Hi! I'm Grace Evans and this is Dry Spell, my weekly letter of off-season reflections on canoeing.
I don’t know about you, but I'm oversaturated. This week in Ontario it feels like the pandemic is winning, and everyone is losing. So today I’m bringing in guest writer Pauline Johnson (1861-1913) to talk about camping in the rain.
Pauline is primarily known for her poetry and performance art, but I adore her canoe writing from the 1890’s. She paddled the Grand River where she grew up, and traveled by train to Muskoka to trip with her pals.
Please enjoy this excerpt from “With Paddle and Peterboro1” published in Saturday Night in 1890, by Pauline Johnson:
We were awakened this morning by the creaking of the guy ropes as they strained and dragged at their pegs. Our tent, beaten upon by the uncertain wind, flapped its wings like some strange white bird struggling in the teeth of a storm, and at fitful intervals hurried dashes of rain battered against the frail canvas that was the sole tissue between us and the Muskoka skies2. We rolled ourselves snugly in our grey blankets3, and watched with heavy eyes the little rills of water that crept under the wings and scurried over the rocks that made such sure footing for our stretchers. The grey lichens awakened, too, as the rain touched their spongy pores, while they drank the trickling drops until wet and surfeited they exhaled a warm, soft mist that arose and laid its shadowy finger on our too early awakened eyes.
Lulled in sleep once more I awoke the second time with a terrible start. The rain was still drip, drip, dripping on the cotton roof above me, but the wind had subsided and it was no sound from without that startled me, but only the rapid throb of my heart, for was I not re-living in my dreams the story of danger and peril that I heard yesterday, while up Lake Joseph4 with a merry crowd of Bohemians who were too light-hearted and jovial to feel the pathos of the superb scenery that had calmed me into a reverie that was almost “akin to pain.” I had laughed and sung and jested also for a time,5 but little by little my merriment left me, and by-and-bye I stole away “forward,” and crouching down alone by the wheel-house, I prepared to luxuriate in the great heart of Nature for the remainder of the afternoon.
Slang term for canoe as Peterborough, Ontario is where settlers adapted European boat building techniques to Indigenous canoe design in the 1860’s.
From now on I’m exclusively referring to my tent as the sole tissue between me and the sky.
I saw a sleeping bag advertised in a 1907 Abercrombie & Fitch catalogue, but they weren’t common until the 1970’s. Campers just used pins and wool blankets instead.
You can’t camp on Lake Joseph anymore. It’s all fancy cottages now; the northern tip has apparently been named “Billionaires’ Row.”
The stories about rainy canoe days are best shared at the dinner table amongst friends who paddle together ....shared later for years to come. Thanks for sharing!