Wildfire at McNiece Lake

Photo credit: Erik Danielson

In April I decided to abandon a career I enjoyed so I could take a seasonal job up north. I decided to go hide in the woods for seven months. I didn’t know anyone up there, but I met people I liked, and so when Erik asked me if I wanted to go on a month-long canoe trip in October, I decided that I should. I decided to buy a canoe and new boots, to get my passport renewed, to paddle whenever possible in preparation for the big trip. I decided to stare at maps after work, wondering what we would find out there. And while three of the original six participants dropped out before departure, I decided to get in the canoe and paddle further than I ever had before.

We had two re-supply stops in mind (Atikokan, Canada and Ely, Minnesota) but we decided against a set route, and so each day we would wake up and have our coffee, listen to the weather radio and start paddling, not sure where we’d end up. This is a great way to see something you’ve never seen before. We decided to enjoy ourselves instead of setting goals and hurrying to reach them. And sometime around lunch we’d look at the map and say, this looks like a good spot. 

On the fourth night we found ourselves on a huge rocky peninsula, looking north across Agnes Lake. We ate our soup with fresh dumplings and looked out on the massive lake. Later, reading in my hammock and watching the big sky, I thought, I’m really glad we decided to ride the south wind up here. I might've seen the aurora in the distance but I was so tired... 

And we moved forward in space and time, and the sun rose on Friday, October 7. We knew it was going to be windy and that we’d have to get off Agnes in a hurry, so we had our coffee and moved north again, through Silence and Sultry and Noon. We stopped for lunch on Shade Lake, and that’s when Erik spotted the plume of smoke to the north. It had been very dry, and now with the heavy south wind blowing, we weren’t surprised to see signs of forest fire. The smoke was in the general direction we were headed, but it was impossible to say how far away it really was, and we didn’t want to backtrack into the wind, so we finished our salami and cheese and decided to keep moving. 

That afternoon we hit lots of little lakes, passing from Shade to Dell to Grey and Yum Yum, and every time we got a glimpse of the smoke plume it looked closer, always to our north. At Yum Yum we had another decision: Keep heading towards the smoke or go south towards the Yum-Yum Portage, which by all accounts was a nasty path best avoided, despite it’s fun name. It was getting late in the day and nobody wanted to test the Yum Yum or the wind, so we pushed north into Shan Walshe Lake, and suddenly the smoke seemed much, much closer. It wasn’t scaring us the way it should have, though. We had heard there were virgin pines on McNiece Lake, so we put the boats and packs on our shoulders one more time and moved closer still. 

At McNiece it seemed we had finally gotten beyond the smoke (or maybe directly in it’s path), and I said to Erik as we pushed away from shore, this might be the stupidest thing I’ve ever done. But we paddled on anyways, both secretly hoping, I think, that the fire would be right around the corner... And it was! Pretty quickly we realized the fire was actively burning our only other route out of McNeice, which wasn’t a big lake. What to do, what to do? Back-tracking to Yum Yum now would mean paddling and portaging and setting up camp in the dark. There was a perfectly good campsite on McNiece itself, on the shore opposite the fire zone, so we decided to stop for the night about a mile from an active wildfire. Yeah... It was one of those decisions you make where you don’t even need hindsight to know it’s crazy.

But crazy isn’t always wrong! 

Here we were in the true interior of the park, five days of travel from anywhere, partially trapped and partially thrilled to be trapped. Canada doesn’t actively fight forest fires in wilderness areas, so we knew we were on our own up there. We started a fire in camp and fried up pike tacos with our last fresh avocado, always keeping an eye on the smoke and the wind. Erik and Paige and I all had huge grins on our faces and we kept giggling and remarking how crazy this was, saying things like, what in the hell are the chances? and, geeesh! and, hooooooly shit! It would be easy to say we were there because of fate, but no, I don’t believe that. 

I knew why we were here on this night, but I didn’t know how being there would change me. How, every decision I had ever made brought me here and now, somehow, and how being here would alter all of my future decisions. The Wildfire at McNiece Lake taught me an important lesson about the choices we make. The problem, of course, is trying to say what it really meant so that someone else can understand it. I just want to explain the rarity of this experience without comparing it to a conversation with a yeti, or the sensation of feeling the wind in your hair for the first time.

Darkness crept in but the fire shimmered across the lake, like northern lights within the rocks and water. Somehow, the wind got stronger - in excess of 50 mph - and we heard trees toppling all around us. Trees were exploding in the fire, booming across the lake. Thunder clapped, but we did not move from the exposed rocks, staring out at this glowing storm of destruction and rebirth. I thought about the things I had been thinking about a lot this year, watching massive pines erupt in flames, the fire creeping along the ridgeline very slowly underneath, releasing the explosions. Old things died. Something new started whirring in me, like the fire had released a sprouting seed in my guts. It was late when I got in my hammock beneath the rainfly and then very soon the rain started, heavy drops with an intense smokey taste. And the wind kept roaring.  

And we moved forward in space and time...

In the morning the wind had calmed and there was a haze lingering in every direction, but the big smoke plume had been drowned out, so we packed quickly and paddled directly into the difficulty. The shoreline was charred, individual trees were still on fire on both sides of the path, and we were over a mile from the next lake with no way to know what was going on in between. We got out and took pictures next to burning logs and laughed in disbelief. And this next decision we never really talked about. It would take each of us two trips to get everything through and we knew the path ahead was as dangerous as anything we could find out here, but we all understood this and knew we needed to do this, so we said nothing more, grabbed our packs and started into the wildfire. 

It was early in the morning but already hot, and as we walked over blackened earth and through fallen burnt trees, the humidex spiked. The forest was either burnt or still on fire, and I was covered in sweat by the top of the first hill. So many downed trees blocked the actual path, the one-mile portage kept increasing in length with every step. I felt like I had gotten myself in good shape for this trip, but halfway through I was using every bit of fuel I had to keep moving at a reasonable pace. Finally we reached the shores of Kahshapiwi Lake, covered in ash and blood (from where?!?), and we looked back. The wind seemed to be increasing again and we still had a food pack and both our boats sitting on McNiece. There was nothing to be done. The decision had already been made. We headed into the wildfire again at maximum speed.

The whole walk back I was thinking, How in the hell are we gonna get these canoes through these trees? It just kept getting hotter. The second run through was a true team effort, especially across the worst-hit sections, threading an 18-foot canoe through a tangle of charred branches, around standing pines that were burning themselves hollow from within and threatening to fall at any moment, shoulders and arms and lungs screaming for rest but something bigger pushing the legs forward. I found fuel I didn’t know I had and became a machine, incapable of stopping or being stopped... My eyes became cool water...  I burnt the pathway into my memory, took a deep breath and then we were out. We could see smoke rising from the trees behind us, all along the shoreline to the north, and there was a sense of quiet triumph. 

I drank mightily from the lake, and I was not the same after that. I can’t explain it any better, I can only live in a way that shows people how it changed me.

-30-

You're always warm and dry

I am now within a planned unemployment... I am now without work for the first time since I got my paper-route when I was 12. I should revise... I'll be without work-ing for someone else. Over the next three weeks - maybe four, five, ? - I plan on putting in the hardest work of my life. Lots of thinking and something like a hundred lakes by human-power!

I am going on a long trip from home. The adventure of my lifetime. But, yes, I have been away from home for months now. A cabin in the woods is nice... my ultimate goal... but this one is not home. I didn't build it. I got here when there was snow on the ground and there'll'be snow on the ground again before I leave it, but it's not home. It's got almost everything I need and a great location, but this is a temporary hiding spot at best. A good, quiet spot. I sleep here, I read here, I keep spring water in a big jug on my porch, mice intrude and die here, there are maps on the wall of every lake I can paddle to in a week, I think in the dark here, but this is not home. I love this spot, but I have no one to share it with, and so, it's not home.

But I will miss it... Like all my important places, particles of me will always live here - I have just a few more nights under this roof, I should expect no more...

Realizing I may not return to this place again, it hurts, and that's been the theme of this year, leaving home behind. It's been a tough, tough year for me. And I could write a book about the last year, and someday I might, but I can't write that book now and I'm not sure anyone would read it, anyways... We've all felt the pain of leaving home, and it hurts. No fun.

What I want to say... What I want to write about now, is not this year of hurt and regret and an expanding horizon, but of what comes next - for there is certainly a guilty excitement in the reception of a blank slate, no matter how you got it. I don't know what I'll do with it beyond the next month, but I think I know what I'm aiming at. This story, this searching for a philosophy of life, is fueled by the hurt of leaving, yes, but it is centered entirely on the thrilling prospect of finding home again.

Finding the true home.

Tomorrow morning I will embark on the greatest adventure of my life, at age 30, into the wilds of Canada with a paddle and a canoe and two fellow adventurers and some amazing boots. And determination. And nervousness. And regret. And hope. And so many questions, so many questions. Plenty of time to think. And decisions. And optimism, somehow.

I'm not always optimistic but I will do a better job of controlling my perspective going forward, and I think that is what the next month and year and life is about. That is what this story is about. I haven't figured out much of anything this summer, but I realized pretty quickly that my worries and complaints about life were my own problem... Maybe breathing good air helped me see it... Maybe it was the quiet, but I see it, even if I don't believe it all just yet.

Here is how I got on this thinking: I read Sig Olsen's Open Horizons a few weeks ago and in the book he tells a story from his guiding days up in the Quetico. This is where I'm going in two days. The Paddler's Paradise. It seems to me the story occurred in my exact current week the way it struck me. This story happened in the fall, during a spell when the sun never shone and it rained on and off for days and days and days. And it was cold. I listen to the cold rain wake me up in the morning, before the sun, and I shiver in my little cabin and think, how am I gonna handle this weather for a month in a tent (or a hammock!), not another group of humans within six or sixty lakes in any direction?

It was this kind of week when Sig was guiding some guesties into the northern wilds, packing his canoe in the cold rain, when an old-timer guide named Buck Skelton gave him some advice that changed his life, and the advice seems to have changed my course, if not my life entirely. This is what Buck told Sig: Remember, no matter how wet and cold you are, you're always warm and dry.

This Quetico adventure is the test of that philosophy. I know I will be cold, out there, rain on the roof of the tent at night, questions rolling through my mind, snow maybe... I am going on a long trip from home. I have been away from home for months now, and if I never get back home, it won't surprise me... I had to put in an address change today and I do not know where my next home is, but until I find it I will keep looking, everywhere. Maybe the answer will hit me out there, in the wild, or maybe I'll think of a new way to think of home...

But can my mind finally calm the wind? Can conviction still shivers? Will I be honest with myself and accept what I say? Will the quiet be truly quiet?

Where I get stuck is on the idea of control... If it is always warm and dry then you control your environment... Your life... And this is a nice notion, like a warm blanket... ... it's just a matter of wrapping yourself snugly. But it's bullshit, of course, and besides, I like my wild, Wild! I like the unpredictability of this world. Sometimes you are stuck in a storm, you are wet and cold. Sometimes life is terrible, uncontrollable.

And sometimes the forecast surprises you with a string of 70s and sun for your ride into the October north.

No, you can't ignore reality on the bad/good ::: days/weeks/years. But that's not what Buck was talking about. Buck's wild was wild, the rain very real, cold to the bone... but there's a way of knowing the chill can't last, and also, that you can't control so many things... And that's the key I think: Acceptance of now, improving tomorrow.

This is today. This is you. They are they. Here is here. Home is where you are tonight and who you share your dinner with. That's my best guess, and I hope it's a truth I can build my boat with as I look out on the lake and wind... And I will give this boat a vigorous test! So I say, be warm and dry and well.

-30-