Travel Writing

by Peter Ferry

  “Isn’t it my story, too?” asks Nick.

  “You as the reader? Well, yes,” I say.

  “What if I don’t buy it?” asks Nick.

  “Do you buy it?” I say.

  “I’m not sure,” says Nick.

  “So Gene Brooke is our Gene Brooke, and Carolyn O’Connor’s real, too?” asks the girl with blue hair.

  “Yes.”

  “And you say they know each other when they really don’t?”

  “Well, they didn’t. They do now,” I say.

  “I’m confused,” says the blue-haired girl.

  “And you can make that happen just because it’s your story?” asks someone.

  “Yes.”

  “Okay,” says the dog-faced boy, “if the story belongs to the writer, and I’m the writer, then why can’t I write anything I want to just like you? Why do I have to write this stupid double-plot story?”

  “Is that a rhetorical question?” I ask.

  “No. I’d really like to know.”

  “I’ll give you a serious answer if you really want one.”

  “I do.”

  “For one thing, the double-plot story forces you to be aware of the narrative voice, forces you to think about the relationship between the narrator and the other characters for another, and it helps in story development, helps your story to be dynamic and not static. A lot of times beginning writers have trouble making a story happen. This assignment forces you to make things happen,” I say.

  “I don’t want to be forced, I just want to write. Can’t you just let us alone to write?” says the blue-haired girl.

  “Well, that would be a bit like teaching you to swim by pushing you into the water. My job is to show you a few strokes.”

  “But this is supposed to be ‘creative’ writing,” says Nick. “That suggests freedom to me. It’s more like ‘restrictive’ writing when we have to do your assignments all the time.”

  “Then make up your own assignments.”

  “Can we do that?”

  “Sure. I’d prefer that you do that. The more responsibility you take for the course, the more you’ll get out of it. But your assignments have to be as good as mine, and I have to approve them. Write them out. Use mine as models, if you wish. Make sure that each one has a specific stated goal or goals and a specific purpose, and the purpose cannot be to exorcise your adolescent angst or explore formless, amorphous, and misguided teenage impressions of love, lust, or any related topic. Sorry. I mean goals and purposes that have to do with the craft of writing, the technical discipline of writing.”

  “Can I ask another question? If this is a writing course, why are we doing all this reading?”

  “Well, you know, writers read other writers just like golfers look at each others’ swings and young surgeons learn from old surgeons, and artists study under other artists. It’s kind of how you learn.”

  “Learn what, though?” asks Nick. “To imitate other writers? What if you want to be completely original?”

  “Well, most people would say that it’s impossible to be completely original, that all work is derived from what came before it. That’s the current word: derivative. Everything is derivative, nothing is original.”

  “I refuse to believe that,” says Nick.

  “Well, of course you do, and you should. You’re eighteen years old. You’re inventing the world as you go. Other people would say you’re reinventing the world. Later you may agree with them, or you may not. It’s like sex. Every generation thinks it invents sex and all the words that go with it. It’s difficult to think of your parents doing those things—”

  “Please.”

  “—or using those words, but they obviously did. Every generation is pretty sure it invents all the dirty words, but they are some of the oldest words in any language.”

  “Okay,” says Nick, “what’s your story derived from?”

  “Mine?”

  “The girl who got killed in the car.”

  “Well, I don’t know. I really hadn’t thought of it.”

  “Aha! The principle applies to everyone but you, then.”

  “No. It applies to me. I just hadn’t thought of it. It’s not a conscious thing.”

  “Don’t you think your story’s completely original?” asks Nick.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean mixing fact and fiction like you do, moving the pieces around, sort of blurring the line between what’s true and what isn’t.”

  “Well, I may think my story’s original,” I say, “but it probably is not.”

  “Isn’t that pretty important?” asks the dog-faced boy.

  “What?”

  “That it’s probably not original.”

  I say, “I think it’s more important that I think it is.”

  “Then you’re saying illusion is more important than reality,” says Nick.

  “What I’m saying is that very often illusion is all we have.”

  8

  …

  Travel Writing

  Dateline: Quetico, Ontario, Canada

  by Pete Ferry

  The real importance of the [Quetico-Superior wilderness canoe country] lies in the values we find there and that we take with us when we leave, although we may not quite understand them.

  —Sigurd Olson

  I MET TOM MAURY at the Candlelight for some beers and asked him about Quetico. “The mosquitoes are as big as hummingbirds,” he said, “the water’s as cold as Dick Cheney’s smile, and it’s the one thing I’ve ever done that wasn’t overrated.”

  Quetico Provincial Park is 1,500 square miles of carefully regulated, damn-near-pristine wilderness territory in southwestern Ontario adjoining Minnesota’s equally extensive Superior National Forest. It is an uninhabited tract of water, woods, and granite in which the only travel allowed is by canoe. At that, permits must be arranged weeks in advance to discourage casual or frivolous visitors. No cans or bottles are allowed in the park and everything else that is packed in must also be packed out. The name itself may be an old Chippewa word, or it may be an acronym for the Quebec Timber Company, which once held leases in the area. Whatever it once was, it is today one of the least-spoiled, most-assiduously-guarded preserves on the continent. It is the land of sky-blue waters.

  Our outfitter’s base camp was a mile and a half across Cedar Lake by canoe, I suppose just to give us the flavor of the thing. We zigzagged there on a warm June evening.

  We ate ham and beans in a dining hall that took me back to the Boy Scout camp of my childhood. Then there was talk of what to do and what not to do. Hang food bags eight to ten feet up out on a limb. Don’t swim without tennis shoes; a cut toe can be a serious problem in the wilderness. Don’t leave any fire unattended, even briefly.

  Our guide was not a wizened, pipe-smoking Finn as half-anticipated. Rather, he was a nineteen-year-old named Mike from Bosnia by way of Romeoville, Illinois. His parents fled the war at home, and although he was given to braggadocio and double negatives, I decided to trust him on the assumption that he knew something of survival.

  We took a swim test after dinner, and I plunged right off the pier, hoping, I suppose, to prove my mettle or some such thing. The icy water literally took my breath away, and I dog-paddled twenty yards gasping and choking.

  Then we each learned how to hoist the remarkably light (70 pounds) canoe onto our shoulders. We packed and re-packed our knapsacks, each time designating a few more necessities as frills to be left behind. And, finally, we crowded around a picnic table and studied maps by gaslight. There was much route tracing and wonderful guide-talk about This Man and That Man Lakes, Poobah Creek, the Wawiag River, the Bitch and the Bastard, Chatterton Falls, and Have a Smoke Portage.

  Day One, June 6:

  I was awakened at 5:00 by the soft gray dawn, mosquitoes in my ears, and rain on the roof. I lay there for half an hour thinking about cigarettes. I had been smoking twenty of them a day on and off for almost twenty years. Now I had five
Merit Ultra Lights that I bummed in a moment of panic to last me nine full days.

  I covered myself with insect repellent and wandered out. It was drizzling. I interrupted a girl kneeling with a towel across her bare shoulders at the lakeside, trying to wash her hair.

  I found a seat in the dining hall, read a story by Kathryn Shonk about feeling far from home in Russia that seemed eerily prescient, and impulsively smoked all five Merits before the others arrived for breakfast. Cold turkey.

  There were seven of us in the three canoes (I was the only smoker) with provisions to last nine days. Among us we carried nine large backpacks, seven life preservers, and seven paddles. All of these things had to be transported by hand when we portaged, or traveled overland from one body of water to another.

  Three of the packs contained all of our personal things, from clothing to flashlights to sleeping bags. One held a nine-by-twelve-foot canvas tent that, in turn, held all of us. Five packs contained food and cooking items. They were labeled breakfast, lunch, supper, staples, and bread. Included were seven fresh steaks, seven bratwursts, two pounds of bacon, some smoked sausage, some processed cheese, peanut butter and jelly and, of course, bread. Then there were the dehydrated foods ranging from Chicken Tetrazzini and Beef Flavored (?) Stew to Apple Brown Betty.

  The first half of the day we paddled toward Canada, most of us spending more time in a canoe by noon than we had in all our lives. We went along quietly for the most part; the little adventure we had planned looked somewhat foreboding from this vantage point. In my head I was humming the old Eagles tune “Take It Easy”; I always thought the line about the women (“four that wanna own me, two that wanna stone me, one says she’s a friend of mine”) was really a fairly transparent bit of braggadocio, but for the moment I was very happy to be in a canoe heading to Canada away from two women who had been making my life complicated. One of these I once drove several miles out of my way to call from a phone booth “standing on a corner in Winslow, Arizona,” but that was a long time ago.

  At the border there was a picturesque little waterfall, a tiny customs office, and a ranger station right out of Yogi Bear that was manned by the businesslike but grandparently Mr. and Mrs. Mike O’Brien. I wondered if there was another international checkpoint in the world where the only traffic was canoes. (Waiting for our papers to be processed, I bought a cigarette from a teenage girl. I felt quite criminal.)

  Mike had been complaining all morning about the motorboats that are allowed on the American side of the border. “Maniacs,” he called their drivers contemptuously as they hummed by. I imagined that he was trying to impress us with his Sierra Clubbishness, but after gliding a few miles north, he had us stop our paddles and listen. We could hear a tiny brook that looked to be half a mile or more away. We could hear the voices of two people in a canoe just approaching the brook. We could nearly distinguish their words.

  Our first campsite was just as I had imagined it. There was a clearing, a small, thick meadow. There was a wood of birch, cedar, and spruce, the rocky bank of a clear, cold lake, and even enough sun for a sunset.

  We ate our tough little steaks and hash browns from metal plates as we stood around the fire. Coffee was brewing over the flames. I felt for my smokes.

  Day Two, June 7:

  The land of Quetico is primordial. Geologically, it is nearly infant. The last ice age ended a mere 10,000 years ago. During it, huge glaciers some two miles thick ground and ground at the earth until there was nothing left but its skeleton of stone.

  Then life began anew. The melting ice supplied the endless lakes and waterways, but the land lay skinned. Even now, the soil is so thin that it is often impossible to dig a hole of more than four or five inches. But remarkably, from this fragile epidermis has grown one of the world’s great forests.

  As a kid, what impressed me about Manhattan was not the size or distinctiveness of its skyscrapers, but the number of them. So it was in the North Woods. From the middle of Lake Agnes, I could see thousands, hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of trees. They were all I could see. They stretched several miles behind me, several before me, and half a continent beyond me.

  We had our first real portage. It was across a long, steep trail littered with boulders that ranged in size from bowling balls to suitcases. It was exhausting and discouraging. How many of these lay ahead?

  But then we crossed placid Lake Agnes to Louisa Falls, where the waters fell thirty feet into a swirling caldron and then forty feet more. We stripped, plunged in, washed our hair in the foam, got very clean, ate cheese and salami sandwiches on the pine-needle forest floor beside the water and even the mosquitoes left us alone. (The Quetico skeeter is legendary and a local joke was that it’s the provincial bird. Portaging with a canoe over your head, you sometimes had to hold your breath to keep from inhaling the infernal bugs.)

  Hale and renewed, we paddled hard up Agnes with the sun on our backs. We stopped early, camped on a pretty island across from hundred-foot bluffs, dried our clothes on the rocks, fished, climbed the bluffs, sunbathed. Just as the travelogue said.

  By quirk of circumstance, there was not a watch among the seven of us. In the past two days, I had never known the exact time. There was some sense of liberation about this, but it was unsettling, too.

  Day Three, June 8:

  Physically this was perhaps the worst day of my life. We were off early under low, fast clouds. A strong wind at our back moved us quickly, but churned Agnes as well. Where we crossed her, she was nearly a mile wide and running with whitecaps. I was frightened, but we made it without mishap.

  We then leapfrogged from one back lake to the next, trying to reach a special rookery and fishing ground. We crossed seven portages in all, the last especially long and rugged.

  By now it was raining. We headed for our last portage, one of more than a mile, but were driven back even on this small lake by the wind and slashing rain. Mike said we had better wait out the rain at the first campsite we had seen in hours, but the rain came harder and colder and didn’t let up. We crouched pointlessly behind rocks and finally struggled to put up the tent. Those of us who had dry clothes put them on, and we all got into our sleeping bags. It was late afternoon, and the tent swayed and sagged with the water and the wind. We were all asleep within minutes.

  I am a city boy at heart. I like baseball parks and public transportation. As a rule, I take my nature in small doses such as postcards and summer cottages. This dose was clearly too large.

  I awoke and it was the same gray light it had been all day. My dreams had been phantasmagoric and my mind raced. I distrusted my vision, but there were no straight lines in the tent against which to test it. I wanted very much to know the time. I imagined myself at home with one of the two women I mentioned earlier, entertaining our friends. We were serving roast chicken, wild rice, and fresh asparagus; there was white wine on the table and good music in the air. But I wasn’t at home. I was in the opposite place. I was a grown man approaching middle age who was desperately, painfully homesick.

  I wrote this the very next day, but already that night had all run together in my mind. There was a jolly period, I remembered, when the rain lightened, and we told dirty jokes and even sang a song. Then there was more heavy rain, and we realized that we wouldn’t have a hot dinner. The tent began to leak. The rain dripped, seeped, ran in rivulets, stood in puddles.

  Mike said that food in the tent might attract bears, and we knew that there would be no dinner. He told us to press together for warmth. Our soggy bags squished as we did so. We were seven men in the middle of Canada lying back to belly like spoons. We dozed, started, twisted, and shivered all night long.

  Several people had spoken the word “hypothermia.” I had come along on this trip because it was free, I was free, and I thought I might get a story out of it. I had no idea that it could ever become dangerous.

  Day Four, June 9:

  Dawn, and it was still raining. Then, shortly afterward, it stopped. Three of
us raised our heads and looked at each other. We crawled out into the wet gloom.

  We huddled to assess our situation. We had not seen any other people since the previous morning. We had crossed seldom-used portages to a remote lake in search of walleye. We faced a mile-long portage through a swamp and an all-day paddle before there was any chance of meeting other campers. And, if it rained, they would be able to do little for us, anyway.

  We studied the sky. It looked as if it would rain again any moment. The least-wet things we had were thoroughly damp. Everything else was sopping. We had to dry out. We had to build a fire. We had to eat. We had to try to dry some clothes.

  We all whittled away at wet branches until we had created a small heap of dry tinder. We skinned twigs and raised a smolder, a flame. It was an hour before the fire was truly established. It had not begun to rain.

  On a graph, the day was an upward parabola from there. We cooked up eggs with bacon bits and hash brown potatoes. We built a bonfire after breakfast and rigged up clotheslines hither and yon, threw sleeping bags across bushes and tree limbs, dangled wet socks from canoe paddles, roasted tennis shoes, heated rocks and put them in the tent to dry it out. And all day long we moved back and forth deeper and deeper into the woods dragging logs and fallen trees, sawing them, breaking them, building our woodpile.

  Our fire roared. A mist rolled in and left. It did not rain. That thing that happens to people in common need had happened. With each dry piece of clothing folded and put away, our spirits rose. We joked freely now. Someone got together a softball game with a pair of rolled, wet socks. We made popcorn and hot chocolate and stood around the fire eating, feeling our drying pants and socks, telling stories.

  After one task or another, I reached for a cigarette. It had been three days, and I had had little problem. No swollen extremities, raw nerves, or temper tantrums. But I expected to smoke. I expected to with coffee, after food, when I wrote. Because I simply couldn’t, I did not miss it terribly. But had I been able to, there were many times I would have without hesitation.