Hey, White Boy!
It was 5 am. A heavy dew blanketed and smothered the brown strip of dirt that I was walking, swallowing the dust, my footsteps and after an hour of wandering, my thoughts as well. I had been outside since 4 am, giving up on sleep after several hours of gazing at the ceiling of the nurses residence while my girlfriend snored beside me.
We had been arguing. Or more accurately, I listened quietly while a long list of grievances was shouted at me in triplicate. This contentious and beautiful woman was not one you actually argued with. You let her get it out of her system, apologize, and have great sex afterwards. We hadn't made it to that last part on this occasion, but I didn't mind, I was still feeling a little too cold inside after the barrage. What drove me outside wasn't the details of the argument - I was pretty sure that I was innocent -but a nagging and bitter question: What the hell am I up here for?
'Here', was a remote, fly-in, First Nation's community(that will remain nameless because of the sensitive events detailed in this story) of about two thousand people in northern Ontario. I had driven 22 hours and chartered an expensive bush plane to reach it. Ostensibly, my purpose was to sweep a lovely woman off of her feet, but as I walked the "rez" that morning, I knew it wasn't true. I had just wanted to see it.
I remembered the flight in. My eyes were glued to the scene unfolding below for about three hours. Endless pothole lakes connected by thin streams stretched into the horizon and shone like polished chrome - a metallic reflection of cotton clouds and warm, blue, space. The vastness of it swallowed me whole as I sat enraptured. Not a road, trail or hydro line in sight. Here was wilderness.
I had passed the boundary line of Canada. The gridwork advance of towns, roads and "progress" ended around Highway 11, which cut the province roughly in half from west to east. Here was a territory, a wilderness, yet to be dominated and exploited, a land still free. South of here all was chopped into forestry cut-blocks, roads and parks. Sure, there were relatively large tracts of wilderness across the southern half of the province, but their existence was a delicate one, held together by a thin line of tree huggers and the temporary reality that the nation's economic beast could still feed itself elsewhere.
I hadn't simply crossed a physical line, but a cultural one - a realization that had begun as soon as the wheels of our little propellor plane skidded to a halt in a cloud of dust, at the end of the dirt runway. A twelve by twenty, one-room shack served as a terminal between the runway and a dirt parking lot. I noticed a couple of pick-up trucks, their beds loaded with happy-looking children of all ages, parked at odd angles to see the plane arrive and take off again. Smiling families shuffled out to greet familiar faces, shouting and laughing heartily in a mixture of Cree and Ojibwe. Although I knew no one, the casual atmosphere, joy, and warmth of the reception spilled over into my headspace and I soon found myself sharing in it.
This sense of community was something that marked my time there for the next two weeks. I certainly got my fair share of suspicious looks, but I was amazed at how warmly I was greeted by almost everyone I met. Seeing as my girlfriend was working most days, I had a lot of free time. I found myself making new friends and striking up conversation everywhere I went on daily ramblings around the reserve. Everyone I met was incredibly generous with their knowledge of local fishing spots and always had a good natured joke or two. I was even offered a job building community housing.
The experiences I'd had with locals, and the general atmosphere on the reserve during my first week there filled my heart to the brim. Things were much different here when compared to most of Canada, in fact it didn't feel like the Canada I knew at all, and that wasn't necessarily a bad thing. Of course, I had heard from my girlfriend of the other side of things - heartbreaking stories of abuse, senseless violence and the dangers of roaming alone as I was. There were some communities in Ontario where no one could walk outside unless armed with a hockey stick or spiked club to fend off the feral dogs and violent "gas huffers". She was an eye-witness to the worst of it. The past week had told me a different story, however, and without realizing it, I had let my guard down completely. I was about to get a serious reality check.
I had noticed that there were a lot of people out for such an early hour. People I hadn't seen before - and not so friendly looking. Even the ragged packs of dogs that followed me during the day had lost their charm; the screams of one being torn apart by its daytime comrades raised the hairs on my neck and turned my feet back to the apartment. I was nearing the final bend, when the hollow rumble of a leaking exhaust spun my head around to the sight of a dust-caked Dodge pickup. I looked ahead and pretended not to notice, but after tailing me for about 30 seconds it rumbled again and pulled up beside me, matching my pace. Fuck, I thought, and turned to face the truck.
"Hey, white boy!" the driver shouted through the passenger window. The truck was occupied by two women. The driver was a round and smiling woman with black glasses, the woman beside her was smiling too, though with a few less teeth. Both were middle aged. These weren't the angry group of knife carrying men I had envisioned. I felt a small wave of relief wash over me.
"Good morning," I smiled. Then, trying some humour, I asked, "What the hell are you guys doing up so early?" They both broke into laughter.
"Partying! We've been up - what - three days now?" the driver replied with a glance at her passenger. "Going str-o-o-o-ng! We're on a bender. Ran outta booze. Saw a white guy and thought maybe you had some, eh?" Her voice was thick with liquor and a heavy, northern drawl.
"Nah, I wish!", I answered lamely. This was a dry community - meaning the government had imposed a regional prohibition on the possession and consumption of alcohol. A prohibition that had done nothing but create a black market for outsiders to profit from.
The smiles vanished. Their disappointment was palpable as they leaned in and muttered between themselves.
"What about anything else?" The driver looked at me with a flicker of hope.
"Nah, I've got nothing."
I explained how I was up there visiting my girlfriend, who worked at the nursing station, we'd just had a fight and that if I wasn't back soon, she would probably kill me. I also mentioned how much I was enjoying myself exploring their community - they cut me off before I could finish.
"Ha! You want the real tour of (insert phony community name here)?" Their faces beamed at me with mischevious excitement.
Now, to most people this would seem like anything but an opportunity, and they're right. That is, if the goal of life is to remain alive, comfortable and safe for as long as possible, getting in that truck would be the furthest thing from a good decision. I had never lived by that doctrine however, and I was getting tired of being the ignorant "white boy". The cozy, safe experience wasn't what I'd come here for. I found I truly wanted to know - what was life like for the people who lived here? I wanted to understand. Plus, if I was going to be bitched at, I figured that I may as well give my girlfriend a good reason. Here was my opportunity.
"Hmmm... Alright. Let's do it." They laughed and gestured for me to get in. I looked back once towards the nursing residence and felt a chill roll down my back.
Manouevering my way to the center of the back seat, I had to climb over a child's car seat and using my feet, push aside a litter of glass bottles on the floor. Finding my place, I leaned back over and pulled the door shut with a screech and a slam. My new friend hit the gas, the tires broke loose, and we fishtailed our way down the road.
We exchanged introductions and handshakes over the center console of the pickup. For the purpose of this story we'll call the driver Nancy and the passenger Mary. Mary's sleeve slid up her arm as she extended her hand, revealing black and purple pockmark scars that traced their way along her veins and explained the sadness lingering behind the generous and open smile on her face. My heart broke a little.
"Huh. You're pretty brave - getting in a truck with two crazy natives, eh?" Nancy joked, before bursting into the infectious, jovial laughter that I would remember her for. We all laughed together over a few, very politically incorrect but friendly jabs and jokes at one anothers cultural stereotypes - humour that somehow dissolved our differences and did much to bridge the gap that politics had created. This wasn't a time for the rehearsed, inauthentic, "Turtle Island" spiel you see from simpering white folks across the south of the country. These people could smell bullshit a mile away and seemed to appreciate and practice a directness of speech that's rare to find "down south".
An empty bottle of Smirnoff Vodka rolled against my foot as we turned a corner, sparking my first question, "Where'd you get this?"
"Huh? Oh, that's from the white guys at Blank Airways. They smuggle lots of stuff." Nancy went on to explain that the 26oz bottle had cost her $130, and that Mary and her had just chugged it before picking me up. I quietly put on my seatbelt.
Blank Airways was a small floatplane business in the community that, on the surface relied on flying folks into remote areas to hunt, fish or visit relatives at some of the neighbouring reserves for revenue. Clearly, they had other sources of cashflow - I would soon learn they weren't the only ones.
Nancy went on to explain that it was easier to get booze and drugs in the winter because of the temporary ice road that connected them to the "outside" for a few months of the year.
"It's the fuckin' brown guys in Winnipeg!" Mary piped in, "I used to sell the drugs for them. They fly you down and send you back with a car filled with pills and stuff - I know!"
"Does anybody ever get caught? What about the police?" I asked.
At my mention of the cops, my new friends just looked at each other and shared the same bitter laugh.
"The piggies? Ahhh, they know... You just give 'em money ...or other things." Mary's eyes twinkled as she smirked at some memory. Then, as fast as she smirked, her face went grim and dark. She spun in her seat to face me.
"But Im not a fuckin' whore, you know! I've got six kids - all with the same man!" Her glare was the sort of dark fury born of serious trauma and painful memories. She went on to tell me that her partner had died of an overdose in the winter and that her mother was raising her children. I smoothed things over with some reassuring words while swallowing a heavy lump in my throat, something about her hit very close to home.
Years ago a cousin of mine got herself into some trouble. Mixed up with the wrong crowd, she found temporary solace from her inner demons in opioids. Addiction eventually drove her to desperate action and saw her making choices that only deepened the pain she was running from until she landed - a shell of her former self - literally in the gutters of Hastings Street, Vancouver. I saw in Mary the same pain, and recognized the anger borne of it. There were many nights I wept for my cousin, not knowing where she was or if she was even alive. Something in Mary brought those feelings right up to the surface. Everything in me felt raw.
The notification bell of a cell phone brought me back to the reality at hand. Evidently, it was Mary's, as she rapidly pulled it from her jean pocket.
"Well, did he message you back?" Nancy asked.
"No, it's my daughter."
Nancy snorted and turned to me.
"Her ex-fucking-boyfriend stole her truck! We're looking for it right now."
If I felt a chill getting into the truck, now my blood went ice cold. I felt the colour drain from my face. Here I was, a white guy in a truck with two native girls in a place where whites were generally hated and we were on our way to find one of the girls vengeful, thieving boyfriends. Not good.
"Maybe we should go see Dave, huh?" Nancy said.
"Ya, ya! Maybe he saw them. Clint, you'll lo-o-ove Dave - he's good shit."
Nancy's tires spun again as she cranked a hard left through a T intersection and cut that old Dodge loose. We slid from side to side down the road, skidding half-sideways over the washboard of a bend that passed a sorry looking cemetery. My ass bounced right up off of the bench seat along with the jingling vodka bottles, the seatbelt I had put on catching me each time the truck lept and saving my head from the roof of the cab.
Thin, white pickets supported tangles of overgrown weeds in rectangular formation around most of the graves that I could see as we flew by the cemetery. Too many of them were the size of children. Now, I'm not overly superstitious, but that graveyard seemed a little too much like some diabolical, prophetic joke. With what I knew of the happenings of the rez from my girlfriend, I figured I was facing pretty good odds that my fateful 'tour' was going to end at a freshly dug hole in the ground. I leaned back and tried to be as cavalier as I could. Whatever.
I tried in vain to make conversation that would allow me to dig for some kind of information about where we were going, but between the vibrations of the truck, its cargo of contraband liquour bottles and the blaring Eminem album that Mary was now rapping along with at full belt, I made no headway. I felt very alone and very stupid. I was just weighing the odds of injuring myself if I tried to jump out of the moving truck when Nancy hit the brakes. The forest opened up on the right to a motley looking shack, squatted low over a yard of waist-high grass. We rolled in at an odd angle across the 'lawn'. Evidently we had reached Dave's place.
The truck came to a jarring halt as it was slammed into park on the roll and the girls were out the door and walking to the house before I could even get my seatbelt off.
This is your last chance, Clint. I thought to myself, looking back into the hazy, sand-coloured dust cloud that had risen in our wake. Safety lay in that direction. I rolled my shoulders as I took a deep breath and let it out like hot steam. Safety... and one hot-tempered woman. I knew the hell that awaited me when I got back( later I would find that I had drastically underestimated it) but I didn't know anything about the hell I'd find ahead of me. I sensed without a doubt that it would be some kind of hell, but being the incorrigible jackass that I am, I thought that maybe a change in scenery would be as good as a rest.
I tried to steel my resolve to simply walk away but every time I did, I'd remember my argument with that feisty, brunette firecracker the night before and the old tendency towards obstinate rebellion would rise up and stop me. I wasn't ever going to be proud of being cautious. That sort of virtue seemed pretty lame when weighed against the excitement of a new adventure. I was tired of hearing the stories. I wanted to know what was real. I wanted my own story. The fear of being murdered was running neck and neck with the rush of giving myself over to reckless abandon. My ruminating at this crossroads was cut short when the slap of a spring-loaded door and Mary's voice calling made the decision for me. Fuck it - I'd follow this goddamn rabbit down the hole.
I turned my back to the road and with it all sense of caution and common sense.
Across the yard Mary was stumbling her way towards me with something held out in her hand. A child's 'Dora The Explorer' mug in purple plastic was extended to me with a yellowish, milk-like liquid sloshing over the rim.
"Homebrew. Try it." She laughed and then eyed me in about as an overtly sexual way as I have ever experienced. Yikes. This is getting greasy. I thought and took the mug from her outstretched hand.
I knew how they made this stuff. My girlfriend had treated countless residents who were dragged in to the nursing station, poisoned by it. Of course those were relatively rare cases when one considered the gallons of it that were consumed on a daily basis on the rez, but I wasn't used to booze being a Russian Roulette with permanent blindness. It was made in dozens of ways, by allowing anything with a high sugar content from fruit to vats of old ketchup to ferment in a bucket, but the extra steps involved to remove the dangerous ethyl alcohol from the alcohol that was safe for human consumption were almost never taken. I rolled the dice and downed the cup. My throat felt thick and hot as the rank smelling liquid passed my lips and warmed my chest as it ran down my esophagus. My body relaxed into a dull stupor. I blinked - I could still see. Not too bad.
Dave's house wasn't one. Tattered poly tarps of blue, orange and puke green flapped and fluttered noisily in the breeze where they were stapled over old window frames. The roof, slumped in the middle like the back of an old horse, long played-out, was a dirty brown scab of curled and crumbling shingles that did nothing to protect what amounted to a misshapen box covered in equal parts rain-swollen pressboard, tar-paper and asbestos siding. Inside was worse.
We entered the house by the kitchen. There were more fist-holes than wall it seemed, with smoke-stained, floral wall-paper covering what remained. Every door had been torn violently from the hinges long ago and never seen again - a tale honestly told by their battered and splintered frames. Suddenly, there was the long-awaited Dave - gaunt, brown-skinned and shirtless - he was half-standing, half-stooping, while swaying back and forth over the toilet on the other side of the non-existent doorway to the bathroom. His manhood was bare and in hand for us all to see as he expelled the most recent flagon of homebrew from his body. To my left were similarly doorless cupboards, counterspace overflowing with crusty dishes, moldy cookware and a card table where flies hovered over a large salad bowl full of the same homebrew I had just drank. Their more curious friends floated on the milky surface in stark, black contrast. I took a seat at the table underneath a dog-eared movie poster of Bruce Lee's 'Fists Of Fury'.
The girls bubbled over with drunken chatter as I awkwardly took a seat at the table. The smell emanating from the salad bowl was one of rotten fruit and rubbing alcohol that singed my nostrils with every breath. The women were directing their excited ramblings towards Dave but he didn't appear to be hearing them, muttering only half-words in acknowledgement of the stories they were trying to relate. His eyes were continually darting towards me suspiciously as he fumbled at re-tying the waist-band of his grey sweatpants. He was clearly uncomfortable and unsure of the situation that had landed like a spent bottle-rocket at his home. Nerves had my skin crawling under his scrutiny as I wondered what would happen next.
Our eyes met and he greeted me with the slightest of nods before looking back at the girls.
"Who's this?"
Mary erupted with giggles, "This is Clint! He's one of us - don't worry."
"Where you from?" He addressed me in a wary tone, his voice almost inaudible underneath the cackling of the women, who seemed to be wildly entertained by the chaotic, awkward atmosphere they had created by dumping themselves and me in Dave's lap.
"Windsor," I replied and then added, "...the butthole of Canada."
A slow grin spit his face to reveal a jagged mismatch of red gums and brown-stained teeth.
"You like Bruce Lee, huh?" I ventured, attempting to find some common ground with a safe question.
His eyes darted to the poster above me and then to the girls. He seemed to be weighing their easy manner around me against the strangeness of having a white man in his home. Finally, he simply shrugged and took a seat. I felt the heavy blanket of suspicion lift slightly.
"Ya... I know Kung-Fu!" He said in a deadly serious tone, raising his hands into their best combat pose until a mischievous twinkle crept into his eyes and him and the girls broke into raucous laughter all around the table. I laughed too, slapping the table when he began gesticulating wildly and making the same high-pitched vocalizations of the martial arts master whose image hung over the room like a venerated saint. The tension had finally broken.
From there the party began. I had been honoured with the only clean cup in the household by the girls, while the rest of them drank scoop after scoop of the sour brew on the table from old, yellow measuring cups and a big soup ladle. Within half an hour Nancy could barely support her own head and kept leaning over onto Dave's shoulder and complaining about her husband's lack of attention towards her, while Mary kept finding sexual innuendos in every comment any of us made and repeatedly reached out to stroke my arm or leg in a way that made me really nervous. I kept adjusting my sitting position to be further from her reach, hoping she'd pick up on my body language and leave me alone without my having to directly insult her in front of the others but my retreat only seemed to encourage her, like a shark that smelled blood in the water.
Dave noticed Mary's advances upon me and smirked roguishly from under Nancy's wandering index finger that was slowly tracing lines over his wiry beard and mustache. He leaned back in his chair, locking eyes with me and extricated Nancy from her position on his shoulder and spoke,
"You see how us Indians live here now - pretty fucked, eh?" He swivelled his head around as he said it, taking in the wreckage of his home. His face and tone were solemn and despondent. His words, spoken as a joke, carried a heaviness that cut through the liquor and the laughs like a knife. His smile stayed where it was, though the girls faded almost instantly, but his eyes seemed to me to become a child's, searching and fearful, as though waiting for words from me that might crush him in his sudden vulnerability. My heart cracked open and admiration poured into my soul for the man across from me. He was showing me something, me, a white-man and stranger in his house. It was his spirit that had spoken, had risen up inside and looked me in the eyes and told me that he knew what I saw. He knew.
Silence followed and for a moment his question, spoken more like a stated fact, hung in the air with a sadness too heavy to bear - yet this was just what they did - bear it.
And it was crushing them.
With those words, and the stillness that followed, David had given me a gift more intimate than I could ever deserve or earn a right to share in. It was a gift of brutal melancholy, heavier than anything I could ever stand under, and yet these three new friends and many others like them across the country did stand and scrape along under it. Somehow still smiling, laughing and loving despite the torments of their reality. He let me feel its weight, gently upon my shoulder, enough to understand, if only a little, what it felt to be "Indian" in these northern reaches of the country we all called home. Few could convey so much with so few words, indirectly spoken, as if casting a net around something that couldn't be captured in its fullness if approached directly.
Then as quickly as their burden was settled around and upon us, it was lifted again with the same resigned humour that made it somehow bearable,
"...and I'm the chief's brother! Can you believe that?!" He roared in dark laughter as he gestured again around his decrepit home to all of us. The absurdity of this kind of abject poverty in a land richer than any other on earth - and him with blood-ties to it's original inheritors - was beyond comprehension. I was forced to laugh along with him and the girls. What else could be done?
My new friends enjoyed a few more rounds of homebrew while my emotions had me silently reeling, we made our goodbyes, took a selfie together(which I have never seen but reckon is still floating around on some far flung reaches of Mary's facebook), and got back in the truck a little unsteadier than we arrived but still somehow conscious. Our destination now was Nancy's house, to check on her nephew that had been visiting from a neighbouring rez for the past couple of weeks.
"Don't worry, my husband Harold isn't home. He's an asshole."
It never occurred to her that I hadn't asked.
Nancy's house was in slightly better repair than Dave's. The plywood a shiny yellow and hole-less, the doors still hung. It consisted of a big square space, devoid of furniture other than a folding table and chairs with two rooms at opposite ends. I was led to the one on the right side, where Kanye West was blaring from behind a closed door. I wasn't ready for what waited us there.
I followed the women into a cramped room with a chipped and battered dresser and an old analog television balanced atop an xbox 360 that was sat on a plastic lawn chair in one of the corners. A grainy image of Kanye marched across the stage in full auto-tune glory before it was muted by Nancy who had been rummaging for the remote. The floor was littered with clothes and garbage and over everything - the dresser, the floor - were old needles. Nancy simply smiled as though there was nothing out of the ordinary and introduced the bony skeleton draped in an oversized hoody and sweatpants in the opposite corner as her 14 year old nephew.
The child made a heroic effort to raise his head from the bare mattress he was laid on and barely succeeded, held the pose just long enough to acknowledge my presence with a frail smile and fell back into his opioid coma. Sadness, pure and visceral fell like a lead blanket over my whole body as I struggled to hide my emotions at the miserable sight of the boy. I couldn't suppress the shudder that worked through my shoulders.
The women saw my reaction and let their gazes fall to the floor before picking up a conversation that had begun in the truck moments before.
Somewhere along our journey to Nancy's, Mary had fallen into a black mood. Eventually she burst out in an acidic tone some words about how Nancy hadn't been there for her when her husband had died, and insinuated some other, darker things about her nature. Voices rose and rose in an angry pitch until they seemed close to an actual physical confrontation. I stood frozen, growing more uneasy by the moment, until my sense kicked in and I took action.
"Okay, girls! Thanks for taking me along with you. I won't forget it, but I better head back before my girlfriend wakes up and kills me."
They both pressed pause on their arguement and flung themselves at me, hugs and laughs were shared and I made my exit.
My thoughts were heavy and dark as I ambled my way along the dirt track that was the road back to the nursing station, the only bright light in my mind was the fact that the adventure was over. At least, that was what I thought.
Cresting a rise along the way, I turned my head from the long shimmering expanse of the lake to a dull thudding I heard coming from the other side of the road. It was the police station, a stark, grey square with one roll-up door for trucks and a man door at the side. There were three girls in pajamas huddled against it, one of them slamming a fist with all her might while the other two stood with their arms around each other. They all spun around at the sound of gravel turning under my footsteps and shrunk back against the building. They shouted something in a questioning tone that I didn't understand, as tired as I was after the morning's adventure I just smiled and waved to them. They didn't return the greeting, but instead watched, clinging tightly to one another, until I passed. Their knocking began again and continued until it fell out of earshot.
Strange sight, I thought and continued on my way back to the nurse's residence.
I opened the door in trepidation, cringing at the sound of the springs on the screen and hoping my girlfriend was still asleep. Apparently she was called in to work early. The blankets tossed aside in a cold bed were all that greeted me. My trial had been postponed. I sighed my relief, fell in a heap on the mattress and was lost to the world.
I woke up to a tongue lashing more hellish than I could ever have anticipated. It wasn't until things cooled down hours later that I learned the grim truth surrounding the three girls at the cop station.
Apparently the nurses got a call from one of the community residents that a group of distraught girls had turned up at their house after trying the police without any success. They had just escaped after three days of torturous imprisonment by their own brother, all of them repeatedly beaten and raped in that time, only to arrive at the police station and receive no help. The cops had all been on a liquor fueled bender of their own the night before and were sleeping off hangovers. It fell to the nurses to send a van to pick the girls up for medical care and report their nightmare to the police when they finally woke up.
The news came like a blow. I felt horrible for not taking a keener interest in the situation earlier that morning, but reasoned that they were unlikely to be receptive to any male that was a stranger in the state that they were in. I couldn't fathom what they had endured. My head reeled at the depth of their horror. Even after the sobering and eye opening tour I had received earlier, it was impossible to understand the degree of suffering that was just normal life on the rez. Impossible to digest such a concentration of evil seen in a few short hours one cool summer morning in the North.
To this day, I find it hard to reconcile how these stories never reach us down in our cozy little corners of this country. No newspaper articles, no CBC features, the world of the indigenous remains out of sight and out of mind to our government and the average citizen. I offer no conspiratorial theories (realistic or not) and have no judgements to cast on anyone. There is no moral to the telling of this, no haphazardly formed opinion. I don't even pretend to have any solutions to the problems faced by our northern communities. I just reckon that the truth is worth telling, and that's what I've done.
I hope you enjoyed the read. These small stories, blogs - whatever they are - come from my heart; I share them out of a passion to create and see others inspired to make their own connection with the Wilderness. If you found value in your time here, and are inclined to do so, you can help keep me writing by buying me a coffee!
About The Author
A bounty of fish from a solo canoe trip down the Makobe River, Temagami.
For Clint Zold, the pursuit of authentic Wilderness experiences has led him across landscapes both far and wide. Whether paddling the ancient Nastawgan of mystic Temagami, hiking the lonely mountains of the West, or snowshoeing the hunting grounds of his trapping territory in the Arctic Watershed of Northern Ontario - Clint is truly at home in the wild.
Living off-grid on the banks of the Mattagami River; the canoe, axe and snowshoe have become his daily companions in a semi-subsistence lifestyle where food, warmth and water come from the land around him. His passion for Wilderness is only equaled by his desire to share it with others