The French River, a mere twelve kilometers, is a passageway between two worlds. From inland Lake Nipissing, the river extends outward, running west until it disappears into another world of water. On a map, the French River estuary looks like the frayed end of a thin, blue rope with several threads connecting to larger Georgian Bay.
Our topographical map prove that the area is not unknown, but it's still new to me and some of the others in our group. So is the experience. Dressed in billowing shirts, moccasins, and brandishing the typical red wool belt, we are pretending to be among some of the people who commonly traveled this river back in the 17th and 18th centuries. Then, it was the main water highway between inland Ontario and Lake Huron. A convenient shortcut, the passage was shown to European explorers by the Natives and quickly developed into a trade route crowded with birch-bark vessel brigades.
By comparison, our group is small. We are five fake Voyageurs with one 38-foot faux-birch-bark canoe carrying a heavy load of gear. Alongside us, a smaller cedar-strip holds an additional two people. We have no plans to paddle hour upon hour, deep into the night, as they would have done. Instead, we'll take it easy, meander up the wider section of river until it narrows and leads us, like a thread through a needle, into the Old Voyageur Channel towards Georgian Bay.
The paddlers who've been there before talk about it like it's another world. They use words like 'breathtaking' and 'awesome' before shaking their heads in the face of the futility of words, unable to fully contain its beauty.
I'm about to see what they mean. But not without a challenge.
In the past few years, the French River Estuary has been drying up, turning once-used channels into dehydrated paths of mud. Along the way, paddlers that we pass share stories of their efforts to find their way into the route to the Bay only to end up doing complicated switchbacks to try and make it there or turning around at dead ends. It isn't easy. One woman tells us she and her partner had tried the year before and ultimately gave up in frustration.
The stories come quickly. Only a couple days after we put in at Hartley Bay and paddled the Western Channel, past Pig Island and Little Pig Island, to set up camp, we hear them. They cast a pall upon the group. With only a few days to make our way there and back, we don't have time to construct a complicated path, nor do we even know if the way is open. With such a heavy canoe, deep water is necessary. On the map, some sections of the channel are faint blue lines that become even fainter with the lack of water. Portages. Lots of them.
We aren't Voyageurs. Many of us are fresh from fast-paced cities where our lives are, if not as busy, perhaps as stressful as the old-time work-horses of the Hudson's Bay Company. By day five, some in the group want to stay put, remain on wide water at the lovely campsite we've found and loll about in costume in the sun. A few of us, though, are determined to make our way to the Bay.
When the four of us set out, we don't know what we'll find or what effort it will take. On the way we pass a couple of kayakers who've given up the effort to locate the channel. But we'd found it, the group of us, the day before and turned back not wanting to line the canoe over a waterfall with no assurance we'd be able to continue. Now, with only four of us and an empty canoe, we haul the huge boat over and into a shallow gully.
We are on a quest.
Alone out here, we are three women and one man, dressed in two-hundred year old styles, journeying among water lilies and below crowds of geese that lift from their private corners when they hear us coming. Crows perch on scraggly trees. Deep inside the wilderness, I think about the Native philosophy of ancestors. How they exist in everything. Rock, trees, animals. As we float in deeper water, I lift my paddle and listen and I can hear those voices in how I feel - part of an existence that goes on and on, ageless.
Before Ballis Point, we slip into a long, narrow waterway with smooth pink rock painted in a thousand natural patterns sloping up on either side. Called the Knot, it is the narrowest area of the Old Voyageur Channel. Some of us get out and walk, guiding the canoe. From here, we emerge into deeper water.
It's obvious now that we're close to the lake. The water seems somehow swollen and its colour is changing to the deeper green of Georgian Bay. Carefully, we watch the topographical map, pointing out landmarks to each other so we don't get lost. A tree half sunk in water, a large rock. In the air is the smell of Lake Huron.
Paddling easily, we make our way through a cross channel and when we turn west at Newtons Point, it appears – the horizon line, shimmering in the distance from the late-afternoon sun.
As we paddle the last stretch through a maze of islands called The Mailbox, heading for Fort Channel, I think I can feel what another, earlier traveler might have felt. Victorious. Deeply satisfied. After all, we've passed through the narrow, stone crevice of a magical land for the gift of seeing deeper into another unknown.