The story behind a missing man
Wilson recalls that Temagami appealed to him because it was raw and untamed—utterly unlike Algonquin Provincial Park, where he had paddled with his family as a boy. “I was pretty strong and pretty determined, a lot like Daniel,” says Wilson, now 61. “I too was searching for something and I did some pretty crazy things that you can say were Daniel Trask-esque. When I look back on it, I realize that you either die or get stronger for it.” But Wilson also alludes to a dangerous paradox in Trask: For someone so captivated by the restorative powers of nature, he appears to have approached it like an adversary.
As canoe season wrapped up last year, Trask revealed to several friends his desire to experience the Temagami winter. He was interested in “doing the Survivorman thing,” says Geiler—a reference to former MuchMusic producer, rock-and-roll musician and outdoors neophyte Les Stroud, who had his own life redefined by a Temagami canoe trip at the age of 25. Poukhlov heard the same story. “I know he wanted to go into the bush carrying nothing with him and come out a year later,” Poukhlov says. “He wanted to just survive and live.”
These days, those grasping for knowledge of age-old Temagami traditions have an ally in Alex Mathias, a 64-year-old Bear Island Ojibwa who has been living off-reserve on his family’s traditional land on Obabika Lake since 1993. Mathias is a gatekeeper of sorts, welcoming canoeists all summer and organizing an annual “Changing of the Seasons” gathering each September to celebrate the fall equinox and the anniversary of the 1989 Red Squirrel Road blockade, a mass demonstration of civil disobedience that resulted in 344 arrests and front-page coverage of Temagami’s imperiled forests. Trask attended the 2011 event, and gave Mathias a handmade arrow as a gift. “I felt that there were things he wanted to ask me and I wish I would’ve sat down with him and invited him to ask more questions,” Mathias says. “Maybe I could’ve helped him figure things out.”
Trask told Mathias not to be surprised to see him later in the year. Mathias cringed. “Anyone can camp up here in the summer,” he says. “But in the fall and winter it’s a totally different country.”
Don and Maureen Trask have trusted me to assemble my own canoe party for the Maple Mountain search on the May long weekend. My wife, Kim, is an easy recruit, and I find a second boat in Adam Wicks-Arshack, John Zinser and Dan Cassell, three Americans who are volunteering on a summer-long canoeing and canoe-building project on Bear Island for First Nations youth. Wicks-Arshack, 23, and Zinser, 24, have been coming to Lake Temagami from New York City since they were boys attending American-owned Camp Wabun every summer. Today they operate Voyages of Rediscovery, an outdoor education non-profit based on Washington’s Columbia River, but continue to visit Temagami to work and explore. In 2008, they portaged into a pond off Lake Temagami, set up a base camp and built their first birchbark canoe; a year later, they constructed the hulking 24-footer they will paddle on our journey. Cassell, 29, a Chicago native and naturalist, is visiting Temagami for the first time.
By our second day we’ve reached Chee-skon Lake and search Spirit Rock, a spire of flaking, bone-coloured stone rising 15 metres above a jagged jumble of ankle-twisting talus. It feels like sacrilege to walk at this site that’s been revered as a spiritual nexus by generations of Ojibwa. But after leaving a healthy offering of tobacco, we justify our trespass with Maureen’s request to comb “power places” like this one. We tiptoe on loose rocks and search for signs of Trask in caves and crevasses that still radiate chill winter air, but find no evidence of the missing man’s passing.
We visit Mathias’ homestead on Obabika Lake, then continue to the Wakimika River, which luckily is devoid of blowdown and beaver dams so even the big birchbark canoe can negotiate its narrow oxbows. On Wakimika Lake, we discover Ojibwa petroglyphs of moose and spirit forms etched into the carapace of a smooth granite island; at the north end of the lake, we pass the long sand beach where the Red Squirrel Road protesters camped in 1989, and where Trask and Poukhlov stayed last September en route to Mathias’s equinox gathering.
Travelling light, Kim and I have no problem with the two portages separating Wakimika and Diamond lakes. Lugging the leviathan birchbark canoe is a different story. The others ask me to help carry the 250-pound beast over the second portage, a 500-metre tap dance through refrigerator-sized rocks. Like latter-day voyageurs, we grunt, curse and manhandle the fragile vessel over seriously rugged terrain. Zinser gladly accepts nearly half of the canoe’s weight, and incredibly cranks out a set of push-ups when we stop to rest at the halfway point. Wicks-Arshack raves about how this is probably the first birchbark canoe to pass here in a century, but I’m more acutely aware that one slip could result in a broken leg and shattered boat. Thanks to luck and Zinser, a beast of burden who clearly defines himself by the level of hardship he can endure on the trail, we make it to Diamond Lake unscathed.
