Only in Canada: The Proximate Wilderness

A long time ago, I was lying on a black-sand beach on the Greek island of Santorini with my beautiful fiancée. Everything was perfect. It was June. The Mediterranean was so clear it seemed you were flying when you opened your eyes underwater. We had brown skins from easy days under the sun, Marlene and I, and the beach was populated by carefree backpackers like us. In those days travel was still cheap in the Greek isles, and we had enough money to eat well most of the summer.

Inexplicably, though, I wanted to go home. Back to Canada. I could not stop thinking about the lakes of northern Saskatchewan and how the aspen leaves would have reached their fullness by now. I pictured chokecherries and deep green moss and orange lichen. With pleasure I imagined flipping over my canoe and dragging it into the water. I was homesick.

My future wife was amused. “You want to leave here,” she said, gesturing at the cosmopolitan scene around us with a swirl of her hand, “to go sit by that cold puddle?”

The cold puddle was called Emma Lake, a small lake on the fringe of the northern bush where my family had a cabin. I had never failed to spend some part of the summer there. Marlene was more indulgent of my quixotic whims back then, and a week later we were home. Still punchy with jet lag, I stood on our deck at Emma, swatting mosquitoes and watching my father burn hamburgers on the barbecue. The water shimmered coquettishly up at us through the birch trees, and I had a great sense of belonging.

Like a lot of Canadians, I have been drawn irresistibly to lakes my whole life. Access to pure lakes is fundamental to my quality of life in my home and native land. I love them all. Vast, wild, labyrinthine ones with granite islets carved into whorls like glacial fingerprints. Lakes in dizzying profusion seen through the windows of a floatplane. Turquoise pools held tight in the arms of the Rocky Mountains. Reedy, shallow reaches where jackfish prey.

I love everything about lakes. The quickstep music of whitecaps splashing ashore, the scents that carry off a northern bay like waves of memory—of fresh-caught fish and spruce and smoke of distant forest fire. The vivid blue paint of damselflies hovering over the water, or the wavering green of minnows moving into the shade under a boat dock like suspended jade pieces. Or the walkie-talkie magic by which water transmits the voices of swimmers far down the shore on a still morning.

Somehow, I even like what is disagreeable about lakes: being caught under a thunderhead in a small sailboat, the existential plague of black flies and mosquitoes, and the melancholy light of late August at high latitudes that hints too early of winter.

Affection is one thing. The hard work of writing a book is another, and I might have been happy to leave the story of the greatest lake country in the world to other writers. Only none had bothered to tell it. Or scant few. I discovered this one day a couple of years ago. I was about to leave on a trip to Lake Athabasca, Canada’s eighth-largest lake—one you can learn more about in a later chapter. Wanting to read up on the lake in advance, I went down to the Saskatoon Public Library to find a book. On the way, it struck me that I could not recall ever reading a book about any lake. There was probably a whole branch of classic literature on Canadian lakes just waiting to be explored, and I relished coming home with an armload of good reading. But what ought to have been a fertile region of the Dewey Decimal empire turned out to be a barren shelf.

Finding not a single volume on Canadian lakes in the public library, I searched the local university catalogue, then the National Library—efforts that revealed the literary gap to be system-wide. There were a tiny handful of books on individual lakes, mainly local history, and some nineteenth-century monographs long out of print. There were many scientific works under the heading of “Limnology”—the study of lake ecosystems—but none were accessible to the general reader. That was about it.

In stark contrast to this near-total information vacuum, there were thousands of published resources on the Great Lakes. They are certainly an impressive spread of fresh water, a fount about the size of the United Kingdom in area, and good books about them are published regularly.

I knew, though, that Canada’s lake-greatness stemmed not from the sheer size of five titans, but from the great sprawl and density of its three million other lakes. Having lived in three provinces and travelled in the rest, I knew firsthand that lakes are relatively common in almost every part of the country. They are dizzyingly numerous across vast inland areas, as anyone who has ever flown in the North can attest. I knew from Mrs. Lorna Zatlyn’s grade eight history that Canada’s entire fur trade past could not have unfolded as it did without the presence of countless lakes, one spilling into the next, that allowed Europeans to hopscotch deep inland to the remotest corner. Without lakes, Canada might have remained a closed world much like Siberia still is today.

Most importantly, I knew that ready access to lakes for pleasure is one of the great perks of citizenship in this country. Relatively pristine lakes remain within easy distance of every urban centre, and recreational use of lakes—for cottaging, camping, boating, swimming—is the national pastime. I knew that bounteous fresh water makes us the envy of our southern neighbours. American tourists spill over their northern border each summer, not in search of back bacon or 5 percent beer, but for access to clean, pure, quiet lakes where the fish are biting. Taken for granted though they may be, happy associations with lakes are part of the Canadian collective unconscious. The proof is there in beer commercials. Advertising copywriters, our modern priests of unspoken desires, sell not only beer but coffee and doughnuts, weed whackers, capri pants, bug dope, and patio furniture against a lakeland backdrop. That the whole nation is stuffing picnic coolers into the trunk for a weekend at the lake is an assumed cultural norm.

The initial disappointment in finding so little writing that celebrated what I considered to be Canada’s defining landscape feature soon turned to a sense of intriguing possibility, like a fresh trail leading north into virgin territory. In so many ways Canada is still an undiscovered country. Though we have mapped every inch of it from space, we have hardly begun to gather the truth of this land we have caught in a great lasso of borders and called a nation. It is a delightful thing to be reminded that your own country is still young and innocent, the work of imagining it still not fully done.

Upon this realization, the seed of a long-dormant quest sprouted—one I had been waiting a lifetime to make. I went out upon a series of interconnected journeys through lake country, to figure out the role of lakes in our lives and in the great cycles of nature. I wanted to see how we use lakes, what we demand of them, and what they may require of us in return. I came to call this watery country of mine Lakeland because something so vast, so unique and magnificent in the world—and as yet so unsung—deserved a name. I wanted to see lakes in as many parts of the country as time, money, good luck, and the patience of my family would allow, to see them in all the seasons and from many perspectives, to ride in as many kinds of boats, with as many kinds of people, as possible. Mostly I tried to approach Lakeland as if it were a country unto itself. Where I went and what I saw is the subject of these pages.

Most of these lakes are accessible destinations not too far from the populated pavements of southern Canada, the lakes people use. The northernmost point I reached was about 59 degrees north latitude, which is to say just shy of the territories. Beyond the provinces lies a deeper wilderness of roadless, uninhabited lakes, the true North. But that is another world, another story.

All of the chapters embrace a wider geography than merely the water circumscribed by the shores of the destination lake. Just as a gull or a robin is the product of the migration route along which it feeds, a river is the sum of many streams, a lake is the offspring of its watershed. It would be an academic exercise, for example, to look at Lake Okanagan without considering the beguiling, beleaguered valley that contains it. Lake Winnipeg cannot be understood without the context of its vast watershed, which runs from the Rockies to within a whisker of Lake Superior. Ajawaan Lake, though not much more than a pond, lies at the end of an international pilgrimage.

These journeys can be read as simple travelogue, but real work gets done too. For the sake of economy a particular theme, or related set of themes, is explored at each lake destination—for example, fishing, algae, international tourism, waterfront fashion—but most of the themes are relevant to all the lakes. The approach is as much about finding commonalities across Lakeland as it is about celebrating variety. And so with the people you meet herein. I hope readers will see their own lake experience reflected in other lives, other lakes. Many Canadians feel a profound personal connection to one lake or another. But I think we have hardly begun to articulate our lakes’ importance as a whole.

That work begins with seeing the land as it truly is, with the immediate physical realm, with the here and now. As the American iconoclast Edward Abbey observed, there is an elegant truth in the physical surface of things, especially when those surfaces have been shaped to intricacy by nature. That seemingly rudimentary step—awareness of what is right before our eyes—often gets overlooked in our rush to “higher” knowledge, in our attempt to tidy the world into clever patterns, orderly schemata. I hope that along the way of these travels, the reader will gain a satisfying number of higher insights—into lake history and natural history, lake ecology, lake politics, even lake psychology. But the first task of the journey is gaining an awareness of the land itself and the ways we use it. As we struggle toward a balanced and sustainable role within the biosphere, all our theories are wobbly if we fail to see the very earth under our feet.

Are there really three million lakes in Canada? This plausible figure is borrowed from some lake scientists at the University of Guelph. But the number depends on your definition of lake. Some definitions specify an arbitrary square area. Some add a water depth requirement. If you include every little kettle hole, bog swamp, and seasonal prairie slough, then the number grows to fanciful orders of magnitude. Yet regardless of how you define them, the remarkable fact remains that about 60 percent of the world’s lakes are found in just one country: Canada.

We may have a vague idea that lakes were formed by glaciers, but that tells us little in a land where everything has been shaped by ice sheets. These have spread over the territory currently known as Canada dozens of times in the last two and a half million years. At first they followed a forty-thousand-year cycle, later slowing to hundred-thousand-year periods between glacial maximums. In between, there have been warmer, relatively ice-free eras like the one we are currently witnessing. Until the theory of human-driven global warming came along quite recently, it was commonly understood that the next glacial winter was imminent. How much human-driven climate change will alter the pattern—or halt it altogether—is now the overarching question of earth science.

Canada’s lake-rich landscape is born and reborn of ice. Each time the ice advances, it erases the lakes and watercourses of the land like a child’s hand sweeping away a sand picture. When it retreats, a lot of water remains pooled, willy-nilly, on the surface, what geologists call a deranged drainage, a wet, youthful world where the water has yet to be coaxed down to sea by erosion and time. It gathers in gouges—called ice scours—cut by the relentless ice into the exposed bedrock parts of the country, creating the familiar Canadian Shield lakescape that surrounds Hudson Bay in a great ring. In areas of land covered by loose till, sand, and gravel, great pieces of stranded glacial ice left surface depressions when they melted. These are kettle lakes. Ice scours and kettles—these two types account for the vast majority of Canadian lakes.

The sprawling Lakeland of northern North America is surely one of the great life zones on earth, defining this part of the world as the rain forest defines South America and the savanna does Africa. Certainly lakes are quintessentially Canadian in a way that the country’s other signature tableaux are not. The Rockies are stunning but, let’s face it, hardly unique. Similarly, Canada’s slice of the Arctic, including both its indigenous culture and its iconic sea mammal species, is cut from a most international pie. The great boreal forest rings the entire Northern Hemisphere like a green cape pinned at the Bering Strait. My own beloved prairie is but an antechamber of the great grasslands that run almost to the Gulf of Mexico and echo around the world.

No, there is nothing so uniquely Canadian as a lake.

The 40 percent of lakes not crammed into Canada are spread thinly over the rest of the world. They are virtually absent over much of Australia, Oceania, South America, Asia, Africa, and Antarctica. There are, of course, exceptions. Africa has lakes Victoria and Tanzania, the magnificently large rift lakes, so called because they lie over fault lines. There are mountain lakes in the various ranges.

As for northern landscapes with a glacial geology comparable to that of Canada, Finland achieves a similar lake density, but on a much smaller scale. Apparently the efficient Finns have made a careful count and find they have precisely 187,888 lakes, if you define lake as any standing water over five hundred square metres in size. As you might expect of the world’s largest country, Russia has plenty of lakes as well. Lake Baikal in southern Siberia, another rift lake, is so deep it contains a fifth of the world’s fresh water. But Russian lakes do not approach the number and density found in Canada.

Lakes are not only rarities, but oddities on a global scale, associated with fluke geologies, imbued with magic. There are volcano-crater lakes, coastal impoundments and everglades, cenotes, oxbows, meteor-impact lakes. In Antarctica, buried under thousands of metres of ice, scientists appear to have found some large lakes, possibly kept in a liquid state by geothermal heat.

Let us pay respect, briefly, to that elephant in the living room . . . Of the Great Lakes a great deal has been said. Those inland seas are a world and a culture unto themselves, storied and sung in works from Paddle-to-the-Sea to “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.” They are qualitatively unlike any other lakes in North America. They cradle massive populations, great smoking cities, heavy industry. They have their own economy, their own weather, their own wars, their own diplomacy. They are shared by two countries. On the American side, they are sometimes referred to as the Third Coast, an apt nickname for what is effectively a maritime region. The Great Lakes are really an extension of the St. Lawrence Seaway, bringing worldly goods off the salt water and deep into the continent. Through that open door an ocean of troubles has entered. Zebra mussel and sea lamprey are among dozens of invasive foreign species that have permanently altered the lakes’ ecosystems. From within, pollution is the most indelible human imprint on the Great Lakes, and issues from both sides of the border.

None of that is in this book—because it is in so many others. In these pages, I refer to the Great Lakes only as a point of comparison.

Scientists refer to the Big Five as the Laurentian Great Lakes, a good hint that there are others. Indeed, the Laurentian ones are really just the southern terminus of an extended great-lake chain that cuts diagonally across the map in a line longer than the distance from Halifax to Vancouver. Lake of the Woods, with a convoluted shoreline said to be longer than Superior’s. Lake Winnipeg, nearly the size of Lake Ontario, far larger than Erie. Reindeer and Athabasca Lakes, sprawling, nearly uninhabited. Great Slave, the deepest lake in the country at 614 metres, enough to swallow the CN Tower with room to spare. The largest lake wholly within Canada is Great Bear.

Back to Lakeland . . . Canadians have so many fine lakes we do not compute them a particular value. We once felt the same way about the bison, the Carolinian forest, the tall-grass prairie. It is difficult to prize a surplus. Elsewhere in the world, much more fuss is made over far fewer lakes. It took an American to observe that “the lake is nature’s most beautiful landscape feature.” The words belong to Henry David Thoreau, writing in Walden, published in 1854, one of the few sustained meditations we have in North American literature on the subject of lakes. For the record, New Englanders use the word pond in the same way as do Newfoundlanders, so Walden Pond is, in fact, a lake. But not much of one.

The English Lake District has been a tourist draw in northern England for nearly two centuries now and is protected as a national park. It is celebrated in the work of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Beatrix Potter and Arthur Ransome, to name a few. Yet the wee ponds that compose the Lake District would disappear into Lakeland like a twist of lemon in a cup of Earl Grey.

In contrast, lakes seldom appear in Canadian literature. When they do, they never play themselves, but serve as a metaphor for unconscious stirrings, mostly of the dark and murderous kind. Literary lakes are psychological stages for felony, death, and madness.

In her mordant guide to Canadian literature entitled Survival, Margaret Atwood has a lot to say about nature, lakes included, and the reason it attaches to dark themes. Whereas to Wordsworth and the English Romantics nature was a warm, kindly female divinity, out on the lonely Canadian frontier she shows her fangs. In fact, she becomes an it, genderless and shadowy, indifferent to the human cause. Nature will, given a chance, kill you.

It’s nothing personal, mind you, just business, the enterprise of recycling nutrients—eat and be eaten. The whole thrust of Canadian literature, says its poet laureate, is about survival in the face of this omnipresent threat of nature as predator. The two favourite natural methods Canadian novelists and poets use to dispatch their characters, Atwood says, are drowning and freezing. And so Canadian lakes are literary murder weapons for all seasons. We have the old Chippewa woman in Duncan Campbell Scott’s “The Forsaken,” left to die out there on the ice, because she has become useless like a broken paddle. We have the protagonist of Earle Birney’s poem “Bushed” going insane in a cabin by a haunted mountain lake. These poems are standard reading for Canadian high school kids.

The nature-as-indifferent-monster theme is potently distilled in Atwood’s own brilliant short novel Surfacing. It is the story of a young woman’s search for her father (or his corpse, or his ghost) on a lake in northern Quebec. The characters are effectively imprisoned by the water until the climax, and the lake swims with portentous meaning. At one point, the heroine even dives beneath its inscrutable surface to find submerged Aboriginal pictographs, hoping to find clues in the lost art of a vanquished people. Like its lake setting, Surfacing is deep, cold, and archetypal, a forbidding territory of the unconscious.

While I choose to run with Wordsworth and the Romantics and ascribe friendly motives to Mother Nature, I grudgingly admit that she can be a little scary. And yet we possess a deep desire to touch the wild, to be at home in it at some level. This fear-love push-pull has plagued humanity since the Fall. We thirst as deeply to be intimate with nature as we do with other people. Both these objects of our desire are likewise prickly, intimidatingly complex, and sometimes even deadly dangerous. And so we search for safe points of entry, where we may reach past the brambles and find the fruit.

In Canada, this brings us to lakes. Upon their shores we find nature at her most accessible and inviting. This is the great gift of Lakeland: the ready interface it provides with wilderness. Ice fields, mountain faces, swift north-going rivers, the open tundra, uninhabited coastline, the great tracts of forest—Canada has all these aplenty, but they are not easy places to visit. The lakeshore, by contrast, is an open door. Linger on the threshold, with your pail and shovel. Or go deeper. Walk the shore until the sounds of the parking lot no longer follow. Paddle around the bend until the world is out of sight.

Lakes are our proximate wilderness, that piece of untamed biosphere from which average people can take a bite. That we do continue to obey an innate call to feed there is another great paradox of wilderness access—hope and threat combined. We consume wilderness even as we seek to take part in it, for consume is what we do. No matter where we go, we bring the ecological threat of our own presence along with us. This would seem an insurmountable problem. Increasingly, the message from the environmentalists is that this earth would be an absolute paradise if only we ourselves weren’t in it. You human beings are the cancer of the planet, says a computer program named Agent Smith in the cyberpunk action film The Matrix.

Even if we are the rogue cells in the superorganism called Gaia, are we not still a rightful part? Cancer may play a positive role in evolutionary terms, devastating though it is to individuals. Cancer or no, I go to Lakeland as much as I can. I wish we had a different transportation paradigm so I did not have to burn a tank of gas to get there, but I have to go nonetheless. There seems little hope of accomplishing our great task as a species—of achieving a harmonious place within nature—if we do not possess an intimacy with it. The paradox again: to fall in love with nature, you must trample it a little. Walk a half-hour down a trail at first light, and you destroy the night’s work of a hundred spiders. A child wading in the shallows with a dipping net will catch a sense of wonder, along with some minnows. If a few of the minnows do not survive their imprisonment in a bucket on the end of the dock, has it been a fair trade? For good or ill, it is up to us to decide. “You humans shall have dominion over all the fish and birds and animals,” says God on page one of the book of Genesis.

As will become apparent, I have concerns beyond spiderwebs and minnows. Runaway development, driven by the great economic boom that accompanied the end of the last millennium, has threatened many areas of the proximate wilderness, including my own cherished corner at Emma Lake. At stake is not the wholesale destruction of Lakeland but the easy and close relationship with the natural world in the lucky land called Canada. It is increasingly difficult to get into the lake country—that is, increasingly expensive. In my lifetime, the proximate wilderness has been aggressively bought up, and urban standards of affluence have been imported like rolls of lawn turf. Humble cabins with families of eight sleeping in bunk beds have been replaced by sprawling retirement homes with two occupants and three bathrooms.

The new tourism has grown in step, and its infrastructure is a heavy industry. Probably it wreaks more permanent disruption of sensitive and accessible wild places than logging or mining. Roadside motels with small, efficient, and affordable rooms have been scraped away to build landscaped resorts. Nine holes have become twenty-seven. The vanishing practice of car camping in the public grounds with a tent, the lowest-cost, lowest-impact means we have of visiting lakes, is doubly stigmatized—both by the culture of affluence and by those who presume to say that the “real” wilderness cannot be found in a cul de sac of tents. No wonder visitation numbers are dropping in national and provincial parks.

The transition from seasonal use to permanent colonization is another force of change in the proximate wilderness. This is where people of sufficient means, liberty, and free time set up house in beautiful places of which they know little except the view. They build palaces in villages, and their weighty urban capital transforms rural communities forever.

We are moving toward a place that, in the short history of a young hinterland country, was unimaginable only a generation ago. In this place, the proximate wilderness is a gated enclave, an upper tier, where standards of affluence and expectations for consumption are sky high. It is nature at a price. I hope that we have not already “won” Margaret Atwood’s survival game, not yet completely beaten wilderness back with our capital and fenced it in with wrought iron. I hope that the next literary chapter we write as a country will not be called “Paradise Lost.” We risk raising the first generation of Canadian children to grow up without any particular attachment to wilderness because their families cannot afford membership.

As I write these words, the country is reportedly on the brink of hard times after a long run of good fortune. Such things come and go—booms bust; bulls hibernate. When the markets receive their inevitable corrections, however, there are no corresponding rationalizations on the lakeshore. Oversized houses do not get smaller. Ill-conceived subdivisions do not revert to woodlots. Only their market prices backslide for a time, waiting to catch the next wave. Development is a one-way track.

Still—and this is where things get interesting—some of the wealthy and influential people colonizing Lakeland become its most capable defenders. They are lawyers, publishers, city planners, deputy ministers. The irony is, they mainly come around to this wilderness advocacy after they have bought a fine house from which to view the wild. But they do come around. I say they, but I really mean we. I come to Lakeland by the same route. The question is, from what peril shall we defend the proximate wilderness? Is it merely about keeping newcomers out after we ourselves are in?

The task is really the opposite: to steward and retain the near-wilderness and keep it accessible and pertinent to a whole people. We need to discover sustainable use on a far wider front than the scattered patchwork of national parks can provide. Anyway, park officials have largely given up trying to protect our near-wilderness because they cannot afford the real estate prices either. We must dig deep into the roots of our own acquisitiveness. This means not building, not buying. It means visiting versus colonizing. It means rethinking exclusivity. We need to protect not just diversity of wild species but diversity of viewpoints, diversity of people in the proximate wilderness.

Our greatest need . . . is to want less. Living more simply used to be the whole point of lakeside culture. Let us reacquire the skills there on the still generous margins of the Canadian bush. Let us gather this knowledge where and when we may. Let us succeed, with new ideas, at rethinking our place as a species on this forgiving scale. For there are dark clouds gathering on the wider horizon of the world. If we stand still and allow them to overtake us, the problems in Lakeland will be remembered as summer storms in comparison.