| Robert Twigger’s gruelling journey across the Rocky Mountains taught him a great deal about the wilderness, early explorer Alexander Mackenzie, and the Canadian landscape.
It also taught him something about himself.
"I learned I was a control freak," Twigger confesses.
"I never knew that before. By the end, that business of making (fellow canoeists) walk behind me, supposedly for all kinds of reasons – like bears, and that I had the map. But the real reason was that I wanted to control everyone and be in the front. I had become this obsessive person like Mackenzie at the end of the trip."
Twigger is discussing his book Voyageur: Across the Rocky Mountains in a Birchbark Canoe (McArthur & Company, 390 pp.). It’s a remarkable journal of ambition, self-denial, discomfort and downright fanaticism – one that will entertain, even inspire, readers but will inevitably leave many wondering why on earth Twigger took on the challenge.
He tries to explain.
" I believe everybody should have adventures, whether they are big or small adventures in their life," he says. "An adventure can be just as small a thing as talking different routes to work or going somewhere you’ve never been before. I think it’s an essential nutrition for us. Modern life tries to force everyone into rat runs, where we repeat things."
We have to force ourselves to make our own paths, he believes.
"For me, I need to have an adventure that somehow captures my imagination. This trip, if it had been done in a plastic boat, just wouldn’t have forced me to give it the full power that I needed to give."
The trip is unmatched in modern times. Twigger and his crew were the first to follow Mackenzie’s route in a birchbark canoe – custom-made for this journey – since 1793. Scotsman Mackenzie had hoped to open up a new trade route. It would run between Lake Athabasca, astride what is now the Alberta-Saskatchewan border just south of the Northwest Territories, and the Pacific Ocean.
Each summer over three years, Twigger abandoned the comfort of his middle-class English home and, with selected crew members who varied over the three legs of the trip, paddled, walked and towed supplies more than three thousand kilometres– half of that distance against the currents of the route’s rivers.
Along the way, they met helpful and friendly townspeople, irritable recluses, Cree trappers and a variety of wildlife. One of his crew lost a thumb, and all of them endured extreme discomfort at times.
Twigger attributes the journey’s ultimate success to the fact they travelled light, as hard as that might have seemed at the time.
Late in the book, in a passage that summarizes the key to success in most of life’s challenges and crises, Twigger begins by saying everything you carry in the wilderness is a burden that "must be essential. Otherwise it… bleeds your will, bleeds you dry."
Even so, "stripping down to the essentials isn’t about keeping things light and easy to transport. It’s about maintaining focus. Because in the end it is the imagination and the will that carry you through; body and boat are only servants."
Twigger’s narrative is largely unsympathetic to his former travelmates’ complaints, and he treats his own grumbling with similar disdain in retrospect. The author says he wasn’t trying to be cranky.
"In quite a lot of my books, I have a tendency to be negative and cynical. The thing is, I find these things funny," he says. "It’s not meant to be an attempt to be nasty to people, but to see the humour of an adventure. When people stack themselves up against the environment, against nature, our efforts are often funny. In a way, I hope it’s not malicious." |
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