Prologue

Who, What, Why

Who

My name is Josh, if that wasn’t clear, and this is my blog about my experience in section paddling the Northern Forest Canoe Trail (NFCT henceforth). I’m not so vain as to think that anyone except my mom will read these posts; but in case you are a recent college/high-school grad looking for the capstone experience of your youth, or maybe a middle-aged father with nothing left to prove but looking to suffer vicariously through some other fool, here is an introduction for you.

When I was 10 years old my parents sent me off to summer camp with a friend. This wasn’t a summer camp where you made macaroni art and performed plays on Friday night; no Darrow Wilderness Camp, sadly no longer with us, was an adventure camp where 10 to 15 adolescent boys (there were a couple girls) acted out Lord of the Flies under the supervision of crunchy college kids for 2 weeks. It was an incredible experience and was fortunate enough to go three more years after my first trip. Most of the trips were in wood & canvas canoes, not aluminum, not plastic, wood & canvas canoes. Our meals were cooked over wood fires, including bannock we made every night to have for lunch the following day. I cannot express how formative those trips were for me, and have yet to shed my disdain for synthetic and composite boats. It also flabbergasts me now at 30 years old, that they allowed those pieces of craftsmanship to be dashed upon rocks in the rapids of the St. Croix while under the supervision of kids in their early to mid 20’s.

Despite my experiences at camp, I am not some outdoorsman out there in the sticks every weekend. I have longed to re-experience those adventures of my youth and this is my attempt to do so. If you’re an average Joe wondering if you have what it takes to take on something of this nature, stay tuned and find out how many times I swamp my boat, or wrap it on some rocks, or get giardia. I hope to share my experience to entertain and memorialize, but also to provide details of what I did to learn from my mistakes and successes.

What

The NFCT is a roughly 740 mile path of waterways stretching from Old Forge, NY to Fort Kent, ME. The trail goes down stream, up stream, across ponds, and across lakes as large Lake Champlain, with of course a healthy amount of portaging (portage– to carry a boat and supplies between bodies of water. From French porter (to carry). Probably introduced into English from French voyageurs). According to the The Official Guidebook, the NFCT is composed of 22 rivers and streams, 56 lakes and ponds, and 62 portages (totaling 55 miles) traversing through New York, into Vermont, briefly into Quebec, Vermont again, New Hampshire, and lastly through Maine. Again according to the guide-book, “[t]he idea for the NFCT as a contiguous route was brought to life in the 1990s. Ron Canter, Mike Krepner, and Randy Mardres of Native Trails, Inc., researched the many traditional east-west water routes used by Native Americans and early settlers as they explored, sought food and building supplies, waged war, and otherwise navigated throughout the mountainous Northern Forest region”.

Why

To early Europeans and ages before them indigenous people, waterways were the means of trade and navigation. Horses are Eurasian animals and only introduced to this land after European contact. Without beasts of burden or roads of an industrial scale, rivers and lakes provided the means of transportation, and the vehicle was the canoe. Canoes may seem a mundane recreational boat to us now, but their ubiquity is only proof of their merit. At the time of writing this I cannot for the life of me find my copy of John McPhee’s The Survival of the Bark Canoe, in which he lauds the bark canoe as a marvel of human engineering and ingenuity, and though dug-out canoes are found worldwide the birch bark canoe of the Northeast is unparalleled in sophistication (I will post-script add this quote if I can find it)¹. Author Kenneth Roberts in his historical novel Arundel, discusses the relative merit of the canoe versus the French bateau for Benedict Arnold’s expedition to Quebec City during the Revolution. Although apocryphal, the Steven Nason, the protagonist, warns of the difficulty in portaging the heavy cumbersome bateaux over the Great Carrying Place which ultimately caused severe problems for the expedition.

I could carry on about canoes but I’ll spare you the pontificating. I want to convey however the mystique the canoe holds over me personally. It is totemistic to me, representative of the culture, history, and craftsmanship of this part of the world. This is not only a long winded explanation of why I will not be using a kayak, though they have their own merits (I may cheat and bring a kayak paddle though), but an attempt to exhibit the significance such a trip has on me. It is an adventure worthy of Natanis from Arundel, or a voyageur, or perhaps your great-grandfather.

Up Next

If you have gotten this far, thanks for reading! My plan is to do weekly post up to the first leg of my trip, and then daily short-form posts during the trip. My next post will be about the planning and logistics of the first section I plan to do. Stay tuned!

^{1 After finding the John McPhee book, I might be confusing the quote with one from another book. Nevertheless there is a relevant quote I will post in full: “When white explorers first came to northeastern North America, they looked in wonder at such canoes-as well they might, for nothing like them existed in Europe. There was eloquence in the evidence they gave of the genius of humankind. The materials were simple, but the structure was not. An adroit technology had come down with the tribes from immemorial time, and now-in the sixteenth, the seventeenth century- here were bark canoes on big rivers and ocean bays curiously circling ships from another world. Longboats were lowered, to be rowed by crews of four and upward. The sailors hauled at their oars. The Indians, two to a canoe, indolently whisked their narrow paddles and easily drew away. in their wake they left a stunning impression. Not only were they faster. They could see where they were going. White explorers got out of their ships and went thousands of miles in bark canoes. They travelled in them until the twentieth century, for bark canoes were the craft of the north continent. Nothing else, indigenous or imported, could do what they could do”.}