Destination: Camping on Crown land

Just 45 minutes from home Camping on Crown land makes times stand still

Story and Photos by Harry Gallon

ILEFT 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

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 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.

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. 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

“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

rumble down the line, day and night. The thunder of steel on steel carries across the water. The rail and river are parallel acoustic lines, creating a perfect harmony.

Lunch time. Meat and fire go together like land and water, offering sustenance. Our hands did not make this kill: we are modern men and have our own means. We wash down hamburgers and sausages with lager or pop chilled in ice, and recline in our chairs, anesthetized by the sun.

An afternoon hike leads us to trees rooted stubbornly in a thin layer of soil. We stroll beneath the boughs of cedar, pine and oak, the seedlings of preceding generations. Beneath our feet is limestone, shale and sandstone — the stratified layers of geological history. Scattered across it are forgotten bits and pieces of human history.

Rivers served as the original TransCanada highway and their shores served as the by-ways. Nick has found arrowheads that date back to the original inhabitants, the Algonquin nation, and tools left by the first

European explorers, the voyageurs, the courier de bois. We have found hand-blown bottles and rusted scraps from the Industrial Age, machinemolded bottles, cans and miscellaneous debris from the turn of the last century.

As twilight darkens into night, the constellations assume their

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appointed places in the heavens. Orion the Hunter, the Big Dipper and the Little Dipper align and sparkle. With no ambient light and less pollution in the air, they appear brighter and closer than in the city.

“Are the stars alive, daddy?” Quinton asks. Measured in context of land, water and sky, our lives are a mere blip in time. We stare into the fire. It certainly lives, taking breath and growing where it can. Warm and full from supper, our slow slide down the chair culminates in bedtime.

The wind strums the water and the water plays the shore. It is a stony melody, structured and familiar. Ian’s snoring competes with that of Thunder. Nick and Quinton are deeply entrenched at each shoulder. The fire spits sparks into the night, the stars burn on. It’s all alive.

Though we do not possess the island, I feel in a sense that we can claim ownership. As Government of Canada land, it is a resource and treasure open and accessible to those willing to undertake the necessary planning and effort. Crown land is a shrine and sanctuary, an interactive environment in which to play and learn. Living our legacy is time well spent in the present and an investment in my boys’ future. Here we do not mark our day, we live it.

Leave your watch at home.

—Harry Gallon is a resident of Ottawa who works as a freelance writer and photographer. He enjoys camping, fishing, canoeing and biking with his two boys. For information about camping on Crown land in Ontario, visit the Ministry of Natural Resources web site at www.mnr.gov.on.ca or call (800) 667-1940.

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