The Way of the Wolf: If a Tree Falls in the Forest… and Lands on Your Canoe
The rain is pissing sideways, and the Barrington River is in flood, its banks overflowing and pushing into the forest. This is our second day working upstream on this water system, paddling the surging eddies and searching out the faint, overgrown portages around the heavy rapids and falls en route.
Shauna Liora and I are grinding our way towards the source of this river, where we’ll cross over the height of land into the start of the South Seal River, which will carry us to Hudson Bay. It’s quite fun paddling up a river, looking for the little weak points and seams in the land and water that you can move through—kind of like a chess match with mother nature.
A pumping flume indicates yet another impassable piece of water and we start ferreting around for the portage, hidden somewhere behind the veil of water birches and alders submerged along the shore. The right shore looks steeper while the left slopes down to water level, so my best guess is the left side for the carry-over. We pull over into the bush and Shauna holds onto the branches from the canoe to keep our position while I traverse back and forth in the forest until I pick up the faint trail and reverse it to shore. I pop out 20 metres upstream of the canoe at the invisible trailhead and we bring the boat in through the flooded underbrush.
This is Shauna’s first real experience tackling rivers in ‘reverse’ like this, but she is excelling. She revels in dragging the canoe upstream and digs her paddle in hard when we’re inching our way against the Barrington’s relentless current. Now, standing waist-deep in the pulsing water she yanks up a pack and sloshes out of the shallows onto land before dropping it. We cross over and I walk to the stern of the canoe to grab a second pack, brushing past a large, rotted tree. Reaching inside the canoe, I catch a flash of movement and spin around to see the 300+ pound tree slowly teeter and then fall square on the canoe between Shauna and I with a resounding ‘thud.’ After shaking off our surprise and having a good laugh over it—thankful the tree didn’t crush either of us—I manage to roll the tree off the back of the canoe. Our Esquif Prospecteur 17 canoe, made of bombproof T-Formex material, is no worse for wear. Same goes for our ultra-tough North Water Spraydeck. No harm, no foul. Expeditions like these hinge on the occasional close call and we’ve been allowed to pass on. Our reward is a portage choked with fallen trees similar to the one that dropped on our canoe.
This moment prompts the age-old philosophical question, “If a tree falls in the forest, and no one is around, does it make a sound?” Had we not been there to hear it, would the tree that fell on our canoe have made an actual noise—would the ‘thud’ have happened? Does anything make a sound if humans aren’t there as audio witnesses? Without a set of ears to pick up the vibration, does sound even exist? Even renowned quantum physicists Albert Einstein and Albert Pais argued this point and couldn’t come to a conclusion. Existence in the absence of an observer is at best, conjecture.
The beauty and privilege of being on a long canoe trip is that I would have plenty of time to roll these philosophical musings over in my mind—about twenty more days in fact. The uncluttered mind is fertile ground for such thought… though mostly it’s about what I’m going to eat next. Ultimately, I’m just glad that tree didn’t fall on my head.
