Continuation Two:

Reloading the canoe after the portage into Ottertrack Lake

In spite of sleeping little, I got up shortly after four. I had a long way ahead of me on a large lake, on which I was to move against the prevailing winds. I could not have afforded not to take advantage of the early hours of the calm before ten, around which time the wind usually started rising. When I was taking down the tent, there was still dark twilight, but, by the time I loaded the canoe and finally pushed off from the bear encounter battlefield at 5:30, there was already daylight. Lake Saganaga with its multitude of islands confused orientation. Even Voyageurs frequently used the help of native guides here to lead them through. The boundary line, which followed the historical route of the birch bark canoes, and which one clearly saw on the map, quite obviously was not also painted on the water of the lake surface. I had thought that I knew, where my camp had been located, yet when after morning start, I arrived at a dead end of the channel that I followed, I had to admit, that I got lost. I returned to the camp and tried a different water channel, still deeper into the Canadian side, but it dead-ended too. By then, I had been already losing an hour. In the end, I returned all the way to the island with the yesterday occupied campsite on the American side and from here, I at last followed channels that I assumed to be right. Still, I needed some kind of a proof that I had recaptured the true sense of orientation. On my right, I was passing an island with cottages, which, if I was correct, should be on the Canadian side of the border. Some cottages along the way used to have fly a flag and I now wished that I would see somewhere just that Canadian, as the confirmation of my right assumption. At last, around a corner, a flag emerged above the tree tops with the red maple leaf. I rejoiced. Spotting a Canadian flag in the middle of the border wilderness had always affected me as a touch of a friendly arm around my shoulders. What was my surprise, though, when, after completing the bend, it turned out that the flag flew over a building of the Canadian Border Inspection. A billboard announced it on shore, of which I guessed that it requested from Canadian citizens, who crossed the border, returning from the U.S., to possess a permit CANPASS…. I was moving immediately underneath it. I turned my eyes away, to have a clear conscience that I had seen no announcement. Now, I paddled at a fast clip in extended strokes, to disappear as fast as possible from the view of the building beyond the nearest rocky point. Nobody stopped me, however, it was still only seven o’clock in the morning and the work shift in the office likely hadn’t started yet. I escaped the law. Now, as a fugitive, I weaved with the canoe among the islands towards the west-south-west along the edge of a large area of open water. I followed it for easier orientation. On the other hand, on the more open water, I was now paddling almost directly against a rising headwind. Around ten, I finally arrived at the end of the islands. A vast bay opened up ahead of me, which, in my direction of travel, I had to cut across. Its water surface was now menacingly black, as it was chopped up by high waves from a strong south-west wind. There was no other choice, but to take it on. The waves tossed with the bow of the canoe and bucked it up, like in a rodeo ride on a wild bronco. I moved at a small angle to the right from the directly against the wind direction. The wind maintained a constant attempt to turn the bow of the canoe to the right, but, at the mentioned aiming angle, only to the point, where I managed to resist it with mighty paddle strokes along the right hand side of the boat with no need to correct the strokes by steering. When the bow wandered to a bit larger angle, the canoe was immediately turning broadside and it took a superhuman effort for me to return it back to its correct aim. I could not skip a single stroke. The battle lasted for forty-five minutes, while the headwind and the waves grew steadily in strength and size. I was forced to maintain a racing pace of paddling on the right side during the whole time. When my right arm was already dying of exhaustion, I at last reached the lee of the opposite side of the bay in front of me. I then moved in its relative shelter, closely along the coastline to a point on its end, marked on the map as “Rocky Point”. This, I was to round to continue on the way. As soon as I poked the nose of the canoe out past the rocky point, however, it became instantly obvious that to try continuing would be a nonsense. Luckily, there was a marked campsite on the rocky point, which happened to be situated on the American side. I landed at the lee side of its rocky shore and unloaded the canoe. It was only around noon, but I put up the tent. I was “wind bound” – “dégradé”in the language of the Voyageurs. They used to make offerings of tobacco to “La Vieille” – the wind goddess, so she would ease on her blow. There was nothing in this situation to be sorry about, though. My body was exhausted to death anyway, my back and my arms screamed for a horizontal rest in the tent.

I used the lost time due to being wind bound in an early sleep, followed by an early awakening the next morning. I could not allow again to be caught up with by a newly arisen headwind on the remaining length of the lake. The sky was still dark, just a narrow band of an orange glow had been spreading above the eastern horizon, when I pushed off the canoe and rounded the rocky point in the direction of the west-south-west. Lake Saganaga tapered down in that direction into a long spear, the narrow point of which eventually snaked through a wiggly narrows into a chain of smaller lakes strung by portages. This commenced with Cedar Swamp Lake and followed with Plume Lake, Ottertrack Lake, Knife Lake, Seed Lake, Carp Lake and Birch Lake. The fresh morning had just started awakening, when I arrived at the portage leading from Cedar Swamp Lake into Ottertrack Lake. Divine serenity hung over the small lake. Just a short while ago, I escaped the wind, as it had started rising, by the time I reached the end of the long tip of Lake Saganaga. The water surface before the portage was thickly dappled with green plates of the leaves and ivory white crowns of water lily blossoms, birds sang in the crowns of the surrounding birch trees. The end of the lake was shallow, with deep black mud making up its bottom. To make it possible to dock with the boat and disembark, there was therefore built a long board pier, jutting from shore into the lake here. Something similar must have existed here already during the era of the fur trade. When my carry with the waterproof backpack had swung past the crest of the lakes-separating ridge, and I was descending to the shore of Ottertrack Lake, I ran into another lone wolf, who had been traveling solo, but in the opposite direction. He was stumbling on the rough rocky path in knee-high rubber boots under the weight of a hybrid between a canoe and a kayak. He was an American, who had allegedly grown up in this Minnesota environment of hundreds of lakes. Although now living in Colorado, he still returned here for his vacations. Perhaps ten years younger than me, he was also up in years. He complained that his lower back had ached from the long kayak sitting to the degree that he was actually looking forward to portages. His soft, friendly and politely aristocratic demeanor with a somewhat neglected physical shape of his tall figure was betraying somebody of a position of importance and influence in his professional carrier somewhere. Dean was quite obviously an adorer of nature and a lover of the lake wilderness, with which he had grown up in his backyard. We struck an instant friendship in the mutual admiration and in understanding each other. Traveling only along a part of the boundary route, he admired that I planned to complete the whole thing. He only warned me, with an expression of deep concern that big problems ought to inevitably await me in my planned attempt to paddle the length of the enormous Rainy Lake from east to west.

I now paddled on a very long, yet narrow Lake Ottertrack. Though I had been looking forward to not encountering the need for carrying for a long time thanks to its length, I soon found that for me, the lake stretched almost directly against the direction of a now already strong headwind. I tried hiding behind the mild bends of the lake’s course, but the forested shores acted as a guiding trough for the air current and aimed it against me, whether the lake angled one way, or another. For most of the time, the progress along the surface of Ottertrack Lake was a strength-draining clenched-teeth battle, fought with the paddle against the nature’s mockery. Only at its end, I temporarily breathed a sigh of relief in a momentary refuge of wind shelter. But as soon as I summited the top of a short portage and descended down to the shore of the next lake, again oriented straight against the wind – Knife Lake – it was immediately obvious that I would not be able to continue, until the wind would abate. It was still only shortly after noon. I rested a while, eating lunch and I pondered, whether I should wait out the afternoon here. Yet, it did not seem that the wind would have any tendency to stop, if at all before evening. I knew from the map that just around the corner, merely some fifty meters from the end of the portage, should be located an American campsite. In the end, I loaded the canoe in a difficult surf upon the shoreline of knife-sharp rocks that gave the lake its name and I set out to rodeo-ride the reflected waves along a high rocky cliff in the direction of the campsite. I succeeded in locating it after a while, but the landing at it in the persisting surf proved to be a hard job to accomplish. I managed to abut the canoe to a meter-high edge of a smooth granite outcrop and, after several attempts, I successfully grasped a rock crevice and scrambled up from the boat atop the shore. I immediately reached back for the bow of the canoe and tried to pull it up fully loaded onto the rock platform. When the canoe’s center of gravity already rested on the rock edge, yet it was still leaning towards the water, the spare kayak paddle suddenly slipped out of it into the lake. I sprung to rescue it and, holding onto the stern of the canoe, I leaned out to the paddle as far as I could. At the very moment, when I touched the floating paddle, my imperceptible pressure onto the canoe tipped its balance and the whole works slipped back into the water, myself included. Luckily, the canoe neither tipped, nor took on water. Now, I swam fully dressed, up to my neck in the water around the canoe and the paddle. The lake was really deep here. In spite of the crystal clear water, the bottom could not be seen at all. I threw the paddle out as far as I could onto the shore. Then I climbed again atop the slippery rock like a flooded-out mouse and this time, I brutally hauled the whole boat so far onto the shore that it could not slide back. The campsite atop the high craggy shore was nice and cozy. It was quite fortunately baking in the afternoon sun, which made it really warm. Hence, I could blithely free myself from the wet cladding and spread the dripping clothing on the surrounding bushes and rocks to dry. The spot was also exposed to a strong southwest wind and the clothing was thus quickly drying, while I was putting up the tent and started a fire for the cooking. There was a pleasing setting here for whiling away yet another wind-binding sentence.

It must be quite understandable that after the recent experiences with the headwind, I again arose right after the walls of the tent started to barely perceptibly pale. This was somewhat after four. Still in the tent, I first changed from the long thermal underwear, in which I slept, to the clothing for the travel on the water. It consisted of a black silk T-shirt, a blue thermal long sleeved shirt with zip-T collar, nylon swim trunks, black, silk long johns and of long nylon pants with zippers along the sides all the way up to the hips. With it, I wore woolly hiking socks, and early in the morning also a compact insulated windbreaker on top. Dumping of the clothing from the stuff sack for the sleeping bag, which served stuffed as a pillow, followed, and the sleeping bag was then tucked into it. Already in hiking boots outside, I placed the packed sleeping bag in the bottom of the waterproof backpack, added all the dumped clothing into it and tightly rolled up the closed cell mat. The latter I carried to the canoe, which I turned upright, and I strapped the rolled up mat to the top of the seat. Taking down the tent and its packing in the waterproof backpack was next, all actions so far practically still in darkness. The sealed waterproof backpack was now moved to the boat, together with the items like the machete, the belt with bear security, the map case, the hat, the camera and the Gore-Tex windbreaker, which had occupied the rear vestibule of the tent. By the time I floated the canoe and loaded it – no more stretching the spray cover on it, because after the very first morning, it would never rain again during the day – it would start sufficiently dawning. Now, I changed into rubber sandals barefoot, embarked the boat and pushed along the smooth water surface into the long dark shadows, immersed in the silence of the awakening early morning. All was still sleeping, only the echoes of an occasional knock of a paddle onto the gunwale of the canoe reflected from the granite walls and dark forest giants, which lined the shores. Low fog slowly folded over the water and ghost-like tatters of vapors stood up just above the surface in grimly dark coves, as the cool temperature of the morning air condensed the evaporation from a still relatively warm water of the lake. The tips of the tall fir trees and pines in the higher positions on the west escarpments commenced to turn gold from the sun rays that fought their way over the edge of the jet-black horizon in the east. The lake surface glistened with blinding glare in that direction and of the coastline and islands there, only their black silhouettes, like theater props interrupted the liquid shine. Sometimes, a long wail of a loon pierced the morning stillness and in my soul, it sounded equally as if he called “Caaaanadaaaa!” My canoe glided smoothly upon a quiet water surface. I had a feeling that I must not disturb the temple-like silence even with a single splash of the paddle.

By the time I reached the end of the fourteen-kilometer long, narrow Knife Lake, I was again wrestling with the headwind. In that situation, I even welcomed the change in the form of a series of portages on smaller lakes, of which there were no less than five. The wind was not a dominating issue here. At the end of one of the portages, I ran across a forgotten, brand new, splendid-looking US Army canteen. It was of a rectangular shape with round corners, made of light, yet robust durable plastic in, of course, the khaki color. On the outside, it was protected by a shoulder bag-like canvas sheath in the shade of “desert sand” with large black letters „US Army“. I was musing about, how somebody would grieve its loss, when he would discover that he had left somewhere this interesting and likely well deserved possession. But, at that moment, a canoe emerged from behind a point with two frantically paddling men. They were from a party of three canoes of middle-aged military-looking paddlers, led by a man with an aura of authority, whom they addressed as “colonel”. The group overtook me on one of the past portages. With a loud hollering they let me know that the canteen belonged to one of them. They had not hesitated to return for it from as far as the next portage.

It wasn’t until after four o’clock and the sun already headed for the horizon, when I restarted paddling into its blinding glare upon the surface of a now again larger Birch Lake. Here, I had to look for a camp site. I had hoped that I would find it no sooner than around the end of the lake, so that I would get as near as possible to a vast Basswood Lake, on which I was to travel tomorrow. Indeed, I did find a campsite on a low, level point of a forested island on the Canadian side, which was really nice and cozy. Also here, the wild fauna came to say hello in the form of a tame rabbit, who hopped blithely right around me, while I was cooking. I was now skirting the southern edge of the Canadian „Quetico Provincial Park” and the map marked in it also Canadian campsites, the majority of which were utterly gorgeous.

My camp on a Canadian island in Birch Lake