Photo by Ranger Tim

Parked the car outside the power plant. Arranged innocent “who, me, officer?” expressions. Slipped into the forest to bushwhack down a steep, boggy slope. Climbed past humped, rusted wrecks. Jumped at the ghostly creaking of a truck-door in the wind. Cursed at blackberry brambles and sticklebacks. Slid over wet logs onto the rocks to examine the Montreal River at the base of the huge hydro dam. Whooped, and with a shuffling, one-footed Riverdance, pumped up the inflatable kayak. It was Ranger Tim’s day off, and we were exploring.

The Montreal River was once one of the finest fast-water rivers in North America before it was dammed in the Thirties to bring light to this benighted land. There are six dams in all; three in the six or seven miles between our put-in spot and the river’s escape into Lake Superior. This famous canoeing river is now inaccessible to all but the eccentric. There’s no way to get a hard-shell boat down to the water, and most people are too sensible to trespass and bushwhack with an inflatable kayak. It’s a great shame.

The mighty Montreal is now stately and plump. I confess that this is fine by me: I like my whitewater on the distinctly blue side, with the kind of gentle rapids that save paddling but don’t trouble the heart-rate. Unlike a canoe, where you kneel like a galley-slave, the inflatable is like a blow-up La-Z-Boy, the aluminium paddle as light as a mixing-spoon. It was all very restful. This brave red kayak has seen far worse: it has been buffeted by ferries while circumnavigating Manhattan, and once it bounced off a startled hippo on the Zambezi.

The pent-up flow of the river drowned much of the surrounding forest when the dams were built seventy years ago. The effect is unearthly. Great stumps poke out of the water fifty feet from the bank, and here and there single-tree islands survive. Looking down at the underwater forest floor, you expect to see sodden hares and squirrels running between the branches. The forest seems untroubled by its loss. The bank is lined with drooping cedars, bright maples, and magnificent white pines that would have made fine masts for a British man o’war. Pink alders and aspens gave the river the festive air of a royal barge party. Saved by its inaccessibility, the area has not been logged for a long time.

The journey was bittersweet for Ranger Tim, who had once turned down the opportunity to buy the two thousand acres of this township for pocket change when the Algoma Central Railway was divesting its assets. Instead it was bought by an American—boo, hiss—subdivided into lots, and flipped for an unholy profit. As we wandered down the river, he mourned each of ‘his’ trees.

A murder of ravens, two dozen, emerged river-right. They cawed and played on the updrafts in great high spirits. A moose must have died for such a party, since they don’t usually congregate in large groups. They wheeled and swooped, dressed inky-black as a SoHo brunch. I lay back in the boat to watch them, and wanted desperately to fly.

There was a neat take-out point just before the second dam, and we climbed up the hill to investigate. A power station thrummed below the bridge, and at the bottom of the gravel road there was a single red truck in the yard. “We stay together, stay quiet, and walk fast,” said Tim, who knows how to do these things. We retrieved the kayak, dry-bags, and paddles, then solemnly scuttled down the hill, camouflaged by a large red blow-up boat like a particularly foolish beetle. Nobody stopped us as we stumbled through the trees, so we put in again and paddled off down the river.
The river was wider and slightly less sluggish on this stretch, and we stopped paddling altogther except to steer around the bends. At a few points we shrieked as we were drenched in chutes of fast water, but it didn’t matter much on yet another day of warm sunshine instead of the expected late-September frost and snow. (By the end of the day my milk-bottle legs had burned pink.)

Two miles down we came to yet another power station. The river had originally split here, and was dammed on both forks. At the wide mouth of the left dam we could see a sign on a small beach, which drew us like a casino billboard even though we knew it probably said mean things.

KEEP AWAY
Dangerous waterway ahead.
Levels rise and fall
without warning.
No swimming or boating.

Parroted in French. But the little beach was connected by a small strip of land to the power station above the dam, and we were naturally curious. A bulldozer dozed near a gigantic pile of sticks, logs, and driftwood, like some bird with a slovenly nest. There was no one around. The station was fenced off, but by scrambling up the rockface we found a passage around the fence, which acted as a useful handrail on the way down. I sashayed across the grand mesh catwalk over the dam, pretending to be Kate Moss modelling life-jackets. We admired the huge chains that raised and lowered the gates like canal locks. Windows flapped in the abandoned storage buildings. We poked our noses where they didn’t belong until we grew bored by these feats of engineering and headed back.

We paddled back across the estuary to the far bank of the river. This was the end of our trip, since from here the river headed to its final dam through a canyon. Tim deflated the boat while I packed the bags, a little deflated ourselves. Then I noticed a Great Lakes Power truck parked just in front of the forbidding sign opposite. Two security guards stood, hands on hips, clearly puzzled, watching us pack up our gear. Our industrial jaunt had tripped an alarm system and they had sped to investigate. The rubber kayak left no landing marks on the gravel beach, though our footprints would have been clear, and with no sign of a boat they couldn’t figure out how we had got over there. Nor could they catch us, and with a good girl’s terror of authority, I was relieved. Instead we slogged an hour and a half up the highway back to the dull, law-abiding world of motorized transportation.

The sugar maples are slowly turning, a few bright-orange prodigies lighting up the hillsides. The salmon are spawning in Speckled Trout Creek. The Mighty Bear, the local classic rock radio station, is choked with commercials for hunting gear. Jonathan, the park maintenance superintendent, promises me moose stew from the roadkill he butchers and freezes every year around this time.

The woodpile is untouched so far, except for the single log I use to prop up the head of the elderly sofa-bed every night. It is raining today, but September at Superior has been two weeks of glorious t-shirt weather, against all predictions that I’d be crouched in front of the fire. Instead I was swimming in the lake.

A huge swarm of flying ants hatched in the cabin. They flew in my face and hair and the ungainly queens crunched lightly underfoot like ant tempura. They did not succumb to a delicate swat like mosquitos, so I sprayed them with my carpenter-ant death spray and swept up hundreds of bodies. Then I began to fret about the birds eating poisoned ants.
   “Most birds don’t like ants,” said Tim laconically. Smart birds. After that I marked my territory with death spray every day at 3.45pm, when the hatch of the day began.

Last time I’d had flying-ant fun was in my college flat in Dublin, where they streamed out of the wall one afternoon when we were watching Blind Date instead of going to lectures. We were all hapless housekeepers, and I think it was my flatmate Pat—or possibly Phillip Bouchier-Hayes—who suggested we should pour honey all over the wooden floor to trap them. Oh, we trapped them all right. They were stuck to the floor long enough to chip off and sell as amber when we ran short of milk money.

A large family of aphids hatched by the porch picnic table when I was eating dinner on Tuesday. Most seemed to think that the purpose of their very new life was to follow the tomato salad into my mouth, and they made a mad dash whenever an opening appeared. They were delicate, gauzy creatures with white powder-puffs around their midriffs that dissolved as soon as you touched them. Presumably this powdery stuff was either for camouflage or it had a foul taste to deter birds; I can confirm it tasted foul to me. It made them look rather like the ghosts of all the striped mosquitos I’d slapped this summer; benign ghosts who didn’t sting but floated reproachfully in my September dinner.

The weather was headed towards autumn yesterday, so Tim decided to take me on a last canoe ride to Rix Township, about an hour down lake towards the Montreal River. His father bought him the red, chestnut-wood canoe the year I was born. “Nice to take the two old girls out,” he said as I climbed in, unsteady as ever. Of the two I am in marginally better shape, if only because my seat is not broken.

We passed a mink in the water, which evoked a profane Hail Mary from this recovering Catholic: “Blessed art thou, a mink swimming.” He was a sleek and beautiful furry tube, a wet weasel. They are native up here, and so are not the pests they are in Europe. We turned the canoe around to follow him, and he rewarded us with a filthy look and a powerful surface dive, reappearing behind a rock we couldn’t reach.

A bald eagle followed us out and back. Did my weedy paddling made me look a more likely prey than the mink? He perched in a tree and and watched, and I was charmed. I’d never seen a bald eagle before, and he looked just like the cranky old lads in the box of The Muppet Show.

Halfway out, there was a house-sized rock in the water, and above on the cliff we saw the long naked roots of a red pine, exposed when the rock fell. It happened last year or the year before, and I would have liked to have seen the explosion from a safe distance. I wanted to stay well out from the cliff face after that, but was drawn back in by the diabase dikes, crevices in the native granite filled with much younger black lava stone. Some were narrow, like Flintstone escalators in the cliff-face, but one was as wide as barn door.

We ate roast-beef sandwiches on a slab of pink rock, then turned back when the rain started and the wind picked up. Canoeing with the wind behind you is like working in a surging economy: you think that you are powering along solely due to your own skill, strength, and talent, and it can be a shock to turn around. Still, in the stern of a sturdy old canoe, maple paddle in my hand, I find bouncing over the waves as much fun as skimming fast across flat water.

Yesterday I learned how to tie a clove knot. The purpose of the clove knot was to string a white bedsheet between two trees outside the Pilot House cabin. The purpose of the bedsheet was as a screen for projecting National Film Board of Canada shorts. I was planning a big night’s entertainment with my ranger pals.

The bedsheet hung in front of the newly-chopped September woodpile, and made the cabin look even more like a jaunty wooden boat. I swept the porch while Ranger Tim balanced the projector and the DVD player on a home-hewn chair. We flipped through the borrowed films: Leonard Maltin’s Animation Favorites from the National Film Board of Canada, Best of the Best: Romantic Tales (and who could fail to be stirred by The Romance of Transportation in Canada? ). I was all set for a campfire singalong to The Log Driver’s Waltz. I was ready and willing to get excited about shadow puppetry, if it came to that.

Dear God, what has happened to me? I am a page of the Utne Reader made flesh. I am Laura Fecking Ingalls Wilder. Is the next step knitting jumpers out of yoghurt? Starting a national wood-chopping fitness boom? Whittling?

I used to get my eyebrows waxed. I used to wear a little spandex unitard to spinning™ classes at the gym. I could live for a year in the woods on what I once spent on Prada shoes. I used to go to openings. (I don’t remember what was ever opened, but I distinctly remember openings.) I saw two movies a week: proper, at-the-cinema movies, not DVDs. I chewed through braised lamb shank after braised lamb shank at posh Manhattan restaurants. There were book parties, and also real parties. I spent a lot of money in Sephora on creams and powders to give me pink cheeks. You don’t get much change from fifty bucks when you’re shopping for pink cheeks in New York City.

But signs of my troublesome wholesomeness were already evident. I once went to a live taping of public radio’s This American Life show. I refused to buy “coffee drinks”. I canoed on the East River, an unlikely Brooklyn Pocahontas. I would have read The Gawker every morning if it had existed then, but I know it would have left me feeling as icky as an it-drink hangover. I refused to spend any time in art galleries unless there was a free bar. Sometimes I cooked to eat, not as performance art. Twice I baked.

So my golly-gosh transformation in the Canadian north woods is not a shock. I’ve spent the last two years chipping away at the polish I’d carefully lacquered on since the age of sixteen. Still, though. National Film Board of Canada marathons. This is the X-treme sport of wholesome dorkiness.

My Toronto buddy Rosalinda sent an email spanking the last time I slagged off these films.

I know now that these are beloved cultural artefacts in these parts. Mark, a Canadian curmudgeon from my Brooklyn days, once surprised me by launching into an NFB cartoon song in Sparky’s:

“Oh the cat came back
The very next day
The cat came back
He never went away…”

Rosalinda again:

Well, I watched three DVDs straight through last night, and if I were eight years old, I would still feel crushed whenever RTE showed these instead of Bugs Bunny. But as a dorky adult, I like them. They are sweet, often entertaining, too often worthy, usually strange. They’re not for kids.

My favourites are the straight narrations, like the 1974 film The Family That Dwelt Apart, where EB White reads his own story, a funny-sad parable of the disasters that follow well-meaning American intervention. There’s a cartoon of a Stephen Leacock story, “My Financial Career“, that I’d first seen quoted in full on Ftrain. A Mordechai Richler story, “The Street” of a young boy waiting for his grandmother to die so he would get his own room. There’s a cartoon song about the tormenting blackfly of “north Ontar-eye-air-eye-o”; we groaned and scratched along to it. And a wonderful deadpan version of Cinderella starring medieval penguins in wimples, and a glass flipper.

The House That Jack Built was one of several late-Sixties indictments of the evils of capitalism, smoking, and cars. “Tax-funded pinko commie Canuck propaganda,” I taunted, but the placid rangers just smiled and drank their beer. We watched George and Rosemary, a story of midlife love where the protagonists lived “reasonably happily” ever after: only in Canada. And then there was weird stuff: in early CGI an operatic nerd built machines to fire cows at his kitchen wall. We learned to flick straight past the CGI shorts; too much form, not enough function.

What I admire most about these films is the breadth of styles and voices, and that they are not afraid to be dark. In a for-profit studio system, like Hanna-Barbera, there’s an instantly-recognisable house style, but the NFB paid artists and filmmakers to experiment. Broadcasting may be the one area where government funding of the arts doesn’t create comfortable, dull work.

Autumn graciously hung back and allowed summer to run a last blue-sky Labour Day weekend. The summer people have headed south. Yesterday the highway was clogged with camper vans; today there are only the familiar trucks. Beth and the maintenance crew are scrubbing down the primly-named “comfort stations” for winter storage, clearing out the fire-pits, chaining the gates to the campsite. The contract naturalists have packed up their slides and unclipped their nametags. The rest of the staff, freed from preparing endless talks and nature hikes, have time to play.

In the afternoon I tried to find the old Frater trail with Ranger Tim and Chris, another naturalist. Earl Devlin, who settled this little Beaver Rock cove in the twenties, had cut this trail himself. It ran four miles uphill to the train station at Frater Junction so the family could collect supplies on foot. It’s so long out of use we never knew if we’d found it or not as we bushwhacked and followed old logging tracks, stepping over bear scat and mounds of moose droppings. Fresh moose dung looks just like chocolate-covered almonds, a thought which had tormented me on the Coastal Trail some weeks ago. Bear scat looks like small cowpats.
   “Is that because of all the berries?” I asked.
   “No, bears shit soft no matter what they eat,” said Tim authoritatively. I was glad I’d had the foresight to pack two naturalists.

We pushed through stands of balsam fir and crossed a gravel pit and then a creek, picking the last of the raspberries. Up on the ridge stood massive yellow birch, somehow missed or left by the loggers in this new-growth area. From the rotten stump of one giant grew three saplings: a maple, a white pine, and a red pine. The white pine had been cropped by a beaver.

Tim gave me jewel-weed tubes to chew, each tiny, saffron-like thread pinched off the end of a red-orange flower that looked like an orchid. The drop of nectar sweetened my tongue. Hummingbirds love them. Then he gave me small twigs of yellow birch to chew: wintergreen again. Manufacturers used to extract it from wintergreen leaves, then from yellow birch (it’s synthesized now). Snowberries have that exact flavour, too. Why is it so common in nature?

Chris caught a tiny spring-peeper tree frog, bleached as a sand-crab, with suckers on each exaggerated finger. I popped a puffball to see the spores rise in a dusty cloud. We picked some morel-like fungus with an intense mushroomy scent to identify later, not realising we’d be too drunk and lazy to pull the books out. Tim wrung a cup of water out of a clump of spagnum moss, a naturalist’s party trick after five dry days. They confirmed each other’s species-identification in a comfortable shorthand while I lagged behind twenty-year-old Chris, as unsure of this jargon as if he were discussing his favourite PlayStation games. The blackflies chewed at the tops of my ears while I swatted uselessly and shouted “Feck off! You should be dead! It’s September.”

We turned back after a few hours being happily lost. A defrosted chicken and a glass of wine called, along with the promise of a fine beach sunset to drop the curtain on the summer. It was warm enough to be still giggling there after dark, a demolished bottle of Viognier and some beers stuck neck-down in the sand, while the chicken managed alone in the barbecue. A yellow crescent moon hung dead-centre in the lake and lit a tempting canoe trail to the horizon. Stars shot towards the water. My warmly-lit log cabin sent a homesteader’s welcome from the little hill.

I’ve always loved September, a month studded with more new-year possibilities than dreary January. I love every megabyte of the first-day-at-school pictures my teary friends send of their kids. I am fizzing with ideas for the next few months—a visit from Leelila? from Adam? October in Ottawa with Claire? A roadtrip down the west coast from Vancouver to San Diego? Winter in Ireland? Or in a cottage in Spain? A book proposal?

Oh, lordy, it is great to be poor, and free, and rich in friends.

I’m still co-habiting with various voles, shrews, and deer mice. They run energetic circuits around the one-room cabin: behind the sofa, up the printer onto my desk, down to the floor, across the shelves, over the linen-chest, and across the fireplace mantel, where they peep out from behind the bowls and trinkets. Then hop! down onto the stereo and around again.

Brewing coffee in a little in-cup drip filter last week I noticed that one of the coffee grounds was not a coffee ground, after I’d drunk. I didn’t gag: I’ve seen enough restaurant kitchens to know I’ve consumed worse. In the staff kitchen pantry, they peeled off and shredded the label from my sesame oil to make a nest, and chewed holes in a ziplock bag of coffee I’d left out by accident. I emptied the shelves, swept off the droppings and swabbed down with bleach while I pictured my caffeinated mice wired up for a brainstorming session on how to breach those metal towers of food.

Some nights they party in my cabin like Bush Jr. at Yale, and I lie awake listening to them snuffle around the traps. I feel the self-pity of the killer as I hold my breath before the metal bar smashes them: they made me do it. They are unsentimental creatures. When a trap is sprung, a mouse will lick the peanut butter clean from under the warm, dead nose of its fellow rodent. I respect their respect for the primacy of the living.

I am now able to empty and reset the snap-traps, though I prefer cajolery when possible. To empty the traps I hold them upside down through a tissue to avoid contact with my victims’ popping, accusatory eyes. I try not to brush the whiskers, and I never touch the tails. In the charnel ground behind the cabin, I prise up the metal bar with another tissue and shake the trap out. The stiff little bodies with dented heads plop onto the duff, and I shout a ritual incantation: “Oh Jesus I’m sorry sorry sorry little mouse!” Then I sprint to the staff kitchen to wash my hands.

Two days ago I abandoned a trap up there: a mouse had clamped his teeth around the metal bait-holder, and I wasn’t about to pry his jaws from his last meal. When I confessed, Ranger Tim retrieved it, quietly contemptuous of my simpering. I can only deal with the neatly dead. Since then he has had to de-trap another creature who haemorrhaged under the stereo, and stomp a squeaking mouse who was pinned by the ear. At the Frater cabin one morning I squeaked myself when I was greeted by a live mouse, sitting in the kitchen sink pinned by the tail. I am ashamed that my inner Carrie Bradshaw has not yet been snap-trapped by rural life. But oh, the rodentry.

If you leave them in the trap for even half a day, the carpenter ants take a break from chomping through the ceiling beams and troop down to swarm the corpse. When the mice are deposited in the charnel ground, the cadaver beetles are ready. They are fabulously industrious creatures. Our mice are usually buried within 12 hours, ready to host beetle babies. Life goes on.

Ranger Tim dropped me off at Gargantua, 35km north of my cabin and a further 14 jouncing klicks down a dirt road that might have been in Ecuador. He has walked the Coastal Trail four or five times and I kept asking him if he was sure—sure—I would be okay alone. Eventually, reassured, I swung my pack on and he yanked on the compression straps, tsk-tsking at my overloading.

Tent, sleeping bag and pad. Spare pants, underwear, shirt and socks. Gore-tex jacket, fleece, hat, flip-flops. Cookpot, cup, bowl, spoon. Four packs of noodles, loaf of bread, cheese, Marmite, peanut butter, yoghurt, teabags, oatmeal, home-mixed muesli and GORP. Swiss Army Knife. Torch. Waterproof matches and lighter. Bugspray, toothbrush, Tampax, moisturiser, camp soap. Desert Solitaire and Going After Cacciato. Moleskine notebook. Uniball pens. Excedrin, for coffee sweats. Band-aids. Map. Rope. Water bladder.

Enough to make me stagger slightly until I got used to the burden. Far too much food, it turned out. I eat extremely on a long hike, but can never predict beforehand whether I’ll be ravenous or ascetic.

Superior’s summer is too lovely to last long, but by the middle of August it was finally in full bloom. I left Tim at the car park and set off down a Hansel-and-Gretel path, a deceptively easy 45-minute stroll to an abandoned cottage. A stone hearth and chimney is all that is left in a clearing behind a sandy cove.

At this early stage the Very Difficult trail rating seemed pitched to what Edward Abbey called Industrial Tourists. So far I wasn’t hiking as much as grazing. Wild raspberries and blueberries flanked the path. Mushrooms popped up under every tree. There were snowberries—wintergreen-flavoured Tic-tacs—and wintergreen leaves. I thought of the excuses I would make rushing into a New York conference room: “So sorry I’m late. Unavoidably detained in a raspberry patch.”

This shore is bountiful. It’s a magic trick to drink sweet, cool water straight from the waves on a fine-sand beach, and to see pond frogs jumping in rockpools. There is driftwood and brushwood wherever you look, and smooth cobbles to ring the fire with. Birch paper makes perfect kindling. If you could throw a stone straight you’d brain enough game—hares, squirrels—for a fine stew.

The natural harvest is explosive this season; the best in 25 years, say the old hands. In the backcountry there are whole stands of raspberries unpicked on the beaches, and so many blueberries you soon learn to pass all but the choicest and fattest. There will always be more. ‘Booberries!’ my young friend Aidan calls them, and I wished he were here to set down in a patch to pick until he turned as purple as Veruca Salt.

The woodland stroll didn’t last. The trail spat me out onto a cobbled beach, the first of many. The Coastal Trail, not surprisingly, hugs the shore wherever possible. You cross coves of fine sand, pebbles, small stones, cobbles, jagged rocks and huge boulders. There are smooth sheets of granite, grey streaked with pink like salt-water taffy, jagged rhyolite, quartz and diabase, evil, predatory granite cobbles. I learned to pick my way over rocks and cobbles, pack throwing me off balance from time to time as I searched ahead for trail-marker cairns, cunningly camouflaged in a landscape of rocks. After hours each day my field of vision reduced to next flat rock. Hop. Hop. Brace and hop. It was blessedly dry: Vibram hiking soles are no better than rollerskates on slippery, mossy granite.

I met five other hikers on the trail. The first day I was passed by a Torontonian with a heavy knee-brace and a heavier pack who told me he was fitting in this hike before knee surgery. Might as well get value for the medical fees. We walked for a while, then I stayed behind to pick raspberries and lost him for good. He was nice, but we were glad to see the back of one another; this trail isn’t meant to be shared with strangers. The second day I sat on the beach at Beatty Cove and watched Tom and Jake gallop towards me; a pair of twenty-year-old naturalists who work for Tim, who were trying to fit the Coastal Trail into their two days off. Then I met Ralph and Mike, high school friends who had been doing a camping trip like this every year for twenty years. We shared the camaraderie of the blistered, and I wished I’d packed in Guinness like them. They told me about the innkeeper who had shuttled them to the trailhead: “I sit in a deckchair looking at these guys limping over the sand, and I ask myself, what part of backpacking is supposed to be fun?”

Outdoors, the in-head jukebox plays all day, songs I’d long forgotten that emerge with complete lyrics. Studenty stuff, mostly. I have no control over the dial.

Some days are sleepy
Some days are lazy
Some days you feel like a bit of a baby
Some days take less but most days take more
Some slip through your fingers and onto the floor
Some days you wake up in the army
Some days are better than others

———————-

Like a bird
On a wire
Like a drunk
In a midnight choir
I have tried
In my way
To be free

The first night set the pattern: I walked until six and camped in a deserted cove. I stripped and swam off the day’s sweat, then spent twenty minutes throwing a stick tied to my pink bear rope at the branch of white pine. Glad no one was watching me throw like a girl. Eventually I looped it over a branch I wasn’t aiming for and left it dangling, ready to string my food up out of reach of animals once I’d finished my ramen extravaganza.

I sat on a log in front of a small driftwood fire, eating noodles. Ten mergansers crossed the cove, so busy ducking for food I could hardly keep a count straight. The molten sun looked ready for a glassblower. When it got dark I brushed my teeth with lake water, tied up my food bag and crawled into the nylon coffin of my bivvy-sac. The mosquitos puzzled at the net inches above my face: insolently, I blew the carbon dioxide they crave. The full moon rose above the trees. A loon called. I wanted to tell someone, but no one was there. I imagined telling someone later, how I would describe it. I wondered if my friends were watching this same moon. But no one was there. At last I understood it as a secret gift; my private moon.

Next morning I packed up without breakfast, holding out for a good blueberry patch to sweeten the muesli. By eight the sun was warming my back on a huge red rock high above the lake. The water was clear to the bottom, a giant lens for studying grains of sand. I sat with my purple breakfast, a queen surveying her territory, glad to have been deeded this landscape.

   “Yah, so I busted dese people in the campground yesterday,” said Jacques as I was stirring my Red River Cereal. Jacques is an enforcement ranger, of the variety to whom a badge and a truck represent intoxicating power. A mwa-ha-ha ranger. He dreams of reading Bermuda-shorted matrons the Miranda Rights when they fail to extinguish campfires by 10pm. Every morning he tries to impress the chicks with stories of busting tourists over Regulation 748b. Every morning we turn the heat up under our oatmeal and stir faster to get out of there.
   “Yah, dey had a big basket of mushrooms. Dey were laying ‘em out on the picnic table in the campground.”
   “What kind of mushrooms?” Surely he meant the magically delicious brand.
   “I don’t know the exact type, but you know, cooking mushrooms. Dey had the butter in the pan all ready to go when I confiscated ‘em.”
   “You confiscated their mushrooms?”
He puffed up. “It’s illegal to remove natural objects from the rightful place in the park. Dat includes mushrooms. And techically blueberries and raspberries too. I woulda gone easy on ‘em if dey had five or six, but dey had a whole big basket.”
   “ Those people are on holiday! They’re probably immigrants camping with their kids. They don’t even know why you took their mushrooms. That’s so mean!” we cry.
He looks hurt. “Rules is rules.”

I was still in mourning for the berries I’d left to rot on the Coastal Trail. The whole park is carpeted with fungus. Even the bears are hardly denting this year’s fine natural crop. To protest Jacques’s lumpish enforcement policy, I dragged Ranger Tim ‘shrooming Sunday morning.

We walked the private trail from Beaver Rock to Laughing Brook with the big dented stockpot that’s been sitting outside the staff kitchen all summer. He showed me the basic identification rules: the fleshy, porous boletes, the gilled agarics, the snowy purity of the Destroying Angel. We picked bone-white coral mushrooms, strewn on the forest floor exactly like dead coral. There were brown-black pigs’ ears, turmeric-stained Slippery Jacks, speckled boletus, chanterelles. We found supermarket mushrooms and a few pearl-grey oysters. Tim told stories of tripping casualties of Amanita muscaria in early mushrooming days.

At the Pilot Cabin he spread newspapers on the porch and arranged our many finds into little groups. I opened a bottle of wine and sat in a deckchair while he frowned over borrowed field guides. We would do a tasting menu, we decided, sampling each set. More than half our haul was unidentifiable or else too close to scary species to risk, but that still left a fine spread. He got butter, olive oil, salt and pepper and good bread from the kitchen and we fired up the camping stove. First, pigs’ ears steamed on a cocktail strainer (inevitably, they fell into the water). Gelatinous and good, like the wood-ear mushrooms the Thais serve. Next, Steinpilz, sautéed in butter, served on toast. Yum. Oyster mushrooms in olive oil. Mmm-mmm.

I’d drunk enough wine to feel like inviting Jacques to the fungus party, but Tim had to go to work. We promised ourselves a good mushroom omelette for brunch next day instead. Tim was in charge, slicing sulphur-yellow Slippery Jacks. “Edible and choice”, according to The Mushroom Hunter’s Field Guide “Wipe the slime from the cap and remove the tubes before cooking”. They stained his fingers and blended pleasingly with the eggs.

Forty-five minutes later I was staring into an enamel bowl and letting loose enormous rumbling belches. Tim paced the porch looking up fungus poisoning treatment in the field guides. I retched and belched again, louder than ever.
   “Can you say your whole name in those belches?” he asked. Not funny. I wanted more than anything to get the Slippery Jacks out of my stomach.
Eventually he headed to the kitchen and rushed back holding out a tall glass that looked exactly like a pisco sour. I groaned.
   “Emetic,” he said briskly, “Salt and mustard powder in warm water. Hold your nose and chug it.” I got half of it down. It immediately shot back up my nose: hot mustard solution, like the worst icecream headache imaginable. “I’m going to make more.”
   “No! No! I can’t take it.”

But I did. Two minutes after I finished the second glass, the Slippery Jacks were returned to their rightful place in the woods and I felt suitably punished for my wanton transgression. Naturally, Tim felt no ill-effects. I’ve never had a food allergy in my life, but it turns out I react badly to slimy yellow fungus in the north woods. Could be worse.

5pm, Day Four of the Coastal Trail. I am limping towards the old Agawa Lodge by the mouth of the Agawa River near the highway. A few more hours before I reach my cabin.

A blond family emerges from the trees. They’ve been down on the riverbank and are heading back to the SUV. Mum interrogates me as we share the path.
“Are you hiking the Coastal Trail?”
Yep. I shrug awkwardly to shunt my pack around on sore shoulders.
“The whole thing?”
“Yes, except for the bit north of Gargantua.”
“How long has it taken you?”
“This is day four.”
“And you’re by yourself?”
I want to say, not any more, but instead I grunt again.
“And you’re not lonely or scared?”
Nope.
“Do you see that, girls?” she says to her tweenies. She turns back to me. “We think you’re very brave.”

There were just two other hikers going my way on the Coastal Trail that day. At several points, the trail crosses touristed day-use areas, mostly beaches. I dreaded them. These were the paradise days at Lake Superior—85°F, no humidity, lapping, lappable water. People stretched out like cats on a car bonnet, warming themselves at last in Northern Ontario. I was a curiosity, stepping out of the woods, picking my way across boulders to get to the beach instead of strolling in from the car park. Burdened and sweaty, wearing boots on fine sand. And alone.

I was stopped every time by people—mostly women—who wanted to confirm I was really hiking alone. Once a man on a deckchair shouted “Hey, the guys you’re with are way ahead. Did you arrange a meeting spot?” I may be looking for the wistfulness behind the questions. But after a few days it seemed strange that these women who had experienced so much more than me—childbirth, childrearing, passing a driving test—could hardly dare imagine spending a night alone in a tent in the wilderness. Was it physical fear, of bears, attackers or getting lost, or breaking an ankle on a mossy rock far from help? Fear of not being able to heft a pack, climb a boulder, build a fire? Fear of solitude and silence? Fear, or hope, that families or lovers could not survive without them?

“You’re so brave.” This embarrasses me. I’m not brave at all. I’m a fearful chicken who screams at loud noises. Truth is, a blazed North American trail with pit toilets and neat backcountry campsites is not all that intrepid. You’d have to be inventive to die of thirst, hunger or cold in the bounty of a Lake Superior summer.

But I wouldn’t have considered a hike like this two years ago. How could I? I didn’t know to string food up in a tree or pick a good campsite or build a driftwood fire. It is too physically tough to count as the kind of relaxation I used to need: who wants to hobble back to the office after a ‘rest’? Like most workers in America, I had ten or twelve days off a year, from which I was to allot time with family 3,000 miles away and also somehow foster a marriage otherwise based around 70-hour work weeks. How could I take five days to walk alone in the wilderness?

I didn’t know it, but I needed it then more than I do now. Our culture does not want us to spend that kind of time alone. We might get to like it. I was lucky; I tripped and fell out of the corporate world, and flat on my back I found the time to try things I thought I might hate.

Great religions understand the power of solitude. The Catholic Church sends the faithful on retreats and pilgrimages. Buddhists spend days or months in silent retreat. African rites of passage send young people alone into the bush. Woodsier types have their spiritual equivalent: Wordsworth’s “natural piety”. But many secular, city people are going to die too fearful to have ever spent real time alone in case their demons came out to do battle.

I’m an extrovert, but I like my own company. Seek it out. I would do this every year if I could: five days or five weeks alone, preferably in the woods. I don’t think you need to haul a backpack, though it helps: you’re slow as a snail, but my God, carrying your house on your back bestows a sense of independence to make you yodel. (I’m surprised snails don’t yodel.) But you could as easily experience your own thoughts in a canoe, on a bike or even in a suburban house with the TV, internet and phone switched off and books and magazines out of reach. Solitude is there to be taken. You might even like it.

I didn’t bring sunscreen. Usually I just use my factor 30 face cream, since Lake Superior is cool enough for long sleeves and long pants most of the time. But these were the hottest days of the year. I sustained nice second-degree burns on the tops of my ears, which stuck out under my baseball cap. They were bloody and itchy, and I thought they were blackfly-bitten until I got home. Hard scar tissue has been flaking off like pork crackling ever since. I look at my festering, hobbity ears in the mirror and think, God, I’m irresistible.

My legs and arms are still covered in cuts and bites. My feet look like I’ve been tortured: raw welts on every toe, red wounds on my heels. I gave myself a pedicure on the porch the day after I got back and as I painted my abused toenails I felt like a battered wife bravely caking on eyeshadow.

Late on the third evening, I saw a sharp rock several steps ahead. Easily avoidable. After eight hours of stumbling over cobbled beaches and boulders, though, stupidity had set in. I slowly exfoliated my left calf along its edge, thinking, oh, I didn’t need to do that. The scar is impressive.

My elbows are scraped raw from my habit of missing the tiny blue signs that led back into the woods whenever the boulders on the coast got too steep and dangerous. More than once I found myself hanging off the edge of a huge rock by my fingers, wondering whether to jump after the pack I’d tossed down. Once a sturdy fellow hiker who was also lost reached down and pulled me up onto a boulder platform an arm’s length above my head, pack and all; halfway up I slipped and skinned all my corners trying to find a purchase in the walls of the little canyon.

I lost a small roll of reserve lard I’ve been hoarding around my middle since Ecuador, and am back down to regulation SoHo dating weight. In the staff kitchen I suck in my cheekbones dramatically, but Canadian park rangers are not impressed by scrawn.

The Coastal Trail Experience was best described by Ralph and Mike, two Toronto hikers I walked with on the last day.
‘We get to camp every night,’ said Ralph, ‘and we say, How can one man be so broken?’