Superior’s Secrets

The ribbon of road wends its way north, bobbing and dipping through wild thatches of forest that have been trimmed and tamed to make room for man. Swaths of northern jungle are parted to accommodate small settlements—the schools and stores, donut shops and diners—that are the bald spots on a pate thick with towering trees and boulders that must have been left behind by giants.

“Are we there yet?” asks my son Liam, for perhaps the hundredth time.

“No,” I reply. And then add, “You’ll know when we’re there.”

“How will I know? Oh, you mean you’ll turn off the car?”

“You’ll just know….”

Suddenly, the highway bends and an unforgiving landscape of rocks and trees is obliterated by a wash of blue. Water stretches as far as the eye can see. “Are we….oooh,” sighs my son, speechless at last. We’re there.

Lake Superior. The Ojibwe called it Gitchigami, big-sea water. Not really a lake, by any reasonable yardstick, but not quite an ocean. A topographical entity that is inimitable. It’s hard to tell where the lake ends and the sky begins. Is that a whitecap or a cloud? And is the sun dancing on the water, or is the water holding hostage a universe of stars? You could lose yourself here.

And many have, most notably the Group of Seven, who haunted these shores and whose haunting canvas impressions inform our collective Canadian identity. But they weren’t the only artists smitten with Superior. In 1855, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow set “The Song of Hiawatha,” an epic poem of star-crossed lovers Hiawatha and Minnehaha, on these waters. That poem inspired musical works by both Antonin Dvorak and Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (who even named his son Hiawatha). Centuries later, musicians Laurie Anderson and Johnny Cash excerpted the poem in their own pop works.

That’s not what we, as Canadians, are most proud of though. We tell our kids tales about the gales of November and the ship that succumbed, sinking to the bottom of Superior’s frigid waters. We sing them passages from Gordon Lightfoot’s “Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” hoping to record over the iPod pop imprinted on their musical consciousness and lay new tracks of Canadiana. We pry comic books from their hands and make them muse on “Lonesome Pine.”

But my son isn’t interested in symphonies, whether of music, prose, or paint. He can’t be seduced by tales of legendary shipwrecks and artists sleeping in boxcars with their palettes under their pillows. There are fish to be caughtand in his boyish, eight-year-old realm that, and not a new view of life, is the big catch.

Still, every journey starts with small steps and ours will take us along the shores of the lake until we and the big water part ways, with us veering inland to explore the heart of the Algoma, the Chapleau Crown Game Preserve, before returning to kayak Superior’s shores. Leaving civilization behind us, we aim to follow that ribbon of road until it ends, in search of wilderness—as much wilderness, that is, as a Grade-3 child can safely tolerate. I want my son—an urban boy for whom communing with nature means a cannonball off the end of a cottage dock—to experience an environment that isn’t manicured. I want him to see nature that is, well, natural. I want him to share my own appreciation for the Canadian North.

He’s ready. I wasn’t much older than Liam when my own father put a paddle in my hand and we canoed into the interior of Algonquin Park. “Don’t bother packing your blow-dryer,” my dad had teased. “There’s nowhere to plug it in.” In the back seat, my son has packed up his portable gaming device to stare, transfixed at big-sea water. I’m not worried.

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