12/20/22
Newsletter #194
The Crack of Dawn
After three summers at Camp Tamakwa, even though I loved it deeply, I felt that the canoe tripping aspect was weak. Most kids didn’t really want to go on canoe trips, particularly long ones, and I did. So, when I was 14 I went to Charles N. Agree Outpost, which was part of the Jewish Center. Agree Outpost was located at the northernmost tip of Lake Superior in Wawa, Ontario. Wawa was known for the Wawanian Goose, and there was a ten-foot statue of a goose in the little town. Agree Outpost was almost entirely about canoe tripping and hiking, eschewing all the fun activities and fraternization of Tamakwa. Agree wasn’t about fun, it was about challenge.
Ten 14-year-old boys and a tripper in his early 20s would go out on a 10-day hiking trip into the deep, thick woods. Since each kid could only hump so much weight, we could only take so much food, meaning the bare minimum. In the adults’ wisdom they had decided that the most compact, healthy food was sardines and rye crisp. We always began the trips with some fresh vegetables, but used them up by day two. Sardines, rye crisp, and hiking all day through dense woods in the summer heat. And since our tripper, Loren, didn’t know what the hell he was doing, nor could he read a map or a compass, we lost any semblance of a trail early on and spent all day bushwhacking through brush and vines. I wanted tougher conditions than Tamakwa and I got them.
One day we never came upon a clearing of any kind, it was all brush, so we finally pitched camp right in the scrub. We had to tear out saplings and shrubs so we could set up our tents on lumpy, uncomfortable ground. As soon as we got into our sleeping bag, Black Flies or No-Seams, tiny little biting bugs that can infiltrate mosquito netting, attacked us. Our only protection was to entirely zip ourselves up in our sleeping bags, then smother from the heat and lack of oxygen. No sleep was gotten by anyone that night.
We now flashback to the couple of days we idled away in camp before we left. With nothing better to do, I spent two entire days sharpening my big mother-scratcher Buck knife on a whetstone to get it to a razor-like edge. A sharp knife is a good knife; a dull knife is shit.
Flash-forward to me stumbling out of my tent at first light, having gotten no sleep, and having been bitten a thousand times by those horrid Black Flies. Knowing that everyone else was awake in their tents, I announced, “I’ll make a fire.” This was greeted by several grunts. I quickly located a dead branch of a Birch tree. Dried Birch bark ignites easily. I took out my knife in my right hand, gripped the branch tightly with my left hand, placed the insanely sharp blade on the white bark, above my hand, then sliced downward. The blade zipped right down through the bark, then directly over my thumb. Being as sharp as it was, it sliced right down to the bone. I glanced down, saw white squiggly things hanging out of the incision, then a sluice of blood cascaded out and I promptly blacked out. I awoke to find Loren bandaging my thumb with butterfly bandages, gauze and tape.
Finally, on the tenth day we emerged from the woods. We were filthy, sweaty, bug-bitten, and starving. We found ourselves on a cliff top 30 feet above Lake Superior, the second-largest largest lake in the world (after the Caspian Sea). It was hot as hell, but a cool wind was blowing. We all stripped naked, then stepped up to the cliff’s edge. It was a long 30 feet down to the undoubtedly cold water. Everybody looked at everybody else and no one would go. Well, I love diving, and though I’d never dived off a cliff before, I just turned and dove off. My hands were properly clamped and pointed, cutting the water apart above my head to enter smoothly. All was perfect, except that I just kept going down and down and down, and it was so goddamn cold I was sure that all the organs in my body would freeze and shut down. Then I had to go back up, which was a million miles. I reached the surface to find my friends way the hell up on top of a cliff that had no visible path to reach.
Naked and freezing, I scrambled up the shrubs and brambles on the stony side of the cliff, cutting my hands and feet, to find my campmates in slack-jawed wonder at my audacity. I was shivering as I dried off and got dressed. Yes, I was audacious at 14. I felt really good about being not only the only knucklehead who went, but that I didn’t jump, I dove.
Let’s all kick some ass today.
Boom, mother f@#king coolness. I did similar stuff. Yikes!!!