The story behind a missing man
In fact, however, his choice of Temagami was far from random. As a boy and teenager, Trask had spent a couple of weeks each year at a cottage the family rented on the region’s namesake lake, and it was there, say Don and Maureen, that their son developed his love of the outdoors and was first exposed to First Nations culture, attending powwows at the Ojibwa reserve on Bear Island. Trask revisited the area in the summers of 2009 and 2010, when his parents again rented a cottage on Lake Temagami. But when he returned to the region on his own a year later, he obviously planned to steer clear of the cottage-country experience. He piled three backpacks’ worth of camping kit into his car, strapped his father’s red Old Town canoe to the roof, and drove the six hours to northeastern Ontario. His food supplies were spartan, including carrots, potatoes and onions, some peanuts and noodles; he trusted his fishing rod and a dog-eared book on wild edibles to keep himself nourished. Trask had been a first-rate Scout as a youngster, was a skilled angler and knew his way around a canoe. Still, he was inexperienced enough that he packed a jerry can of gas, apparently to help in starting campfires. This would be his first stab at canoe tripping, the quintessential activity on Lake Temagami, which serves as a multi-lobed gateway to thousands of kilometres of paddling routes.
“His intention was to brave the elements and have the sort of experience that broke him or made him different,” says Poukhlov. “He wanted to bring some justification to his life—something different from working as a roofer or hanging out in bars.”
Trask didn’t return to Waterloo until July 29. He spent 10 weeks criss-crossing the backcountry, finding profound solace amid the nastawgan, the aboriginal name for the ancient network of water routes that radiate through stands of old-growth pine across the rooftop of Ontario. He maintained contact with his parents throughout, sending text messages when he had cell service or emailing updates from summer establishments such as Camp Wanapitei. Along the way, he befriended Ojibwa elders and local characters like Geiler and Poukhlov, and made a pilgrimage to Maple Mountain, a remote, 650-metre peak that is known as Chee-bay-jing—“the place where the spirits go”—by local First Nations, for whom it is an ancient burial site. He survived the notoriously rough portages of the Lady Evelyn River, and ultimately chucked his cell phone into a waterfall in a ritual of disconnection from society. He was thrilled, he confessed to Poukhlov, to be no longer a part of a “civilization that makes you a worker bee.”
Don and Maureen say their son was a changed man when he returned from Temagami that summer: more reserved and inward, more sceptical about modern society and life. “The north changed him, and not in a bad way. He was gentler, he was kinder,” says Don. Trask told his father that his city life was a “waste of time,” and that he couldn’t wait to get back to where he felt he belonged. After restocking his bank account with a month’s work as a roofer, he returned north in September for another three weeks of canoeing.
“Everything about Daniel,” Maureen says, “was intense.”
I was fascinated by the case of Daniel Trask from the moment Maureen posted an alert about his disappearance on a regional outdoors web forum last November. An idealistic young man who vanishes in the wilderness—echoes of Into the Wild. Like Christopher McCandless in John Krakauer’s classic book, Trask embodied the fantasy of leaving behind the nine-to-five grind to live off the land in wild nature. Yet his story was also different in important ways. I interpreted Trask’s summer in Temagami as an apprenticeship of sorts: He had taken the time to forge friendships, gain a better understanding of Temagami’s cultural history and learn the skills of wilderness survival. In many ways, he’d done the groundwork to make the region his adoptive home.
