Fogg’s Horn

The Miscreant Meanderings Of Our Man Markus

Smoke Scenes

I am sure most of you think of me as the consummate boulevardier, the kind of guy for whom “outdoors” means a seat on the terrace. But I have my plein air credentials. I never made Eagle Scout, but my mother sewed more than a few woodsy badges on my sash. I got one for canoeing, and I still keep a sixteen-foot Old Town in the garage at Casa Fogg.

Paddling in circles around a lake, though, isn’t my style. I like to go places, Point A to Point B, the farther apart the better. My most ambitious trip involved taking the canoe on VIA’s westbound Canadianfrom Montreal into the wilds of Ontario, there to be deposited at trackside with no way of reaching civilization but to paddle a 55-mile route through a string of lakes and portages to a flyblown outpost where I could catch an eastbound train. (I know, I could have remained in the same place and caught the return train in situ . I also could have stayed at the Ritz on rue Sherbrooke for a week.)

Did I say “I”? No, it was “we.” There were two of us. For the sake of having a drinking buddy, fireside chatterbox, and bow paddle, I brought along my friend Jack.

Jack wasn’t Mr. Outdoors — at one point along the way, he commented, “Whoever said that the proper study of man is man sure had that right” — but in all the important ways he was the ideal paddling pal. He had no problem helping to heft bourbon, cognac and calvados on portages, he could catch pickerel on a spinner, and he knew how to cook them (we also packed along lemon, butter, oil, seasonings, and a plastic vial of Pinot Gris). The fact that he smoked cigarettes was no big deal, since we’d be out in the open, and I was sure he’d suck down the last of the day’s forty or fifty before getting into the tent. No, the problem wasn’t that he smoked.

It was that he picked the canoe trip as the time to quit.

We were out past Sudbury somewhere. The train had made a scheduled stop at a depot on the edge of the wilderness. Suddenly Jack shot up out of his seat in our compartment, clutching a carton of Merit Lights. He took off down the corridor and returned less than a minute later — good thing, since the train was about to pull out — empty-handed.

“I dropped the carton on the side of the tracks,” he told me. “Some Hoser will find

it. I hope he likes Merits. Me, I’m quitting smoking.”

I was happy for Jack, but I’d have been happier if he had waited till we got back. I knew what we had coming. VIA hadn’t yet banned smoking in the club car, so Jack had been able to take care of his jones on the train. And we only had a few more hours to go before the Canadian would stop and let off us, the canoe, and our gear. So, I wouldn’t have to watch Jack climbing the walls of our compartment.

Climbing the gunwales of a sixteen-foot canoe, however, is a different matter.

We got through the first lake, and the first portage, without any trouble. A mile or so into the next lake, though, I was sitting in the stern, smoking my pipe and paddling along with a nice tailwind, when Jack turned around in the bow and said, “Can I have a few hits off your pipe?” Turns out the tailwind had been strong enough to waft smoke the length of the canoe.

“OK,” I said, and gingerly crouched forward, pipe extended in the hand that wasn’t clutching the thwart ahead of me, while Jack reached back. He eagerly grabbed the pipe, clenched it in his teeth, and inhaled deeply. As you may know, you don’t inhale pipe smoke. He may have been the first man ever to fill both lungs with Mac Baren’s Dark Twist … and he didn’t so much as cough. I knew he had been smoking cigarettes since he was fourteen, but this was the major leagues.

A Regular Ritual

This became a regular ritual whenever I had my pipe lit, but since I only smoked the thing once or twice a day – the rest of the time it was tucked away in one of our packs with the Mac Baren’s – I had to get used to one itchy Jack. I’d get the pipe out when we hauled out at clearings and set up for the night, but I wondered if I’d see him start to inhale campfire smoke.

On the third day out, we were halfway along the biggest lake of the trip when we saw our first sign of a human presence. It was a cabin on a point a half-mile or so ahead. I’d barely picked it out of the trees when Jack called back to the stern, “I wonder if they have cigarettes?”

The cabin turned out to be halfcompleted, someone’s little retreat on an inholding in what our topo maps said was Crown Land. “Crown Land,” Jack said as we paddled to shore. “I bet that means they have a few cartons of Alfred Dunhill’s sitting around.”

There were no Dunhill smokes, and no people. I felt like a burglar, or at least a trespasser, and had that creepy sensation where you know you’re going to get caught even when it looks like there hasn’t been anyone around for ages. The place was so remote that whoever was building it didn’t even have power tools, for the simple reason that there was no power. Jack, meanwhile, kept poking into every corner, even opening a toolbox. That made me especially apprehensive. So did the distant sound of a float plane, high and far and still not visible.

“Let’s get the hell back in the canoe and paddle out of here,” I said. Jack reluctantly gave up the search, and we shoved off. The plane droned on, never coming in to land at the cabin cove.

Another day, and another sign of humanity. This took the form of a patch of blue nylon a few hundred yards ahead, partway up a slope above a sandy shore where we could easily beach the canoe. I knew that was where we’d be heading without Jack even saying anything. Tent meant people, people meant – the hope that springs eternal! – cigarettes.

We hauled out and headed up the slope. There were three tents, actually, but no signs of life. “Hello,” Jack called. “Hello –anybody here?”

We heard a grunt, and a half-dressed guy climbed sleepily out of the tent nearest us. He had a mop of uncombed hair and a week’s growth of stubble. We’d woken him up from a nap, but he didn’t seem to mind. He was as surprised to see us as we were to find him. We were obviously two guys going somewhere in a canoe, so he didn’t take long to figure why we’d showed up, but what was he doing here in this little encampment?

“My buddies and I are gold miners,” he told us. “They’re out in the bush. I was out early and came back to catch some more sleep.” I had heard there was gold prospecting going on in the area, and it was funny to see that it was conducted on this kind of shoestring level. Before I got to ask anything about it, though, Jack piped in with the crucial question of the hour: “You wouldn’t have any cigarettes, would you?”

It was no surprise that the guy had cigarettes. Gold prospectors in the Ontario bush are not big on healthy lifestyle choices. He crawled back into the tent and produced a pack of Craven “A” smokes, the old Canadian staple.

“What can I give you?” Jack asked, figuring he was just making a pro forma remark that would be waved off with a “Forget about it.”

But the guy must not have come up with any nuggets that week. “Three bucks,” he answered. Jack fished a loonie and a twonie out of his jeans, and off we went. Destination Missanabie

Two days later we hit Missanabie, our destination on the rail line. We tied up at the dock in back of the Hotel Missanabie, a saloon with three rooms upstairs, and checked in. Since the only things to do in Missanabie are walk up and down the one street and drink at the hotel, we spent the next day and a half till the train came by hanging around the bar and playing pool. But we weren’t the only clientele. Around seven in the evening the day we got there, the bar began filling up with none other than our gold miners. There was a dirt road that straggled into town from their camp, and they’d come in every night, covering in an hour’s drive on dry land a route that had taken us two days in the canoe.

The miners were a chummy bunch, and we had a good time with them drinking Labatt’s and shooting eight-ball. But we hadn’t been together a half hour before one of them came up to us and said, “You know, we gave Al there a hard time for what he did when you showed up at the camp. He told us about it, and we gave him shit.”

Jeez, I thought. Were cigarettes that valuable up there that the guy’s pals got on him over letting a pack go? Should we buy them a fresh pack at the bar? I’d barely started to say we were sorry when the guy piped up, “Al broke one of the first rules of the bush. When you’re out there and somebody really needs something, you don’t sell it to him. You give it to him.”

Jack wouldn’t take the three bucks Al offered him, so Al bought him a beer. The law of the bush had been upheld, and we went on playing eight-ball. The next day we were on the train to Montreal, and Jack, happily replenished with cigarettes from the bar, headed straight for the club car.

I imagine the search for gold went on.

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