You can be sure the world is getting too civilized when all the portage trails are marked with signs. I know, I know: the herd must be kept on the path to keep them from eroding the banks and trampling endangered wildflowers. And, yes, it's convenient, especially at dusk when you've been paddling a loaded canoe all day, you're anxious to find a campsite, and getting lost on a portage means spending an uncomfortable night in the woods.
But I miss the days when you could get lost, when the faint trail around a rapids branched off into three or four traces that led to hidden blueberry marshes where you could happily spend an afternoon staining your smile blue. I miss finding my own way across a carry and, better yet, lucking onto ancient rutted trails that might have been blazed by Ojibwa hunters and deepened by voyageurs in the days of flintlocks and birchbark hulls. I don't want a sign to point it out. I want to discover it myself.
To the voyageurs who explored the old Northwest and opened up much of the continent to white settlers, portaging was a necessary inconvenience. According to Grace Lee Nute's The Voyageur (published in 1931 and since reprinted by the Minnesota Historical Society) those tough little French Canadians were usually under five-feet-six-inches tall to take up as little space in a canoe as possible, yet could heft two or three and sometimes as many as four 90-pound cargo bags on their backs, cinch them with a tump line, and trot across portages.
Typically they would proceed about a third of a mile, put down their load, and go back for another. Those legs of the trip, or posÄs, were used to measure the length of a portage. One 45-mile portage in Wisconsin consisted of 122 posÄs. Other difficult trails, like the 12-mile Methye Portage on the Saskatchewan River, took on legendary status and became a gauge of endurance. If you could portage a freight canoe and all its cargo across the Methye in a single day you were indeed a voyageur and not some flatland pork-eater.
Bruised feet, twisted ankles, and severe hernias were common among the voyageurs, but only the worst injuries kept them from their work. They did much of their traveling in birchbark canoes 25 feet long or longer, too large and too heavy to be carried easily, so whenever a portage could be avoided, it was. Rapids were often run, though it was forbidden by fur-company regulations. Sometimes a rapids or obstruction could be bypassed by unloading the passengers and some of the cargo and lining the boat down the river with a rope, or cordelle. To cordelle around a difficult stretch of water saved time and effort but frequently resulted in damaged canoes and lost cargo.
Just about everyone I know has a love/hate affair with portages. Most of us can't even make up our minds whether to pronounce the word as the French "por-TAJ" and risk sounding pretentious, or blurt out the Anglicized "POR-tidge" and risk sounding provincial. However you pronounce it, it's plain hard work. Yet there is something about it we love. Portaging in this age of Kevlar canoes, freeze-dried dinners, and compact camping equipment is certainly not the grueling ordeal it was in the 18th century, but at the end of a mile-long carry when we set down our gear at last we feel sure we could have earned a place in one of those 25-foot voyageurs' canoes.
Portaging awakens us to the hard old way of doing things. Every jolting step, every arrow of pain in a shoulder, every aching calf muscle reminds us that we're not so far removed from life as it was lived centuries ago. Carrying our equipment from one waterway to another makes us independent, strong, and confident. Each portage on an expedition is like taking another step away from the frenetic and mind-numbing world of commuter airlines and cellular phones. We don't want it to be easy.
A "Portage Here" sign is an announcement that we have gotten soft, that there are too many of us, that the great American wilderness has been packaged up and parceled off forever. Who wants to be reminded of that?
Copyright (c) 1996 Jerry Dennis. All rights reserved