grey Owl was commanded to appear before King George VI at Buckingham Palace. The strict protocol demanded that the audience take its place and then rise as the footmen threw open the door to make way for the king and his family. But Grey Owl demanded that the scenario be reversed, so that the king and his court would rise, and “he, Grey Owl, would enter.” And so it was. King George, the queen, the queen’s parents, the Earl and Countess of Strathmore, and Princesses Margaret Rose and Elizabeth, along with much of the palace staff, rose to their feet as Grey Owl entered in full buckskinned regalia. The lecture was a great success, and especially delighted Princess Elizabeth. When it came time to leave, Grey Owl put his right hand out to the king, touched him on the shoulder with the other, and famously said, “Goodbye, brother. I’ll be seeing you.”

  Grey Owl really did live the life he wrote and spoke about, but despite the truth of his satisfying vision of the wild, his fans and readers had paid for an Indian. What they got, they only later discovered, was a white man playing dress-up. If Grey Owl had lived out his days quietly in the north woods, no one would have cared. But there is no faster way to make enemies than parting people from their money in a lie. On Grey Owl’s death, a waiting horde of newsmen discredited him, slandered him, cursed him, and cussed him, and his books and his message of environmental conservation were lost in the fray.

  To get to Grey Owl’s cabin, I drove to Prince Albert National Park, Saskatchewan, from my house in west Texas. It’s about 1,725 miles from Lubbock to Waskesiu, but I didn’t drive in a straight line. I made a number of detours over several weeks, camping along the way: the Medicine Bow National Forest near Cheyenne, Wyoming, where great mushrooms of smoke from the High Park Fire savaged the sky; Deadwood, North Dakota, because of that HBO series; Devil’s Tower, Wyoming, because N. Scott Momaday (Kiowa) writes that “it has to be seen to be believed,” and I believed him; Lake Sakakawea on the wide Missouri River, North Dakota, where Lewis and Clark once camped; then on up over the US/Canada border to Crooked Lake, Saskatchewan, where I watched a terrible wind come in over the quiet waters; then out to Riding Mountain National Park, Manitoba, where Grey Owl also lived for a short time; and finally, to Prince Albert National Park where he lived out his days and now is buried. So, to get to Prince Albert National Park, I drove 2,450 miles. Inside the park, I drove another 100 miles over a period of four days. So now I was at 2,550 miles of driving to get to Grey Owl’s cabin. Of course, I would also have to eventually drive home.

  I drive a 2002 Ford F250 4-by-4 supercab, with a 7.3-liter V8 Power Stroke diesel engine (yeah, the last of the good ones). The paint is peeling and the truck has 200,000 miles on it, but it’s still going strong. I’m running Firestone Destination A/T tires at LT285/75R16, which is a little bigger than the factory tire, so that reduces my fuel economy just a bit. Then I have an eight-foot cabover Alaskan Camper on the back, which weighs 1,750 pounds, dry. The thing about the custom-made Alaskan is that it’s the only hard-shell popup camper made in North America. The top raises for camping and lowers for driving on a hydraulic system, which dramatically reduces drag and thus helps maintain reasonable mileage. I’ve got a canoe on top of that and a whole lot of gear stowed in the cab because I’ll be making a long canoe trip out of Stanley Mission, Saskatchewan, after I visit Grey Owl’s cabin, plus books, clothes, pots and pans, food, assorted tools and other miscellaneous gear, 35 gallons of fresh water, 20 pounds of propane, and at least, at least, a case and a half of beer.

  On a good day, my truck can pull down 18 miles to the gallon. I use a diesel fuel conditioner, because the EPA changed the diesel fuel standards to remove most of the sulfur, thereby reducing emissions of oxides of nitrogen and particulate matter. That’s good news for all living things that respire, and those that don’t too, and a good step toward curbing climate change, but the process reduces the potential energy of the fuel, decreasing the work it can do, which lowers fuel economy, which means burning more. This new ultralow-sulfur diesel fuel (ULSD) is rated at 15 parts per million (ppm) of sulfur and isn’t so good for diesel engines built before 2007 because they are designed to burn low-sulfur diesel (LSD), rated at 500 ppm. One of the problems is lubrication, so the fuel conditioner lubricates older diesel engines, like mine, and can also increase fuel economy. Instead of buying this, you have to buy that. Now, this ULSD fuel is good news for European diesel engine manufacturers because they build engines designed to burn ULSD fuel, so now Europe can compete with North America in the marketplace. But I suppose this is not so good for North American diesel engine manufacturers, who until now had less competition at home, which is probably why the diesel fuel was made that way for so long to begin with. This is a more complex issue, though—it includes a world campaign to lower sulfur content in diesel fuels for the sake of the entire planet, and I have no business reducing it to market exclusion. The point here is that with all this weight on and in my truck, and with this fuel and my engine, I probably average 15 miles per gallon. That’s not too bad for an outfit that weighs upward of 15,000 pounds, but I’d do much better with a Toyota Prius. At any rate, to get to Grey Owl’s cabin, I burned 170 gallons of diesel. According to my source, 1 gallon of diesel produces 10 kilograms of carbon emissions. So to arrive at the parking lot where I will unload my canoe to paddle up to Grey Owl’s cabin, my truck alone has produced 1,700 kilograms of carbon.

  Grey Owl’s cabin is at the southern edge of the Canadian Shield country—a vast region of exposed Precambrian rock and glaciated lakes that covers half of Canada and most of Greenland, and extends south into the
midwestern and northeastern United States. It was the first part of North America to be uplifted, and most of the great mountain ranges of the ancient past have long since eroded away, the land pressed flat by advancing and retreating glacial ice. This process of glaciation (which occurred 1.6 million to 10,000 years ago) carried away most of the soils and carved out the many thousands of lakes. The land is an undulation, like the surface of a golf ball—lake to exposed rock to thin soils over bedrock and the boreal forest stretched across it. Few roads penetrate this country, and many are seasonal, relying on winter ice to connect passages over solid ground. It is a country so filled with itself that to travel here is to accept it on its own terms—water to land, land to water by canoe or motor boat in summer; and ice to snow, snow to ice by dogsled or snowmobile in winter.