Just 45 minutes from home Camping on Crown land makes times stand still Story and Photos by Harry Gallon
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LEFT MY watch at home. Here there is no itinerary. My actions are measured by body’s need and boyish want, free from clock and commitment. Morning light bronzes the water as it has for generations of flora, fauna and man who marked their days here. Stomachs rumble, demanding the first offering of the day. Time to prepare breakfast.
We are weekend squatters. Tent stakes are driven between rocks, and for two days and nights we claim this island our own. It’s on the upper Ottawa River and like hundreds of other islands, it’s owned by the Government of Canada. Crown land is our collective legacy — a real-time museum, open and accessible to all. To adventurers past, it served a practical purpose. To my sons Nick
and Quinton, our friend Ian, and our dog, Thunder, it is an interactive playground. We are a mere 45 minutes removed from our west-end Ottawa lives. Here we live as free, natural men. Eggs poach in orange rinds wrapped in foil. Cedar smoke curls over the mortared fire pit and spreads across the campsite. I brew coffee and cook bacon in an iron pan on the Coleman stove. The boys’ feud over a makeshift swing built from flotsam and jetsam, and Thunder, snout to the ground, sniffs out discarded morsels between twigs and rock. We ready mind and body for a day of real living. www.OttawaOutdoors.ca
We eat silently at a table made from pine barn board. Nick and Quinton wash down their fuel with fruit juice, Ian and I with coffee and Bailey’s. Yes, natural men, with cultivated tastes. We chew, swallow and survey. Each of us calibrates the signs and measures the opportunities. The horizon is scanned for rain, the wind gauged for velocity, the sun for heat. We meet at the water. There is something about the junction of land and
water that draws people. It is a memory lodged in our collective human psyche, the site of welcomes and send-offs, celebrations and rituals. The sound of water lapping shore evokes disparate feelings of contentment and restlessness. Nature’s perfect rhythm — the ebb and flow of humans coming and going. The river was once the means of transportation, trade and commerce, but now serves as a playground and classroom for boys young and old. Nick skips a small shard of Canadian Shield in the river and asks, “Are you older than this stone, dad?” I am pleased to tell him
that it’s about six billion years of age, and yes, older than I. He and Quinton toss pebbled, glassy stones, the igneous debris left by retreating glaciers. I explain to them that a shallow sea (the Champlain) covered this area about 100,000 years ago. Quinton can’t quite get his head around standing on the bottom of a sea. “Where’s Nemo?” he asks. We will not be finding Nemo, but bobber fishing with a hook and worm will yield a variety of indigenous fish. The boys take turns reeling in catfish, stout and whiskered. Smallmouth bass, largemouth bass, rock bass, perch, muskellunge, pike, pickerel and many species of nongame fish share the waters of the Upper Ottawa River.
Lunch is prepared on a slab of shale that protrudes into a bay on the south side of the island. A mile further south lays the Ontario shoreline, partially obscured by smaller islands. The rusted smokestack of the closed Tembec lumber mill rises in the east, the Braeside dock where we launched to its right, and a line of homes in Sand Point directly south. Beneath the ridge in Sand Point runs the Canadian Pacific Railway line. The crown jewel of the Industrial Age, it supplanted the river as a mode of travel, trade and commerce. Freight cars still
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