Oh. Canada.
I once went missing in the woods for two days and had to survive by drinking spring water before I finally found a road, then a town before being rescued.
Reader Sooz asked for the story behind this in response to this post, so here it is:
I was sixteen. I was staying with a friend in Canada and we decided to rough it for a couple of days. We packed up enough food for one of them and counting on the fish biting for the rest. His dad drove us up to a nearby small lake, about a mile wide and we threw everything we took into a canoe.
It wasn’t exactly in the days before mobile phones, but it was 1988, before anyone under forty had them and long before there was coverage in the woods of New Brunswick. He was English too, so we knew that once we were out of reach, we would stay that way until we made out way back.
Our plan was to row across the lake, set up camp on the far shore, fish a little and on the second day paddle fifteen miles down the stream to the nearest sign of civilisation, a small clearing which comprised three houses and a general store, where we would call my friend’s dad who would come and pick us up.
The first day went well, the fishing was good, we started fires with flints a knife and we camped out by the stream which we planned would eventually carry us home. The weather was hot and dry and we couldn’t have hoped for more while making do with so little.
Early on the second morning we went out on the lake as mist caressed its still surface disturbed only by the occasional fish rising to catch a fly. As we paddled on towards the opposite bank a doe and her two fawn we drinking at the bank. The mother noticed us first and stood bolt upright, stamped her foot and circled around her young before they followed her into the tall grass beyond the gravel shore.
We didn’t catch anything that morning, and since we were leaving anyway, we weren’t bothered about eating, so we rowed back to camp, dug over the ashes in the fire pit, rolled up our tents, threw everything in the canoe and pointed her (oh yeah) downstream.
After about a minute, the canoe was riding so low that it was barely floating and it scraped the pebbles on the bottom of the riverbed, making progress almost impossible.
“The river’s normally higher,” said Guy, thereby absolving himself of any wrongdoing. “We’ll have to drag it.”
We took off our shoes and pulled the canoe through the around the bend (that’s tents) where the river widened out and grew shallow. The water flowed out ahead about a mile straight and eight inches deep and we tiptoed on, dragging it along, one at either end as it scraped along the riverbed.
After 10 minutes, someone, I can’t remember who, said: “It’s too heavy” Our sense of humour was fading and we had stopped referring to the boat as “she”.
“I’m putting my fucking shoes on,” I said. Also, everything had become “fucking”.
We strapped our tents to our rucksacks and put them on to lighten the load in the canoe to help it rise and we trod forth in our shoes.
Sometimes the water level reached our knees but when we god back in the canoe we found that our gear was so heavy and wet that we would weigh the boat down and only be able to paddle about twenty feet before having to get out and walk again.
By midday the sun was beating down, we were out of drinking water and has missed our rendez vous with the car. The pickup point was in the middle of nowhere and we weren’t even anywhere near that.
———-
“You don’t understand your power over the common man,” said Alistair Campbell.
The words seemed to echo endlessly around their cell. Digging a tunnel had proved fruitless and oddly phallic. Finding a vein had been the laborious task ahead, but they opted to forge ahead
September 8th, 2006 at 12:00 am
Cliff-Hanger! From CLIFF!
Yeow!!