On a reunion in the wilderness
TWELVE YEARS GO by faster than you would think. I should know because that’s how long it had been since the last time I went camping. Now when I say “camping”, I don’t mean pitching a tent within spitting distance of a car and a five-minute drive from a bar of chocolate. I’m talking about carry-a-boat-on-your-head, arm-yourself-with-a-gallon-of-insect-repellent, don’t-even-think-about-breaking-your-leg-or you’ll spend-three-days-slumped-in-the-bottom-of-a-canoe kind of camping, otherwise known as a week-long canoe trip in the boundary waters splattered across the remote borders of Minnesota and Ontario.
You may well ask: “Why?” Or may state, more conversationally: “Hmmm, well that doesn’t sound like my idea of a holiday.”
And yes, it has to be said, seven days in the Great North Woods armed with little more than a pan and a folding knife is a little short of relaxing. There were times when, waking up with a full bladder and nothing between me and the pounding rain but a conifer or two and a taut sheet of space-age plastic, I began to doubt the wisdom of allowing myself to be talked into joining this shower of old buddies. I am a city slicker, after all, unaccustomed to balancing on a wet log while holding a Kevlar boat over my head and wearing 80kg worth of backpack while being accosted by bugs that know to go straight for the jugular (euphemistically known as “portaging”).
There are only so many times that a person has to peel the slugs off his wet sandals before he realises that he is out of his element.
And did I fail to mention that this was a man trip? Oh yes. Copious amounts of alcohol were ferried, as were tackle boxes bigger than heads. Monster fish were caught, fish the size of school children, fish that could feed our little cabal without blinking their little fishy eyelids, had they had any eyelids to blink.
I hear you asking the question again: “Why?” And, “Did you eat that fish’s flesh while its heart was still beating on the stone face fronting your stolid campsite?”
Since you ask, yes. And were we proud? In a man trip sort of way, of course. Which brings up another anthropological aspect that emerged fairly quickly into the week: the natural distribution of tasks that falls upon individual members of such a group, particularly a group that has known each other since their student days a dozen years past, if not longer.
There were those of us who were called upon to fish and feed the masses. There were those of us who cut the potatoes and carrots and those of us who hacked through the thicket to find dry wood. There were those of us who winched and garotted the ropes that held the tarps between the trees, under which we would crouch in the dirt during the rainy evenings, when pine cones were won and lost in many a dice game.
Then there were those of us whom nature had given the gifts of documentation. Or at least that’s what I tell myself. Another possible description of my role in the deep woods could be “one who stays out of the way and tries to keep dry”.
Even at that, I didn’t do very well, although to be fair, none of us did. I think it was day four when I started to forget what it felt like to have dry feet, or even to wear socks. But hey, what better way to reconnect with a group of friends you haven’t spent proper time with since the Clinton administration than to lock yourselves in the wilderness and push yourselves to the limits of health and, as long as we’re at it, death?
I mean really, I couldn’t have picked a nicer group of lads to give the responsibility of not tipping me out of a canoe and drowning me 800 yards from shore, halfway between civilisation and Canada.
And so what have we learned, having joined a late-night, backwoods chorus line of snoring men inching their way into their thirties, after eating our body weights in fish, after watching one drunken friend dump another drunken friend into the lake along with the entire contents of his tackle box, after receiving more mosquito bites than one would have thought humanly possible without suffering anaphylactic shock, after braving the beavers and their many dams, after having received the never-too-late blessing of a cloudless last day out and burning ourselves on the rocks like lizards who had lost their scales?
Next time, let’s invite some women.
Neil Burkey is an American writer living in London
Róisín Ingle is on leave