Kevin's little floating adventure

October 2: Manitoba Natural History Museum

2009-04-27T17:31:00.003-05:00

I was still stuck in Winnipeg, and it was clearly time to get going. The weather wasn't going to get any warmer, that was certain. I kept calling the people I met in Spruce Woods, but they best they could get me was a ride down to Fargo. From there, maybe I could catch another truck to Minneapolis or some other point on the Mississippi and continue my trip.

On the other hand, there was something intoxicating about completing the remainder of the trip on my own power. I had made it this far already, so why not? If I started south on the Red I might make it far enough to be able to limp over to some tributary of the Mississippi. In fact, a tributary of the Red runs almost all the way out to the Minnesota River, which meets the Mississippi in the Twin Cities. The valley that connects these rivers actually crosses a continental divide, and during high floods the Mississippi and Red riversheds sometimes actually join across here, producing an unbroken stream of water from Hudson's Bay to the Gulf of Mexico.

I decided I would paddle south. But as I walked to the Red River, I passed the Manitoba Natural History Museum and couldn't help but walk in. I had checked out of the hostel and so my backpack was completely full for the journey. I had to buy a locker, stuff it in there, and then finally wander around the exhibits.

The museum was surely built in the 60s or 70s; all the typefaces and design seemed to date from that era, and frankly I appreciated it. How nice to have hexagons, triangles, circles and playfully varied typefaces instead of the stark lettering of modern art museums.

The writing was as good as the design. Certainly better than my review here, I failed to take good notes so I am describing from memory, like a kind of dream. A dream in which placards warned about insanity-inducing biting flies, I could vouch for that, and a no holds barred attack on artificial water levels created by manmade dams.

I walked through a field of dinosaurs, sailed a nineteenth century vessel that had housed a score of men, wandered past giant boats that were pulled up and down the Red River. These boats were four times as wide as mine and probably twice as wide, and made of heavy oak. Crews of a dozen men would have to carry and push them over any obstacles in the waters I had travelled, just to trade a few furs.

By the time I reached the boat club, the sun was making itself comfortable on the horizon. Jim shook his head and said it would take too long to get out of the city that night, and I was sure he was right.

I walked back to the hostel, and told the girl at the counter, "Well, I guess I need yet another night." She smiled, scanned my credit card one last time, and handed me a room key.

Day 103 ended: HI-Winnipeg

October 1: Double Jeopardy

2009-04-27T17:20:00.002-05:00

I'll give the answer first.

"I'm cleaning out my boat. There was so much mud in there it was developing its own ecosystem -- I had to throw out a rat and piles of moldy books." And a bunch of other trash too, but it might not have been a good time to go into exactly how much of his dumpster space I was using.

His question? "What *** **** do you think you're ******* doing? That ******* washer is for ******* member use only!" Actually I'm not sure I answered him at all. I never know what to do when someone walks up to me and starts cussing me out unexpectedly. It is so far out of my comprehension that I usually just stare back with a confused expression on their face. Usually they at least soften a bit, but not this time. I turned off the power washer but he continued.

"You shouldn't ******* be using that ******* thing. It's ******* ***. I've already had to put up with your ******' canoe."

"I'm sorry," I finally answered, "Jim said I could --"

Jim came running up from the docks and pulled the thick man away. When he turned back towards me he grinned evilly and cussed all the way back to the clubhouse.

Day 102 ended: HI-Winnipeg

Tinker time

2009-04-18T20:27:00.002-05:00

It's time to fix up the boat so John Stiehm and I drove it over today to Leonardo's Basement, a workshop I have been volunteering at off and on. I guess they trust me; they've given me the key to the place so I can go in and work any time I need to.

I've tried to take photos of Leonardo's, but nothing I've shot has turned out real well. Fortunately a month or so ago a professional photographer came in and took some good ones for an article in the Minneapolis Tribune. I am hidden in the background in at least one of the photos.

Also, the average age in these photos is at least five times higher than usual at Leonardo's. Studio Bricolage serves alcohol so only people 21 and older are allowed to play Friday nights.

September 31: Another day in Winnipeg

2009-04-15T08:31:00.000-05:00

I ended up spending a week in Winnipeg, and although it may not be the most exciting place in the world, it seems that most nights I felt too tired to write up the day's events in my journal. Similar things happened while out on the river; when I realize I've gotten behind I usually make a bullet list of significant things over the last few days. But while I was working out my time spent in Winnipeg, I could not for the life of me recall what happened September 31, or even what day of the week that had fallen on! So, I decided when it came up I would just have to go over a typical day in Winnipeg and maybe some things that didn't make it into my other posts.

I believe the hostel had six bunks in the men's dormitory, but they seemed to have a policy against filling them all because there were never more than four guys in there. Although my schedule slipped later and later as I stayed in Winnipeg I was usually the first one up, to stumble around between the snorers and take my shower, get dressed.

Breakfast was often at the HI-Cafe in the hostel, which for real cheap would serve a pile of pancakes, hash browns, and eggs, plenty of fuel to get going in that cold city.

Almost every day I tried to find a pay phone and put in a call to the people I had met in Spruce Woods Provincial Park who thought they might be able to hook me up with a ride to Minneapolis. This never came through.

Out of habit I usually returned to the hostel before sunset, cooked myself a dinner out of a can, and usually ran into interesting people. There was Alex, from Rochester, a high school grad who ran butterfly houses at summer fairs and had won a year's worth of free movies by producing a first place student film. We played chess and watched the presidential debates with Tyler and Calin, a gay couple who subscribed hopefully to the hypothesis that Obama was far more liberal than his words or actions indicated. Monsu, a Pakistani, didn't care too much who won because neither one was likely to stop the unannounced bombing raids in his country's western provinces.

Melanie and I fought over pots and burners for a couple of night's before going out to watch a film at the nearby independent theatre about Hunter S Thompson. Melanie was a German, but she worked on a farm in Ontario which was powered strictly by clean energy: solar in summer, wind in winter.

I was at the hostel long enough to catch the vice presidential debates for a while -- there was an Ausralian couple watching as well, who told me John Howard had banned student unions because students shouldn't be forming organized labor movements.

There were other interesting folks who went through the hostel, but it became more difficult to meet people the longer I was there. My social energy lagged and more and more I was ready to move on.

Day 101 1/2 ended: (HI-WINNIPEG DOWNTOWNER)

September 30: St Boniface

2009-04-14T14:59:00.000-05:00

"Incomprehensible" is the word. Incapable of being comprehended -- or is that comprehood? No matter, the real question was whether the incompressibility -- I mean incomprehensibility -- incomprehension? -- was just me, or it was the exhibit, or if there was any difference. If a tree falls in a forest, and I'm the only one there, does it sound for anyone but me?

Let me backtrack -- back in a circle, back around the ravens and stars and pirate flags -- we are rewinding the film now, and so I walk backwards out of the Plug-In Institute for Contemporary Art. Pause it now. It is paused. I am in mid-stride, one foot hovering above the sidewalk in the direction of the institute. I am still in Winnipeg. The air would be blowing gently except it is also paused. Molecules quiver with paused kinetic energy.

Okay, let's take a breath. This is not going to be easy. Let's wander like ghosts into the institute and observe what happens. There is nothing there yet because the place is devoid of people. It is waiting for a live observer. Push play now and the physical me will enter.

I enter the institute, a storefront in this old mall. The walls of the first room ripple into shape -- and what shapes? Huge outlines of ravens, crows and cats, filled in with black sit menacingly on the wall. They are just pictures, they have no stories, no identities really, as meaningless as my dreams. I walk into the next room, painted black with colored strands tied between the ceiling and the walls and a television set in the front casts repetitive blurry shadows and also moans. It is like those nightmares where you are awake and cannot move a muscle. I compliment it. Fast forward now. you see me zipping through the few pockets of ironic cleverness in this pit of meaninglessness. Some odd witch costumes made of denim, and why all of the pirate flags? These things are worth at best a grimace and then I move on. I mean the cleverness of people trying to show how clever they are, not that of people in love with the creations of time.

We have zipped through, and now we will let the rest play out at walking speed. You can imagine me panting for breath out on the pavement, as though to recover from the incomprehensibility, but that would be too generous. I only sought meaning, so I walked to St Boniface, the French quarter and the cathedral.

There is a nice footbridge between the forks at Winnipeg and St Boniface, the old French quarter. It is suspension, an art piece where the support tower looms above you and braided cables hold up the bridge. There is a bar on the bridge, but I passed it. I was too busy staring at the Red River, flowing north beneath me, and the chill which crept silently into the air.

On the other side I kept to the river trails, until I saw a cemetery to my left. I crossed the road and walked through the cemetery to the cathedral -- an ancient structure which stood over the graves and me. In the center of its face, where a stained glass rose should have been, there was nothing but an open circle. Through the burnt-out cathedral's eye and roof I watched as clouds drifted across the disc until they were absorbed by the stonework.

Day 101 ended: (HI-WINNIPEG DOWNTOWNER)

September 29: Ride and Park

2009-04-14T11:12:00.000-05:00

I finally had my bicycle back from the repair shop so it was time to hit the trails of Winnipeg. There are, in places, paved bicycle pathways in the town, but these are mostly restricted to parks where people can drive in and putter about for half an hour. There isn't anything like the developed river pathway system that Calgary has. There are ad hoc dirt trails by the river in certain locations, but it is never clear which have deadends until you try them, and get stuck in boulders, fences, and fallen trees.

Winnipeg's exclusive means for supporting bicycle commuting is labelling certain roads as bicycle routes. This is a common approach which can create some confusion, because even in communities which do this, it remains legal to drive and cycle on all roads. The point I think is simply to suggest that cyclists use certain roads when possible to create a safety in numbers on certain routes. This can create the confusion that bicycles are not allowed elsewhere, but in Winnipeg the road I was taking had signs posted which suggested the opposite confusion was also at play:

CYCLISTS
REMINDER
--------
VEHICLE TRAFFIC HAS
THE RIGHT TO USE
THE STREET

I eventually found my way to Assiniboine Park, and was wandering about in the English Garden when I heard "Cool bike!" shouted from around some bend in the bricked path. I had missed this refrain completely in Portage, and in Winnipeg it was certainly rarer than in Brandon, perhaps because there are other cool bikes, or the city is more anonymous.

The voice belonged to Naomi, who with her friend Mary quickly ascertained that I wasn't hip to her music scene but we shoul have lumch together anyway, somewhere in the Leo Mol sculpture garden in half an hour.

Leo Mol was apparently a Winnipegonian (???) sculptor working in Bronze, and for all I know his life's work has never escaped from the confines of this garden. I walked among the bears, the nymphs, and the heroes, waiting for the appointed time. There was Io, riding a bull, her hair in twin ponytails, perhaps to resemble a cow's horns. There was a man proud to be from Winnipeg, the city which had one so much for him he started its first cultural fund.

The building I thought we were to eat lunch in was locked; I spent a quarter hour trying to find it, but when I couldn't, I just shrugged and walekd away.

Away to the zoo. It had been cloudy all day, and by the time I got to the zoo I was quite chilled, even wearing two jackets. I spent all the time I could in the tropical house, the monkey house, and the little Australian exhibits to warm up.

When it comes to zoos I am quite spoiled, having grown up in the St. Louis area. The St. Louis zoo is still the best I've been to. It has all the well-known large land animals, and collects a number of the small, overlooked ones as well in its reptile house and insectarium, where my sister worked for a couple of years. And although there are always a few dilapidated displays, the St. Louis zoo charges no admission, which is incredible, and sets me up for disappointment when I visit other zoos.

I began to notice that the Winnipeg zoo made some strange decisions about its displays. There was an indoor glass case of "North American birds" which featured a robin, a towhee, a killdeer, and any number of birds I had recently seen quite free, at no cost and not bounded in a small cage with others. Then I began to notice some other curious selections; sure, they are interesting animals, but is a raccoon exhibit really necessary? Who hasn't seen white-tailed deer? I began to wonder if there would be a grey squirrel cage as well.

There was not.

Day 100 ended: (HI-WINNIPEG DOWNTOWNER)

September 28: My body is a cage

2009-04-14T09:08:00.001-05:00

I believe the gate operates as follows. There are a number of steel bars suspended on tracks in the ceiling. A number of these are designed to lock securely in dimples in the floor; the keyholes are located as roughly waist height. The bars are joined by horizontal chains so that the entire passage is blocked. We can see just a few people on the other side of the gate. They walk about calmly, talking to one another.

One wears navy pants and the medium blue buttoned shirt that identifies him as security. His face and hands are black, and his hands hold keys.

All but that lucky few stand this side of the gate. There are dozens: a dark man in dark clothes clasps his hands behind him and leans forward and bak like a pendulum. A woman with a blond ponytail wears a baggy jacket taps her purse with long fingernails, the clasp of the purse so it clacks once a second, exactly. One teenage girl clasps at the chains, expectantly peering through at the clock high on the wall, on the other side. The clock is nearing one and a couple more of us grab at the bars. I and most present hang back to assure ourselves we are not so desperate, but I suspect we are. I try to read them but if I make judgments based on their appearances, it is because that is all I see. There is more to it than that, of course -- like me, they are trapped outside this cage. I can only guess what brings them here, and most of my guesses are also cages.

What brings anyone to a library? I have heard some criticise literature as escapism, or perhaps only certain genres, and maybe they are even right. If these people are escaping from something, what is it? Maybe it is like this: for one book, the man escapes his darkness, the woman from her femininity, the teenager from her awkward years. There are heroes in an unheroic age, those too poor for eccentricities, people born too early or too late for their calling. So it is like this: the man would have been a feudal lord, the woman a Martian colonist, the girl -- hasn't made up her mind yet. The world is trapped outside the library.

A lonely bell rings and the guard meticulously unlocks the gate. He puts the key in each hole one -- at -- a -- time, until the metal lattice of a gate crackles open and the crowd runs inside. I hold back, walking in, to maintain my composure.

Day 99 ended: (HI-WINNIPEG DOWNTOWNER)

Featured in "The Daily WTF"

2009-03-04T19:00:00.004-06:00

An adventure I've had in Minneapolis has been featured in a popular technology blog. It's titled Rolling in the Money and I'd like to thank The Daily WTF for sharing it.

The article mentions my friend Calvin's game Venture the Void, so if you want to help out a pal, go buy a copy of his game.

Update: You can also read the original email I sent to Calvin about this outing.

September 27: Nothing more than feelings

2009-02-28T00:56:00.002-06:00

Winnipeg was going to be a cultural haven after the Qu'Appelle and small towns of Manitoba, a sort of New York on the prairie. I was going to get out and experience those high arts, an emotional rush of giddy heights which would leave only the base emotions at the end of the day.

I was up at sunrise, and walked out into the wide world of Winnipeg, wandering its streets and footpaths until I found myself at The Forks of the Assiniboine and Red Rivers. A man jogged with a dog. A bike was abandoned up on the path and following a foot trail down to the river I found a girl, staring out at the sunrise across the river, alone.

The Winnipeg Art Gallery was everything I wanted in an art museum. I walked into a huge exhibit of canvases stretched and warped over the third dimension, gradients of color producing a sensual feel to the minimalist works. This was the early work of Bruce Head, who graduated to explorations of work derived from strips of torn paintings, experiments in ink and color, and fields of lines that defy all description.

By the time I had gotten through the Bruce Head exhibit I was already incapable of taking in the work in the next few galleries, which were full of paintings by other Manitoban geniuses. My hasty notes suggest names like Aba and Charlotte, and I recall in particular an enormous painting of Jonah being tossed to the whale. Here the whale was round and cartoonish, cute except for the blood red eyes and bleeding mouth.

If that wasn't enough, the next gallery had a display meant to showcase all the best work in the WAG's collections. Every worker in the gallery from the cleaning staff to the head curator chose one or two works that particularly struck them. The disparate styles were not jarring but spoke to multiple kinds of genius that go unseen in galleries which emphasize particular historical narratives.

Then it was off to the used bookstores, where I sifted throuh piles of unsorted books, coming out with a couple Steinbecks, Aeschylus, and a couple books recommend by my friends: the Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time and Moving Mars.

The sun set and I found my way to the local indie theatre which was showing the film "Red". This is about a man seeking revenge for the killing of his dog. The killer was a son of privilege and his tenacious fight against the powers that be leads to cruel disaster by the end of the film.

I was tired.

I arrived back at the hostel and played two games of chess against Alex. Alex was a high school grad who anchored a local television station, and won a short film competition which gave him a free year's pass to the movies. In his spare time he fixes up bikes, and in summers he runs a butterfly house for state and provincial fairs.

I was pleased to win both games handily.

I was exhausted. I don't think there really are "higher emotions", just complex combinations of the base ones. The loneliness of the bike girl, the sensuality of Head's abstracts, the catharsis of death in the movie theater and the thrill of victory in chess.

I really could feel nothing any more, a kind of emotional emptiness that could only be refreshed by sleep.

Day 98 ended: HI-Downtown Winnipeg

New meta-blog and meta-meta-blog

2009-02-27T13:07:00.003-06:00

Okay, I agree with others who have said that there is no reason to blog about not blogging. I am now posting at least one entry a week, which might not be a torrent of information, but does at least mark this as an active blog. However, my goal remains to post quality content every day. One reason is it would be unfortunate if I embark on the next portion of my trip before bringing the story up to Minneapolis. Another is a couple people (primarily the couple who raised me as a child) do remark if I fail to update.

To prevent further pollution of this blog by a morass of excuses for missing a day or writing poorly, I have created a new blog Kevin's little blogging excuses, where I will speculate on the probability of a new blog entry being written up that day, and at least offer some lame apology if I fail to update.

When I got that site up, I realized that there was a problem. What if I don't update Kevin's little blogging excuses as well or often as I should? So, I set up the blog Excuses excuses where I may or may not apologize for the "little blogging excuses" blog.

Now, I admit to being a little worried about what will happen if I have trouble with that blog. If necessary I will have to petition blogger to allow an infinite progression of meta-blogs.

Weather advisory

2009-02-26T22:34:00.001-06:00

Blog canceled today due to blizzard.

Be careful out there.

September 26, Part 2: Of people and paddles

2009-02-25T11:05:00.000-06:00

"It's leatherman!" the teenage girl said. She was working the counter at the donut shop up from the boat club. She waved her arms in front of her, the left elbow went down while the right was up, and vice-versa. It was a motion that resembled the hypnotic action of a TV show magician. I guess it is also the motion teenage girls use to greet middle-aged men dressed in leather.

"Is it all leather?" she asked him. Yes, it was. I couldn't help but overhear him explain that every article of his clothing was 100% leather.

The woman at the next table leaned over to me. "Are you a kayaker?"

She must have been asking because I had a two-meter long kayak paddle leaned up against the wall next to me. "Ah, no, I'm actually going to try to sell this paddle." She nodded at this strange explanation, in which I failed to explain that I had been canoeing across Canada and for three months had not used this paddle since the first day. It was time for it to go.

The bus stop was right out the door. School must have been out because three kids were trying their skateboard tricks there. It is a mystery to me how skateboards have maintained their coolness factor when I don't believe I've ever seen a successful trick performed on them in real life. You would think so much public failure would drive kids away from the machine.

My bike was in the shop to get cleaned up, so I boarded the bus with the others. At the next stop, a young black couple were arguing. She kicked him and hit him, and the bus was not a moment too soon for the young man. He calmly boarded and paid the fare, and looked back towards us on the bus, desperate, and alone.

One of his eyes was red, red where it should have been white.

MEC had advertised a gear swap. I explained to the head gear swapper that I wasn't sure when I was leaving town, and I was looking for advice on selling this kayak paddle. I would have had to pay something like $10 just to enter it in the swap, and it was unclear whether I would be able to retrieve any money. He suggested I just take it to Salvation Army.

I walked for some time in the direction he pointed, but I must have looked lost carrying a kayak paddle through downtown Winnipeg because a businessman on his lunch break asked where I was going.

"Salvation Army," I said, "but I'm not sure where that is."

He dialed up 411 and I heard this part of the conversation.

"Winnipeg."

"Winnipeg."

"Win. Ni. Peg."

"Salvation Army."

"Salvation Army."

"Sal. Va. Tion. Ar. My."

"Yes, I'm at the corner of xxxx and yyyy and I'm wondering if there's a Salvation Army nearby. Winnipeg. Xxxx and yyyy. Yes, Salvtion Army. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Okay, thank you. Bye!"

He directed me south on the next street and my walk continued.

On the way down I saw a man in one of those hooded jackets with patterns on them, white and puffy with repeated images of skulls and things. It's a fashion I associate with people who have a need to look tough like rappers and high schoolers. He was walking a tiny terrier on a pink lead.

I arrived at the Salvation Army. "Do you take this?" I asked the dishevelled old woman at the counter.

The answer was "Yes." I wouldn't need to just drop my paddle off in an alley after all.

Just before sundown I found the Hostels International downtown Winnipeg location. It was about a block and a half from the Quest Inn where I had started the day. I met some interesting people there I will mention later, and according to my journal:

Watched debates: same stupid talking points from 3 months ago plus news that Russia invaded Georgia!

Day 97 ended: HI-Downtown Winnipeg

Ugh, Winnipeg

2009-02-25T10:34:00.002-06:00

So it turns out I did not take very detailed notes during my stay in Winnipeg. One page of my notebook only covers two days, the next, about five. It's difficult deciding how much I can expand these entries into full posts, and to what extent I should bother.

On the other hand I did type up about a day and a half's worth of material while I was there. I'm going to try to see what I can do with what I've got, but if these posts vary significantly in length or quality it's because of the lumpy source material I have here.

I am also a bit worried now about my Mississippi River material, now. I haven't reviewed it but I remember the cold making writing rather miserable, even though a lot was happening. This is one reason the blog just shut down during that time.

I'm going to try to just keep going on, but blog updates may become irregular when I hit rough spots, like now. I'm sorry about that.

Thank you for reading.

Minneapolis Central Library

2009-02-22T13:38:00.003-06:00

Since I have arrived in Minnesota the libraries have fascinated me as being relatively larger, more connected, and newer than their brethren in Canada.

The Minneapolis Central Library is the epitome of that. There are four floors, full of books and computers. Despite the number of computers, you still usually need to book a time to use one. The stacks use the Library of Congress system, so much of my time is spent browsing the familiar Q and QA sections, with occasional forays into G465 and other familiar places.

Unlike the University of Calgary library, the books do need to be renewed more than twice a year and so I have racked up some fines.

This photo shows the almost crystalline structure of the entrance. During a thaw, police tape and pylons block off most of the entrance to protect us from the ice which falls from that overhang.

It's about a fifteen minute walk to the library, a frequent destination to pick up books or escape the roommates for a time. The Minneapolis skyway system provides a longer, indoor route most of the way when it is bitterly cold out. If I just walk down Nicollet Mall, I can see beggars, hear a jazz trumpeter, pick up supplies at the Target of Targets, and see the point where Mary Tyler Moore threw her hat up in the air at the beginning of her TV show.

September 26, Part 1: Leaving Amber

2009-02-22T12:54:00.002-06:00

In the morning, Amber insisted again that I take a pair of baggy jeans, as if that would make up for threatening me for cash the previous day. "You know I didn't spend that money on anything good," she said.

She also welcomed me to spend another night or two, saying she didn't feel like going anywhere all day. She was too tired to go anywhere except for maybe lunch later.

I said goodbye and she must have known I did not intend to come back. She said she didn't like goodbyes; we might see each other again, if only in the next world.

I wandered the city until I found the Winnipeg Information Center. I asked for a bus map and a good place to grab breakfast. The woman there recommended the "Underground Cafe". Brightly colored murals there depicted jazz musicians and Salvador Dali. The layout and hosting confused me as to whether I was meant to order at the counter or the table, but somehow I got my meal.

I didn't record what I ate, nor do I remember it. It wasn't anything special.

When I left the place, about ten, I headed to Mountain Equipment Coop, where I hoped to find gear that would make the rest of my trip easier.

While waiting for the walk light at Ellis Avenue, a familiar person was walking up the road towards me. It was Amber!

She asked if I wanted to go get drinks.

Day 97 continues.

Interruption of Service

2009-02-19T12:38:00.002-06:00

The Internet is down at home, so I could not post a blog last night. Posting will resume when I can connect again or have time to portage a usb drive to the library.

Thank you for reading.

September 25, Part 2: Meeting Amber

2009-02-17T22:26:00.004-06:00

The phonebook listed a Woodbine Hostel as a potential place to stay. It might be cheap, and the location was 466 Main Street, which sounded downtown enough. When I arrived there the first thing I noticed is it was Woodbine Hotel, not Hostel. I walked in and so no one at what I took for the front desk: a kind of white, drywall counter. I felt foolish just standing there, so I went back to the street, walked around the block, and the second time saw 466 1/2 Main Street by the first door I had tried.

This door led immediately to a stairway leading straight up to the second floor. A dingy middle-aged couple were talking a half flight up and it was too narrow to pass them. I waited for these important people to disperse before I could get upstairs, where I squeezed through the hallways hoping to figure out what was going on here. It was still early afternoon but loud voices and televisions shouted through the scratched doors until I accidentally found myself downstairs again, back out in the street.

Once again I entered 466. This time I did not stop at the empty counter but continued into the bar behind it. There was a couple there indistinguishable from that I squeezed by on the stairs, and a plump blonde girl talking to them until I entered and grabbed everyone's attention.

I said my name was Kevin and I asked if there were any rooms available; no, there were not. But the blonde said she had an extra room available at her hotel, and without having time to think about this we were walking down the street towards it.

I asked for her name. "Amber," she said, "and wht's yours?"

"Kevin," I said, and then because I had already said this, added, "Still."

Tears filled her eyes and she said she suffered from memory loss due to a car accident in 1996.

She was on permanent disability since then.

Then, she explained that she didn't really have a second bedroom.

Or a second bed.

But this would be okay because we would take the mattress off of the bed and she would just sleep on the boxsprings.

Before we arrived at the Quest Hotel, she warned me that there were a bunch of old people sitting out front who "had nothing better to do" than watch people come or go. She thought it would be best if we went in separately because the people at the front desk were "really nosy" and she didn't want anyone to think she was having people over.

Compared to the easy pace of the river her statements hit me like a supersonic train and I did not have time to think. A minute after she entered the hotel I followed her through the gauntlet of wrinkled Indians, avoided the front desk, and found her at the elevator, which we rode to the second floor.

When we got to her room I paid $40 for staying two nights. She told me to make myself comfortable, take a shower, make some phone calls, and that I looked like the guy from Nickelback and could use whatever makeup I wanted.

I took my shower, and made a couple phone calls but when she returned an hour later she didn't seem to think I was comfortable enough. Not that what she was about to say was going to help this. Allow me to quote from my journal:

When she came back she was distraught and asked for $20 more.

"Do you drink?" [she asked] -- "Sometimes."

"Ever do any drugs?" -- "No."

"How old are you?" -- "28."

"Smart. I did something 1 time and now I'm in trouble.... if I don't get $20 to this guy he's going to kick in the door."

She was very worried about being seen w/ me & although I gave her $20 I am extremely suspicious of her at this time. Hope I can contact someone to stay somewhere else tonight. Her address is Rm 2xx, Quest Hotel, (Quality Inn) ph. (204)956-xxxx

I took photos inside her room to prove I had been there. Her full name is Amber xxxxxxx.

When I left, I took all my things, just in case -- I almost hope I can find someone else to stay with, even if I'm out my $60. I feel like the rube from the country.

....At the laundromat now. I hope I can find someone other than Amber to stay with ASAP

Although Amber told me she would be back at the hotel "way before" 10, I got there about a quarter after nine, and there was no response to my increasingly heavy knocking. Now I was the the one wanting to kick her door down. I couldn't believe I had become so naive to be taken in by just anyone I happened to meet downtown.

I sat outside the hotel, on a stone wall around the nearby park. I thought I would catch her as she went in and force her to live up to her part of the bargain. I realized she was not in; her room was dark, and the curtain left as I had seen it.

After some time of the old people at the entrance staring at me, I gave up my post and went into the lobby. There were four public phones in the Quest Inn, the leftmost lower than the rest like a children's urinal. At the right one I could keep an eye on the stairs and elevator.

I hoped to get in touch with Luke, who said he knew someone who might live in town, or Kathy, who might have contact information for a mutual acquaintance who had moved to Winnipeg a couple years previous. Instead I got in touch with my friend Richard.

"Hey Richard, apparently I'm not very smart..."

"So you're saying you're a dumbass?"

(I know Richard cares deeply about me but sometimes his timing is off.)

All of a sudden around the corner came Amber, who grimaced in the direction of the front desk and said she was going upstairs. She took the elevator and I took the stairs, to appease the all-seeing eyes of the "high maintenance" people at the front desk. She asked if they'd given me any trouble.

At the hotel we take the mattress off the springs and she asked me if I wanted to do anything. I just said "Sleep."

She lay on the box springs, saying, "Don't worry, I'm comfortable up here."

...

Minutes later, she said, "How do you sleep?"

"Well," I said, "sometimes I lie on my stomach like this; sometimes on my side, my back; whatever's comfortable."

She said, "Do you toss and turn alot?"

She said, "Okay, this is not comfortable so I'll just come down there and sleep by the wall, and you can have that side." She brought down her blankets, lying beside me.

She said, "Don't worry, I'm not going to try to do anything sexual to you!"

With finality, she said, "Good night!" She reached out and slapped me in what turned out to be the most ironic place possible.

Day 96 ended: Room 2xx, the Quest Inn

September 25, Part 1: Enter Winnipeg

2009-02-16T22:49:00.003-06:00

Winnipeg doesn't seem so big from the river.

If anything, I was surprised how many more places there were inside the official city limits that might have made good camping. Large wooded areas indicated isolated city parks. Islands formed in the river, around bridge pilings both current and past.

The houses and fenced yards gave way to apartment buildings. A man at river left threw a plastic bag into the river, and I saw where it accumulated with his other droppings. He had a tent made out of tarps there, living in the city. Not the first such rat I'd seen, but it seemed so much more wasteful, so blatantly predatory, compared to Calvin of Brandon.

Improvised dirt trails braided around the sides of the river, just missing the litterbug's tent, and grew into paved riverwalks and plazas filled with people, some out jogging, others out on lunch break.

I was in downtown Winnipeg, city founded at the meeting of the great rivers of southern Manitoba. Here the Assiniboine empties into the Red River of the North, which flows on into Lake Winnipeg and then the Hudson Bay.

My route, however, lay south. When I arrived in the city, as soon as practicable I had stopped to buy a map and try to figure out where I could store my canoe. I was interested in seeing the city, and also uncertain how I was going to get south to the Mississippi River. There was some possibility I could find a trucker to take me to Minneapolis, or I could get out of the water and try to bike some distance, or I could head upstream on the Red River.

I would start the upstream trip immediately. I found a listing for a Winnipeg canoe club about two miles south on the Red River, so it was time to press upstream for the first time during my trip.

The Red River is wide and powerful. A wind from out of the south did not help. I paddled hard. I had to cross the Transcanada Highway yet again. This time, the arches tunnelled the wind against me and it took all my strength to keep the boat under control and push through the bridge.

The two miles took 45 minutes of paddling, which isn't too bad, considering. When I got to the canoe club I parked my boat out on the dock, got out and walked up to the club. I walked all around the club building and checked out their dragon boats before deciding that they must be closed. So then it was back north on the Red to the canoe club neighbors, the Redboine Boating Club. There I received permission to leave my canoe out by their blue shed.

I would have to find someplace to spend the night in this city, so I filled my backpack with clothes and books, and was securing my food in front when I saw something crawling around in my oatmeal. It scurried into a plastic bag, which I tied up and pulled out of the boat, coming face to face with a giant rat.

I should have just stabbed it there but I took it out on the docks where a worker was repainting the white stripes. He said we should just try to drown it, and so he took the rat bag from me, and held it under the water, under the dock. The first try was no good so he pulled it out and retied it, then submerged the rat again. The creature went wild under the river, thrashing it around. When he pulled the bag back up there was nothing in it but holes.

We had just released a rat in this dock with all these expensive motorboats, my gift in exchange for letting me stay.

I wished String was there. She would have known what to do.

Day 96 continues.

September 24: Camp Manitou

2009-02-15T11:22:00.000-06:00

Camp Manitou is just outside western Winnipeg, but the suburbs here already line the river on both sides. Before I got into Winnipeg proper, I thought it would be a good idea to stop at the campground for the night, make some phone calls about what to do with my canoe while I was in Winnipeg, and get myself cleaned up for the city as well.

The dock for the campground stuck out at river left, somehow immediately recognizable as public despite little visual distinction from the private docks owned by every other building on the river. Perhaps it was the thicker woods, or the larger area, but I have seen some significant docks connected to private acreages too.

I walked up the wood steps to the campground where I could hear only the clanging of a flagpole, and somewhere, the barking of a dog. To my right was a cluster of cabins, all but two were locked. One was full of tables. The other was the art cabin, and its sink refused to give the treated water I wanted.

On the left side of the campground, gathered around the clanging flagpole were the gathering places of this group campground. There was a giant mess hall and activity center, and the maintenance shed as well, all locked. A big empty swimming pool was gated off, and there was a garden, with the gate in its fence conspicuously open.

Further on, there was a regular two-story house, with a wooden sign on the front, "Bob's Place". I knocked on Bob's door, rang Bob's ordinary doorbell, and knocked again, over a period of some hours, but Bob, the caretaker of the place, was not there.

I walked the road to the campground's land entrance, which was closed by a locked chain-link gate.

Given the circumstances, I did what anyone would do. I ran the ropes course.

I couldn't ride the zip line at the beginning, since the "zip" part was packed away somewhere, but I walked the low tightrope, clambered over the hanging wood beams and climbed over the wooden barriers for an hour, all the while expecting that barking dog to come running out of the distance at me. In that case, I would need all these climbing skills.

I set up my tent at the top of the dock stairs and peed in the bushes there because the bathrooms were locked.

I never did see anyone there.

Day 95 ended: 49*51.964N, 097*20.818W

September 23: Tough night

2009-02-14T10:46:00.000-06:00

Too many people and too much mud. Explosions on the river: invisible bullets flew over through the trees. I couldn't tell where they were coming from, could not see any people bearing firearms. I alternated between trying to stay as visible as possible and hoping the banks would provide some cover.

The sun was declining, I could not find any campsites and some amplified doorbell ding-donged over the river. What song was it playing? What was setting it off? Why was it so ear-splitting?

The bend in the river past the doorbell offered a tiny inbank of mud-covered gravel. I had to bend over the weeds that grew there to provide any footprint for my tent. The site was unnatural; there was a dirt road across the river and only a neglected area of bushes and trees stood between me and the doorbell of doom.

It began to rain that night, hard. The wind picked up and so did the lightning, which came down all around me. Unlike the Saskatchewan summer storms that banged around mostly in the cloudtops, some of these strikes were close. After one flash I could not even count to one before the thunder shook the doorbell's memory from my mind. I remembered the conservation officer from Virden who had been struck by lightning; his first thought on waking was that he had died and gone to hell.

There were no trees over my tent; the brush was too thick to approach them and it was too late to move anyway. The only thing was to lie in bed.

My sleep was broken by half-awake nightmares where, still laying in the tent, I seemed to grow forked limbs and slowly grow into robotic material while a voice asked, "This is what you want, isn't it?" Deeper sleep came and went. It was still filled with nightmares fed by rain and electricity.

Fed up with the pain I woke again and again, forcing myself through the layers of the unconscious until I had woken up so often I was actually awake. I bundled up against the cold night and drank some clean water, but did not sleep again.

In the morning it was still raining and I did not have the energy to do anything but read in my tent until the storm finally broke.

Day 94 ended: 49*52.043N, 097*29.337W

Flour kills

2009-02-14T00:48:00.002-06:00

Minneapolis has spent most of its history exploding.
In 1878 the Washburn "A" Mill, then the second largest flour mill in Minneapolis, exploded. A spark ignited the seven stories of suspended flour, blowing the lid off the building and destroying a third of Minneapolis's industrial capacity.

The Washburn "A" Mill was rebuilt, better, stronger, faster than before, and ran until the 1960's. In 1991 the building caught fire again. Preservationists took charge of the property and today the Mill City Museum stands on the site.

September 22: Legs and arms

2009-02-13T20:59:00.003-06:00

A goose crouches on the riverbank, unable to join its compatriots' migration. A lone white insect floats over the surface of the water, having missed its species bloom by two weeks. A canoeist, living on the river for three months exactly.

What lonely things should we discuss today? We'll let E M Forster be our muse:

"Furniture ... alone endures while men and houses perish, and that in the end the world will be a desert of chairs and sofas -- just imagine it! -- rolling through infinity with no one to sit upon them."

You see them all along the river, often paired but never mated. Office chairs, mostly, that have outlived their fashion or comfort, or are simply old. I commonly see discarded bait boxes or tackle, and even chests containing who-knows-what. I believe everyone who owns riverside property has established some poor seat overlooking it from which to fish.

Sofas are not much less common, and are often in surprisingly good shape considering weather. The fates of office chairs are individual and mysterious, but sofas have more public destinies. The water will rise and snatch them away, it seems, and take them to some more scenic resting place - sans cushions, of course! They are often found face down under bridges, but I have at least once seen a sofa perched high in a tree, embraced by the branches of its distant cousin.

The nylon lawn chairs seem to fare the worst, but this is something a true scientist should test. Of these I rarely see more than a folding frame swaddled in rotting fabric, collapsed upon the bank. The white plastic ones do better, regular seafarers it seems, finding some pile of branches to rest in.

Best are the congregations, the multitudes of seats -- I exaggerate -- the half-dozens of chairs half-circled about some point near the water. Typically the central chair even sits higher than the others, as on a little hillock. So we know that even at the bottom rungs of its society, furniture maintains some social hierarchy.

And Forster is right: these seats are always empty, and slowly rolled by rivers to the sea. We can only hope that once there they are put to good use, that somewhere schools of fish study at discarded desks, sharks sleep in loveseats, and lionfish-tamers do their work with a chair and whip.

When the oceans are full, then we shall be buried in furniture. Before the end we will construct castles and oceanside villas out of the cushion, as we did when we were children, but before long it will become difficult to navigate: "Oh, turn left at the chesterfield, climb down five oak chairs and then take each right until you see the pink leather loveseat: we live behind the next roll-top desk."

Day 93 ended: 49*58.053N, 097*39.362W

(I apologize for the late post today. My written journal says "I typed up a pretty awful journal for Sept 22", and the filename for this typed journal indicated the entry was incomplete. I was loathing the thought of fixing up this awful, incomplete entry so much I put it off until now, when pulling it up in my text editor I found... this.)

September 21: The growing hordes

2009-02-12T08:26:00.000-06:00

I saw a flock of gulls and could not make out what they were doing. As high as they were, and as erratic the swarm, they resembled insects more than birds. As they circled round they flashed light and dark, top and bottom in the sun.

There was no overall direction, although my bird book listed them as a migratory species in the region. There was no obvious food in the water or the air; instead, they played in the wind and as I passed under the center of the group they formed a "donut hole" above my head.

When fleeing, gulls make fairly individual decisions. It is a strange fact that birds do not seem to pay much attention to the flight of other species, so I might see the geese fly off first, then the cormorants, then gulls, and pelicans; and always last if they even do flee, are the "fearless": the sandpipers. I had been seeing largely geese and gulls so they were the easiest to contrast. Geese always fly away as flocks, simultaneously. Sometimes I do see a goose or two start to fly off alone, but you can see their embarrassment when the rest do not follow, so they land immediately, pretending not to be afraid.

I never see an embarrassed gull. They make their own choices, and as I approach a flock of gulls sitting on the shore there is a gradual wave of flight as I broach their individual personal spaces.

This did not help me understand the donut flying above my head, however.

Later, I saw two hunters with rifles, dressed in jeans and baggy t-shirts; I guess they were kids but I could not see them clearly. Near my campsite I heard raucous young men drive by in 4-wheelers. I attended to my cooking to show I felt I had a right to be there and wasn't worried about kids running around with guns. At least I tried to convince myself this. I was glad the next day would be a Monday and there would not be so many people running around.

Day 92 ended: 50*02.398N, 097*52.004W

Porcupine

2009-02-11T15:45:00.000-06:00

He hid behind the grass and his spines. He wasn't afraid of me, but not too intent on cuddling, either.

September 20: Back filled with quills

2009-02-11T10:07:00.002-06:00

I saw two couples at river right. Fishing or just sitting? There appeared to be a rod. Hutterites, I thought. The girl, Pamela, at the Portage la Prairie art gallery had suggested I try to meet some.

Hutterites are communal anabaptists, like Old Order Mennonites and Amish. Living by the second chapter of Acts, they renounce violence, hold all things communally in their colonies, and carefully manage the technology in their lives. Cell phones are in; televisions are out.

I have seen them around, visiting Calgary or the small towns I've stopped in, but had not met any. The mean wear dark clothes, but the women can wear colorful patterns in medium blue or red.

I waved uncertainly to them, but noticed no response. As I got closer, I called out to them, "Hello, are you fishing?"

They were. They called out to me that I was about to hit their lines, transparently winding down into the water. I just missed them and then I briefly explained about my trip, what I was up to, where I came from, and where I was going.

It was difficult yelling at each other over the wind, over the water, over the accents. One of the rambunctious women called out as I drifted away. Whether encouragement or invitation I couldn't know. I just smiled at her until they were gone, behind the curve of the river.

Something didn't sit right with me. It wasn't much of a conversation and I had any number of things to ask them about their culture, had I the opportunity. This business of trying to shout at people over the water didn't seem like any way to meet anyone. If I had pulled over the canoe, got out and tried to strike up a conversation, what's the worst that might have happened? I should try to talk to everyone I see. There aren't too many, and mostly on weekends.

Not half an hour further down a white-haired man fished with three grandsons. "Don't forget the worms!" one shouted, waking me from the book I was reading. But I didn't go talk to them.

I found an unexpectedly sandy beach somewhere after the Transcanada Highway, so excitedly set up my tent on the clean shore. A porcupine fed in the grass nearby, a spiky monkey pulling down plants with its paws to chew on the leaves.

He was the only animal that did not bother to run away from me, and I wondered how close I could get, and how useful it would be on occasion to have quills on my own back.

Day 91 ended: 49*58.902N, 098*05.547W

September 19: Escape from Portage la Prairie

2009-02-10T15:29:00.000-06:00

Since I had tried the routes to the east and west of the oxbow lake out of town, I decided to see if I could find a path south through Portage la Prairie's Island Park back to my canoe. "Island Park" is a misnomer. It is simply the center of the oxbow lake, connected by land in the south. There is a single bridge in the northeast connnecting it to town. I hoped to find some route to my shining path in the south.

I got as far south as a white pickup, parked at a dead end which also had a middle-aged man in a flannel shirt, and a small dog with cute curly hair and a cute temper when it comes to bicycles. The man called the dog off of me and drove away in the white pickup. I couldn't getaway so fast. It was obvious when riding over the grass to escape from the dog that my rear wheel was flat for the third time of the day. It had been gimpy for a while but it finally refused to hold any air. Considering how long it took last time to fix it, I figured it would be quicker just to walk it back to the canoe.

Figuring out how to get there was the hard part. I walked back the way I had ridden, using the "left-hand rule" to try to find a route down to the south. That is, always take left turns, and turn around at any dead-ends. After about three dead ends I realized walking was going to be far too slow to find the Southern Passage, so I would have to head north, past the old fighter jet overlooking the lake, over the bridge, and back onto the Community Pathway.

At some point I had a rule that I hated all cities the first day, and loved them the second. This wasn't really working in Manitoba, though. I loved Brandon all the time I was there, but I still had not come to grips with Portage. The town seems to be missing most of its sidewalks, and drivers seem to treat pedestrians as obstructions anyway, gunning it through intersections to avoid stopping for walkers. While cycling into town, I could not get any cars to pass me at a safe distance regardless of whether I rode right, center, or left in the lane. It was frightening.

"Left!" a man yelled behind me, annoyed at this person walking his bike on the all-important Community Walkway. He cut in front of me on his hundred-dollar dual suspension mountain bike, with the seat all the way down so he had to ride frog-legge and fat. He was fat! Arg, but that wasn't important.

Not one single person in Portage la Prairie was interested in the Brompton. This is not a matter of demographics but the spirit of the city. In Brandon everyone stopped me to ask questions about it, young and old, rich and poor, natives and immigrants, single men and single mothers. Portage is all cheap mountain bikes, rusty ten speeds and silly cruisers. No one probably knows enough about bikes to notice it.

No one in the town seemed happy. Mumbling waiters who can't listen right even to get a tip -- hey, I only asked for $2 back, and he gave me everything back. I managed to shove some of it back in his direction, but not as much as he would have gotten if he had actually listened to me instead of just mindlessly going through the motions. And I don't know how many times I had to repeat to the hotel agent that I was canoeing for her to understand that I had no car. Even the woman at the art gallery, who understood about the canoeing park, still told me I should "drive" here, and "drive" there.

That isn't fair. The women in the art gallery seemed happy, and why not? They had to be proud of the quality of the art exhibit they could put on in such a small town. I had to think hard about who else I had seen that didn't seem utterly depressed. There were two in the art gallery, and the two park workers who helped me portage. Two young, native fishermen I met at the park were positively blissful. I don't know if that park should count, though; it's outside city limits.

I did witness one spontaneous outbreak of joy. My first night I had made it to the library just before closing time, and there was a girl leaving, twelve or thirteen. She checked out and broke into a huge smile, saying "I just looooooove books!" She had glasses and pigtails. No, maybe she was Hutterite. It is hard to tell. The gloom of Portage presses in on this memory and I can't recall if she had braids or a kerchief, wore a dress or jeans. The gloom set in immediately.

"I know you do," croaked a librarian, almost sarcastically. The bookgirl was one of maybe half a dozen people who could save the city from divine wrath and she was unknowingly mocked by one of the people she might have loved.

The library was new and in nice condition on the outside. Patrons are limited to six books out at one time, and are charged for checking out DVD's. One woman wanted to check out two DVD's, and that would have costed $6. She didn't have the cash, only Interac, her debit card, which the library doesn't take. She considered running out to an ATM, but then just said, "Oh, forget it." I thought the librarian was happy that her discs would avoid the psosibility of extra scratches.

I could go on. A woman had difficulty renewing her card because she didn't have a driver's license, and of course how can you read if you can't drive? Two native men wanted to use the internet terminals, but were turned away for not having picture ID. Maybe this is normal, but it seemed like a lot of incidents in such a short period of time. Maybe the men were lucky, though. This is the only library I've been that actually charges people to use the computers.

As I was thinking these thoughts, I was now walking alongside Crescent Road. I was told in the art gallery to keep my eye out for a statue of a bird on top of a tree. I had seen it in the distance, over the woods, but as it got closer I was thinking about the library, and remembered my brief, fragmented chat with Shawnti. She had said the event that had caused me so much grief on Day 45, the killing of the boy on the bus, had happened in Portage la Prairie.

Wait, that was in Portage la Prairie?

Was that why everyone was so gloomy? Surely that couldn't be the only reason. The fur traders used to have about a 15 mile portage from the Assiniboine up to Lake Manitoba here, and they used to carry everything on tumplines, which put all the weight of their gear nd merchandise on their foreheads. That is not the happiest origin of a town name.

I had thought the violent act was entirely due to the strange internal workings of the mind, but what if it was actually more based on the sad clouds of the environment? What kind of legal precedent would that establish when the verdict comes down "Not guilty by reason of Portage la Prairie"?

It had been very warm the last couple of days, and I walked in shorts and short sleeves. Mosquitoes rose out of the mowed grass and speckled my arms and legs, their stings surprisingly blunt and painful, like shots of poisonous medicine.

"I've got to get out of town," I thought.

"I've got to get out of town before I kill someone!"

Day 90 ended: 49*56.395N, 098*14.028W

I can't just leave it there. The girl at the art gallery had wanted to call the newspaper, and I refused adamantly. Eddy Harris and Matthew Mohlke, when they met with newspapers, had both felt the tedium of waiting for the reporters to arrive, and then seeing their epic personal quests cut down to soundbites, to five minute feel-good stories. The girl had said, "Well, it's just such a big deal for this town," and I couldn't see why. Why should the people in town care what someone who was passing through was doing?

Well, the murderer and his victim were both just passing through, too. It really wasn't Portage's fault that event happened there.

I had a little light, this idea that yes, you can go out there and do things, strange things, that it is safe enough, that there is adventure and excitement to be had in this world, and a newspaper would reduce that light to just a faint glimmer. A spark might be just enough to give someone a bearing in the night, but I hid my flame under the bushel.

September 18: The shining path

2009-02-09T15:27:00.000-06:00

I've decided that the best way to get to know a town is to walk it first. Otherwise the sights move too fast and there is no time to take it in, to get a feel for the place under the feet. The feet tell you how far apart everything is, the eyes and ears show what kind of people live here.

For the second night in three months I had a bed; I took out a hotel room, perhaps only because Murray in Brandon had mentioned staying there, and so it seemed like a good idea to try the strange life of sleeping in bed, showering in the morning, and, uh, washing clothes in the tub.

I still needed to get back to my bed, though. It had been a long day. As you might expect, the portage was difficult. The string of white buoys did little to indicate the severity of the dam. In Saskatchewan a drop of even a couple of feet was always accompanied by a warning sign at least as tall as me, and often orange barriers across the waterway as well. This innocent string of buoys, however, is all that floats between an innocent paddler and a fifty foot drop. The portage nearly finished off the frame that holds those wheels to the boat.

So then I had rented the room and walked into town, which was a couple miles away. Getting out would be tougher. I decided to go around the other side of Crescent Lake, the large oxbow lake in the south of town. I didn't start until 8 o'clock, and the sun was setting.

That was okay, though. The "Community Walkway", as they call it, skims around the outside of the lake and is well lit. I followed it around west. According to the visitor's guide, there are "several accesses", which are nothing more than asphalt strips with painted lines across the street, as if pedestrians will only walk on asphalt between painted lines.

Oh, look! A salamander! It was thick as my thumb and longer than my finger. It stood still and raised a spotted tail towards the sky. Somehow it made that tail look so appetizing even I was tempted to lean over and snap at it. It was not the only salamander. I counted four, all sitting in the middle of the pathway, perfectly still, although only the first raised its tail like that.

Oh, amphibians. There were three frogs too. Cold blooded creatures that jump far too late to escape any decent predator, or perhaps pedestrian. I felt something crunch under my foot, but convinced myself it was only a clod of dirt.

The Walkway fed into residential streets with no sidewalks and few lights. I followed the streets through turns: left, right, left, right, until I was walking into a minor footpath. It started in the middle of the street and was shaded by trees. I guess my way was already too well-lit, anyway.

The path was white, limestone, I assumed, and just bright enough I could see it although the trees sheltered all else in black. Black, black, oh, the path! I had little idea where this path would go, other than some hope it would lead me to bed.

I knew the moon was only a couple days waning so it would be coming up soon, but until then I could only follow the path blind to all else, just following that white road. A creek was at my left-hand side, and I heard some major animal, like a stegosaurus or possibly a beaver struggling in there as I passed. A number of goblins hopped off the path as I walked down it. Eventually I came to a fork: straight or left?

I needed a bearing, but the trees to apparent north were too tall for me to find Polaris. I found Betelgeuse easily enough, and took it as roughly south. There was still a bit of glow to the west, but that would fade soon, and besides, was difficult to distinguish from the city lights. There was a spotlight to the apparent north-west, but how could I know how close it was?

My hotel was to the southwest, across the Transcanada Highway, which was roaring... to the south. I didn't need a visual bearing, I could just walk towards the noise. I turned left, still following that white path, sure that stepping off of it was like stepping off the world.

The path crossed the creek, but the bridge was not white. It was a dark grate, and I could just see the water splashing below and to the sides. There was nothing to do but hope that the grate was true, and walk across to the shining path on the opposite side.

My path did not lead to the hotel. It stopped suddenly, dead-ending in the darkness. As I stepped off the end I saw the moon rise in the east, a small chunk eaten from its right side. There was a dirt road here.

The dirt road led through a grove of mysterious trees, all different sizes but the same shape, and not the Christmas one. Could fruit really be grown in Manitoba? Where am I? But the answer would not come, for soon I was out on the north outer road, and then running across the Transcanada Highway, and then sauntering down the south service road to the hotel, and there to bed.

Day 89 ended: 49*57.044N, 098*19.345W

"Voyageurs in my veins"

2009-02-08T21:56:00.004-06:00

I was curious whether I'm the only one in living memory to have canoed the Qu'Appelle River, and it turns out I am not. I found this article "Voyageurs in my veins" by Jean-Philippe Bourgeois. He describes how in 1996 he and Alain Bourbeau canoed the estimated 3700 miles from Calgary to Montreal, taking the southern route. Alain had never slept in a tent before this trip.

This is a great, well-written article, and I enjoyed comparing their experiences with mine. For instance, the discovery of the Qu'Appelle:

At the top, I look east, and see no water. If the river's there, it's hiding down in the trees. So I climb down the far side of the dam, on the left side, where my map indicates the channel picks up. I see no water.

I look down at my feet. The Qu'Appelle is a drainage ditch, and empty.

I knew this was a possibility, but I honestly didn't think it would come to this.

-- Kevin Saff, from Little boy lost.

Atlases differed because of the dam which backs water up, the South-Saskatchewan either joined up with the Qu'Appelle or it didn't, leaving a huge gap. An earth dyke separates the two systems.

Alain, through a deviant lack of shared information from my part, did not share my anxiety. We paddled from Calgary to Winnipeg using the "Canadian Tire Road Guide to North-America". Page 112 failed to reveal where the anticipated link with the Qu'Appelle was.

Standing on top of the dyke, we peered into the horizon and saw nothing but a few cows, ankle deep in a mud puddle, the only water in sight.

--Jean-Philippe Bourgeois, from Voyageurs in my veins.

Their Qu'Appelle met this disappointing first impression more than mine did. For the first five days, they had to pull the canoe over the muddy river bottom, in water never exceeding four inches. Their photo of the Qu'Appelle is horrifying. I was so lucky to do this in a high water year.

The entire article is worth reading. Their experience in Ontario, which I never got to, sounded surprisingly similar to mine on the Mississippi.

Airplane in Island Park

2009-02-08T15:36:00.004-06:00

Oops. I meant to post a blog entry every day, but I accidentally skipped this one. So instead I will post this photo of an airplane I saw in Portage la Prairie, the town which is the subject of the next two posts. I have started posting some other photos as well, not in any particular order.

While I'm here, I may as well mention the ads you might have noticed running all around the page now. I had an ad up during the blog's hiatus that pulled in a couple bucks, so considering that I don't have enough work right now I am going to see if I can pull in any real money with content rolling again. Let me know if these get too annoying. I am thinking of writing up summaries of the OLPC, Brompton, and other things targeted to certain communities in the hopes of pulling in a couple waves of people.

September 17: POWER

2009-02-07T15:24:00.001-06:00

Human beings are accustomed to feeling powerless. It is their uniqueness versus all the world, all of society. It is this powerlessness that makes us moan in pain against all the injustices perceived against us. And it is this powerlessness that makes us fight back, to use our power against the forces of the world.

We underestimate our powers.

Since few people are doing what I am doing, it is a struggle to proceed when society is not well structured for this kind of journey. Witness my anger at Buffalo Pound Lake. In ranting against big lawns and camper trailers I am using the power I have, and must be careful.

North American culture is enamored with this kind of trip. I have power because what I am doing is valued by society in a way they can relate to. I get free meals, lifts past dams, and other kinds of help. And, well, I like it too. I want to be able to encourage people, showing there are other ways of using space and time available to them if they want it. I belive these ways can be good for them and for the land. But I must be careful not to use my power as judgment against them. I have youth, freedom, and resourcefulness to do this, and while these are not necessary they are helpful.

So, I must use this power to encourage, not to judge. A difficult thing. Since we rarely recognize our power it gallops along without control, steamrolling the powerless mercilessly.

Day 88 ended: 49*52.718N, 098*23.943W

September 16: Bob Crain

2009-02-06T15:57:00.001-06:00

Bob Crain builds glass houses.

I suppose one day he was taking out the trash and noticed all the bottles. He realized he had a problem and decided to make something of himself. Or just the bottles.

Somewhere in southern Manitoba he started stacking them up. I don't know what he used for mortar, but he built a house with his addiction. When that was done he built a church out of bottles, and I guess that fixed him because he stopped there, with his house and church whistling in the wind.

I don't know how they are positioned, or how the sun glares off the surface at dawn or dusk. I don't know how tall, or wide, or deep those buildings stand. I don't know if they are close to each other, or far.

I did know they were ten miles from the Assiniboine and my bike had a gimpy tire.

The tire could have been fixed, or at least managed. The distance was not great but harder to negotiate. I did not want to see Bob Crain's glass bottle houses, so intriguing on my map and I did not see them.

I negotiated with myself. It's okay not to see everything. If you try to, you won't anyway. I could build something myself. A tribute to Bob Crain and his construction out of destruction.

Once while at a retreat stationed around a muddy lake, I went down to the lake and saw all the twisted rebar and concrete slabs there, and decided to build. I started with sundials and ended with cities five foot tall. I was the master of time and space, and pants of mud covered my legs.

It was joyous to build, knowing that these buildings would not last. In those days I hated photography and every attempt to preserve the passing world as if anything were permanent.

I could do it again, I thought, bargaining on the river. I won't go to Bob but I'll bring his spirit here.

The bargain made I passed under the bridge to Bob's house.

And, you know, I did not build my cities after all.

Day 87 ended: 49*45.265N, 098*29.262W

September 15: Snow Geese

2009-02-05T14:51:00.001-06:00

I saw three snow geese.

A large flock of crows.

Maybe two hundred.

Drifting down the river is so passive, waiting for the next thing to show up.

Sometimes,
nothing does.

Day 86 ended: 49*45.486N, 098*42.572W

[LIVE] What's going on

2009-02-04T19:31:00.002-06:00

Okay, so it turns out I've got this blog about a little floating adventure.

Tomorrow, February 5 I turn 29 years old and the next post will go up.

Just to warn you, that one is rather short but some long ones are going up after that. Some of these I wrote on the river, some I just typed up here.

Here is Minneapolis. I am still carving out a life for myself. I am tutoring some Somali students in mathematics and volunteering at Leonardo's Basement. I'm still looking for a job that will keep me in the black, but I'm eating better and staying warmer than I was out on the Mississippi.

I am still planning to finish.

[LIVE] Minneapolis

2008-11-24T20:10:00.000-06:00

Hello, everyone, I have reached Minneapolis!

Actually, I have been here since Thursday. Why did I put off posting? Thursday was a little too cold to be on the water comfortably -- blocks of ice formed on all my stuff and even my clothes as I locked through the St Anthony dams in downtown Minneapolis. I staggered into the University of Minnesota campus gasping for warm air to thaw my hypothermic lungs, and spent my last dollar on a slice of pizza to heat my stomach.

In spite of that, I might have tried to continue on with my increasingly frozen adventure, except I have been committed to seeing family over Thanksgiving and the locks are shutting down for maintenance in December.

So I am now planning to winter in Minneapolis until May.

Here's my calendar at present:

Thursday, November 20: Last day of canoeing in 2008
Monday, November 24: Still in Minneapolis, staying with family friends
Tuesday, November 25: Flying to St Louis
Wednesday, November 26: Driving to Indianapolis
Thursday, November 27: Saff Thanksgiving
Saturday, November 29: Rupp Thanksgiving; driving back to St Louis
Monday, December 1: Locks 1-5 close; daily posts resume at the "Little Floating Adventure"
Sunday, December 7: Karen's recital
Monday, December 8: Locks 6-10 close; flying back to Minneapolis
January: Classes begin at the U of MN
May: Classes end at the U of MN; canoeing to New Orleans

It is all very confusing and nonlinear to me. All of a sudden I am looking for a place to stay and work in Minneapolis. Got any leads?

I doubt I will blog about all the individual days spent in Minneapolis, although this blog will at least be active as I throw all the old days up here. My muse has changed her tune and my journal has been accumulating sketches instead of paragraphs for the last couple of days. That may indicate a direction for blogging the long layover.

[LIVE] St Cloud

2008-11-14T13:19:00.000-06:00

Hi everyone.

I'm just checking in to say I'm currently in St Cloud, Minnesota. The boat's holding in and I hope to be in Minneapolis within the week. After that I hope to have some time and opportunity for a bit more posting here -- I'm taking a break to Indianapolis for a Thanksgiving family reunion.

[LIVE Day 140] Brainerd

2008-11-08T14:04:00.000-06:00

Someone is waiting to use this computer, so I can only post this quick note.

I am in Brainerd, the boat is in critical but stable condition, it is cold, I am continuing with my trip tonight. I hope to be in Minneapolis in two weeks.

After that, I should be able to post more.

Day 85: The death of sand

2008-11-04T12:25:00.000-06:00

If sand is a primal element in the creation of my universe then who am I without it?

It happened very slowly, as increasing amounts of mud began to infiltrate the sandy banks. There was not a particular point at which I could say, no, this is no longer sand, but mud. But perhaps there was a spiritual marker.

As I crossed under Highway 34 I noticed one of these cables, that seem to provide for crossing the river by means of a little box hung from it. It seems superfluous with the bridge right there, but someone must find these things tremendous because I had seen many of them, always a hundred yards or so after a bridge. I always wated to get a closer look to see if I could ride one of these things, but always had some reason preventing me. This one was "too close to that house, no good landing."

I would never get another chance because I would never see one again.

Instead I camped on the island just there, my feet filling with mud as I tried to clean my muddy clothes in the river and find some branch to hang them from. I wasn't sad, I just wasn't ecstatic anymore. The river is just a place where good or bad things can happen.

Day 85 ended: 49*41.590N, 098*53.103W

Day 84: Biking for books!

2008-11-03T12:24:00.000-06:00

It was Saturday, and the Provincial Park gift shop was open! When I peeked inside I had seen many books! Being a natural sucker for any field guide that seems useful I had to go and see what books they were.

The first step was to get to a road. There was a "canoe campsite" nearby, but the low water made a nasty mud step rather than a gentle rise, and I succeeded in dunking myself and my bicycle into the dirty water before finding my way to the top.

The second obstacle, or rather obstacles, were all the friendly equestrians camped there. It was difficult, but somehow I got through all the scrambled eggs, pancakes, toast and bacon they threw at me. Fortunately my stomach is impossible to fill.

Despite the detailed directions and trail status reports from the horse riders, this bicycle rider soon became lost enough to resort to the GPS. I found the Transcanada Trail, which actually crosses all of Manitoba and was going my way. Me and my gimpy bike progressed west as I had to stop frequently and refill the rear tire with my broken hand pump.

And I saw a horsey and some families and a red van! They were all happy.

And I got to the heart of the developed park where the nice wood buildings were in the joyous rain showers and I looked at the books. I looked at them as though looking for a friend, but these books were not my books.
That was okay. I rode back a different way and in the sunset was pink! and the dark of my arrival was once again beset by equestrians bearing food.

Day 84 ended: 49*41.400N, 099*05.089W

Day 83: Bliss

2008-11-02T12:23:00.000-06:00

My life was becoming increasingly blissful. Going so quickly from those two wretched days of rain, to the welcoming city of Brandon, to the "cereal bowl" and the sands of Spruce Woods had lifted my spirits to immeasurable heights. Every night as my head hits the bag I think to myself how I never want the trip to end. When I discover that Spruce Woods has no riverside camping available for me, I take it in stride, happily chatting at the reservations desk for an hour. When the awesome-looking gift shop is found to be closed, I just decide that I may make the ride back there on the day when it will be open.

My voice becomes sweet and wistful, as though I've been smoking the weed, but this is a natural high. Everything and everyone is beautiful. I aimed for the canoe camping site near the east end of camp, but when I discover it is inhabited I calmly paddled upstream and made camp at the previous sandbank.

The natives in this area held sand to be one of the fundamental elements of nature involved in creation. Truly it is a gift of God - so clean, soft, and dry. It was the sand and clear sky that pleased me, and I began fantasizing about sand and clean water, of sailboats and ocean beaches.
Such intense peace is rare to find on this earth. I don't know that I've had it at such a level, or for so long, as during this point in the trip.

Day 83 ended: 49*41.605N, 099*05.001W

Day 82: The Real Thing

2008-11-01T12:23:00.000-05:00

A sign at river left had the words "Punch-Bowl" carved into its wood and painted yellow. This confused me because I had written in my journal the previous afternoon that I was certain I'd found the devil's punch-bowl written on my map. No small, thing, because I had been desperate to find it. I had recently spent much of a day bushwacking about the bank trying to catch a glimpse of Fort Assiniboine or Brandon House, only to later determine that the large clearing and building at river right had been at least one of these. My map had placed both at left. It isn't that the map is false or lying, it is probably simply aimed at placing these things in the right block of roads rather than on the correct side of the river. The map's truth may not be mine but it provides leads to finding interesting things, and I imagine some of the things I find are even better than the real thing.

Back to the present. Here there was a wood staircase leading up the bank -- it clearly could not lead back to the spectacle I had just left because I'd hiked around it in the morning, and those trails, more popular with moose than humans, had nearly trapped me in a blanket of plants bearing bright red leaves of three and white berries.

I walked up the stairs and down the dirt paths blinded by a book I was reading, "The Real Thing" by Tom Stoppard, a devilish clever playwright who here proves himself by making the leading characters actors as well. He weaves together scenes from the shows they're acting with the one you're watching to explore the nature of jealousy and fidelity, and so there are moments when the "reality" of the scene is uncertain.

I saw little but my bare feet were happy experiencing the different textures of boardwalks and beaten paths, until I had to open my eyes as we descended down by a couple of blue-green pools.
Now I found the devil's punch-bowl, the real one, though still at river left rather than the map's right. It was another blue-green pool nestled in a wooded valley.

I have since seen photos of the place 100 years ago, and here is a case where natural changes obsolesce man's names. Then, it was a huge sand crater, treeless, perfectly round, with strange waters. It deserved the name. The spring water is cyan and warm, it never freezes but supposedly moves "eerily" all year round. I did not notice any unusual movement, but it may have been being especially sneaky while I was present.

I liked mine better.

Day 82 ended: 49*41.897N, 099*14.227W

Day 81: The Devil's Punch Bowl

2008-10-31T12:22:00.000-05:00

The banks bled; mineral springs dyed their gravel beds crimson. A sandy delta gaped from the left after a trackless bank of spent logs. Shrubs guarded the entrance to the sacred place and I had to climb like Zaccheus to witness the spectacle.

Deer had once tracked up this sandy slope, but what strange enchantments they found here I could not read. Not so nimble I lost my footing once or twice on the ordeal to the summit, which is not the summit but the edge of a wide sandy crater, but not a crater. For it was born not from some falling visitor from heaven but from the unholy depths of the earth where the unwanted critters make their homes.

Two pairs of springs burst forth (but more, for I abstract out the smaller minor things) to coalesce in two yawning Y's, themselves meeting in a pitchfork that just escapes the bank through a tiny brush-lined crevasse to the delta and river beyond. All elements mix in their colors but not their places, with yellow clothing sand, grey the dirt and the darkest black takes mud. Green weeds grow near red rocks to complete the inhuman rainbow below.

It is a conspicuous place meant not for habitation but for marvel. In awe I set camp outside its twisted gates. I would stay a while. Perhaps forever.

Day 81 ended: 49*38.726N, 099*18.364W

Day 80: The birth of sand

2008-10-30T12:21:00.001-05:00

I saw a snapping turtle sitting high on some island bar, and unlike the turtles I had been seeing on the river he didn't flee at my approach - didn't jump into the water and trade precious solar heat for increased safety.

I supposed he was dead, like the motionless beaver I had photographed on the Qu'Appelle. Out of perhaps a morbid curiousity I paddled over to take a closer look at him.

He had an enormous shell, larger around than my pith helmet, and extending from it were those fearsome, armored, bear-like claws. His tail had plates sticking up like a stegosaurus, and his little yellow eyes were motionless over the monstrous beak.

I reached in front of him with my paddle, luring him to snap, but got nothing. When I tapped the top of his shell the head retracted an inch and the tail flinched. He was fearless. His armor had gotten him through so many years, it would be a worthwhile surprise to him if there was any predator capable of finishing him off.

He was sitting high on a patch of sand a couple feet triangular. It was the first sand I'd seen on the Assiniboine since that misleading initial island at the Qu'Appelle confluence.

Not much further the river cut out into a sandstone bank, a nearly vertical cliff sixty feet high. Atop the cliff were spruce, a pleasant change from the still green deciduous trees dominating the river. Of course, most of the spruce were green as well, but one in twenty were grey, corpses standing among the living before being laid out over the river.

I was becoming an island snob. I dismissed many nice gravel islands for the usual trivial reasons: it's too early, too small, too noisy, too grassy. The sun made a blessed appearance, early, giving a warmth that lasted the day. The sun draped itself in clouds as it fell towards the horizon, reminding me it would not light my night as well.

That is when the islands gave out. I thought it was going to be another "Casey-at-the-canoe" story, where I'd reject several decent sites only to end up camping on mud. I saw a bank that looked gravelly, but the approach was predictably shallow and muddy. I would have needed to drag the canoe through twenty feet of mud to get to the cramped dirty shore. I relieved myself and moved on.

The wind temporarily with me, I let it push me backwards over the water. I looked up from my book and saw a long gravel bar. I had to paddle hard against the wind, against the current to get back to it. The filling between the gravel rocks was brown. I dreaded the thought of another of these muddy gravel campsites. It may be better than pure mud, but it disappoints when I was expecting gravel's cleanliness.

I dug my paddle into it and it was sand. I stepped my foot out and it was real sand. Real real, real sand.

Day 80 ended: 49*36.824N, 099*22.492W (?)

Day 79: A very special day

2008-10-29T12:21:00.000-05:00

Not much happened.

Day 79 ended: 49*39.152N, 099*32.251W

[LIVE Day 129] Grand Rapids, still

2008-10-28T11:57:00.000-05:00

Hi, everyone,

No decision need be final at this point. It is a warm day here in Grand Rapids, Minnesota, a place that I do not wish to last out the winter. By the time all my American readers are voting, I should be in Brainerd, where I should have the opportunity to try fixing the boat if my banking letter goes through okay. If it does not, or I cannot repair the canoe satisfactorily, I'll call it quits for the season and think about where I should stay.

By Thanksgiving I ought to be in Minneapolis. This Thanksgiving I am going to attend the Saff and Rupp dinners (in Indiana) which I have missed for the last three years, living in Canada. This is another opportunity to stop for the season.

By Christmas I should be in the St Louis area, where my parents live. This is a conceivable resting point.

After that, continuing south should bring noticeable improvements in heat and light, and only a busted canoe would stop me.

For various reasons, I would like to learn how to camp effectively in the winter, and how to enjoy it. One day I might like to try the Iditasport, which is essentially biking the Iditarod dogsled trail in winter.

So I am continuing for now, although there are still many opportunities to stop in the future if it is necessary. When I have the chance, I will probably continue with more detailed "LIVE" posts as the dated ones become increasingly irrelevant. I am aware I have had few chances to call or email anyone individually for a while, and this is frustrating to me.

Thank you for reading, and for the advice!

[LIVE Day 128] Grand Rapids

2008-10-27T12:29:00.000-05:00

Hello everyone.

The weather is getting cold, I can't get my socks dry, and yesterday I lost the flashlight I was using to find campsites the previous two nights.

And one thing I don't think I've mentioned here is I've been operating on a shoestring since my arrival in the US because I had no bank cards and my savings is locked up in a certificate of deposit in Bank of America - which has no branches in Minnesota.

But worse than that, a large crack has been developing down the center of the hull.

I am trying to decide what to do. Many an adventurer has in the past over-wintered with the natives, from Lewis and Clark to Peter Jenkins of "Walk across America" fame. On the other hand, when the Thief River Falls newspaper posts a front page story saying I face obstacles that others haven't - "darkness and colder weather", it sounds like a challenge.

It may take at least a day or two to make this decision, and certainly that long to make any repairs, if possible. Buying a replacement canoe is perhaps a possibility, although it makes the bicycle portage look even more ridiculous. I hope my friends and family here can offer advice on how best to proceed and honor the help that I have already received.

One thing is certain: these nine days on the Mississippi have convinced me more than ever that I must float the entire river. The question is "When, and in what boat?"

[LIVE Day 122] Bemidji

2008-10-21T09:39:00.000-05:00

I am taking the frost as a warning to HURRY UP.

When it strikes two mornings in a row I read that as
HURRY UP
HURRY UP.

The theme music speeds up and I will have to be quick to avoid being eaten by Baron von Blubba. I have some posts from day 79 through 85 ready, but can't take the time to post them right now.

Day 78: Ghost at grey cabin

2008-10-19T09:33:00.000-05:00

There were two kayakers about a mile up stream, a young couple. I think they were just taking a day trip out from Brandon, and were probably enjoying seeing Waggle Springs on their way. In that area they couldn't go more than a few feet before seeing another stream of water burbling out from the bank into the river. They were lovely people, and had matching yellow kayaks.

I, on the other hand, was exploring an abandoned house on the side of the river. There was not much left there; it had not been inhabited since 2000. The living room had a sofa torn up by wild animals. On the wall were planks with paper wasp nests on them, and it was not obvious if the nests had been put up as art or habitation.

I had climbed in through the back porch, which had large tubs of cleaning supplies, but I saw that a screen door was wide open at front; that explained the sofa. In the bed room there was no bed, but there was an envelope on the floor. It contained two pieces of paper, filled on both sides. One handwritten, the other typewritten. Both seemed to be pulled from the middle of longer letters, and I was having trouble picking up the narrative. The handwritten one said someone had called her a "NATURAL BORN WRITER", like that, the upper case giving emphasis. The typewritten one gave me an idea of the author's age. She said when she was married she was still a young bride, although she had teenagers. So, her marriage must have been in her thirties, and her age at writing must have been at least fifty.

Another section had her "singing and dancing at the grey cabin". That was where I was. I tried to imagine an older woman singing and dancing in this decrepid building, but the image I got was one of insanity, whether I placed her in the trashed living room or this barren bed room.

I heard a popping noise, and then a voice. The door in the living room was not at the angle I remembered it. "I don't believe in ghosts," I thought, "Is someone here?"

Two lovely kayakers paddled down the river and saw an old cabin on the left hand side. Suddenly, a man jumped off the back porch and ran towards the canoe that was parked nearby. The canoe had "CALGARY TO WINNEPEG?" written on the side in large letters, with "Winnipeg" misspelled just like that.

This apparition was a strange interruption to their day. The girl said "Hi" to the man, who replied "Hello". They paddled hard and the specter disappeared behind them.

Alone again, they slowed down. The river was peaceful and they had each other and their matching yellow kayaks.

Day 78 ended: 49*45.583N, 099*43.084W

Day 77: If we don't release the past

2008-10-18T09:32:00.000-05:00

A fisherman helped me drag the canoe past the broken Brandon dam. It was late afternoon, and at last I was leaving town.

White insects drifted over the river against the current. They drifted like snow at first, but when I saw their round wings and double tails they looked more like shining fairies. Many of them were not alone. There was a flightless sex, and when one of these fairies found one they allow it to grasp onto their tails, and then fly back out over the waters with their partners in tow. These were not weighed down more than the others, but floated as effortlessly as the others. Many would tire and hit the water, or hit my canoe, and be unable to recover, slowly dissolving.

I saw a tent and a bicycle on the left side of the river. A man was waving. I slowed down and drew near the shore.

"Are you traveling?" I asked.

He said, "No -- waiting."

"It gives me time to work on my beattitudes," he said.

This was his second summer occupying that location on the riverbank. He spent 121 days his first time out, and had already gone longer this year. It must be a good place to stay. Some wooden steps had been built from the water up the bank.

I asked him if he minded me spending the night there, that we could talk tonight and then tomorrow morning before I left. He hesitated for a moment before inviting me up. We found a deer bed that seemed to be just the place for my tent. When I was done setting up I walked over to his firepit, which was a ring of small cinderblocks around a discarded computer tower. There were two log benches there, but he insisted I sit in one of two canvas lawn chairs.

His name was Calvin. As he stoked the fire I got a closer look at him. He was missing his right front tooth and had wrinkles radiating from his eyes. His eyes were always smiling, and without those wrinkles I might not have known he was middle-aged. He talked in circles around what he wanted to say. I was talked out in Brandon and spoke little. How can I relate our conversation to you? I must straighten it out into a story, by cutting out all the wandering meanders he placed in the way.

He was divorced. He had a son and a daughter. He had not seen them in a decade.

He asked me what inspired my trip. After Crooked Lake I had written a story in my journal that purported to explain why I had decided to go to school in Calagary, and why I didn't find what I hoped there; why I had to leave.

"My friend died in a car accident," I said. That was only part of the story; I didn't want to go into details. I was growing unhappy with this as an explanation, however.

"Was she your girlfriend?" he asked.

"No." That was another part of my story, and I felt guilty. Her parents had told me after her death how already people were beginning to mythologize her life. It is too tmepting to burden our memories of the dead, and because I didn't want to go into my entire story I was hanging too much on one important part.

"It's harder when they're closer to you," he said. After his marriage he was dating a woman who had some sickness; she was hooked to some medical bag and a couple of times had to be driven to the hospital.

Once he did not get her there fast enough. That was shortly before he began living by the river.

"You've just got to believe that they aren't gone forever," he said. "You go to sleep, you wake up. Look, all these insects around here, they are born and live for just a short time, but they lay their little eggs or seeds, whatever you want to call them, and next year they hatch!"

Calvin had gone without any money for more than a year. Whenever he finds a coin or two on the ground, he just picks it up and drops it in a donation cup somewhere. At night he bikes into town, sometimes taking his trailer, and picks up supplies to live with. He had a fishing pole, and a tent covered with tarps. A couple of nylon lawn chairs he found in the trash, and I think he got bread and fruit from the trash as well.

He told me he was waiting for people to do what "they're supposed to do." Since he hadn't paid alimony in two years I gathered he was waiting to be taken to prison, which would somehow fulfill the theology of suffering he had developed.

Day 77 ended: 49*51.384N, 099*43.084W

[LIVE Day 118] Itasca State Park

2008-10-17T20:41:00.000-05:00

Hello everyone.

I have finally typed up "Day 79: A very special day", and it was a very freeing experience for me, as I hope it will be for you. Unfortunately, I couldn't figure out how to copy the latest set of posts to my blog the way things are currently set up.

Tomorrow, which is both day 119 and October 18, I will set out on the Mississippi River, starting at its headwaters in Lake Itasca. The Mississippi meanders north for a couple of days to the first city, Bemidji, where I expect to be able to upload a number of posts.

It hasn't been my custom to talk much about the trip itself in these live posts, but given how the others are becoming increasingly post-dated I thought I would give you a heads-up. The last couple of weeks have been extraordinarily difficult. I spent several days paddling south, upstream on the Red River, and then more than a week towing my canoe behind my bicycle to Lake Itasca. The canoe trailer broke down many times. There was plenty of rain, but also plenty of helpful people along the way.

It is expected to reach more than 60 degrees (F) tomorrow, and the sky, which has been mostly overcast since Winnipeg, should be clear and blue.

In the first half of the trip, I was often quite limited when and where I could upload blogs and contact people. As you know, it was not unusual for me to go two weeks or more, only having an hour to try to catch up on the net before moving on. The Mississippi River is more commercial, and more heavily populated, so there is a potential for me to stay in more contact -- but I don't know for sure. It is always hard to achieve balance.

Thank you for reading.

Day 76: Two services

2008-10-17T09:32:00.000-05:00

The Southwestern Manitoba art gallery is located in downtown Brandon, in the second floor of a mall that also houses the public library. In the morning, I walked in and immediately threw $5 in the donations box, only to be told that the main exhibit didn't open until the evening.

When I returned, the stores of the mall were chained off, and the elevator marked with the logo of the art gallery wasn't operational. There was an adjacent stairwell which I stepped into, and started walking up. Another woman was walking up and found the door locked at top. We tried a lower door, and realized we were locked in the stairwell. Some knocking at the top attracted attention and we entered into the gallery.

The exhibit was featuring the art of aboriginal women. I looked around and I was the only nonnative male there. I helped myself to cheese and crackers, and punch, to have something to do while I waited for the exhibit to open.

I thought to myself if this were a church there would already have been half a dozen people greeting me, introducing me to the fold. And why not? It all comes down to what kind of community you are trying to create.

There was a table littered with reading material: magazines and pamphlets. I picked up one advertising the "Winnipeg garbage museum", which was full of digital images of people viewing refuse placed on pedestals. It was a creative idea, but the text was a kind of review of the exhibit, tying it into other current trends in art. I had the feeling the reviewer was more interested in drawing ties to other work, to demonstrate their knowledge of current art, than in the work itself. The text changed a clever concept to something foreign, elitist.

I wandered around the exhibit hall, and while most of the work was not especially gripping, it was at least reaching, grasping at that thing that art is, that visual experience that can take your breath away. That is the thing you can take down to the masses, if you wanted to. Have greeters, nurseries, and children's services and you can bring art down from the mountain.

A few more white and male people showed up, and we watched and took pictures of a large group of aboriginal women singing. It was a participatory art, with call and response, but we drew an imaginary line around that group of women to exclude ourselves from the art, and so failed to experience it in the way it was meant.

A young woman stood up to give a speech about about the exhibit, and introduced one of thephotographers whose work hung there on the walls. These speeches were very formal and congratulatory, until painter Helen Madeleine was invited up. She offered an unprepared sermon, where she talked about there could be many kinds of salvation in the world; how when she paints she feels the same as how she prays; that art was a salvation of the world.

Across the street was a different denomination. The art in the first room was largely political, and utterly irrelevant. Sometimes a painting is only worth three words: "Bush is bad", and this is the kind of thing which says nothing when hung in an alternative Canadian art gallery in an election year.

The art was worse, but the communion was better. Perhaps because there was real wine. Everyone was talking to each other and were not too thrown off when I mentioned I had been invited by smoe random guy on the street. I guess the art community is fairly ecumenical, though, because people drifted to and fro across the street all night.

I began to feel sick. Before going to the art galleries I had enjoyed a meal at Lady of the Lake. It had been ages since I experienced a sit-in restaurant, and I felt as though I had tasted food for the first time as I savored every bite. But after having a huge meal there and nibbling at the galleries, my stomach was turning and I was worried it would create an unplanned piece of performance art.

I excused myself from my conversation partner, and seeing Helen Madeleine, thanked A young woman stood up to give a speech about about the exhibit, and introduced one of thephotographers whose work hung there on the walls. These speeches were very formal and congratulatory, until painter Helen Madeleine was invited up. She offered an unprepared sermon, where she talked about there could be many kinds of salvation in the world; how when she paints she feels the same as how she prays; that art was a salvation of the world.

Across the street was a different denomination. The art in the first room was largely political, and utterly irrelevant. Sometimes a painting is only worth three words: "Bush is bad", and this is the kind of thing which says nothing when hung in an alternative Canadian art gallery in an election year.

The art was worse, but the communion was better. Perhaps because there was real wine. Everyone was talking to each other and were not too thrown off when I mentioned I had been invited by smoe random guy on the street. I guess the art community is fairly ecumenical, though, because people drifted to and fro across the street all night.

I began to feel sick. Before going to the art galleries I had enjoyed a meal at Lady of the Lake. It had been ages since I experienced a sit-in restaurant, and I felt as though I had tasted food for the first time as I savored every bite. But after having a huge meal there and nibbling at the galleries, my stomach was turning and I was worried it would create an unplanned piece of performance art.

I excused myself from my conversation partner, and seeing Helen Madeleine, thanked her for her speech before I left.

Day 76 ended: 49*51.427N, 099*56.705W

Day 75: Cool bike!

2008-10-16T09:31:00.000-05:00

I was heading into the city of Brandon. My mapbook had at least two things to say about Brandon. First, that it is the second largest city in Manitoba. Second, that it has a population of 42,000 people.

I thought it must be like my hometown of St Peters, Missouri, which boasted a population of 42,747 when I was growing up there. St Peters is a suburb of St Louis, with probably a forty-five minute drive downtown on average. But downtown St Louis is mostly dead, so most people don't have to get that far. They commute about half an hour into town where their jobs are.

St Peters is subdivisions and subdivisions of boxy houses, with the population spanning from the dizzy depths of the lower middle class to the giddy heights of the upper middle.

I had an epiphany during my last visit there for my sister's wedding. Mentally overlaying the St Peters city map onto Calgary, I realized that even the longest drive in St Peters was only a middling bike ride in Calgary. When I was offered a ride to the church service the day after the wedding, I said no, I'll bike.

There is a clumsy asphalt trail that stretches most of the distance from my parents' house to their church. It probably takes a third of the distance and a quarter of the traffic lights as the driving route. Still, by St Peters standards this simple bike ride qualified as a major creative act.

Bounding over the cracks in the asphalt with my shirt whipping around me, I wondered how many drivers might see me and be inspired to go without their wheeled cages for a day or two. It was such a freeing experience to realize that St Peters life does not require a car, and besides that it was a beautiful, warm spring day.

In church I think the sermon was titled "God's view of the environment". The pastor said this would be the first in a series on political topics so people would be ready for the November vote.

I do not remember anything about reducing waste or energy usage, conserving habitats or species. I do remember a video parody of a famous computer advertisement. Intelligent Design was a cool guy in a black t-shirt. Evolution was shorter, and took a ribbing from Intelligent Design for being so fat. The sermon concluded with a call to send money to a certain organization; just $25 would help the children in Africa.

Maybe it wasn't the Environment sermon, and that was the next week.

After the sermon a group of people did notice me unfolding the bike, so I gave a full demonstration of how quick it was to open and close.

"Yeah! Now just add a motor, heater and air conditioning and I'm there!" one of them chortled, and the entire group broke into laughter.

So much for my attempts at evangelism.

I parked my canoe at a public boat launch in Brandon, and biked into town. My first order of business would be to get myself looking respectable. I found a route into downtown, and I was surprised there was a downtown, with actual people in it, and that the street was wide and one-way.

Wow! I found an actual public transit booth and helped myself to a free map of the city which was an actual city and not just an adjunct to some other city. A couple of guys sitting on the sidewalk saw my bike.

"Hey, how'd you get such a tall seatpost!" one said.

I explained that it was a custom part, because this was a folding bicycle.

"So you can fit it behind your carseat?"

"Actually, my canoe. I'm canoeing so this was the only bike that would fold down small enough to fit."

I took my dirty laundry bag off the back and demonstrated how quickly I could fold it down to a small size.

"Cool," he said, "you can fit it behind your carseat!"

I unfolded the bike and asked him if there was some place nearby I could get a shower, because he looked like he would know. He pointed out a public health services building just a block away. I signed up for a shower there and asked if I could leave my bike somewhere, because I did not have a lock. The woman on-duty said I couldn't leave it inside, but she could lock it up until I was done. I told her it was a folding bike, that I had dropped out of a PhD program in math to canoe down the river.

I was sure she did not believe me.

I took a ridiculously long shower and shaved my beard. They had a computer in the building, and although they blocked email I was able to write down all the addresses I thought I would need. A different, younger woman was on-duty when I needed to retrieve my bicycle. She said she was told that it was strange sort of bike. I said yes, and when it was unlocked I gave her the demonstration. She asked me about my trip and flashed a healthy smile as she went back to her job.

There was a sports store nearby, so I thought I should pick up my own bike lock, to have more flexible options for leaving my bike around town. When I found out they were as much of a bike shop as anything else, I asked if they had any 16 x 1 3/8 inner tubes. The tubes I had brought with me on the trip were 16 x 1 3/4, which could be stretched to fit, but was probably one reason I had so much trouble fixing the tire back at Echo Lake. This is a very strange size of tube, and the tubes they gave me were nearly collectable due to age. The clerk asked me all about my bike and my trip, and came out to see it.

Zip, zip, I folded and unfolded it all over again for the clerk. An insurance agent, Russ, had seen the bike from across the street and came over to talk to me about it and my trip. When he heard I was canoeing, he invited me over to his office. He called up his friend Murray who had canoed Brandon to Winnipeg before.

We talked for awhile and it sounded like he made a good living for himself, largely dealing with farmers, he opened his office only by appointment and so kept whatever hours he liked.

Murray came in, and we talked shop while Russ checked his phone messages. He had canoed to Winnipeg in the spring, and said it only took 6 days. I was expecting to take three weeks in the fall, and he found that difficult to believe. Murray was disappointed I dropped out of my PhD program, but he himself had left a professorship to try to save a group working on fair trade goods. He had convinced Russ to join the boar of directors.

Murray did not have time to talk long, and headed out. Russ and I talked about getting together for lunch, but unfortunately, this never happened.

I went to a local laundromat and washed my clothes, and then headed back to the canoe. The main street was now full of people milling about checking out souped up cars, so I was forced to walk my bike through the crowd. Suddenly, I heard some boy shout out "Cool bike!" and found myself surrounded by people demanding to see it,

I gave my folding and unfolding demonstration for the last time that day.

As I rode back to the canoe I thought how different Brandon was from what I had expected. My first day I saw a real, live downtown area, and talked to everyone from loafers and service workers to insurance agents and professors. I was happy, it wasn't raining, I was in love with the city.

Day 75 ended: 49*51.246N, 099*58.663W

Day 74: Worries for another day

2008-10-15T09:31:00.000-05:00

My tent was high on the east bank under the trees, sheltered from both rain and morning sun. I was woken by some light, and read there in the tent. My naked feet weren't going anywhere until I knew they'd be safe, and I could wait all day if need be.

Leaves threw shadows on the tent, and I looked out. The sky was partly bright and partly blue. The sky was still chill under the canopy of trees. The sun shone on the water but the bank was still in shade while I cooked breakfast.

It was a slow start to a beautiful day. The sun was candy to my eyes starved by three days of clouds. The river was wide and slow under the windless air. Low slopes led up to trees which ruled the banks until they were done in by beavers or the widening river.

There was little in the way of wildlife. A few ducks, which are not so annoying on the wide river, a couple of heron. Many white-tailed deer thought themselves hidden near the river, and did not consider a canoeist especially threatening. There were many flies congregating about the canoe, my floating island, and I could not blame them. I had a bag and a half of garbage. The garbage had been soaked in rain for two days and now the sun was cooking it up. It smelled really good. I did swat several flies, though; I consider death a mercy to them.

The river made a series of sharp loops under a crop-duster which did the same. The sky started accumulating clouds and the river straightened.

I saw a ramp leading up from the river to a nice private campsite. It had a picnic table and a firepit, and tracks leading up to the road. There was a dirt patch that would have been great for a tent if it were a little higher. A canoe was there, and a motorboat, both turned upside down so they didn't fill with water or snow. The motorboat had a gas can on top. It would have made a good spot to co-opt for a night, but I pressed on.

A bit further I saw something like a roofless shanty. Loose boards defined an area, and used house doors, once painted burgundy, provided access. Inside there was a firepit, a chest of drawers, and some tables and chairs.

The exterior was festooned with signs. One identified the place as "Willy's fishing hole". Others seemed to be random warning signs: a large exclamation point on a yellow triangle, and a rectangle which read, "VORSICHT GRUBE".

I was feeling uncomfortable, I mean I really had to go, so I found the nearest tree and let loose. As I began to feel better, I looked up and saw a metal sign. The sign's letters were faded, but I could just make out "NO TRESPASSING OR HUNTING". I zipped up and continued on, highly amused.

I came to the confluence with the Little Saskatchewan River. I had seen this on the map,and hoped it would make good camping. The Little Saskatchewan has a gravel bed, and laid a huge gravel bank at the confluence. It was the best site I had since the Large Saskatchewan.

I set up my mesh tent as far from trees as possible to get an early waking. I left the rain fly off for the same reason, but kept it nearby. The sky had clouded up considerably during the day.

This was a well-used but not well-loved campsite. There is too much trash on the river for me to bother cleaning up all of it, but when it shows up on my campsite I take it personally. I could not be comfortable until I picked up every beer can, water bottle, bait container, and plastic bag. There was some strange paper wrappers which I determined to be fireworks; they also had to go, as well as the occasional cigarette butt laying around.

I was out of water, and although I should reach Brandon the next day, the Little Saskatchewan was clear and fast, so I pumped two liters of water through my filter. For each liter, I count "1... 1, 2... 1, 2, 3..." and so on, to prove to myself I am making progress. I guess on average I get to about 20, which comes to 5mL per pump.

With my chores accomplished, I was comfortable and my site was very beautiful. I sat down to write this very entry.

Day 74 ended: 49*52.313N, 100*07.169W

[LIVE - Day 115] Thief River Falls

2008-10-14T11:05:00.000-05:00

Hello all, from Thief River Falls, Minnesota. The journey has been getting strange, and I still haven't written anything up for Day 79 yet. There is likely to be a lapse, then, after day 78 goes up as I try to make my way to Bemidji. I hope that this delay is not excessively long.

Thank you for reading.

Day 73: Bootless

2008-10-14T09:31:00.000-05:00

It was still raining. I unzipped my tent to stick my head out, and the sky was just beginning to lighten in the dark, diffuse way of an overcast morning. I stayed warm inside, reading a gory story about a bullfighter.

There was a fence outside my tent, say six feet away. On the other side of the fence were cattle, still distressed about the presence of my tent. Imagining some farmer beyond the cattle also distressed about the presence of my tent, I could not stay. I believed by now anyone would forgive a tent one night anywhere, but I couldn't be sure about two.

The gloves and socks I had worn the previous day were still soaked and it was pointless to put them on. I made three barefoot trips over logs and mud, and over slippery rocks to the canoe.

I pushed off without breakfast. There was no visible break in the cloud-cover, and the rain was still coming down. I thought about the river adventure books I had read, and their descriptions of the miseries of wind and rain left no impression on me. Was it all there, and I, lying on my comfortable sofa inside, simply unimpressed?

No. I am just such a whiner! Always complaining about the weather, never accepting anything less than perfection. I whined about the Calgary winter each year, although I always knew it was there and that I was part of the bargain in moving up. And now I whine about a bit of wind, a bit of rain. I dreamed of drifting down a warm, sunny river with perhaps a light breeze, and any deviation from this was viewed as calamitous.

I forced my mind to form the thought "This is just the day I'm wanting." What is good to do in a canoe, in a rain that will not let up soon? Perhaps poetry. I couldn't write, but Calvin had impressed upon me that poems are written in the mind; you can write it at your leisure. I had never been good at this, but there I couldn't even hold two rhymes in my head. If my mind is too small, I must expand it.

My friend Cameron had been trying to encourage people to meditate, to hold your mind in a blank state for a period of time as a practice of self-discipline. The only time I tried this with him I laid back on the sofa and kept my mind clear for a second or two before flitting around among all my hopes, worries, and math problems. I finally achieved about twenty minutes -- in slumber.

But sitting on a canoe in the rain may be a good place to try this, to achieve peace with the weather.

It was a spectacular failure.

This won't do at all, I thought. I unfolded my feet; they were cold and numb.

I had had enough of the rain. Spiritual well-being can wait until my physical needs were cared for. I decided I would stop at the first place I could reasonably weather out the day.

The river ran nearly straight east and what wind there was supported this direction. The rain sometimes fell to a sprinkle, sometimes intensified, but averaged a strong drizzle. All that rain fell in the river, in the canoe, on me, and on the mudbanks I was watching. I drifted slowly through 3 1/2 miles of river, and that's 7 miles of mudbanks. The river needed a lake or two to flush out its system.

My hands were cold on the paddle, so I limited my paddling to what was necessary. After drifting for a couple of hours I crossed under a bridge, too high to offer any relief from the rain.

After the bridge my map showed a series of three meanders. I made a prediction about where I might see a rocky bank, on the outside of the first meander, and possibly the second.

The first meander had a good 20 feet or so of stones. Most of it was beside a docked pontoon boat, under a looming camper-van. On the top of the hill a huge house stood sentry, next to a significant warehouse. Pitching a tent there would have been an intrusion.

The second meander had only mud, as did the third. The river made a sharp kink about a mile later. If there was no good camping there, I knew there would be none until the end of the day.

The overcast sky was not static but fooled me with many false hopes of sun and blue skies. It was constructed of many layers. I did not notice when a low, dark cloud came between me and the higher layer of clouds blocking the sun, but when it went past the sky would brighten suddenly, and I would look about in wild expectation, only to see the same gray everywhere.

Just after the kink was a good bank of stones and boulders. I smashed into it, and then stumbled out of the canoe. My bare feet were too numb to feel the ground, so I watched my steps very carefully.

I carried my tent further up. There was a good shelter under the trees, and I pitched my rainfly, stowing the other gear I would need underneath it. I went back to cook my afternoon dinner, and only meal of the day. I needed to do this before warming up in my tent because I knew once comfortable I wouldn't want to leave. But still, I had to eat.

My windproof, waterproof matches were proving fireproof as well. My hands, grubby with rain, wind, and stew, messed up the friction surface of the matchbox, preventing lighting. Finally, I got one lit, and threw it in the stove, which sputtered to life. I put my pot on and waited a bit. It seemed to be taking a while.

I took the pot off and the stove was dead. I guess the fire didn't take. I had to get another match lit, and finally soup was on.

I made myself comfortable in the tent and read more Hemingway -- a prize-fighter who bet against himself.

The tent became quite bright. There was a clear shadow of a leaf on the wall. Clouds don't cast shadows, even if they are very bright. I stuck my head out. "Hello old friend! Sun, you might not have risen on the third day, but I hope you stick around to set!"

I was wrong about the shadow; it was not clear. A lucky coincidence placed a distant bunch of leaves between me and the sun, and the gaps between them formed a natural pinhole camera. As the wind blew, multiple layers of diffracted shadows turned about on my tent fly, like a kaleidoscope.

Day 73 ended: 49*53.622N, 100*14.832W

Day 72: The rain begins

2008-10-13T09:30:00.000-05:00

It rained.

All day, from before I got up until after I pulled over for the night.

I'd gone through this before so I had tried to be prepared. All my rain clothes were there in the tent, ready to wear in the morning so I wouldn't have to sit the day out in my tent any more. But there were still some things I lacked.

The journey was miserable without boots. As I drifted along, I saw a bridge over the river and decided to stop there to put on more layers of clothing. It was dry under there, so I could put on another jacket, a pair of gloves, and socks on my otherwise bare feet. Socks alone may not do much when you are sitting in a boat that is slowly filling with water, but the wet material is somewhat better than nothing at all.

As I changed two fishermen appeared, one on either side of the bridge. I struck up a brief conversation and continued on. If the rain really brings up more fish, I didn't notice, but sometimes I think sportsmen just love the misery as much as anything else.

I did notice that they were wearing boots.

Dark and light patches shifted about on the water as I floated on - some chemical or organism makes different areas of the water reflect differently in the rain. I studied these for quite a while, ascertaining that they really did move with the current, and were not mere reflections of objects on shore.

At the end of the day, a few "raindrops" drifted down slowly and erratically. If I wasn't ready for rain, I was surely not ready for the cold stuff.

Day 72 ended: 49*53.479N, 100*22.666W

Day 71: Murphy's wind

2008-10-12T09:30:00.000-05:00

The Assiniboine initially flows southward near the Manitoba border, but after Virden it takes a swing to the east, towards Winnipeg. The wind had been trying to push me in that direction for a week, ever since I got on to the river, and I knew that couldn't last.

The wind blew east that first day after Virden. There was violent rushing during the night as the four winds clashed for dominance, and in the morning I discovered my enemy had come out on top.

The river continued to meander, giving periods where paddling was necessary for progress, and others where I could take a more relaxed attitude, pull out a book and float along. The book that day would be the Oedipus plays by Sophocles.

I won't claim that the wind was fated to fight me, nor can I think did it desire to. Nature is not malicious, merely indifferent, and for each person inconvenienced by a westward wind another found it helpful.

There were few breaks in the day. I briefly surveyed the equipment gathered around a half dismantled bridge, I was scared off of a landing by some trailer campers, and criticized myself for not at least knocking before continuing on.

Meanwhile the sun stayed hidden behind the dense cloud cover, foreboding worse suffering yet to come.

Day 71 ended: 49*48.833N, 100*29.338W

Day 70: Quantum Adventure Theory

2008-10-11T09:28:00.000-05:00

How does an adventure change if it is being watched by otside observers?

I saw a gutted van parked high on a bank. There were multiple trails leading down the ten foot drop to a rocky bank below. People seemed to like my photos of abandoned cars on the side of the river, and there is certainly no lack of these. Dumping beats the towing fee, I guess. The geography here would mean a convenient little side adventure to take some closer photos.

It was an old Ford Econoline, and its windows had been shot away long ago. Whatever had been left of the engine was gone, and much of the dashboard torn out, but the stereo remained. I doubted it would work, and had no battery to test it. In the passenger seat I found a newspaper from March 22, 2005, and I easily believed that was the last time anyone had been there.

Part of one side had been spraypainted white, and then the words "THE HUT" painted over that in black. Some fun must have been had here. A large pit had been dugout nearby, and a bathtub placed inside. This bathtub had clearly been used to contain fires.

Another bathtub had fallen down the bank, being undercut by the river.

I considered spending the night there to live out whatever pent-up "Into the Wild" fantasies I might have, remembering how Chris finished his life in that "magic bus" in Alaska. But I remained a bit irked that when I started telling people about my plans for this trip, several people asked me if it was inspired by "Into the Wild". At first I was offended at the thought I was trying to reenact someone else's life, when the trip had been envisioned long before I read that book. Later, I was more offended at the thought I was trying to reenact someone else's /death/. I eventually got over that reaction. I've seen the movie, and read the book. They're cool, but it was still early and I decided I wanted to make a bit more distance before calling it a day.

Not too far afterwards, I stopped so I would have some time to write up some entries for [this] electronic journal. I felt guilty because I was three weeks behind, and further that this was obvious because I had just uploaded some things in Virden.

The documentation was having an effect on the trip itself. First, I got a bit closer to one of those abandoned cars than usual, next I was stopping earlier than usual to document some more.

Perhaps time is the greatest effect this documentation has had. It takes considerable time to type everything up, to upload it, to keep my computer charged and happy. But it also means that much of the time spent drifting in the canoe focuses on what things I want to write.

I wonder if my feelings, my actions, have changed as well? My boasting about past explorations has made me bolder in exploring the abandoned detritus about the river, that is a fact. The undercut house where I nearly lost my canoe? I probably would have left it alone otherwise.

All the talk about reserves and the mishaps I have there, and my ill understanding of the situation led me to pick up a book "The Unjust Society" in Virden. It's about the political situation of Indian in Canada in 1969. So, I now have an understanding 40 years out of date. The situation has improved a bit since then, or at least I hope so. This book could serve as a major piece of evidence in the devil's case against mankind.

Day 70 ended: 49*49.558N, 100*43.250W

Day 69: Missed confluence

2008-10-10T09:27:00.000-05:00

I biked into Virden because it had been more than two weeks since I had called anyone.

It had also been more than two weeks since I had bothered to clean myself up at all. I decided I would stop at the first sand or gravel bank to bathe myself, shave, and make sure the bike was operational. But no clean shores ever came; all I saw was mud. So as I drifted along I soaped myself down and stuck my limbs into the water to rinse. I clipped my nails, tried to shampoo my hair, shave the edges of my beard, and even trimmed my nose hair. That last bit is tricky when you are floating backwards down a river and apt to hit a log at any time.

When I reached the bridge that was to be my connection to the road, I had to walk through mud to secure the canoe, and bushwack through weeds up to the road. By the time I got there, my legs were muddy, my hands were dirty, even my beard and nose hair had regrown.

While there, I decided to check out the electronics store, hoping they would have XD cards for my camera, or extra plugs for my computer. A red sign said closed, and a hand-written notice on the front door announced they would be closed for the long weekend, August 30 through September 1. But there was light coming through the window, and it was August 29.

I called in to see if they were open, and a girl flipped the sign and let me in. I immediately asked if they had any XD cards, and she almost ran back to the memory section to check. It was only then I noticed how shockingly beautiful she was, and this was not from bush goggles but from a lifetime of admiring this kind of beauty.

She must have had a nice sandy beach to lay on at night, and fine gravel from which she could wade into the river to bathe herself. Her river must not be as muddy either -- certainly it smelled nicer. There must not be too much rain, I supposed she hung her clothes from the branches of a tree. And not much wind either, because her light hair curled evenly down to her shoulders. She must have a proper boat launch, with wooden staris down to the shore.

She had no XD cards. I had to leave the store, alone.

I went to the Ice Cream Island and ordered myself a bitter burger and sour shake; my stomach was growling. Must not be any sun on her beach, if her face is so white, I thought.

Day 69 ended: 49*51.155N, 100*49.389W

Day 68: What are you going to do about... dragonflies?

2008-10-09T09:27:00.000-05:00

Most insects live horrid little lives, and their deaths can't come soon enough. At every stage of their existence there are angels yearning to extend this mercy to them: frogs, swallows, even other insects. Dragonflies.

Dragonflies are different. So wise, so caring, and every once in a while they get caught on the surface of the water. When this happens I always try to scoop them up and give them a chance to dry off.

I saw one struggling hard, and it was so large I thought I might need a larger paddle to scoop him up. Somehow he held on to it without breaking it, and I flopped him down on the solar panel, he flapping those soaked wings like he was crazy. That's right, man, rage, rage against the dying of the light.

He analyzed the situation and realized he was no longer in immediate danger. Out of the water, and I had no appetite for insects. He stopped flopping around and looked at me with his face, all eyes. I looked back and saw the four worst wings ever. One was frayed nearly in half, another open in a hole. The third was crinkled horribly, and the last one shared all the problems of the other four.

He groomed himself with a foreleg. I knew nothing in my medical kit was likely to help. To every thing there is a season, friend. A time to live, a time to die. It almost seemed better to cast him back into the water, but I thought I would let him taste a few last minutes of life.

Besides, it is a nice and strange thing to float down the river with company, even if they are incapable of speaking back. The Assiniboine was filling out nicely, growing in width, growing in trees.

The dragonfly launched himself off the boat. He wobbledup and down but made a sure line to shore. I was shocked. He had only dried for a couple of minutes and I couldn't imagine those four wings keeping anything in the air, especially one as large as he was. I guess the control systems are more important than the surfaces.

Later that night I watched a female go down on the surface of the water, to fetch food or drink, but she was drawn in and thrashed on the surface. She wouldn't let herself be scooped by the paddle and so I had to grab her by hand. She was smaller, brown and yellow compared to the flashy blue and black coloring of the males. Her wings were intricate, like new.

She never calmed down in my presence and took off far too soon, for she immediately hit the water again. I paddled back, let her climb up on my hand, and this time she made it to shore.

Day 68 ended: 49*54.327N, 100*50.848W

Day 67: Reckless abandon

2008-10-08T09:27:00.000-05:00

I saw a house being undercut by the river; its foundation extended several feet over the cutbank, over air and over domestic garbage cluttering the bank: broken dishes and a lawnmower, treasures to some future archaeologist. I was feeling guilty for neglecting the exploration of the various abandoned buildings that populate the riverbanks, and especially so after boasting of my feats of exploration in my journal. I could not just go by this old house without letting myself down.

I pulled over to river right. There was about ten feet of shallow, sloping mud before the eight foot cliff of the cut. I left my canoe in the water, anchoring it by tethering a bungee about my paddle, which I stuck upright in the mud.

There was no easy place to climb the cliff just there. My sandals were slippery, filled with mud. My feet slipped all around in them so that mere walking threatened to twist my ankle. I took them off and spent the rest of the excursion barefoot, carrying them in hand if they would be necessary to cross broken glass or nails.

I found a slope up and walked to the building. I did not even have to touch the door, since some screen had been torn out. I just stepped over and in.

The floor was thick in dust, and the area around the stove was black, as if a fire had gotten a bit out of control there. I always imagine teen parties or reckless campers using these abandoned buildings. There were a couple of aluminum lawn chairs, their nylon webbing torn and twisted in this room, but nothing else was recognizable.

The next room had a sink with drawers on either side, a kitchenette. I opened a drawer and imagined what I saw were old dishrags, but it was hard to say. On the floor was an overturned chest of drawers, empty. Some floorboards had been taken up to reveal a large wooden box in the dirt beneath. This box was now empty. There was a couch lying there, and its foam was shredded into a layer of debris all over the floor.

There was a cheap grandmother clock on the floor, which might have worked if I wound it up. The only thing I thought unusual was an open roll of aluminum foil, surprisingly new.

I walked back to the door I entered and had a look in the washroom before I left. The toilet was at back of the house and now empties onto the bank below. I didn't need to go.

There were two shed not far away. One was full of rusted steel, likely old farm equipment, but it was hard to say, it was so far gone. The other shed was empty.

There wasn't anything terribly unique as far as abandoned buildings go.

As I walked back to the house, a gust of wind struck the canoe, and my paddle leaned over, allowing the bungee cord to slip off. The canoe was free, and moving.

I jumped down to the lower bank and grabbed my paddle. The wind and current pushed the canoe about as fast as I could walk alongshore, but overturned trees and piles of branches slowed my progress, and the mud was no help, either. I hoped the canoe would get caught in the stumps of old trees in the bend up ahead. These were on river right, so I would just be able to scramble across the branch piles and into the boat.

The wind had other plans. The canoe found some muddy shallows at river left, and was stuck on shore. There was no bridge or ford nearby, and I knew what I must do.

I stripped down to my underwear, leaving my clothes in a heap on the grass. I took some deep breaths and prepared myself. I am a weak swimmer and holding the paddle in my hand made me even worse. Halfway out I thought I should have left the paddle and used the spare when I got to the canoe.

I was fortunate the river was not wide at this point, maybe fifty to sixty feet across. My feet touched the muddy bed, I waded over to the boat, and I paddled back to my clothes. I felt surprisingly clean after my swim.

Day 67 ended: 50*04.113N, 100*54.407W

Day 66: The Assiniboine

2008-10-07T12:32:00.001-05:00

The first thing I saw when I got to the Assiniboine was an island, that ended in a sandy point. I was enraptured; I thought this new river would relieve all the Qu'Appelle's troubles. I even noted that on one section there was wind against me, but the current was still strong enough to push me forward through it.

These ideas were soon to be corrected. When the wind has it out for me, it can easily throw up foot high waves to impede my progress. I felt like I had hardly gotten anywhere when the rain started, just a sprinkle.

I found a rocky shore, but there was still an inch or two of soft mud through the rocks. It didn't seem meaningful to stop there; the mere presence of rocks could not be taken as a promise of cleanliness. I continued.

The rain continued as well, it was growing in strength. A bridge crossed the river, aloiw bridge like those early on the Qu'Appelle. It was just high enough to be ducked. If the water were a couple inches higher I might have needed to get out and guide the canoe under. If it were a foot higher I would have needed to portage.

The rain was coming down and I saw no rocks, no sand, no islands to stop on. I turned my attention towards finding good tree cover to shelter me from the rain. Some cow-stomped mudbank would have to service, but when I stepped out I was up to my knees in mud.
There wasn't any point in going anywhere else. I ferried my things up under the trees and established camp. I removed as much mud as possible by rubbing some sweet-smelling weeds against my skin. There was nowhere to drag the canoe aground so I had to simply tie it to a tree, leaving it sitting in the water.

The wind roared impressively during the night, and even my well-sheltered tent shuddered in it. I had a mental image of my canoe drifting out to the middle of the water, and sinking end first, like the Titanic, but sans orchestra. The clouds covered the moonless sky so I could not check on it until morning.

Day 66 ended: 50*08.281N, 101*03.633W

Day 65: First night on the Assiniboine

2008-10-06T12:32:00.000-05:00

The moon was on its way out.

I had been sore at the waning moon for some time. The waxing moon gives light when I want it most, at the end of the day. I can push disembarking just a little bit longer, knowing i can set up my tent or cook by its white light.

The waning moon gives a false sunrise, waking me and dogs early. I don't want to get up before the sun dries the world again, so I suffer the howling, roll over and cover my head until the real sunrise comes.

I heard the beaver playing in the water and was concerned about my canoe, filled to the gunwhales with snacks and food. I left my tent to guard my territory and forgot all about the beavers. All the stars and constellations were hung out brightly. It was a gift of the waning moon.
When that dying moon did rise, two coyotes did as well, and they were near. One howled, while the other sniffed and grunted, menacingly. Further there were more howls. I remembered Eddy Harris's violent confrontation with wild dogs in the South, and wondered what I would do if a pack of them did try attacking the tent. I unsheathed my axe. I rustled my tent and through my helmet in the direction I heard them. These antics only created seconds of silence before Grunter and Howler began again in earnest.

When I could no longer abide the thought of a grown man afraid of such small dogs, I grabbed my axe and stood up outside the tent. The world went silent, waiting to see what man would do.
All was dark grey as the diffuse light of the wan moon competed with the stars. The moon uselessly pointed to where the sun would rise in a few hours. I stumbled over stones and cattle tracks to my canoe, and grabbed two flashlights.

I pointed my lights where I had heard the voices, and saw nothing. What could I do, hunt them in the night? They were behind the trees, and I wouldn't know how to get there. I laid down in the tent, and as soon as I did, the coyotes started again, but further. They were sauntering away. I imagined Howler was saying, "Soory about that. My bad."

Silence reclaimed the area, except for the distant lowing of a cow. I returned to my dreams.

Day 65 ended: 50*14.336N, 101*08.589W

Day 64: The two best guys in St Lazare

2008-10-05T12:32:00.000-05:00

Based on my deteriorating breakfast experiences, I was becoming concerned about having enough food to reach Virden or Brandon safely. There was a small town, St Lazare, near the confluence. I tied up the canoe under a highway bridge and hiked the mile or so into town.
The highway was main street and as I walked I saw Decorby Family Foods, a grocery store, closed Sundays. Since it was Sunday, I kept walking. There were a couple of restaraunts, a repair shop, and a small convenience store. In front of the convenience store were gas pumps, but I didn't see the prices advertised. There were also three men talking.

The nearest one was almost sixty, and wore a black jacket over his white shirt. I interrupted the conversation.

"Is that the only grocery store around here?" I said, indicating Decorby's.

"Yes", said the nearest, "but he just drove past here. He drives a silver pickup, oh, quarter-ton... half-ton?"

We could wait for him to drive by, or walk over to his house. This seemed like a lot of trouble to me, certainly rude, to track down the owner of a closed store, but I let the man lead me to "Benny".

I bluntly asked him his name: "Robert LaClare". And mine? "Kevin". But a single name, appropriate for a large city where who you are is defined by what you, and only you, do and say, is incomplete in a small town. You are not just yourself, but a representative of a family, a representative of a nationality.

"Oh, Saff, what is that? English, Scottish maybe?" he said.

"Swedish, actually, but it doesn't mean anything in Swedish."

He apologized on behalf of the other two men he had been talking to. I noticed how they had turned away when we started talking, to exclude me and him from their ongoing conversation. I had interpreted more as personal quirks than rudeness.

"It's okay, everyone's different," I said.

"Sometimes in these small towns," he said, "people aren't comfortable talking to strangers, but they're good guys. I can just meet someone and its like I've known them ten, twenty years!"
We tracked down Benny while avoiding two "drunks" Robert didn't want to run into. "But they're good people."

Robert introduced me to Benny and said I now knew the best two guys in town.

"Well, one of them anyway," Benny said.

Benny was Ben Decorby, the owner of the grocery store. He drove me the block back there in his silver pickup of uncertain tonnage, while a pop country song played on the radio. He got the hook stuck in his head and hummed it while he opened the store up for me and I picked out my groceries.

"Do you need a receipt?" he said.

"No."

"I'll just do it this way, then. It will be faster anyway." He started totaling up the groceries by hand, rounding to dollars.

I worked out the sum more exactly in my head to keep him honest, until I noticed he was giving me a healthy discount, which shamed me to stop. The total came to $50, which I paid with a single bill. He started asking if I needed anything else.

"Need some water?" indicating the bottles, stacked in 24-packs by the door.

"No that's alright. I've got water." I was running a bit low but I had my water filter and didn't want to deal with a lot of empty bottles.

"Spitz?" Sunflower seeds.

"No, I'm okay."

He got the idea that I was going to refuse everything if he asked, and went over to a dark corner of the store, just taking things off the shelves. Meanwhile a thin, weathered man in a red flannel shirt took advantage of the unusual store hours to buy groceries, or just a block of cheese. He waited at the register.

"Hello," I said.

No response.

Ben came by and added a box of Wagon Wheels and snack bars to my pile, and went back into the store.

"Hello," I tried again to the waiting man, again to no response.
Benny brought over a couple Powerades, crackers, and a water bottle. We packed it all up in two cardboard boxes, and he rang up the man's cheese. As the weathered man walked out he turned to me.

"Good evening," he said.

"You too!" I said, surprised.

Ben drove me out to the bridge, and we took the groceries down to the canoe. He watched as I unpacked everything into my canoe. The boat was piled high with gear because my tent and bag were too wet to pack up in the morning, so were stacked on top of everything else to dry off.

"No alcohol?" Ben asked.

"I've heard too many stories about how boating and alcohol don't mix. You know, there's a big weir in Calgary and every year a couple guys get drunk and go over it."

I arranged everything in the canoe to make room for myself, and recovered the rope.

"You ever thought about just getting away from it all?" I said.

He shrugged. "Well."

I scooted off and he climbed back up to his truck.

I suppose Robert is right about people being different in small towns and big cities. I have been a suburbanite, a student in a University town, and lived a short walk from the downtown of a city of a million people. Each one of these environments has shaped my values, my actions, my identity.

Now I am a river traveller, and I can see developing in myself similar qualities to others I've read; even qualities I thought myself wise in criticizing in them.

I especially disliked how at the end of every book, the author seems desperate to get off the river, to get it all over and done, as if the river is some terrible thing that must be escaped. Yet, I found myself hurried to get off of both Lake Diefenbaker and the Qu'Appelle. Maybe this feeling of moving on, making progress, getting to the next thing, is too essential of a human characteristic to overcome.

Then there is the "efflusive praise for minor acts of kindness" which I had mocked. Well,it really is surprising how much smoe people want to help. A math PhD is much more difficult than floating down the river, but I got hardly any help with that. A river journey is a story people want to be part of, and can. If you want to be a bum, it's best to be a tramp; tramp by bike, scooter or boat and you'll always find people wanting to help.

Floating down the river, there is sometimes little to think about but these small kindnesses I cannot repay.

It is frightened to be changed, and changed into what?

"You sound like Kathy!" my Calgary roommates remarked when I first called back, after only a couple of weeks. Kathy is a calm but passionate, carefree explorer in the backwoods of Alberta. She encouraged me in this trip; she gave me her water filter.

If floating down the river makes me more like Kathy then this "efflusive praise" seems like a small price to pay.

Thank you, Robert LaClare, for welcoming me to St Lazare and leading me to "Benny". Your easy-going, friendly manner is an inspiration.

And thank you, Ben Decorby, for your generosity of time and food, which kept me going a long way. Your kindness will never be forgotten.

Okay, that is laying it on a bit thick. Still, they're good guys. The two best in St Lazare, I'm sure.

Day 64 ended: 50*23.404N, 101*15.805W

Day 63: Scrambled pancakes

2008-10-04T12:32:00.000-05:00

The sun was unslowed by clouds and cut its way through the tree cover. There was no evidence of the previous day. Everything was already dry. The ground was dry to my feet, the trees were dry and not even dripping, the sky was dry, and some clothes I hung out to wash in the night were dry as well. The day of rain could have been a dream if my rumbling stomach didn't remind me I'd only had one meal.

My breakfasts have not changed much since I started out. Sometimes I cook up oatmeal, and sometimes I just launch the boat and munch on snackfood. I did, however, add scrambled eggs to my diet. I have verified that eggs can go at least a week unrefrigerated. I just crack open three or four of them into my pot and stir as it cooks; just eggs with no oil or milk. Since I don't much clean the pot after meals anymore, last night's supper adds its seasoning, and then I also have salt, pepper, and dill available.

The morning sun found me without oatmeal, without snacks, and without eggs. As an experiment I had picked up some Aunt Jemima pancake mix at the last store. I wasn't sure what I could do in a small pot, but I thought maybe I could dump a bunch in there, mix in water, and stir it as it cooks, just like for scrambled eggs. Except this would be "scrambled pancakes".
Well, I stirred and stirred, and it started bubbling, but nothing seemed to be hardening. I turned up the heat a bit, and got a couple corners of the pot to start making pancake. I mixed these lumps in with the rest of the goop, and the stove stopped; it ran out of fuel.

My little fuel bottle was dry and so to get more I'd have to fix the large jug out of the canoe. This wouldn't be fun with only mud to stand in. I decided I would have to eat my creation, which was really just warm, wet pancake mix.

I did start eating it, and I was able to keep it down. It was essentially just flour water, right? It had the effect of filling my stomach and possibly giving me some calories as well. Still, there was no denying it. I managed to eat most of the pot before pouring the rest into the river.

It was the worst breakfast ever.

Day 63 ended: 50*26.273N, 101*21.503W

Day 62: Rainbound

2008-10-03T12:32:00.000-05:00

It was raining when I woke up.

There was a barbed wire running on the ground just outside my tent, and beyond it the drop-off to the river below. On the other side were a series of well-worn trails. If humans hadnot made them, they had certainly used them. It was raining, and the rain was either loud enough to mask the noise of the mining operation a mile over the trails, or the rain was persistent enough to prevent those mines from working.

There had been numerous evening showers on my trip so far, but this was the first time it was raining when I woke up. My rain pants were stowed in the canoe, soaked as it would turn out. It would be uncomfortable to canoe with soaked legs.

I was quite busy in that little shelter of mine. The previous night I had been thinking that the two-person tent was overkill. If I had brought a one-person tent, I could have been more flexible, able to pitch on smaller patches of flat land.

Now it was wonderful. I typed up four journal entries and almost completed my latest reading of Tom Stoppard's Arcadia in spacious comfort. Worried I would be cooped up all day, I slid down the muddy slope to my canoe to see what I could.

The sky was overcast with no sign the rain might let up. The canoe was a bit swamped and I imagined the river creeping higher and higher to swallow it. I checked the GPS, and it said it was only 8:30. I could wait before setting out.

I felt fortunate to have a sheltered campsite in a high location. And it was surprisingly warm inside the tent where I read and wrote as I waited. When I checked the GPS again, it read 10:30, and then -- brzzzzp -- flashed forward three hours. It was suddenly afternoon.

I found a decent walking stick and carefully slid down the slope to my canoe. I had a quick dinner in the rain, and bailed the boat a liter at a time. The path I had been taking was now far too slippery to climb, so I had to find a different way, climbing up the weeds to the top.

I walked the trail to my tent and got in. I wasn't going anywhere that day.

It was raining when I went to sleep.

Day 62 ended: 50*29.566N, 101*31.446W

Day 61: Twisted metaphors

2008-10-02T12:32:00.000-05:00

The Qu'Appelle is so blessed with meanders that I have seen a number of cut-throughs as well, in all stages of development. When I have the opportunity to cut through a meander I feel great, like I have saved considerable time and distance over my map. This feeling even even outlasts the remembrance that all the other meanders have grown longer to make up the difference.
My happiest memory of one of these cut-throughs was from earlier on the Qu'Appelle. I had acquired about three families of mallards in the course of an hour, and had been unable to shake them, they continued to lead me raising bedlam as they went. I came to a short meander and saw that it had a narrow cut-through, just wide enough for my canoe. It was still immature enough that the main current, and the ducks, continued around the bend. When I got through to the other side, there were the ducks still on the outside of the meander. When they saw me they turned around and swam upstream. It was a joyous occasion.

In the previous couple of days I had seen a few channels that may have been cut-throughs, but had not taken them. I couldn't see to the end, and was worried they would become too narrow or shallow for my boat to pass. At least once this was fortuitous, as I saw a moosess and her two calves I wouldn't have seen otherwise. I have not seen many moose this trip, and I'm very happy when I do.

I finally came to one that seemed to have some flow, and reasoned that it was narrow, but traight. The main channel was wide but twisted. Heaven demands that I take the cut-through.
I went thirty feet before the canoe just stopped in the channel. There was mud all around, everywhere, and my boat was big and stuck. I had to get out to help it along. I stepped out in the pool ahead to try pulling it along. Splash! That was deeper than I expected and I was soaked to the armpits. I took off my wet clothes and climbed the mud beside the boat. I rocked the boat to widen the channel. After some effort I was able to get it free, although there were still a couple more places I had to yank it through the channel.

It took far longer than just floating the meander. Sometimes, I guess you should just go with the flow.

Further down, there was a terribly thin meander with just a strip of land holding it together. There was a beaver lodge on the point of this meander. I noticed that the water must have been higher earlier in the year, and had begun to cut through the strip of land in a couple of places, down to about a foot or two higher than the river itself. The beavers must have been intent on protecting their investment, and had filled these gaps with sticks to put off the inevitable.
With all this erosion going on the river became quite muddy again. Since Round Lake I had grown accustomed to sleeping on decent rock bars, but now the banks were all layered in mud. After looking all evening for a clean campsite, I had to leave the canoe on a mudbank and climb my stuff up an eight foot slope to a lat, dry spot under some trees.

This proved to be a fortuitous location.

Day 61 ended: 50*29.566N, 101*31.446W

[LIVE 102] Winnipeg!

2008-10-01T17:06:00.000-05:00

Hello everyone,

I have been in Winnipeg for almost a week. I am going to try to leave it tomorrow, around noon.

I haven't gotten anything uploaded yet this time, due to restrictions on the library computers. I have to around post 78 ready if I can figure out how.

Thank you for reading.

Day 60: Get it over with

2008-10-01T12:32:00.000-05:00

The Qu'Appelle was making its last effort to win me over. Moose walked by my tent in the morning, as I lay camped out on a gravel bar. It would have been incredible if this was not the Qu'Appelle.

I just wanted to get it over with. I couldn't take it any more.

At the beginning of the trip I was so sure of how an adventure must be handled. If I was ever bored, or got tired of it, why I'd just load the canoe up on the trailer, get on my bike and go. At the very least I would call for help, to be taken away. If I couldn't enjoy it, what was the point? In that way I hoped to safeguard against this feeling.

That had become so foreign. Reality had completely changed. Those thoughts were theoretical, not grounded in this new reality. What do I do? What is life if not packing in the morning, paddling at mid-day, and scrambling for camp at night? Breaking such a routine in the middle of the trip would be as psychologically difficult as starting the trip in the first place. It was doable, surely, but a change seemed even worse than struggling through the last few miles on this never-ending river.

Even small changes are difficult. Early on in the trip, my knots were atrocious. I was quite comfortable using improvised knots, grannies and shoelaces. I knew these knots were bad for some reason, and certainly it sometimes took me awhile to make enough loops that the thing would hold -- and then there was the time to get it all loose again. I knew my curmudgeon was waiting to teach me his knots, but I wasn't ready yet. It would be a major change in procedure. Of course, when I finally did learn the proper knots I couldn't imagine going back. So much quicker to tie and untie, and more secure as well. It's just the change that is hard.
I knew I would eventually have to leave the river, but all I needed to do to get off the Qu'Appelle would be to suffer out these last couple of days. As bad as it migh be, trying to bike out was too inconceivable.

In these thoughts I quit the day early. I rejuvenated myself reviewing my maps, reading, and writing. That freed me from worries of time, space, and distance.

This is a constant struggle that can never be fully resolved. I exist in both present and future, and must care for myself in both these places. The more I tend to myself in the present, the more the season will advance and the harder the future becomes. But if I live only for the future I might never get there.

Day 60 ended: 50*31.252N, 101*40.816W

Day 59: Good... or evil?

2008-09-30T12:36:00.000-05:00

The Qu'Appelle River. Good... or evil? Is it a good river suffering from human indifference, or is it primarily an evil river bent to seduce the unwary? Shall we spend time and money to save the river, or is it best put down? I don't know. Let's talk about herons.

Good... or evil? Undeniably good. Even a lousy day float can be saved by a heron sighting, because they are shy, graceful birds rarely seen outside the river. I have seen a number of great blue heron on the lower Qu'Appelle. Their territory does not have much overlap with pelicans, or strangely enough, great horned owls. They are only blue in flight. Standing on the bank they are thin and grey, like a large stick.

Unlike pelicans, it is unusual to see more than one heron at a time. I suppose they areas shy around others as they are around humans. It seems to be motion that sets them flying more than anything else. They don't seem to actually hear my approach before I round the bend. I have made some sad conclusions from this, which I hope prove to be false. Birds don't have visible ears; surely their hearing is not as good as ours. If the heron doesn't hear me what else might birds not hear? I have a terrible fear that the rich melodies of songbirds are not fully appreciated by their mates, but only by us.

If it's motion that scares them, I imagine that staying still I must resemble a log floating through the river. If you think that's silly, maybe you haven't spent enough time on the river. Certain ducks will lay low and still to mask themselves as logs. I thought this was silly at first -- clearly, it's a duck. However, I have now seen actual, bona fide logs that look like that. I have seen logs that look like muskrats, stereos, dishwashers, fishermen, and canoes. Trees grow queerly and water gnarls them until any shape can be obtained. Now anything floating slowly in the water, or sitting motionless on the bank, is at considerable suspicion of being a log.

I once thought I saw a heron standing on the bank. However, the object made no motion, and I was paddling, so I knew it must be a log. A surprisingly heron-shaped log, but a log nonetheless. I continued paddling toward the next bend. The log bent down, ate a fish, unpacked two huge wings, and flew around the corner.

When I came around the corner there were two herons standing there, and my log still in flight over them. The herons were spooked by my appearance, and they launched into the sky as well. I had never seen three herons at once before, and I don't think they knew how to act in such large company, either. A couple of them settled into the tops of trees, and it is very funny to watch these large birds perch on the high branches. The tree bows considerably under the weight. I suppose herons are too large to fit onto the lower branches.

There, friends, is my case that herons are good. Make of it what you will, and ask yourself, is a river more than the sum of its birds and twists?

Day 59 ended: 50*28.947N, 101*47.859W

Day 58: Crossings and fences

2008-09-29T12:35:00.001-05:00

I cooled down significantly by the day after the private causeway. The truth is, most of the people in this area were very respectful of paddlers. Many fences were just a single electric wire, high enough on one side to underpass without ducking.

Other farmers had solved the problem of crossing the river by piling up boulders for equipment to roll over. They put up signs saying "CROSSING" on either side to warn of this kind of structure. I am not sure a sign is really necessary, but it shows they were thinking of me, and helped explain the mystery that I had thought of as man-made weirs. The purpose is not in stopping the water, but in crossing it.

I don't mind these kinds of crossings. They are usually fun to paddle over, or at least easy to push the canoe through, and I imagine the fish have a better time navigating them, too.

And the river after Round Lake is often beautiful, well-treed, well-moosed. The water is clearer and there are frequent shale banks to stop on.

While happy in these thoughts I came across one of the worst fences I had seen. Three barbed wires straight across with frequent posts. I was fortunate to be just able to squeeze the canoe under on the side, while ducking through the fence on shore.

Maybe it is a good river, worth saving in places, and where else but the section after Round Lake? It's too bad that just a couple inconsiderate people can ruin so much of the river.

Day 58 ended: 50*31.395N, 101*55.356W

Day 57: The last voyageur?

2008-09-28T12:33:00.000-05:00

To imagine yourself the first person at the scene of a virginal land, the first to reach some destination and take in its bounty of promise. That is the great white wilderness myth. If it had any great value to me I suppose I ought to have studied the history of the rivers I travel. I gather from conversation and asides in books that I am accidentally retracing an old fur-trading route between the west and Montreal, by French voyageurs. I suppose I could have packed a couple pelts from the Indian trading post in Banff and amazed myself around every bend in the river, exclaiming that surely this must be what those men first saw so long ago.

The reality of the river makes this myth inaccessible to me. The Qu'Appelle is a drainage ditch between pastures, with faint memories of wild glory scattered about. It is choked by dams and fences, and now a driveway as well! I was shocked to see the river just end abruptly, before my eyes, with no channel continuing anywhere. I thought I must have taken a wrong turn somewhere, but no, as I drew near I saw that someone had simply laid a concrete road straight across the river, with nothing more than 6 inch pipes at intervals to allow current through.

I am forced to make new myths. I am not the first man, but the last, to make this particular voyage. The voyageur route was made possible by a certain political situation that lasted for a finite period of history. I have heard that the United Arab Emirates, being the descendents of nomadic peoples, have enshrined the right to travel and make camp in their constitution. Here, the law will soon protect only highway travelers and landowners will fence, gate, and dam every river in their backyards. As I understand it, and I hope I do not, the law in Florida allows landowners to shoot anyone on their property without first ascertaining if they be burglars or wayfarers. Who will take this route if every mile brings a new wall across the river, and setting foot on land to pee or sleep risks death without vengeance? It will never be possible to obtain advance permission from the hundreds or thousands of people who claim some toehold on the banks of the river, especially when risk and weather make a schedule unaffordable.

There continue to be people who push themselves to set new records, to be the first to do wonderful new things. The first to go around the world on human power. The first to unicycle across the United States. Perhaps when we run out of interesting firsts, people will begin competing to be the last ones to perform feats made impossible due to changes in political and atmospheric climates.

Being last carries with it a certain responsibility, so I will respect the life and history of the river by keeping clean camp and recording its last words, whatever they may be. And there may yet be hope, so I can lean over the patient Qu'Appelle and beg it to fight for life. I recorded the coordinates of this river-strangling driveway and took photographs. I can take these to the authorities, or paddlers, or fishermen, and ask if this is what is to become of the river. If so, I hope that day comes quickly, so I can be not only the last to paddle the entire river, but also the first to drive the entire length.

I put the canoe up on its wheels and rolled it over the road. Getting back in, I noticed thin blood dripping from my left foot; two leaches had attached themselves and drunk their fill as I made portage.

Day 57 ended: 50*31.469N, 102*09.210W

Day 56: On Round Lake

2008-09-27T12:31:00.000-05:00

Oh, Round Lake isn't round; they just call it that. Out of hope, maybe, or spite. It pocks with points and bulges with bays, and looks rather more like a smashed ant than a round. Its shape must be forgiven because it is politics which mars it most.

Round Lake shares the happy circumstance of most lakes on the Qu'Appelle, with the south side in reserve land and the north an economic free zone. So these lakes grow grand cottages on one shore looking across to wooded hills on the other. The value of these cottages does not depend solely on view but also the water level, so the pleasure craft can be readily launched from lakeside garages.

Thus these lakes are dammed. To dam a lake, though, you need the permission of every flooded one, and only one side has cottages. The Canadian government, in respect of the treaties, must obtain Indian permission to flood the land. Arrangements have apparently been made on all but Round Lake, where the old dam stands open.

I do not know the reasons for this, but the white people I've met have all but accused the natives of extortion. "There were some nasty things that happened in the residential schools," said one, "but they need to understand that these treaties aren't written in stone."

Another told me, "They say it was flooding their pastures, but there's no cows on those pastures!" I certainly hadn't seen any. "It's better for them, too."

I can sympathize with these people. A lakeside cottage is a significant investment, and they hadn't considered the risk that the lake retreat. So what can they do?

Their arguments, however, are very unconvincing to me. Abrogating the treaties breaks the only semblance of legal ownership they have to the land, anyway. It simply says, yes, we will just take the land because you are powerless to stop us. And I do not trust someone who claims to know what is best for the natives; that is how this whole mess started.

In lieu of the Indian side of this disagreement, which is unavailable to me, let me offer my opinion as a self-interested river traveler. The lake was low, but not shockingly so, not enough to make a round lake crooked or vice versa, just enough to expose some nice sand and boulders for me to pull my canoe up on. No dam meant no portage and no risky dam shoot.

I imagine that the more natural ebb and flow of the water creates a healthier ecology as well. I never saw water on the Qu'Appelle so clear as after Round Lake. If I had a spear I could easily have killed a dozen fish a day, just looking down out of my canoe. I could nearly catch them on my paddle.

I guess all the mud and silt empties out into the lake. The clear river is alive with ferns and weeds, an entire world under the water, a world that is inaccessible to those of us just skimming the surface. The green weeds swaying back and forth are like the hairs of sirens, luring hapless river rats to break that surface once and for all.

Day 56 ended: 50*31.737N, 102*20.369W

Day 55: What are you going to do about... your head?

2008-09-26T12:28:00.000-05:00

There was no wind so I made straight for the dam, using a mixture of J and C strokes to maintain a constant direction without changing sides. I hoped my wake, a perfect "V", would impress Svein and Maryanne, who kindly saw me off with a cup of coffee and helpful gifts: pens, a knife, and a tiny multitool.

There were five people standing on the dam's pathway as I approached, a man with his two sisters and two sisters-in-law. I briefly explained what I was doing, and one of the women asked me if I at least had a hat and sunscreen.

She wanted to see me try to shoot the dam, if I thought I could. They offered to help me portage otherwise. With this group of people waiting and willing to help, the risks of the dam were multiplied. The two foot drop looked like four, the healthy, voluminous flowof water looked like a deadly whirlpool ready to swallow me in. I only understood that later; sitting alone in the water past the dam I would see that it was easier than the one I shot in Fort Qu'Appelle. But now I deemed the dam too "scary" to run and accepted the extended family's offer to portage, so they came down to my canoe.

"That's no hat, that's a pith helmet!"

Oh no. That brings us to the continuing saga of the hats.

I am a forgetful person, so it is necessary that I put this down despite the heartbreaking effects it may have on some readers. In a year I will remember just the names and certain features of some rivers. In two years, a vague recollection of some kind of kayak or perhaps canoe trip I took. In three years, if anyone asks me about making this trip I will respond with disbelief about the entire thing.

My friend Calvin has used this to his advantage in the past. He has said that to convince me of anything it is only necessary to claim that I once said that very thing in the past. I know he has done this several times to make me believe things that seemed quite doubtful at the time, which I have now forgotten. But I know that I can become easily excited about some concept, discuss it at length, and forget it by the next day when I taste the next piece of mind candy.

That diversion is necessary because I will criticize Calvin further down, but he may forgive me if I mock myself first. Only time will reveal who will have the last hurrah in this story which I am now finally going to tell.

Two nights before my departure Dave and Sarah, father and daughter, asked me if I had a hat yet. I said no, so they decided to pick me up in the morning and we would go hat shopping together.

Calvin could not believe it when they pulled up. It was not mere skepticism, it was a frontal assault on everything he believed, as though someone had just produced evidence to him showing up is down or the world is a simulation.

"What? They wouldn't drive up here just to get you a hat. Tell me the real reason!"

Calvin had, sometime before, considered offering me his grandfather's helmet, used in some important conflict which totally escapes me. He may even have used fairly certain language about giving me this hat. I cannot know, because I am skeptical about Calvin's predictions of future events, even those within his control.

This has gotten me in some trouble at least twice.

My friend Karen came up to Calgary one week, and one evening we called "Music Night", inviting people to come over with instruments and we made strange sounds, had some laughs, and maybe even got some music out of it. Calvin was excited about doing this again while Karne and her violin were still there, and talked about having another one Friday afternoon.

I knew, because I knew Calvin, that this was the type of thing he would talk about but would never actually happen. Karen did not, and when Friday afternoon drew near she tried to impress upon me the importance of returning home, that I was insulting my friends by running late. Now, I remember giving a lengthy explanation that the event was impossible, no phone calls had been made, no emails sent, that this was all Calvin's fancy. She remembers this explanation as a shrug and a sigh, and was upset with me for some time later, even though the house was entirely abandoned when we arrived.

Calvin did get me once, because the correspondance was in email. Calvin, Clement, and I had talked for awhile about making a trip to Vancouver to see sights and friends. Calvin seemed quite excited about it, talking at length about how the real way to go was to take the bus because it was such a beautiful drive. As the dates approached, I was trying to get firm information from Calvin about booking the bus tickets, but his attitude had suddenly shifted. He didn't want to go all of a sudden, and why take the bus when you can just fly? I was pretty shocked. Maybe I missed the tone in the email, the underlying belief that this just wasn't going to happen. Clement had already booked flights. I managed to get the same plane out with him, and a later one back. Sometime during the week Calvin had even said that maybe he would still meet us out there, but I don't think Clement or I took that possibility very seriously.

That is all to say that while Calvin may have a firmer grip on the past than I, I was not going to believe he would lend me the hat until I had it in hand.

Dave, Sarah, and I drove all around Calgary looking for Tilley hats. This is a Canadian brand designed for marine use, and Dave is quite fond of his. We went to the store that used to sell him, and the proprietor suggested three places. The first one didn't exist, and he had the second one confused with a gay cruise line. After driving all over the city in humor and confusion I finally had my two hats: the Tilley and the pith helmet.

I said I might wear the hats on alternate days, but early on in the trip I found the Tilley too comfortable to give up. Moreover, it had a chin strap that held it firmly in place those very windy days. The strap on the helmet was too long, and it wasn't adjustable, so it didn't feel as secure.

But I think we made a strategic mistake when purchasing that hat. I have a preference for growing my curly hair out long and wild, but my trip began soon after my sister's wedding. My hair was shorn to show respect for that day, and still near its nadir on that silly day we bought the hat.

After nearly two months on the river, my hair was inching towards its more natural state. I do admit to using an off-brand shampoo on those few occasions when a shower has been available. This shampoo promises it is ideal for "Richness and Volume" or "R&V" by the label. This claim is highly doubtful, but certainly unnecessary for my hair which is naturally resplendent in "V". The Tilley hat was becoming too small for my head.

So I had just switched to using the pith helmet. It did fly off the first day in the wind, but I recovered it. I have worn it since then but gone hatless when the wind threatens to tear it off or strangle me with the chin strap.

Calvin, you have won a minor victory after your initial setback, but do not think the saga has ended.

It has only just begun.

Day 55 ended: 50*32.413N, 102*32.317W

Day 54: For love or money

2008-09-25T12:25:00.000-05:00

It was a day of rest at Crooked Lake, spent in the usual way. I showered, washed my clothes in the sink, recharged my batteries, read and wrote.

In my writing I reflected on a dream I had in the night. I was magically transported to Calgary, which promised me everything a city might offer. I could rent a large dilapidated iron foundry for $29 a month. It might lack some domestic conveniences at first, but the extra cash on hand would go a long way to relieve that. Women would fall at my feet, the air would be always clean and never too cold.

I turned this down for some vague feeling I should really be on the river instead. Who can say if I turned down a devilish temptation or providence's call out to a wayward son?

The $29, though. Dreams about money bother me. They usually come in a particular form. I will see at first some unusual, large coin on the ground, and pick it up, finding it to be valuable. Then there is another, and another, and the dream turns to greedy coin-collecting until it all vanishes at my waking.

It ruins the dream. The pleasant memory of a dream comes from visiting strange places with exotic rules of physics, saving people with your magical powers, fighting or running from terrifying monsters, falling in love with impossibly perfect women, or making love in impossibly public places. There is no pleasure in acquiring a wealth that is never spent.

The worst dream along these lines I had long ago, and I hope I do not bore you too much in relating it. Two lines of dejected people were filing into a stadium, and long-hooded men carried out caskets as the lines slowly advanced. I was told that the heads of the lines fought to the death in the stadium; the winner earned their heart's desire, and the loser was carried out like this. I chose one of the lines and waited my turn.

But when I reached the front, heading the other line was my heart's desire Herself, and I Hers. We did not fight but walked out together to the confusion of those evil monks. We enjoyed each other's company until some man stole the bag of coins I carried. I had to get it back, although She said this was not important. I defeated the thief and took back what was mine, but when I returned She was gone and I could not find Her.

I feel revulsion when I have these dreams. As in dreams, so in waking life I must waste time chasing such worthless valuable. When I was a child and had these dreams I could not believe the effort of acquisition was wasted, and I would actually search my room for the missing coins when I woke up, offended that they were not there.

This trip has been encumbered with money. I need it, I feel, to buy food, repair kits, and the occasional designated campsite. Oh sure, I could have done a lot of fishing, but even fishing has heavy costs if you do it legally; $100 per province by one estimate. The mythological stature of Christopher McCandless, of "Into the Wild", was that he began his trip by giving his bank balance to charity, and burning his cash. My savings give me a sense of security, knowing I could fail many times and still get back up. I worry this security has its costs in freedom.

I remember reading a story in English class about a boy, lost in the wilderness, using the $100 in his pocket to start a fire, to survive. The class balked at this waste of money; it was a symbol we were not ready for.

As I fed the flames of my cooking fire that night, the tender in my wallet itched. I felt like I had to turn just so, keep the right angle to protect it from the flames.

Day 54 ended: 50*36.218N, 102*40.335W

Day 53, part 2: A little caution

2008-09-24T17:22:00.000-05:00

The wind on Crooked Lake was going due east, my purposed direction. I saw cottages all along the northern shore, gulls everywhere, and pelicans on the sandy points. One pelican did not settle for the black skull cap worn by the others. He seemed to have a long black wig, down to his shoulders. Queer bird.

I began to see campers and boats on the shore and knew I was near the Provincial Park. Large storm clouds were building behind me. The wind picked up, throwing decent waves at me and making it difficult to steer. I put on my life vest. The waves washed me ashore at a beach between the park's two campgrounds.

I walked up to the registration booth. It was self-registration during the week. I went back to the canoe and paddled to the first water site beyond the beach.

A man hailed me as I approached the campsite. He was wearing blue coveralls unzipped a few inches revealing white hair on his chest. White hair spilled out from under his blue cap as well. The cap read "Svein Bryeide Construction Ltd", but I did not notice that yet.

"So are you into wild parties and loud music?" I said.

He answered without irony. "No, I never really got into that."

"Me neither." This was going to be a quiet campsite, which made me happy.

We talked about my trip. Svein Bryeide had run a construction company for 30 years, working for the oil industry. He had no thought of retiring yet. He and his wife Mariann had graduated from tent camping, to a tent trailer, to a camper top, to a trailer camper. He claimed the current model had a living room with "a chesterfield and a fireplace", and that might have been true. It seems like a luxurious way to travel. They were taking a week's vacation at Crooked Lake, visiting friends in the area.

I was canoeing through southern Canada, and I was traveling alone. I was exposed to all the dangers of the waters.

"But a little caution goes a long way," Svein said.

"What's that?" I didn't hear.

"A little caution."

"Oh, yeah."

"Still, probably safer out there than on the highways."

Svein's comment stirred far more latent emotions in me than he could have expected. Every time someone had tried to point out the risks involved in the trip I was making, I wanted to tell them to look at the risks they accepted everyday. Driving is not safe for being common. There was more.

My friend Melissa had been a constant companion in Calgary. I was not there long before she invited me to go hiking with her, which became something we did any time the weather was warm. The Canadian Rockies are beautiful in the summer. You will never run out of places to walk, no matter what your skill level. Clement often came hiking too. Sarah also frequently joined us.

The winter is often hard on me, and the 2007 Canadian winter was no exception. I felt uneasy, the things I took pride in were valueless, everything I did was wrong, I had no value as a man to women. It is a difficult state of mind. When you don't care for what you can do, you try all those you can't and that only confirms your ineffectiveness.

I began to lean on my friend Melissa. It is strange how friendships can evolve. Sometimes they can become deep quite suddenly, sometimes they can totter on that edge and then back off. One night I called her in an almost manic state and she calmed me down. She did not doubt I had value. She was patient as I wavered in spilling myself out to her. She was going to Australia in the summer but there was time enough to talk before and after that.

I decided to stay in Calgary for my PhD.

I also decided to build a boat. Some year of undergrad I built one out of cardboard and duct tape. It was easy and it was hard and it took my mind off of some things. It was a success and a failure; it died on its maiden voyage. I was floating under the engineering building when a pipe opened overhead, and the inside was all wet cardboard.

I decided to build a better boat. A wooden canoe, and I looked until I found the easiest plans to build a decent canoe. It would be a JEM Merrimac, and the plans cost about $50. I ordered the wood on June 14, 2007.

The next day was very bad.

"My friend died about a year ago. She never got to go to Australia, and she'd been planning that trip for years." I was speaking wildly.

"It happens to everyone," Svein said.

I hadn't explained anything. He looked away.

"It's always hard," he said.

Day 53 ended: 50*36.218N, 102*40.335W

Day 53, part 1: Wounded pelican

2008-09-24T10:20:00.000-05:00

I was worried because once again I would be passing through an Indian Reserve. While it's true that I often passed beside reserves, my interpretation is that when the river passes through a reserve, on both sides, the river must actually fall under the laws of that people rather than being Crown land as I assumed elsewhere. I, doubly a foreigner, felt like an intruder unprotected by law, and so I hurried through the reserves and avoided setting foot on land.

As you've seen, this has only caused trouble for me. In the Siksika I became stranded, trying to sleep in the canoe rather than going to land and hoping for forgiveness. In the Piapot I cut the fence that stood in my way. I knew I should just start thinking of the reserves the same as any other land, within reason, to prevent myself from turning minor mishaps into major ones. Still, by now I had an expectation that Something Bad always happens on the reserves. Since there had been fences of varying difficulty since Lake Ketepwa, I imagined a river simply clogged with fences or even walls.

Just as I entered the reserve, a pelican sitting on a gravel bank was spooked by my appearance, and swam out into the river ahead of me. This was unusual behavior for a pelican, which rarely precede their flight ith swimming, unless they were already on the water. I drew close enough to see that its wing looked wrong, and I knew it was injured.

Although I count pelicans as friendsI don't think this relationship is symmetric. I use their presence as a sign of pleasant camping, but before I reach the site they all fly away in caution. I am sure they view with annoyance this man who goes around stealing all their favorite basking locations. And here I was chasing a wounded pelican down the river.

My logical side sees it so, but my romantic side, given to building mythologies, was in control that day. Here was my spirit guide, come to lead me through the dangerous territory! And so I followed at a respectful distance, while the pelican turned its head from sideto side, looking back to make sure I was still following.

My guide was powerful and benevolent. There were no fences, there were no troubles. Just before the bridge that marks the end of the river, the river split into two channels. One, shallow and gravelly, continued straight forward under the bridge. The other meandered around to the right, rejoining just before the bridge.

Because I knew the pelican was wounded and I was thankful for its faithful guidance thus far, I knew what I should do. I took the right hand channel as the pelican took to the gravel on the straight one. When I meandered around the pelican saw me and swam back upstream whence it had come.

I proceeded on alone.

Day 53 continues.

Day 52: Changing minds

2008-09-23T12:19:00.000-05:00

The drugs did something to my brain.

I guess our brains really are made of chemicals. I don't know rightly how to describe the effect other than what I felt initially, that I had lost a certain "edge" or "sharpness". My thoughts became not hazier, but blunter. I wonder if there is actually any discernible difference; say, if I took different standardized tests on and off medication, if there might be any difference.

My journal records "Little memorable happened today", which can perhaps be taken as evidence that I was not seeing or experiencing things as intensely as I had been. However, it also contains shocking proof that the medication did have a severe effect on my cognitive powers:

"Today, I felt sorry for a mallard."

I suppose I must have become at least somewhat accustomed to my new chemical state because reading that sends shudders down my spine.

I do remember the bird. She was sitting on a log, as still as possible while keeping an eye on me. Her only defense was if I did not see her. She truly had a broken wing. While birds mocking that state make a huge commotion of yelling and flopping all around to get your attention, the actual, real thing must paralyze the bird in fear.

I had mercy on her, giving as much distance as possible while I passed.

I'm sorry folks. If it wasn't for these allergies and the drugs they make me take, I might have rid the earth of a member of its third worst species. My only consolation is she probably did not live long anyway with that broken wing.

Day 52 ended: 50*38.666N, 102*54.245W

Day 51: What are you going to do about... your nose?

2008-09-22T12:17:00.000-05:00

I felt like I was leaving the plains. Wetter, surely, there were more trees, and even raccoons running about on the shore. I must be entering the midwest, or whatever its Canadian equivalent is. Even the air felt more humid, more like back in -

-- ACHOO --

- Missouri. I guess there is some ragweed about, and that's something to sneeze at.

Now this is going to be a sticky post.

I have always run in the fall; I mean, runny nose, runny eyes. It isn't the nice thick snot of a good head cold, but the continual running of a sticky faucet. My wastebasket and its environment would fill up with tissues, which had to be purchased in those economy packs of twelve or twenty-four boxes.

It became nearly impossible to sleep on my side because the mucous would accumulate in my nose so I couldn't breathe. Sleeping facedown just made my pillow wet and disgusting. If I slept on my back, the stuff fell back into my lungs, keeping my nose clear, but I would develop a hacking cough that lasted through the rest of the year, until the allergens returned and my nose started up again.

It's probably these allergies that made me fairly uninterested in athletics and physical activity when I was young. It wasn't until I was 22 that I discovered Claritin (Loratadine) helped considerably. The next spring I moved to an apartment on a statelong bike trail, and was soon doing century rides.

I quickly noticed that I had no significant allergies in Calgary. The dry, cooler climes were like heaven to my nose. But working east I finally found them again, and here in Canada they come a month early. I had hoped to chase summer down south on the Mississippi, but now I'm worried I'm going to be chasing allergy season, instead.

Now with my eyes blinded by run and sun, any plant with leaves looks like the despised ragweed, and some of the fences too. I didn't see the nasty fence in time to slow down. The post unexpectedly swung up when I hit the lower strands which cut up my left elbow enough to bleed.

I was a complete wreck by the time I stopped that evening. I knew I had brought some Loratadine with me, because at the beginning of the trip the bottle had spilled little tablets all over the place. That wasn't encouraging, though. Did I still have the bottle, and was there still anything left? I searched all through my first aid bag, my backpack where I had seen it last, before finally finding it with my personal hygiene supplies.

There were plenty of pills. Since I hadn't needed any in Calgary they were two years expired, but what could I do? It took effect surprisingly rapidly so I was able to sleep that night.

Day 51 ended: 50*35.319N, 103*00.361W

Day 50: Convenient new inventions

2008-09-21T12:15:00.001-05:00

When I am not making much apparent progress on the map and the river gyres in the pasture, I have to invent ways to convince myself I am moving on. I need not go crazy here, there is some place a little further on for that.

I start marking my endpoints on my map. The distance between two points is disappointingly short, but put down three, four of them and it suggests I might be getting somewhere.

Bridges are major landmarks anytime, but especially so when I'm feeling slow. Cliff swallows happily make summer homes on the underside. Their flying meals are surprised by the birds swooping out of the downward-facing holes, built that way so they don't need an extra room for the loo. I looked up under one bridge and the entirety was covered with mud stain in an intricate web, the memory of forgotten houses. I wondered if the bridge was entirely covered in nests one year, or if they vary their places each time, to eventually generate this honeycomb pattern.

I was quite proud to cross under three bridges, all arched affairs built from the same concrete moulds, and in roughly the same crumbling state, showing the underlying rebar in the structure and supports.

I was also quite happy to see several raccoons, and their courage surprised me. Four cubs hid in the bushes while their mother climbed a tree and growled at me as I slid past. They are like small bears; omnivores and generalists with little hands. If the red panda and great panda are closely related that suggests to me a bear really is a kind of giant raccoon.

The biology teachers at my high school, Mr. and Mrs. Ulmer, were some of the most peaceful, nature-loving people I know. But Mr. Ulmer's raccoons were my mallards. They built their house in the woods and were constantly dealing with raccons raiding their garbage and garage.

Now the improvised weapons of the nonviolent are often horrific compared to the worn tools of the seasoned killer. Such was the case when Mr. Ulmer suddenly found violent cause. His first attempt was a kind of spear which I think was made by taping a garden trowel to a broom handle. This was difficult to aim or throw with sufficient power.

One day, Mr. Ulmer heard some raccoons foraging in his garage, which was paneled with those old boards with holes drilled every inch, meant for hanging tools. From which apparently Mr. Ulmer took his electric drill, and attached a bit the same diameter as the holes. He pulled the trigger and kept jamming that thing into the board wherever he thought he saw fur. We were not told if any raccoons died that day, only that the bit did need to be frequently cleaned of fur and blood.

Day 50 ended: 50*31.815N, 103*09.125W

Day 49: Pasture goggles

2008-09-20T12:10:00.001-05:00

It was morning because I was wet and alone. The wetness came from setting up just my mesh tent on the hooved pasture, and a fog rose over all the waters in the night. My bag was soaked, and my clothes were cold. The loneliness came from being out on the river for almost two months. Most of the time I am okay, but a couple days after passing through any town the loneliness strikes, and there is nothing that can be done about it. There are no phones on the river and its only other inhabitants make poor conversation.

Moo's about it. I can sometimes hear it as warning or longing but if there is any subtlety to the calls it is lost on me. I may one day break that code. Certainly at first the cattle all looked the same to me, but now their individual characteristics were clear.

There is the shoulder of some bull proud in youth, there is the wise face of grandma cow, her sagging teats feeding her last calf. An aged bull seems somehow forgiving and kind. The supple skin of a young heifer carries a universal sensual appeal. There she is, glistening black with freckled sides, so beautiful it was disturbing.

I shook my tired head; this is too much. I spent too much time in park, in town, writing, thinking, and not enough calling people, meeting people. I told myself, next town I really need to hit the bars, have some drinks, make some friends for the night.

The next town of any decent size on the river, where I could spend the night, was Brandon. I didn't realize it was about a month away.

Day 49 ended: 50*32.936N, 103*19.264W

Day 48: John Updike is an ostrich

2008-09-19T14:42:00.000-05:00

I lost it.

I lost not only the plot but the book as well.

I lost Self-Consciousness.

This is a work by John Updike that I picked up from the Fort Qu'Appelle library. There was a book sale on, and the librarian very kindly suggested I take a couple books, waiving the nominal charge. I've never read any Updike before but he was one of the few regarded authors left, and seeing this book of memoirs I hoped to find something in it worth stealing.

The first chapter seemed interminable as I got used to Updike's indulgent writing. It concerns some remembrances of his childhood, which he spices up by incorporating into a story of how he waited an hour for his lost luggage to arrive.

I frankly became angry with Updike. "He doesn't respect that the connotations of words have an explanatory power that doesn't need expansion! His constant attempts to display cleveerness leave no room for the reader's own cleverness!" I do not know nowif these criticisms are valid, no longer having the book. Certainly worse could be said of my writing. But the one example I remember is when he related a story of how as a very young child he was hit by a car, and how very apologetic he was to the officer, and how he was worried of spending time in jail. This is a cute story about the foolishness of young children.

But then Updike feels the need to explain it, explicitly saying that when he was older he realized that the cop was more worried about an irresponsible child ipossibly being injured than his culpability. I felt Updike must think I am very stupid not to have understood that, or possibly never been a child myself. My feeling was that most readers of his book have been children, and later adults, and could not possibly need this explanation. My feeling, furthermore, was exasperation.

I turned to a later chapter, hoping it would be an improvement over the lost luggage iof the first. This one took the form of a defense of his stance apparently supporting the Vietnam war, although if it actually contained such a defense, I am none the wiser for it.

I have with me, from the beginning of the trip, the book "Travels with Charlie", by John Steinbeck. In this book, Steinbeck tours the States with his dog, Charlie. It seems he is constantly getting into situations, making essentially the correct judgments, and then criticising himself for getting involved in what are other peoples' problems. And that may be a correct judgment, too. I am constantly impressed as I review the multiple booklets this text has dissolved into on the trip, by Steinbeck's moral courage and honesty.

And that is what I suppose I was expecting from Updike in this chapter. Instead, I saw him voting for Democratic presidents while hoping they lost. The doves were wrong because the ones he knew were just as decadent as him in those days. Sending young men to war to bring back honor for the country is just like sending the butcher to the countryside to bring back meat for the table. While Updike feels some guilt at never having been shot at or threatened with bombing, he has had a lot of dental work done, which is much the same thing. And, impossibly, he makes too many protestations that he is not, literally, an ostrich.

The complete disregard for any moral or ethic whatsoever came as a complete shock to me after Steinbeck. Later, I would discover that reading the chapter in context, he must regard hawkishness as just an embarrassing personal condition like psoriasis or stuttering. I didn't know what to make of it.

But there was that ostrich business...

Is it possible that John Updike, the celebrated American author, is actually and literally an ostrich? At one point he says there is an entire category of things that would fall under the heading of "I am not an ostrich". If this seems far-fetched to you, consider for a moment. I believe it was Aristotle who argued that the primary reason for man's sentience was that he walked upright on two legs, bringing his head closer to the heavens. Surely, the same is true for any ostrich.

Not an ordinary ostrich, surely. A very intelligent ostrich, hunting and pecking at his tiypewriter, having achieved some part of the measure of a man through his literary success. But an ostrich nonetheless. How could he have hid this for so many years? On the bookstands, nobody knows you are an ostrich. And his skin and speaking conditions give him excuses to rarely appear in public, on which occasions he may hire an actor, or merely wear a builkier sportcoat.

In presenting this information I am definitely not trying to demean Updike, his work, or other ostriches. Indeed, some of my best friends are birds. But I am hoping that this fact will help some of his readers better understand his works.

Certainly, when I discovered this, I went back to the beginning of the book, and read it as though written by an ostrich. The result was a far superior book, a kind of avian Notes From Underground. The first scattered reading indicated a poor life, half-lived. He goes nowhere, does nothing, and attends church only to spite his wife. However, I wouldn't expect even an extraordinarily intelligent ostrich to imagine the life of a man with his head out of the sand.

Speaking of which, the psoriasis serves not only as a metaphor for an ostrich's wrinkly skin, but as an excuse for his having spent so much time in desert and sandy conditions, for it appears expsoure to the sun is a treatment to that skin disorder.

It is quite unfortunate that I lost this book, because I had very carefully dog-eared every page which presented some evidence of his ostrichness. For instance, in the introduction Updike claims another was planning a biography, and he felt he had to get there first. Why so, if not to control the story and hide his ostrichness?

Once we can accept that John Updike is an ostrich, other questions arise. Is it possible that Updike, who presents as a conservative Democratic man, is actually a liberal Republican ostrich - but female? I have no clues as to the question of politics, but when it comes to gender I have some idea.

Another book I got from the book fair I believed at first to be the memoirs of a local woman growing up in the depression, only to later discover it was actually a work of fiction written by a man. Because this book is a self-published labor of love, and because I am about to criticize it, I will spare both its name and the author's. In the preface the author claims he wrote it as a challenge to the idea that a man cannot write about the life of a woman. Indeed, the book lends evidence to one or the other side of this argument, allowing me to conclude that John Updike is probably the same gender he tells us he is.

We eventually come to the title of his Vietnam chapter, which was actually "Why I am not a dove", which is clearly a double-entendre. We have Updike, the ugly duckling, growing up not into one of the more beautiful birds but into the ugliest one of all, even uglier than a duck, if that were possible.

And recall that much of Hans Christian Andersen's obsession with physical beauty in his work was the fact that he possessed so little of it, himself. He overcame this handicap by literature, in the same way as Updike would later overcome minor speech and skin disorders, the Vietnam war, and being raised in Pennsylvania. That Andersen's ugliness was the more profound is clear; while Updike spends much of this book in fear of homosexual overtures, Andersen never got a favorable response to his love letters, neither from women nor men. Which may be why people will still know the Ugly Duckling and the Emperor's New Clothes long after Updike again becomes only a humorous name given to minor film characters.

Enough of this, I believe the case is clear, and it is perhaps fortunate that I will never be able to read the last two chapters to bore you with further details. The penultimate one appeared to a hundred page letter to his grandsons, improbably sent by way of mass publication. The last, I'm sure, speculates on the effect on the world of literature if he turns out to be an ostrich, after all.

The time for such speculation is ending; we need merely sit back and watch.

Day 48 ended: 50*34.854N, 103*27.366W

[LIVE 90] Portage la Prairie!

2008-09-19T12:32:00.000-05:00

Hello, everyone. I have uploaded through "Day 66: The Assiniboine". I am having a bit of writer's block, and so I suppose it is a good thing this blog trails my journey by so much.

I seem to be forming a fairly large book collection in my canoe, which is a rather hazardous place for them. Books either get destroyed by rain, or being stuffed into my dry bags. I do wish now, however, that I had asked for gifts of small books at the beginning of the trip, so I'd have people to share all my reading with. I have been reading books by Blake, Byron (Don Juan (the first use of doubled parentheses in epic poetry?)), Sinclair Lewis, Steinbeck, Hemingway, Tom Stoppard, and John Updike. I also have picked up a book by Marquand, and am considering paying $1 for the privilege of seeing if I can finish Roth's "Zuckerman Bound" before it is eaten by the canoe.

The order of reading books is important. Going from Hemingway to Updike is excruciating. Steinbeck seems a bit lame after Updike, his descriptions, anyway. But I can go back and forth between Hemingway and Steinbeck with no significant pain. It is strange how that works.

I was wondering if you, my readers, wanted to suggest books or authors to look out for. These should be relatively cheap, small, and good. Cheap usually means used, but I have no prejudice against new books -- in fact I would prefer it. If they are cheap. And do suggest a proper order for reading the books.

Or just name any book.

Thank you for reading.

Day 47: You've lost that sinking feeling

2008-09-18T14:42:00.000-05:00

I was camped on a sandy point just before Mission Lake, and just as I headed off I decided to make my first backtrack of the trip, heading back into Fort Qu'Appelle. Merv had told me Home Hardware would have a bicycle technician who could fix my wheel. I still couldn't pop the bead of the 16" tire back in place, and the loss of mobility made me feel less capable of handling surprises the river my throw at me. The technician charged me $2 to get it back together, and said it was "extraordinarily difficult" to make me feel better about my failure as repairman.

While he was fixing the wheel I noticed a pair of automatic locking pliers that could serve in place of an adjustable wrench. These employ a very clever mechanism I still don't understand to lock onto bolts of any size up to half an inch. I had to have them, as well as a fair portion of their camping supply aisle: repair kits, mesh bags, windproof matches. I managed to stop myself before picking up the plastic egg container, though. My eggs have survived quite well in cardboard or styrofoam, keeping good at least five days unrefrigerated.

The wind was going against me on the lakes, so I wouldn't make it far after backtracking to the city. I quickly stopped at a nice spot on Katepwa Lake where I could read, write, and repair to my heart's content.

My chief repair would be my air mattress. This Thermarest, as long as I could remember, quickly lost air as soon as I lay on it. This was actually a major factor in my February fiasco. We were having an Indian summer during a week school was off, so I thought I'd take the opportunity to bike up to Banff. This is about 100 miles, which is a long ride, but I figured I would break it down, take two days of 50 miles each to get up there, and two days back. I filled my bags with canned food and a white gas stove that should have been
good for winter operation, in addition to my tiny one person tent, sleeping pad, and bag.

Things started to go wrong when I got a late start out of Calgary, taking time to fix my handlebar tape in the morning. So I had to push it if I was to make it to some camping area. On the highway I took, the lands are all fenced and posted "no camping" until Kananaskis Country.

In the mountains, the sun sets early and even if it has been warm all day it gets cold very quickly at night. I was already bundled up in warm jacket and gloves when I got to K-Country. As soon as the fences ended, I started looking for a place to set camp, but I thought I saw bear tracks in the snow, which was disheartening. I got back on my bike, and my weary legs took me another mile, two. I simply had to make camp before the sun set, so I pushed my bike through the snow bank on the left hand side as soon as I found a flat place to make camp.

Th sun was down, but I remembered there was a full moon tonight, shining its white light through the tree cover. But not fot long. This lucky light began to retreat, and I remembered that the reason I knew the moon would be full was there was actually a lunar eclipse that night. As the shadow of the Earth engulfed the moon, I set up my tent and tried desperately to prepare a meal.

The stove did not work. I had never gotten the stove to work well, and it was foolish traveling out with a bag full of canned goods and a stove that didn't work.

I ate as much jerky as I dared and went to bed. The air mattress released its air as usual, and so there was no air protecting my bum from the frozen ground.

The next day, cold, tired, hungry, and worn out, I had to call for help from the Kananaskis Country visitor center. About everything went wrong that could have. I figured if I could have at least been able to cook food, I could have taken another day, regained my strength, and continued on. I might still have needed help getting back, but hey, it would have been the weekend, and I would have been in Banff.

There was a woman I once knew who had done historical research in Sudan. While she was out there, her Thermarest mattress developed a leak. Her boyfriend, kept in contact via her satellite phone, suggested that she put the mattress in a bathtub full of water to find out where the leak was. She said, "There are so many things wrong with that, I don't know where to start."

But there I was on the shore of a lake, so I could easily find the leak. The mattress hissed when I put it in the water and I quickly saw a gash most of an inch long at the back of the foot. It was astonishing I had never noticed it before.

I applied the glue, and waited for it to dry, according to the instructions, before putting the patch in place. That night I inflated the mattress, as usual, and found to my delight that it kept its air completely. Oh yes, I remembered, this is how an air mattress is supposed to work.

After an hour of turning on the mattress, I had to release some air to return it to a level I was used to.

Still, this would come in handy on later nights. A site of rough stones or dirt trampled by cattle doesn't matter if I have an inch of air below me, and so I am able to make better use of poorer campsites.

Day 47 ended: 50*43.889N, 103*40.588W

Day 46: The descent

2008-09-17T14:41:00.000-05:00

Pat and Dave had warned me that there was a dam at Fort Qu'Appelle, but also thought it would be open, and so it was. However, when I heard open I had assumed open like a channel, open like a door, not open like a two foot sheer drop. I wondered if this is what they meant, and how many times they had canoed over this dam. A large metal sign warned "This structure not designed for public use," which was not encouraging, but there weren't the bright orange barriers I was used to seeing before dams, so a descent was perhaps possible.

I climbed up the bank and stood on the dam walkway, looking down through the perforated metal to the raging waters below. It did not look safe. The water poured through several open channels, and each channel had large metal screws sticking out on either side. There was enough room to go between them but accumulated plant debris on them showed not everything did.

I walked over onto the wooded "Trans Canada Trail" to grab a stick, and then dropped it in the water. The stick fell through the dam, under the water, and didn't reappear for several seconds. Maybe they had shot it many times before, but they probably didn't do it on fully loaded open canoes. I had no experience with this kind of obstacle. I decided not to risk it.

I climbed back down in the canoe, put my life vest back on, and paddled out, took one last look, and completely changed my mind. I was never going to be here again, a portage would be a huge pain. The worse that happens is I take a spill and have to recover all my stuff in the pool below.

So I chose the channel with the least white water below it, paddled as hard as I could toward it, my bow crosses the dam, my hull scrapes the bottom, and I stop. The water below it wasn't white because there wasn't enough flow, and then there I am, the first six feet of a fifteen foot canoe just sticking out over the dam. The water wasn't shallow enough for me to get out and pull it back, so I had to straddle the boat, and push my feet against the dam while holding on to push the canoe back. The low flow there meant, with some effort, I was able to get the boat out of trouble, and free again.

For my second attempt, I chose the channel with the most white water beneath it. I suppose this is the Goldilocks method of shooting a dam. I took a breath, paddled as hard as I could toward it, my bow crosses the dam, falls rather more than I liked into the water below, and is followed by the rest of the boat, upright and in one piece. There was half an inch of water sloshing inside at my feet, and my heart was pumping hard in my chest.

It felt amazing.

I parked the boat and wandered over to the "fort". This is clearly a modern reconstruction, festooned with the flags of Saskatchewan and Canada. There were no signs on the outside, and inside, I saw only "Washrooms only inside" and "Smile, you are on camera!" It was less welcoming than I thought a fort should be. I got out of there, fast.

I took the Trans Canada Trail through the woods, over the dam, and into the Fort Qu'Appelle museum. Merv showed me around, and he was old, and incredible. He knew everything about every artifact, where it was found, who brought it in, how much it was worth. There were models of the historical fort, xray machines and piercers, fur coats, guns, and fossils. The frames and display cases were as interesting to him as the objects they contained. I thought someone better videotape Merv's tour before the museum becomes just another collection of "pretty cool" things.

He showed me one thing that struck me significantly, although it will take me some time to explain why. It was a simple metal sign, black sticker letters pressed on to a white background. There were several paragraph on it, explaining the geology of an area, "the formations were carved at the end of the last ice age 11000 years ago" etc etc. Merv said there used to be a geological trail that ran all through and around the city, with about a dozen of these signs placed up. There was a lot of trouble with vandals, shooting, and the like, but he and others did their best to keep it going. And Merv gave me an explanation for so much I had seen in Saskatchewan when he said, "the new government isn't interested in this kind of thing."

I gathered that the Trans Canada Trail I had been walking on had taken the place of this geological trail. Well, simple tradeoff, right? A local limited interest trail, versus a hiking trail spanning the length of the country. Perhaps, but what I haven't told you yet is that this Trans Canada Trail won't even get you out of the city of Fort Qu'Appelle.

The idea for a Trans Canada Trail was conceived some time ago, and in many provinces a long distance portion of the trail actually does exist, but in Alberta and Saskatchewan it consists only of some relabeled municipal park trails, so you can't cross the country, and not even the province.

The descent from thinking to feeling. So much made sense to me then. In all the provincial parks I had been, the interpretive centers were closed or unpopulated, spooky, abandoned buildings. And in Missouri State Parks, if there is a camp store there are sure to be books about the area, its geology, flora, fauna. But the privatized camp stores in Saskatchewan were devoid of these things. Being ever in want of a bird book, I had to invent names for the ones that interested me: "bowtie", "fearless", "kentucky".

Before I left, Cameron had given me a copy of Tom Stoppard's play "Arcadia" to read along the way. The book uses English gardens as an analogy to the change in values from the ordered, truth-seeking Enlightenment, to the irregular, emotional Romantics. There it was simply a change in fashion, but in Saskatchewan I imagined it now as some political cataclysm that closed the interpretive parks, privatized the camp stores, and transformed the geological trails to cross country trails that do not actually cross the country. Who has time for all those useless facts anyway, or actually hiking trans Canada, if you can drive into a place and feel as though you might? Centers of learning and exploration fall to campers who never leave the tended lawns: Et in Arcadia ego!

Here I show even I am unable to resist the spirit of the age. I do not know if the above interpretation is true, only that it feels right to me at this time.

Day 46 ended: 50*45.962N, 103*46.350W

Day 45: The horror

2008-09-16T14:40:00.000-05:00

Warning: This is a morbid post, but I hope you will understand what I am trying to say.

I was camped down on the lake, but the showers and laundry were all on top of the valley. My bicycle still broken, I trudged up the hill in the heat with my things until I reached the building. There, I discovered I had nothing that I needed. There was no laundry detergent for sale there, and besides that, I had brought my bag of clean clothes, not the dirty ones. I thought to at least shower but the bag I thought contained my soap and shampoo was actually my minor electronics bag: it had the cords and chargers for my camera and other things of that sort.

So, it was back down the hill to get what I needed. Drudgery is the birthplace of thought, and I couldn't help thinking about a story Dave had told the previous day.

I had remarked how out there on the river I have no river, no contact with the news. If there is anything significant happening in the world I would never know, but that doesn't necessarily mean it would be significant to me. One Mississippi River kayaker was treated in terrible suspicion as he tried to lock through. Unknown to him, nineteen highjackers had just crashed four planes in the days before, and anything unusual was taken as a major threat.

Dave said there was one story in the news about a boy, who I think was traveling by bus from Edmonton to perhaps Toronto. Somewhere in Saskatchewan the man who sat next to him killed him, in a quite brutal and shocking manner. I heard just enough of the story and just little enough detail that my mind went crazy imagining the event, and I could see it quite clearly; the blood and guts, the horrified crowd stampeding off the bus.

I think as children the emotional horror of violence must be quite overwhelming, quite terrifying. As we grow up we are exposed to it in stories and film, and we become desensitized. Society needs to desensitize us because it wants its wars and executions, so it isn't long before the headshot, the killing fields, become mere facts of life.

Still, there are certain acts or events so unusual, so outside the bounds of what we might even imagine, that it renews the horror all over again. And maybe worse, too, because the emotional realization comes with an adult's understanding of how the blood and organs work, how tenuous life is, and how miserable it can be for those people left behind. The killing, which I will not describe, fell into this category. His neighbors said he was a nice guy, maybe quiet. Nothing unusual about him.

Of course we want reasons for these things to happen. Since the perpetrators are often young men, video games and loud music often get the blame. Perhaps instead something in their childhood caused them to act this way, or if we are in a certain mindset, something is wrong with their race or religion. If there is nothing that seems violent or strange about the person, maybe the real problem is their life was too boring. The monotony of the post office or government bureau drove them to murder. It doesn't matter what the reason is, as long as we can find one.

Later, my ritual cleansing finally complete, I was hiking in the trails by my campsite. Some group had very kindly placed large signs, metal maps, at every intersection, but as far as I could tell had neglected to mark your current location. I soon became completely lost in the maze of trails, as dark clouds flew overhead, releasing just a sprinkle of water on me.

So what if there is no reason? The mind is made of meat, as murder shows. What if the killer really was as ordinary as you or me. In one minute, blood, following its random course through his skull, favored this region, and not that one, and as a result he acted out in this way. Nothing special about him. It could happen to anyone.

I think acceptance of mortality is one of the defining traits of maturity, so I don't think the horror of this kind of action comes from the idea that I might be randomly killed by some other person. I already know there are many ways I could die, and most of them random. I could be struck by a car or by lightning. I heard of a girl who died in her sleep. Why, the doctors never could tell, and she was no older than I. You must simply expect that death may come at any time, so use your life wisely and with that understanding until then.

We also have this understanding of our friends and acquaintances, that we cannot know how long they will be around, so we must enjoy what time we will be together.

If I can accept the idea of my death, the idea that I, an ordinary person, might be driven to kill by some random occurrence in the brain seems too revolting to contemplate. I hope that such a thing is impossible, but my knowledge of how the brain works is not too comforting in this regard. So I think part of the horror is the concept that we might do such things, randomly, for no reason, this blood cell went this way instead of that. I hope I am wrong but cannot know. A man shoots up his office, a mother drowns her children. They never conceived of it until that moment. Horrible.

It doesn't seem possible to come to peace with this idea. If such demons live in the soul of every person, it is as though the mass of the brain must lend its cooperation to hold them at bay, and no peace can be made with the physics on which thought rests. So I have no choice but to believe the man was weird and twisted, and trust no proof can be produced to show otherwise. If you search his computer maybe you will find images of terrifying violence. Listen carefully to hi conversation and you will hear only the ugly, dark side of things and not the light, not happiness. At the very least I hope he had some prior contemplation, some fantasy of using his knife in that way.

A strange thing to hope, but it would be some reason that I, and you, harboring no evil thought, cannot be like him.

Day 45 ended: 50*46.429N, 103*47.659W
(Again, these coordinates, being the same as day 44's, are uncertain.)

Day 44: Kevin Rex

2008-09-15T14:40:00.000-05:00

My servant the wind blew me into Echo Valley Provincial Park. At the first entry gate I met Mackenzie and Trevor, friends from the University of Regina. She was putting off the completion of her pychology degree, and he had wrapped up a geography bachelor's there. Both of them had led float trip on the Qu'Appelle, and were interested in my trip. Mackenzie wanted to give me a certain lakeside campsite, but couldn't do it there, so she directed me over to Pat's booth further up.

Pat thought my trip was incredible, and asked so many questions about how I handled portages, and what I did about maps. She and her son had been dreaming about taking a long trip as well, the Milk River to the Missouri! I told her how that was an early plan of mine, and why I didn't take it: too many dams and too large lakes for my taste. The day must have been a minor holiday, Saskatchewan Day or something, because many cars were driving by as we talked. When a line had formed, Pat waved me on, and I promised to come back with my maps.

The campsite I got was actually meant for large groups. I had seen it from the water, but it looked occupied. As I pulled my canoe up on shore I could see the family that was there frantically packing everything up; I suppose they were just putting off leaving, and why not? It was a beautiful day, and great fishing, I'm sure. I took my time, even left for a while to visit the store in the reserve, so they wouldn't feel rushed.

When I returned I pitched my tent and surveyed my domain. This was a large lawn ringed by trees, with multiple firepits and a water tap right there. The beach, sand and gravel, extended down to the lake. I was assured by everyone that the lake was very low, but it must have been higher in the past, because a picnic table was sitting in the lake, just beyond the beach. A mallard decided this was a wise place to raise her family. She could sit on the table to keep lookout as her chicks sat on the bench below.

I returned to Pat with my maps, and met Dave the conservation officer. Both of them had canoed or kayaked the Qu'Appelle, and knew tons about fences, cattle, and how tediously mendering it could be. The last time Pat had kayaked there, she had been attacked by a bull. Dave had once been struck by lightning; it burned right through his foot and he woke up thinking he was in hell.

My bike had developed a gimpy rear tire, and because the Brompton does not have quick release I needed a tool to get the wheel off. Dave got a tool from maintenance and drove me back to the campsite.

Honestly, I felt like royalty. They would erect some sign when I left, saying Kevin was here August 4, 2008, and then below that a smaller plaque would say the sign was dedicated May 5, 2010 by the Earl of Croom, or something like that. Nowhere had so many of the park staff been so interested in my trip or treated me so kindly, and what a huge change from Buffalo Pound where I had felt so unwanted. Saskatchewan Provincial Parks was winning me back.

A family boated into the other side of the group site to have dinner, and I failed to start conversation with them. Apparently my kingdom was only so large.

Day 44 ended: 50*46.429N, 103*47.659W

(Those coordinates may not be correct. I stayed at the "Hole in Wall - Water" campsite and forgot to take a GPS reading while I was there. These are simply the coordinates I saw when I turned the unit back on after leaving the campsite, and may not be correct.)

Day 43: The Gordian fence

2008-09-14T14:39:00.000-05:00

This is a tough entry to write, because it details the first time I sinned during this trip.

"Sin" has some really powerful connotations, so I am reserving it for powerful meanings. There were surely many times before this that I did the wrong thing in error or ignorance, while trying to do right, but here there was little reason for me to believe I was doing right.

Now I have been an explorer for many years, in the city and in the country, and have a well-developed explorer's ethic. Don't break anything, don't steal anythin, leave only footprints, take only photographs, leave no trace. In the wilderness that about sums it up, but in the city, one tends to start taking signs like "Keep out" or "Danger" more as invitations, than warnings. Should I ever own a house I should probably get a mat for the front door with "KEEP OUT" printed in red and white. That way I will both feel welcome and be able to scrape my boots on it every time I enter.

I would never go into any private, personal property, but if a hospital was awaiting demolition, some house abandoned for months, or some new building going up, why not take a peek? But the ethic is still clear. I never took anything or broke anything, and fences and locked doors were not problems to be solved by force, but challenges to be overcome by wit and logic. One night I was down in the steam tunnels below the University of Illinois campus, and was aghast when two people I had brought with actually just took sodas from a lounge. Later, in a hospital, some friends found some old x-rays but I convinced them to leave them for the next explorers to see.

I am relating this not so you will be impressed with me, but just so you can see that this is a very well-defined, if peculiar, ethic.

Coming down the river so far there had been essentially no fences blocking my path, and indeed I believed it was illegal to block a public waterway like this. The closest to a fence were two strands of barbed wire, on either side of a low bridge early on the Qu'Appelle, that were easily ducked or pushed out of the way.

I was all set to hurry through the Piapot Indian Reserve in the morning. Being unclear on the rules pertain to the river through the reserves, I had adopted certain additional principles: I won't set foot on the land, and I will try to get through as quickly as I can. It is probably dangerous to adopt new rules for special circumstances, because they get blown out of proportion, masking the old rules you live by.

Soon after entering the reserve territory, I saw a fence across the water. Two barbed wires, from side to side, supported by posts; but the fence was erected when the river was lower, and the post or two that were here had been uprooted, collecting debris along the left side. Since the left seemed blocked, and the wires were relatively low on the right, I hoped to accelerate the canoe, that if I went fast enough, my boat would push these wires down under it, and scrape just over the top.

I was going pretty fast when I hit the fence, but the wires were too high to go down under it. Instead, they became tangled up in my front canoe cover, in the ropes and hooks I used to secure it. Besides that, the current was strong and pinned me to the fence. I wanted to get through the reserve quick, but there I was, caught like a fish in a net.

I knew the fences were meant for cattle, not people, and that the river certainly seemed high enough to stop the cattle from crossing here. I felt a solution to my problem at my right breast, reached into the pocket of my lifejacket there and pulled out my Leatherman. With two quick snips the top wire was free, but the canoe still wouldn't go over the bottom one, so two more snips and the current pushed my canoe through the broken fence, free.

Free in physics, but not in spirit. I immediately realized that cutting the fence had violated all my explorer's ethics, and on the Indian Reserve, to boot. I had broken the obstacle, cheated at the puzzle. I had let a trace, and in rather a violent way, too, by actually severing a piece of someone else's property.

There was another fence a little ways on. Two sets of three strands each, which I was able, with difficulty, to squeeze my canoe through. I wondered if I had calmed down and looked more carefully at my problem earlier, I might have found a better solution.

It is amazing what rationalizations the mind can dream up! I felt horrible about this travesty all day, but by nightfall, I had many excuses. I was angry because I believed there should be no fences across the water, and there had been none before. The river was high enough anyway, would I even have cared if it hadn't been on the reserve? And surely fences have problems all the time; this one was already in trouble with those fallen posts and accumulated debris. Anyway, if I neer tell anyone...

I would later be able to prove to myself that these excuses did not assuage my guilt. apparently these fences were not as singular as I believed them to be; in the next section of the river there would be many more fences, some of them electrified, and not on the reserves. Later I was asked how I got around fences, and I said by going over or under them, neglecting to mention I wasn't above cutting them.

It is surprising how quickly guilt can turn to anger, even hatred. I did not forgive the native teen I saw walking down the street for looking haughtily at me, as many teens do. When I saw two native men and children fishing off of a dam right in front of the "no fishing" sign, I boiled inside. If they are above our laws, why should what I did matter? And there were plenty of grievances, young and old, available locally to fuel my anger. A report that some reserve further on was using its location to extort millions of dollars from the government. A story that some natives up north had massacred a herd of animals, taking only their hinds in a refigerator truck, leaving the rest to rot. Hardly a traditional style of hunting, and this from a people mythologized by our culture for living in harmony with nature, using every part of the buffalo.

So fast, so fast, so fast. One day, two days, three. There is nothing more to say, for peace I would need to somehow make contact with the Piapot, set things right with that anonymous rancher I may have harmed, and hoped my act was of as little harm as I imagined. But I resolved this too late, and there would be no Internet until Brandon, and likely no peace until later, for no sin is too small to devour one who has not offered apology.

Day 43 ended: 50*36.218N, 102*40.335W

Day 42: Labyrinths

2008-09-13T14:39:00.001-05:00

It is like a labyrinth, I thought, the only thing it tests is your patience.

I was sitting in a boat in a ditch winding through a pasture. The banks were high enough to prevent seeing anything to my sides, but occasionally the opening before me was long enough that I could see out to the valley beyond. At the time I saw a house. A house I had already seen several times in the last couple hours, and sometimes from angles more advanced from that one.

The Qu'Appelle at times makes me despair of ever getting anywhere, and then I start plotting my campsites on my map just to prove that, yes, yes, I am making four or five miles a day, as the crow flies.

Distance, though, doesn't seem to be the right measure for the Qu'Appelle. The river sits in a valley carved by an ancient, powerful current fed by glacier runoff at the end of the last ice age. The tiny Qu'Appelle winds about in a space-filling curve to fill this wide valley, and so I start thinking about how many acres I have travelled, how many square miles I have left.

A cathedral labyrinth is designed to have no branches, only an area of twists and turns. The kneeling or crawling supplicant must lose sense of the distance travelled, as I do, and continue on in just the assurance that the trial must, eventually, end.

I don't know how many square miles I travelled before I came to a weir. A pelican and cormorant, illegally fishing in the turbulent waters below, fled at my approach. There was a good two or three feet drop on this weir, but plenty of current over it. I consulted my curmudgeon, who told me that waterfalls are usually quite safe if the flow is sufficient, but dams are often far more dangerous than they appear. I scouted alongside the river, and even though there was no great portage route with my wheels, decided that was the safest way to go. The dam did not look so bad itself, but there was a woodplank walkway going over it, which I would have to duck. Then, blind and powerless, my canoe would have to continue in a straight enough course to avoid hitting the sides of the chute, which would surely upend the boat if struck. The physics said it should work, there was a big pool below where I could retrieve anything that got dumped, but there just wasn't room for my head.

Past the weir, I looked at my map in shock. It actually showed two channels for the Qu'Appelle here, and by the map I had taken the wrong one. Is this a labyrinth or a maze? Did I miss a fork somewhere? Was the arduous portage around the weir so unnecessary? I imagined the southern channel a paradise of sandy beaches populated by nubile women hand-feeding pelicans, until I came to it. It was not wide enough for a canoe, and the mapmakers had misinterpreted a small creek.

It did get me thinking about the real fork at Lake Diefenbaker. There were two routes from there to Winnipeg, either the Qu'Appelle, or the South Saskatchewan. I had estimated the South Saskatchewan route to take two months, and the Qu'Appelle at one month, given what I knew about my rate of travel. But the Qu'Appelle turned out to be a muddy, twisting little devil, and I knew the Saskatchewan had sandbanks, islands, pelicans, and no doubt some lovely ladies as well. Did I go the wrong way? This path was going to take longer than I had hoped.

Day 42 ended: 50*48.994N, 104*29.879W

Day 41: Last mountain portage

2008-09-12T14:38:00.000-05:00

I woke up in my most audacious camping location yet. Over my head was a huge red danger sign, put there to satisfy your curiosity about what horrible things would happen if you were to swim through it. My stuff was scattered everywhere, with clothes and bags laid out to dry on my upside-down canoe. The front windows of a house lookeddown on me, not more than 150 yards away. And just across the walkway on top of the dam, and through a gate in a chain-link fence, there was a baby campground with cute little pines, only half full of camper trailers. I wasn't used to having so many neighbors, but I hoped the tree where I conducted business was inconspicuous enough.

Really though, I was just in the middle of a portage, and who should care if I took the occasion to cook and sleep, do my laundry and repair my boat?

When all was boat-shape, I started to take it all down on the back side of the dam, sliding the canoe because it was still too heavy for me to lift. I was sure to tie it up with two ropes so it wouldn't float away again. When my things were halfway packed, a nice senior couple came hiking over from the paid campground. We talked about my trip, the canoeing they've done, where they were headed, and the usual pleasantries. I wondered what they thought of me so blatantly free-camping there, and got an answer without prompting, "You sure were quiet! We didn't know anyone was over here." Well. I guess I need to try harder, the.

I have heard this before about me being "quiet", and I have a number of hypotheses suitable for further testing. Firstly, just that a canoe is completely silent, especially compared with a motor vehicle. That doesn't seem worth commenting on. A likely interpretation is simply that I am young, and look much younger than I am. When I told people I had dropped out of school for this trip, they often asked if it was high school or university. Well, actually it was a PhD, and I had about 3 years in industry as well. Anyway, I suppose the old expect the young to be loud and rowdy and are surprised to find out otherwise.

The final possibility is that they subconsciously expected such an ambitious trip to be announced by choirs of angels and trumpets.

In to the canoe, off with the leaches, and on with the journey. The trees disappeared from the banks, which themselves fell lower and lower. Before Lumsden some banks were easily ten feet high, but here the cutbanks were just high enough I couldn't see over them, sitting, although the heads and backs of cattle were easily seen. Through these featureless, overgrazed pastures saunters the Qu'Appelle, taking its time and making its way back to every point a dozen times, as though I needed to see it from every angle.

Too many cows, and too many people, I thought. There were houses every couple hundred yards up on the valley slopes, and I felt like an ant winding through a tunnel with glass sides. Stormclouds appeared on the horizon, and I had to camp somewhere. With the maturing of summer there was less wind and more rain, and although these clouds did not look overly wet, I had been fooled before.

I pulled my canoe up on the mudbank where the cattle came down to drink, and pitched my tent nearby: bright yellow rainfly visible to miles of houses down the valley.

Day 41 ended: 50*45.527N, 104*40.785W

Day 40: Dear Rubber Ducky

2008-09-11T14:38:00.002-05:00

Dear Rubber Ducky,

Who knew that the day we met would be the day we parted? I was floating down the river, evading fallen trees in my dashing Tilley hat. You were lost among the river trash of Lumsden, waiting for someone who would take you from that place. You, with your yellow plumage and rubber skin.

Things proceeded quickly. You showed me the tattoo on your bottom, "CM 2008". I took a photo of my new mascot, happy to show the world.

You did not want me to see Lumsden. You said the library is closed on Thursdays, there would be nowhere to leave a boat to bike to Regina. I still wanted to look around and was shocked by your insistence.

I climbed up that steep bank and after looking for some time, did find the library, and was amused by its sign "The Library". Along the way I had seen ads for a drugstore. These ads were ducklike characters, but I thought nothing of it.

I then hiked along the tops of the steep river banks looking for a place to park a canoe. It was odd, having trails along that channelized section of river, as if to form a kind of amphitheatre. I noticed a painting of a duck on the road, labeled "21st, September 1, 2008". I still did not unerstand.

But when I went to get groceries, there was a rack of shirts. Most of these shirts bore embroidery or printing that said "Lumsden 20th annual duck derby, 2007." And that is when I understood. You knew if I went into town I'd find out that in exactly a month, there would be hundreds, thousands of rubber ducks floating down the river. And maybe then you wouldn't be special. Maybe you wouldn't be the one.

I took three trips to carry the groceries back down to the canoe, and then got out my pliers to remove the leaches from my feet. Neither of us said anything. You were afraid I'd dump you there, but I was merely saddened by your lack of confidence and candor.

The river became high and slow. Approaching a fork, with no current to guide me, and not enough detail on my map, I was lost. But you helped, you really did, you said "Follow the arrows, they'll show you where to go." I looked and I saw bright orange arrows posted on either side of the right channel. Having no other clues, what could I do but follow?

We continued on until another fork, again with one channel marked with arrows. I did not want to follow this time. My map clearly showed that the left one went to Last Mountain Lake, whereas the right went to the dam, and beyond that, back to the flowing river. You were insistent, "Just follow, don't say no!"

But I was going to portage the dam. The banks were steep, so I had to take everything out of my canoe, and there was a lot of stuff. I don't remember how many loads I had taken when I returned to find my canoe missing. You were trying to run off with my boat! I saw you making your way out on the orange barriers before the dam. Fortunately I had my life vest, and doggy paddled out to the boat, recovering it.

I had too much stuff and could not bear the thought of more portages like this one. I had to get rid of anything unnecessary, superfluous.

I'm sorry, Rubber Ducky. You made bath time lots of fun, but I'm awfuly through with you.

Doop doop dee doo,
Kevin

Day 40 ended: 50*42.402N, 104*47.987W

Day 39: Some things I did or did not see.

2008-09-10T14:37:00.000-05:00

I found a tiny patch of rocks, just big enough for my canoe, and dragged it up there. The flavor of the river was changing. Where it had been ranchland for miles, it was now becoming forested, and here was this little patch of rocks. This is an improvement. It is starting to get on in the day, so I could either stop here, or go on and hope the river gets even better.

I usually scope out this sort of situation on foot - barefoot, if no cactus are about. I want to feel the ground, to stretch my legs out after a full day of sitting in the boat. And so I climb up onto the bank to look ahead, to see if there are nice gravelbanks or even sand just around the corner.

It is about minimizing regret, I suppose. I can stand not having the greatest campsite in the world, but I will be quite frustrated with myself if I come around the corner in the morning, and see the greatest campsite right there. Sometimes I have looked on ahead and found nothing. But sometimes, I have gone on ahead and discovered that the river really is just getting better and better in that stretch, and I go on for miles until I come to a sandy beach with pelicans basking in the sunset, and dragonflies darting to and fro in front of a great double rainbow.

It has happened.

On this day, I was walking up on the high bank and saw the beginnings of some shoddy log cabin a couple of guys must have been trying to hack together in the woods. A couple of black lawn chairs sat nearby, and they were covered in empty beer cans and bottles. I watched my feet carefully to make sure I didn't step in any broken glass. There was a big blue tarp just lying out there, and several blackened patches where bonfires had been. These campers had left a trace or two. The biggest bonfire was held around a living tree, which sickened me. Approaching it, I saw on the ground

A HUMAN CORPSE.

There was its blue jacket, and here was its red and black patterned flannel, scorched in the flames. What was I going to do? I guess go back, get the GPS and contact the police in the next town, where I'd say, yes, officer, this is the exact spot where I saw the -- oh, wait. I lift the blue"jacket" and examine it more closely. It is just a sleeping bag, and empty. I am quite relieved, and imagine what I would have to do if I did find a body. Such things do happen, I suppose. Just not that day.

I continue on, climbing over trees, brushing away shrubs, wading in mud, until I come to a point that looks out over the next turn. Well, it doesn't look any better there, so I begin to turn back. When I see that all around, all the plants I have been stepping through barefoot are

POISON IVY.

I had seen a sign at a recent park warning of it, though I hadn't yet encountered any in Canada. Now I believe I have walked through poison ivy before and not been affected, but I have seen ivy rashes and they do not look fun. At least a month of itching and treatment and scratching. So, it is a good rule to follow: "Leaves of three, leave them be." And suer enough, there they are: one, two, three... four, five. It isn't poison ivy at all.

I return to my canoe quite relieved that this is a decent campsite, and that I saw neither a human corpse, nor poison ivy. I may have been a bit fooled by the river. The increasing forest cover made me feel increasingly like being back home in Missouri, where such things are more common. At least, the poison ivy is more common.

So I calmly got my stove and cooking supplies out of the boat and began to make dinner. But sitting down and looking at the stove, I saw on my feet a number of

LEACHES.

Right there, on my feet. Three huge ones on my right foot, and one on my left. Just stiking there, sucking my blood. I yanked them off one by one with my pliers. After the big ones were gone, I noticed many smaller ones. I killed them with alcohol and salt. They respond the same way slugs do. Shrivel up and die.

I am not kidding this time. Though I have never had leaches before, I know bloodsuckers when I see them.

Now I have no major gripes with leaches. They are quite professional in what they do. It is true, thier bites neither hurt nor sting; as far as I know they don't transmit any horrible disease; they have great uses in alternative medicine, for people who don't think conventional medicine is freaky enough already; in two generations teenagers will probably adorn themselves with them as a form of rebellion. But it is important to set personal boundaries and one of mine is that nobody sucks my blood without obtaining permission first. And so I must add them to my enemies list, which now reads, in order of decreasing hatred:

1. Ticks
2. Biting flies
3. Mallards
4. Leaches
5. Mosquitoes

And so there you have it. Another animal I had no experience with before beginning this trip, now added to the enemies list. Oh, Canada, you are a silly country.

Day 39 ended: 50*38.721N, 104*54.798W

Day 38: Five hundred meters over the sea

2008-09-09T14:37:00.001-05:00

I had a monologue worked out in my head about there being no rapids or even obstacles on any of the river I had yet traveled. If you fell asleep on the river the worst that would happen is you'd wake up beached somewhere further on.

I am happy to report that this is not true. Let me start in the middle, scoping out a rapid dropping two feet over fifteen. This is not especially large, but it was a significant change from what I was used to. Until the previous day I had seen only the barest hint of riffles, and no trees since early on the Bow. But now there were many trees that had been undercut by the current, now nearly blocking the river, but always leaving some three foot gap for me to dodge through. Some brief rapids flowed over stones, and these are wonderful because they are preceded by gravel banks that make for good landings.

Some of the stone rapids, like this one, look like they are kept up by human hands. There are gravel roads to either side, and boulders there which I suppose are rolled into place as the need arises. A higher, slower river provides water for irrigation and a natural boundary for the cattle.

Even the beavers have gotten into the act. They want to maintain a water level so their lodge doors are only accessible underwater.

Fortunately, there is enough flow in the river that I can go through or over all of these obstacles. However, I hadn't yet done anything quite as large as this rapid, so I was a bit concerned. Walking alongside and beneath it, I saw a rockfree channel of sufficient flow; all I would need to do was keep the canoe straight as I passed through.

I considered the principle of least regret. Would I be more likely to regret running, or not running the rapid? If I ran it, I could imagine myself capsizing, which would be a fair disaster. It would at least take time to clean out my stuff. But these rapids had injected interest into the trip. If I bypassed the rapid, I would miss out on the rush of excitement, and who could say if I would come across another one like this?

I decided to limit my risk. I had never lined a canoe down a rapid before, and this would make a good exercise for this procedure. Then, I at least learned something. I moved the boat over to the channel I had seen, and grabbed the rope attached to the bow. I slowly unreeled the rope, allowing the canoe to slide down the rapid under my control. The deed done, I was then on my way, and didn't feel bad about my decision, just about losing my third and last pair of sunglasses while examining the situation.

It's appropriate that on this day of such visible change in elevation, I fell to 500 meters over sea level. To put that in perspective, here are the day numbers for every 100 meters of elevation:

1000m: 1
900m: 3
800m: 5
700m: 9
600m: 17
500m: 38

If the progression continues, I might reach sea level in about eight years.

Day 38 ended: 50*36.791N, 105*02.588W

Day 37: Julyflies

2008-09-08T14:36:00.001-05:00

I thought of them as mayflies, even though that's one thing I'm sure they're not. My sister, after my crude description of them, thought they might be craneflies, so I'll call them that. They looked something like mosquitoes, without the bloodsucking mouthparts that earn those insects a place on the enemies list.

I seemed to watch the entire life-cycle of these craneflies over the course of a week. At first, they were only an irritating buzzing. A couple of days later I actually saw them; vast clouds of insects that filled the sky. Their buzzing was not rhythmic, but did follow a certain dynamics, perhaps diminishing at a gust of wind, and then crescendoing to one of many climaxes during the night. There were billions of them. The population of earth became flies buzzing over Buffalo Pound Lake.

When I returned from Moose Jaw they were no longer omnipresent, but formed distinct vortices, tornadoes of activity in the sky.

My last day on the lake, I woke up to a constellation of craneflies on the tent fly. Outside, their carcases were dissolving on the water, their purpose complete. The wind was going my way, and I knew it was my time to go.

I threw my stuff into the canoe. Nothing was dry enough to pack correctly, and I had to portage the dam at the end of the lake.

It was a difficult portage.

But the next section of the Qu'Appelle was beautiful. Gone were the mud steps that had been so frustrating on the upper Qu'Appelle, and in their place were trees desperately holding the bank against the river. There were great horned owls, coyotes, mule deer, kingfishers, turtles, blue heron, and, well, mallards. A thunderstorm came up and so I pulled over to stop. I found a great place, well sheltered by trees, and assembled my tent there.

When the rain stopped, I decided to spend the day. My computer needed fixing. I had heard that some OLPC's had developed a malady known as "sticky keys", and now mine had, too. First it would add an "A" every time I hit the shift key. Then, after almost every letter. I hit erase so often, the erase key started sticking, too.

The computer is held together by tiny, phillips-headed screws. They are too small for my leatherman tool to unscrew, but I had a bike multitool whose screwdriver just fit. I took apart the entire keyboard section, saw little that seemed wrong to me. There was some sand in the neck between the keyboard and the monitor, but that was all. I just brushed off the back of the keypad and reassembled the computer, without most of the screws. The parts mostly snap together, anyway, and besides, I had lost some of the screws already under the trees.

That fixed the problem for the time being, but I have continuing problems with sticky keys and so my cute little computer is sadly, often in pieces.

Day 37 ended: 50*35.732N, 105*14.350W

Day 36: Back on the lake

2008-09-07T14:36:00.000-05:00

I do not know at what age children learn that objects continue exist even if they are out of sight, but this seems to be a lesson I have had to relearn in regards to the canoe. I spend nearly all day attached to it, and then set up my tent right beside it at night. Sometimes I wake up during the night, worrying about whether my canoe has been washed away, blown away, or somehow blinked out of existence in quantum fluctuation that I try to set up my tent so the canoe is easily visible out one door. Somehow pulling it completely out of the water and tying it to a tree isn't as good as really seeing it.

So I was glad when I got back from Moose Jaw to see that the canoe still existed, completely unmolested. I didn't know how long I was going to be out at Moose Jaw, so I had written on the side of the canoe the places I had been so far, and how long I had been out on this adventure so far. I was disappointed I couldn't spend another night in Moose Jaw, but by the time I started looking there were no rooms available anywhere. So I had to stash my things in the library until six, see everything, pick up groceries, bike back to the park, and canoe across the lake to find my camping spot. By the time I got there it was quite dark and so the spot was merely serviceable.

The next day was a lazy one, a recovery day. I slept in, to start. The wind was going the wrong day to get off the lake in a hurry, and I wasn't sure how hard the portage at the end would be. A thunderstorm picked up, so I got off the water to get out of the lightning. Then it began raining, so I set up my tent. Too slowly! It was soaked through by the time I got it up, and I found better shelter under the trees.

The rain ended quickly. I stayed there the rest of the day, a nice sandy beach with plenty of space for reading and writing while I waited for my tent to dry out.

Day 36 ended: 50*34.971N, 105*21.485W

Day 35: Pool

2008-09-06T14:34:00.000-05:00

The Moose Jaw gallery had an exhibition on by Dorothy Knowles. I found it amusing that the sign outside read simply "KNOWLES", which was coincidentally the same name as the motel that made me feel so unwanted the night before.

Knowles is a landscape artist, and I found myself comparing her to another female Canadian landscape artist whose work I had recently seen in Calgary: Emily Carr. The most striking thing to me about Carr's work was how disjarring her compositions were. Walking into a gallery full of her paintings made me uneasy. I wanted to reframe her work to give a more pleasant composition. Knowles, on the other hand, generally uses classic, serene compositions, and walking into her gallery was almost like walking into a living room. If anything, I wouldn't mind her to be a bit more daring.

But a lot of the difference is in the implied distance to the subject. Carr's work is up-close, almost tactile. You can feel the shape and texture of her trees with your eye's hand. Knowles on the other hand, has everything in the distance. Nothing you can touch, but a short drive or a good hike will get you there. It is the British Columbian versus the Saskatchewan landscapes. Closed in, vertical, and personal, versus wide open, horizontal, and distant.

I won't claimto be any kind of art critic, and I certainly can't give a full review of either artist's work. Too much Carr gives me a headache, and I would have needed long johns and a parka to take in Knowles's winter scenes properly.

I have been using "landscape" here in the general sense of an outdoor scene emphasizing the environment, whether natural or artificial, but when I contemplate the idea of "landscape" what I idealize is a certain quality. The painting should draw you in, invite you to wander around in its setting, to explore it with your eyes. I don't know how to describe it rightly, it is the feeling that this is a place you could go, and after turning away, the feeling that this is a place you have gone to, climbed its tree, drunk of its waters.

To me, this is most epitomized by the masterpiece "Early Spring" by Kuo Hsi (Gui Xi). I take it as a quite personal affront that after his death, the fashion for landscape changed and his tapestries hanging in a Chinese palace were painted over, made permanently unavailable to modernity.

The Chinese artists of that period were somehow able to produce this feeling in me by shrouding their works in mists, which I need to peek behind, but to get there I suppose I will need to climb the mountain after seeking advice from the figure in the foreground, made miniscule by the scale of the landscape. Meanwhile, I am staring at a work of art, and so my hand tries to retrace the scraggly lines that make up the twisted trees and crumbling boulders here. And so my eyes are slowed down, they take considerable time in taking it all in, despite the fact that the work seems to use a minimum of brush strokes and washes.

And so that is one example of this wandering quality to a landscape. There are certainly other ways to achieve it, and even ones which might stretch the formal definition of landscape. Another example I can almost visualize while sitting out here under the trees is actually a certain "Where's Waldo" image, of a giant, bizarre four-way football game, of uncertain rules. And here I wander as I take in all the figures, try to figure out what they are doing, why they are doing it, and form them into larger groups. Certainly all of the Waldo images use similar techniques, and maybe I'm being a little bit silly comparing them to the Chinese masters, but most of the Waldo images do not produce this wandering feeling in me, anyway. At most one other. And this image might not even be thought of as rightly a landscape, because take away the figures, and there is nothing.

Why do I bring this up here? Certainly none of Carr's work that I saw had this wandering quality. I admired her curves, forms, and use of color, but few works invited exploration, and none deeply. Knowles's early work, on the other hand, seemed to be stretching, aching to produce a place to wander, and she succeeded quite capably in her painting, "Pool".

It is a simple composition, a large sky hanging over a forest in the distance. Somewhat nearer is a field with a large pool on the left hand side. It produced such strong desire, strong wandering in me. Knowing that I would never see it again, I sat down in front of it until I could gain sufficient mastery of my feelings to teach myself how she touched this vein in me.

But I still do not know. It is a mystery that I cannot recapture. Her big blocks of trees are a forest on the edge of my vision. I must hike there so that I can find the trails that run among them. But I know they are just blocks of paint, outlined by charcoal. I dive into her pool, I suppose, because the reflection is just dishonest enough that time must have passed since I glanced at the forest.

The sky! The sky is what proves the landscape, what makes the color blocks a forest and the stripes grass. I cannot explore it, cannot gain a foothold in it. Its clouds are huge, real Saskatchewan clouds, and as you look into them they change shapes just like real clouds. Now this one is a lady's face, and now it is a horse's mane.

It is too much, anyway, for me, and after the peak of emotion was gone there was little I could take from the painting other than this woman had been visited by genius, at least on occasion. So I wandered away from the Pool, and into the town of Moose Jaw, to see what I might find there.

Day 35 ended: 50*36.197N, 105*24.339W

Day 34: Little Chicago

2008-09-05T14:33:00.002-05:00

I locked up my motel room and decided to walk downtown. The neighborhood I am staying in was clearly up and coming 30 years ago. At one intersection two furniture stores grin at each other across the street, both promising "real oak", and both closed permanently. The residential section has fared no better. All the paint is peeling, and every other house has a "Beware of Dog" sign posted. From behind their locked front doors the horrible screaming arguments of people in need is overheard without eavesdropping.

I had a feeling of apprehension about my visit to town. It took two hours of thirsty pedaling to get here from the east side of the park, I could have sworn the attendant at the first motel refused me a room because of my scummy appearance, and here I was shacking up for the night in the slums.

And then a thought of correction made its way into my head. "Kevin, you always hate a town the first night. Give it a chance this time!"

A man hailed me as I walked by on the sidewalk, asking if the bus was still in service. Looking at the peeling orange paint and unkept appearance of the bench, it seemed doubtful to me. But I had no idea, and told him I had just arrived in town. So had he, and he was quite excited about it. He had just bought a house for $68,000, and being a professional carpenter he was going to fix it up and sell it in a year for twice as much. He'd lived in Calgary and Regina, but didn't enjoy the price of staying in those towns.

When I told him I was walking downtown, he quite animatedly told me "You'll love it. You know what they used to call this town in the 1920's? Little Chicago. Al Capone came up here sometimes." Apparently, to run his business when things got uncomfortable in the States.

I walked by a grand building, a library/gallery/museum/gift shop, according to its sign. It sits next to a little park with a creek running through it, and here are many strange things to look at, even with the library closed. There was one path running into the park, posted with three signs. The first two read "Pedestrians only" and "Service traffic only", and I spent some time in confusion over whether the conjunction or disjunction was implied here. The third was easier to understand: "Waterfowl can be aggressive." Most of the waterfowl were mallards.

There are also two time capsules celebrating Moose Jaw's centennial, both to be opened a hundred years after their sealing. The first was to be opened on Moose Jaw's bicentennial in 2082, and the second to be opened on the occasion of Moose Jaw's bicentennial in 2103. And that took a bit longer to figure out.

So much for the park, except there was one entrance dedicated to the memory of a man surnamed "Gate". I kid you not.

This being a Friday night, there was not much for me to do downtown. I have never been one for the bar scene, and feel awkward in a situation where I know the names of neither the people nor the drinks. It probably wouldn't help that I had mud on my face, and was wearing jogging pants and a bright green t-shirt both made baggy by my paddling diet. But then again, I could be wrong as well. As I say, not my scene.

Most of the places I would visit the next day, a borscht sampling salon, a smoothie bar, and the Tunnels of Moose Jaw, were closed. I spent some time in Reader's Book Shop, which is a used bookstore that also has Internet terminals, and seem, with its wall of manga and Magic: the Gathering cards, to be transitioning to serve a geekier audience. I scanned the shelves searching for my current two favorite authors. John Steinbeck and Tom Stoppard. They've become favorites by writing the only two entertainment books I have with me, "Travels with Charley" and "Arcadia', respectively, both well worn and falling apart from the rigors of adventure and rereading.

Finding nothing to my taste, I return to my motel room. Although the sign reads "Newly Renovated!", every surface but the carpeted floor is covered in wood paneling - and poorly, I might add, with white paint showing behind every knot. On the wall was what appeared at first glance to be a framed cross-stitch of John 3:16, but on closer inspection proved to be a photocopy on certificate paper.

Although I have a bed available to me for the first time in over a month, it seems the comfortable toilet seat was a greater blessing to me. For, I have painful diarrhea all night long.

Day 34 ended: 50*35.691N, 105*24.672

(These are the canoe's coordinates, at the park boat launch. I do not have the coordinates of the motel.)

[LIVE 76] Brandon!

2008-09-05T12:37:00.000-05:00

I am in the city of Brandon.

It is nice.

I have uploaded posts through "Day 59: Good... or evil?". I have a pretty good buffer now, through September, and may begin speeding up the posting at some point.

I have questions for you readers:

1) My flickr account is stuck in French, a language I never learned too well, and my pro account has expired. Could someone do one of the following for me?
a) Explain how to navigate the menus to change the language back to English.
b) Explain how to navigate the menus to renew a flickr pro account.
c) Just buy me a pro account.

2) Was Fraggle Rock actually that good, or is that just childhood nostalgia?

3) Did Rocky and Bullwinkle actually have any continuing storylines, or was that just another gag?

Thank you for reading.

Day 33: It just wouldn't work

2008-09-04T14:32:00.001-05:00

"We can get you this spot here. It's only two minutes from the boat launch."

Two minutes is clearly a driving time and only proves to me that the registration girls here don't have a clue what I am asking for. I just want a site on Buffalo Pound Lake where I can set up a camp for just my canoe and my tent. Is that too much to ask?

I told them "I'll think about it," and walked out of the registration building. I came to a conclusion. It's nice stopping in these provincial parks to get showers and laundry, but it would be too much of a pain to haul my stuff up from the water to some a camp site. There's nothing across the lake, so I figure if they can't find a spot for me, I can just cross to the other shore and camp right with my canoe.

So I re-entered and tried to explain this to them. I said I understood that they had no designated spot on the water, but I don't need much room, just for my tent, really, and that I would like to use their facilities and that I would like to give them money. The three of them briefly consulted and then I got the conclusion, "I'm sorry, it just wouldn't work."

You're right, it wouldn't work, Saskatchewan Provincial Parks. The relationship that started out with memorable showers, had continued into winks and illicit activity on the grounds, had now come to this. There was no place, anywhere, for me in their lives. But that's okay, Saskatchewan, I've been looking forward to Manitoba for some time now. Of course, I'd still use the washroom and showers here. I still hd physical needs, even if I had been emotionally rejected.

I was frustrated, maybe largely because I knew what perfect campsites there were up the lake, that I had passed up to get there. I'll admit, perhaps if I had come some other day, or people with mor eknowledge and authority had been manning the desk that day, things might have come out differently. I just hadn't been ready for this response.

My bike and I coasted down the hill, back to where my canoe was parked. This was "seasonal camping", and it was inhabited primarily by these rather large camper units. For a long time I couldn't understand the appeal of these things. They all have names like, "Wilderness Tripper", but clearly they don't have anything to do with wilderness. But Steinbeck's book "Travels with Charley" has at times made me lust after one of these units and the luxuries it must contain. A real bed every night! A kitchenette, a bathroom and no doubt showers too!

They may be worthless for wilderness adventure, but they seem pretty good for travel, and the inhabitants I've met seem to agree. Drive about your little home on wheels and then you can pay to park it for a night on a green lawn with little planted trees, everything the suburbanites inside can't bring with them. Then they spread out their lawn ornaments, erect a little shed, and even build fences or hang big black tarps around their site so they can have a little bit of Privacy. Apparently Privacy is a big deal to your modern camper driver, because at the registration desk the girl trying to find me a spot ranked all the sites in terms of this Privacy, a term that has utterly no meaning to a person who has essentially been living on the river, alone for a month. I much prefer Neighborliness to Privacy.

So, I had gotten it into my head that campers are for travel. But this lot was for "seasonal camping", whatever that was, and there was a huge mowed field, room for two soccer games that I'm sure never took place, between this lot and the lake. I wandered around for a bit hoping to ask permission from someone lakeside to set up a tent in their lot for a couple nights, but the place seemed almost entirely abandoned. I supposed "seasonal camping" meant people lived in their nice suburban homes most of the week, with their big lawns and televisions, and then commuted out to the park weekends to stay in their metallic homes with big lawns and televisions. The whole park just seemed so fake to me at that point: the mowed lawns, the raked beaches, this parking lot that people thought of as wilderness adventure.

I decided I wouldn't take up residence on these absent folks' lawn away from lawn. But I wouldn't erase myself completely from view. I set my tent on a nice beach on the opposite shore, where absolutely anyone would see me, if they just turned their heads away from the television for a minute.

Day 33 ended: 50*36.515N, 105*25.142W

Day 32, part 2: Hungry

2008-09-03T17:32:00.000-05:00

It is getting dark, but on all banks I see only the stair-steps of knee-deep, boot-sucking mud. But I have no choice. If I look around one more corner, there won't be enough light for me to set up my tent and cook dinner, and I am very hungry.

For several days I have been out of snack food and have been subsisting solely on a pot of oatmeal in the morning and a can of pasta in the evening. This is light fare for adventuring, and I have to draw my pants tighter and tighter as the fat has melted off my body.

Tonight I vow to have a double dinner, and start upping my food intake in general.

I can't do anything with the canoe but leave it in the water, tied with two ropes to trees on shore. I have to climb up and through and down a four foot slope of mud to move my camping supplies onto dry ground, a trip I try to make as few times as possible tonight. I take up two cans for dinner. These cans are unlabeled because when my boat got swamped the other night at the park, the can labels became a soupy mess, which I decided to just dispose of. So, it is a double dinner surprise tonight.

The first can itself is extra large, and on opening it I discover it is a double helping of vegetable soup. I pour it into my pot, and put that on my lit stove. It cooks for a while and I put my spoon in to stir it, but I clumsily upset the whole stack of stove, pot and soup, which pours into holes in the mud, the fuel still burning! I have to empty my water bottle to stop the fire.

The next can is also vegetable soup, and I am able to successfully cook and eat it. But although I am still hungry I am not willing to climb out over the mud to retrieve another can of food.

Putting into bed, my mind, which now has some fuel to work with, put a few things together I had seen as I was setting up my tent. A white building, just to my south. What looked to be a sign, just to my north. A pickup truck, driving and then stopping to examine what I was doing. For allI know I am camping in someone's backyard but it is too late to do anything about it. It is too dark, too muddy, I am too tired.

As usual my mind brought to consciousness all the fears and doubts I have about this location, and it is astonishing how well it is able to accomplish this task. It seems that every gust of wind, every rustle of leaves, is turned into the voices of accusers in the distance. I know this is not real, that it is only a testament to what my subconscious can accomplish with the overtones of these sounds.

I realize how every place I have slept for a month, I have worried about what people would think of me camping there, what they would do if they found me, and so on. But for a month I have not heard a bad word from anyone, and only positive words and encouragement from those who stumble across what I am doing. All my friends assure me that landowners expect some use of the shores of rivers for cooking and camping, and who could complain when I explain what I am trying to accomplish?

But still, I have a trump card to play on my subconscious when these doubts arise. An old adage I must have picked up from some forgotten source: "If someone has a problem withme, and doesn't tell me about it, then it isn't my problem."

My trump card played, I go to bed. There are no voices in the wind. And though I am not happy about my site this evening, I have no worries.

A weasel snuck into my canoe during the night, and banged my cans and trash about. Not wanting to cross the mud, and having nothing worth throwing at it, I let it do what it will.

I sleep soundly, and in my dreams the family in the white house invite me in for breakfast in the morning.

Day 32 ended: 50*46.063N, 105*44.321

Day 32, part 1: Ducks' unlimited stupidity

2008-09-03T10:30:00.000-05:00

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WARNING: This entry is concerned with the behavior of mallard ducks, and therefore may not be appropriate for all ages and work environments. I don't know what ages and work environments may be reading this blog, so as a special case there will be a friendlier day 32 post after this one. Continue reading only if you do not wish to have any positive associations you may have to these fowl creatures completely shattered.
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I began to hate mallards in St. Charles. Now, if you don't remember which ducks the mallards are, they are your very common, almost stereotypical duck. The male has a green head uring breeding season, and both sexes have irridescent blue stripes, bordered by white, on the side of their wings.

My apartment complex surrounded a small pond, and the management apparently thought it would be cute to have some nice little ducks in there. And they are ort of cute, when they are little. Little yellow chicks with black stripes, just a sittin' on the water. But this exhausts any positive qualities the ducks may possess.

I first figured this out when I saw half a dozen males chasing a single female on the sidewalk outside my apartment. But the female was getting worn out and - something unutterable - the males were actually having turns taking advantage of her. I had never seen gang rape before, even among the animals. When I realized what was happening I rushed in to break up this madness, and soon only the female was left, slowly waddling back to the pond with pain.

I later read more, and learned that this kind of behavior is common among mallards. Ornithologists apparently coined the term "rape flight" to describe another of their activities, similar to what I saw, but airborne.

Now it is apparently the case that a few years ago a mallard drake was chasing another in apparent rape flight. The one being chased was beginning to lose his breeding plumage, but still recognizably male, when he hit the side of an office and fell to the ground, dead.
A researcher, hearing this noise, left his desk and went outside to find the chasing mallard engaging the corpse. This activity continued for over an hour until the researcher chased the live bird away and claimed the corpse for further study.

This is apparently the only known same-sex necrophilic act outside of humans. I wonder who keeps those stats.

Knowing this, I could still believed for the longest time that it was only the males that were bad. But now, I know that this is not true. Oh, the mothers I guess do some care for their chicks, or at least let them follow them around, but seeing so many of them on the Qu'Appelle, I am decidedly unimpressed.

These are some of the stupidest, most selfish mothers I have ever witnessed.

Most waterfowl, when they see my canoe, do begin to swim away. Unfortunately, since they usually see me coming downstream, they swim downstream away from me and so it appears to them I am giving chase, even though I am merely following the path of the river. But most are at least smart enough to realize if they cannot evade me on water, perhaps the land will work, and lo and behold, when they go ashore their pursuer does not follow.

Mallards are too stupid to figure this out. They keep going and going, swimming in front of me until they wear out. The chicks, one by one, grow too weary and dive until I am out of the way. I often wonder what happens to these scattered litters once I am well gone. Is the mother able to go back and reform her group?

But that is if the mother even stays with the chicks. Her first reflex on seeing me is to make loud quaking noises and splash around in the water. Many birds that lay eggs on land have this trick of acting hurt to draw you away from their young, but with mallards, the act is entirely transparent, and besides, she may or may not actually go in a different direction than her chicks, more often than not ensuring that the predator will see them all.

Another of her tricks, and I have seen this many times, is to simply fly away, abandoning her squeaking children in the water until the danger has past. This beggars all belief. This same day I saw a pair of songbirds valiantly defending their nest against a whole flock of crows? I saw a pair no larger than sparrows chasing a great horned owl, sitting on that huge back, pecking away to drive the beast from their home. And yet mallard parents, always single mothers, seem quite willing to simply leave their chicks for the taking. And the effect of these tactics is quite apparent in the size of their brood. For inevitably in this section of river, if there were a great many chicks together, 9 or 12, they were very young. But I never saw more than two chicks near fledging age, and wonder how many litters a mallard bears before she is able to bring even one chick up to adulthood.

I saw on this day a mallard mother abandon her offspring, and fly away from me right by the jaws ofa hungry coyote. I do not know if he caught her, only that my eyes were one moment tracking a flying bird and the next saw only a coyote turning away from the river. Her young orphans decided to adopt a sick goose, a pathetic thing that unable to fly or swim quickly, kept repeating its sickly "hirk, hirk" as it panicked and rejected the responsibility of these children.

But I don't feel too sorry for them. If they hadn't leaped out into the water in front of my canoe I probably never would have even seen that family, hidden in the reeds. The chicks are stupid, too.

And I spent so much of the day following these stupid birds, constantly rasping out their quacks ahead of me, warning all the other animals so that all I could see were mallards, mallards, mallards. I took to racing them as soon as I saw them, so I could get ahead of them, they could get away, and I could see some life other than mallards. But there were just too many, so I had to create an enemies list just so I could add mallards to it. From Most despised to least, on this day my enemies list was:

1. Ticks
2. Biting flies
3. Mallards
4. Mosquitoes

Ticks are clearly the worst. How many ticks do I have on me right now? I don't know! I can't see the back of my head! And they carry "Lyme disease". I have no idea what that is but I don't believe they ever named a pleasant, curable disease after a person. They are nasty little critters, and if ever I find a "scroll of genocide" in the woods here I will use it to eliminate ticks from the earth, even though (no, because!) I don't see very many of them.

Biting flies -- well, I never see too many at a time, but they are tough to kill, even once caught. I took to slapping them and then drowning them or crushing them with pliers because they survived what I was sure were deadly blows. Their bites are like being pierced with blunt pins, and though they don't last long, any time I see one of these insects I can think of little but to worry when they are going to bite me or when I will kill them.

Mallards range beteen hopelessly stupid, and viciously evil. They are annoying, and there is little I can do when caught behind them because I did not bring firearms with me. I did not come from a hunting, gun-toting family, and honestly feel no need to kill other living things. But mallards make me wantto purchase a weapon, of a caliber large enough to leave them unrecognizable, and go to the firing range every day until I am skilled enough to slaughter a flock of them at first sight. However, I do admit they are not as bad as ticks or biting flies.

Mosquitoes are bloodsuckers, but do not attack me on the water, and are easily repelled by deet elsewhere. Their bites are certainly annoying, but mosquitoes don't give me the helpless feeling that the other animals on this list do. They are not skilled at evasion at die at the lightest slap. Their only strength is in numbers.

Day 32 continues.