Solo Canoeing Across Canada with Chris Taggart
By Jim Moodie

I first catch up with Chris Taggart at his home-away-from-the-water, a small, nondescript house in a working-class district of Sudbury, Ontario, a city famous for its slag piles. Pulling up in front of that ignoble address, I’m struck by the certainty that only a world that elevates snowboarders and supermodels to such brightly lit pedestals could leave a person who has single-handedly conquered the continent in a 16-foot canoe--in a single paddling season no less--to flicker in such obscurity.

That’s before I learn that Taggart lives in the basement.

It’s upstairs, where he’s been visiting with a fellow lodger, that I actually cross paths with him. It’s March of 1998, four months since he completed his marathon journey from Montreal, on the St. Lawrence River, to a point just 300 miles shy of the Pacific Ocean. A total of 4,750 miles, accomplished in just one seven-month space, between break-up and freeze-up. You’re expecting an individual of mammoth proportions.

A stringy 32-year-old with long, straggling blond hair, Taggart looks less like a continent-conqueror than a combination of Neil Young (the young) and Kurt Cobain. It’s an impression his attire--faded jeans, equally well-laundered flannel shirt--only serves to reinforce, as does his later announcement that he plays guitar and sings. Whose songs does he like to play and sing? Among others', Neil Young’s. Right now, during the opening moments of our first meeting, he’s not singing, but talking. Only he isn’t talking to me. He’s talking to a dog.

Before you conclude that Taggart’s a touch wacky, or perhaps still ‘bushed’ from spending 200 days alone in a canoe, there are a couple of things you should know about him. One, he loves dogs. Two, he probably is still a bit ‘bushed.’

Not that this is necessarily what’s going on here. The dog, a gregarious black lab pup, belongs to the upstairs neighbor. Presently, the pup has managed to slip out into the hallway, where he’s expressing himself, puppy-style. He’s leaping on me, and then leaping on Taggart, licking, wriggling, his rubbery hind quarters a-swivel with excitement. "I know how you feel buddy," Taggart says in a soothing voice, patiently putting up with the pup’s antics. "I was like that too."

Here, the canoeist extricates himself from the dog long enough to let his eyes go wide with the memory of some shape glimpsed on a shoreline--on some point or delta, some piece of land somewhere in Canada. A figure, or maybe just the mirage of one; a hint of civilization. And he makes as if he’s paddling vigorously towards that image. "People!" he exclaims.

It’s a moment which says a lot about Taggart, and the massive trip he undertook in 1997. On the one hand, he’s joking, deliberately overstating the degree to which he craved human contact during his voyage; ever since his introduction to canoeing as a teen--when he’d invariably be the ‘odd man out’ during fishing trips and end up having to commandeer a canoe by himself--Taggart says he’s mostly preferred going it alone. But at the same time it betrays a part of him which truly does hunger for companionship.

It’s an area in which he’s not had a whole lot of luck. His dogs--he’s had three--all died young, victims of freak accidents. Worse, both his mother and his adoptive father died prematurely, leaving him alone by the age of 26. His biological father is a person he’s never met, although he believes he might have glimpsed him once. And his last relationship with a woman, someone he says he truly did love, was called off just prior to the trip. It’s a decision Taggart says he in many ways regrets, but the course he had charted for himself simply didn’t coincide with the one that she had in mind. She wanted children, stability, a person who would be around. Taggart wanted to cross the country by himself. The two seemed mutually exclusive.

Above all, though, Taggart’s identification with the dog serves as a reminder that, whatever the wider significance of his trip--setting a new mark for solo travel, breaking the Rockies, calling attention to a route first blazed by Alexander Mackenzie in 1793--the main thing was the process he had to go through on his own. In the end, Taggart’s epic journey was less a date with history or even the country, than a kind of extended appointment with himself.

For the record: Taggart appears to be the only individual to have ever tackled--and all but wrapped up--the famous Voyageur route across Canada in such a short time frame. Verlen Kruger and Clint Waddell did it (and then some) in a single season in 1971, but they were a team. In more recent memory, the McGuffins, Gary and Joan, also made the transnational odyssey--spreading it out over a 'comfortable' two-year period. Taggart put in at the head of the Lachine Rapids in Quebec on April 16, and with two paddles, a pee bottle, no ground support other than 10 prearranged food pick-ups, a tent, some pots, and a single calendar in his head, began paddling. By November he was in British Columbia. He crossed the Great Divide--an awesome feat in its own right--and entered the Pacific watershed.

Ironically, this should have been the easy part: for the first time in two months, he was heading downstream. Another 20 days and he'd be in Bella Coola, on the Pacific Coast, adding his own name, perhaps, to the rock so famously autographed, two centuries earlier, by Mackenzie. But winter had a different agenda. While in the Rockies, Taggart had gotten his first taste of ice--a series of small lakes at the height of land had already seized up. He was able to negotiate those by a combination of dragging, ramming, and, at one point, hacking his way forward with his hatchet.

A 10-pound maul couldn't have helped him with the McGregor River. There, after a few days' giddy ride on open water, he ran smack up against an ice-jammed canyon. It was four miles long, high sided, impossible to crack. Taggart spent eight days holed up in his sleeping bag, occasionally crawling out to attempt a fire, or to clear an SOS sign in the snow, or to check on the freshness of some nearby grizzly tracks. Possibly he prayed. On the ninth day a helicopter search and rescue team from Prince George appeared in the sky above him.

"People!"

Taggart's basement: it's actually just one room of the basement, a tiny paneled space crammed with camping gear, maps, a ratty couch, what appears to be a raccoon tail, paddles, a banner he was presented with by friends on his return to Sudbury, his guitar, and a painting by a local artist--a gift from his uncles--depicting a lone canoeist. Its title: "When I Was Alone."

"I still think it's possible to get to the Pacific in one season," he says, leaning forward from the couch, hands spread on his knees. "Looking back, there were a few times I took a day or two off to rest up, thinking I'd save my energy. If I didn't take them off, I might have been more successful getting to the ocean." As well, with what he knows now, he says he could afford to push a bit longer on certain days and be confident he'd still find a camping spot.

But you can only push so much, he admits. "When I read back through my journal, I can see the times when I was exhausted," he says. "If I'd gone much harder, I might have just wasted myself before the finish line. It's kind of a tortoise and the hare scenario." As Aesop has it, of course, the slow but steady guy always wins; but then his tortoise wasn't up against a country which happens to freeze solid five months out of the year. Taggart throws his hands up.

Those hands, though they look okay now, took a real beating during his journey. Taggart estimates he took a total of 4.8 million paddle strokes; his knuckles were regularly swollen, and at night, he says, his fingers would "close up like flowers." He also dropped 15 pounds en route, largely because of the giardia he contracted on the Athabasca River in northern Alberta. At that point, he was still 125 miles out of Fort Chipewyan, the nearest town, and had to battle intense stomach pains before reaching a doctor. Although he recovered relatively quickly--it took just four days of rest--he never did put the weight he'd lost back on. It didn't help that his next test was the 700-mile-long Peace River, which he had to battle upstream for 45 days. Shortly thereafter, while clawing his way up the fast flowing Parsnip River in the Rockies, Taggart says he actually called it quits.

At least, he thought he had. "I couldn't go any further; it was too much for me," he recalls. "I stashed the canoe and hitchhiked into Prince George--I had given the trip up." After thinking it over for a few days, though, he realized how terrible it would be to pack it in with the height of land so close within his grasp. "I regrouped, and got back in the canoe," he says.

Simple to say, harder to do. But Taggart can barely express how glad he is that he did take up the struggle again. Breaking the Great Divide proved the literal 'high point' of his entire journey. "I stood there at the height of land, where the Arctic waters switch over to the Pacific, and just soaked it in for about an hour. I felt like the most fortunate person in the world. I couldn't stop smiling...I still can't stop smiling," he says.

It was a long way to come for a person whose exploits as a canoeist were, until that point, mostly limited to a small chain of waterways within the Rainbow District of Ontario, an area couched within the LaCloche Mountain Range. Mountains in name more than stature, these bare quartzite hills, a favorite subject of Canada's Group of Seven painters, lie on the north shore of Lake Huron, within sight of the place Taggart considers his true home: Manitoulin Island, the largest freshwater island in the world. It's there that his mother stemmed from, and also where he spent most of his summers as a youth. As a teen he delivered milk for Farquhar's Dairy, a Manitoulin institution, and it was through that job, indirectly, that he got his first taste of canoeing. He and his co-workers would go fishing on the weekends, venturing out into the North Channel or among the myriad small islands of McGregor Bay. Often, Taggart would end up on his own in a canoe--but that was okay with him.

"I actually liked being alone most of the time, and if I had the option to take a canoe, I would take it," he says. "It's quiet. You have the opportunity to smell everything. It's peaceful." So that accounts for his fondness for the "poor man's yacht"; the question which still needs be asked is: at what point does a weekend fishing trip permutate into a grueling lurch across the country? Taggart shrugs. "You get deeper and deeper into the sport, and next thing you know, you're crossing the continent."

He's skipping a few parts, and he knows it. Some are rosier than others. "I wasn't on the right track for quite a few years," he allows. While he always kept his passion for bass fishing and canoeing, there was another part of him that hungered for the faster life of bar hopping, highways. "Sex, drugs and rock'n'roll," he says, grinning in a way which might have once been unapologetic, but now contains a flicker of embarrassment. Taggart traveled widely, but not so much by canoe: those trips were by car, or thumb--wild trips to New York, LA, Daytona. When he worked, which wasn't all that often, it was as a construction laborer. He once came to blows with a friend and was charged with assault, although Taggart says it's not how it might seem. "I had actually started to get back into canoeing by then; that's partly what the fight was about. My friend was saying, 'What, you don't like us anymore?'"

Taggart did, but he also realized he liked canoeing more and more. From there, it didn't take much to begin dreaming about a trip across the nation, he says. The idea had actually been in the back of his mind for almost a decade, ever since one pivotal fishing trip. After exhausting the bass opportunities in McGregor Bay itself, he and a friend began portaging into smaller, more hidden lakes, going deeper and deeper into Rainbow Country in search of new fishing holes. And that's when it dawned on him. "I bet you could make it clear across the continent like this," he recalls thinking. "There are trails leading everywhere."

And so there were.

"After a couple years of the study, the hobby of it, I realized there was one trail which went right across Canada. I asked myself, is it possible to do this in one year? That's when the challenge started," Taggart says.

He knew he wouldn't be ready for it overnight, so he began preparing. He already had one canoe, but he bought a "newer" one--a used ABS, 16-foot Old Town-- and outfitted it with a skirt. He assembled gear. He did a 40-day solo trip around the perimeter of Georgian Bay, just to test his stamina and his stomach for solitude. He fared well on both accounts. He lined up sponsors for the "big one." And in April, with ice still floating in the St. Lawrence River, he set off.

Travelling with him were memories of past paddling companions, primarily of the canine variety. In the corner of Taggart's basement is an urn containing the ashes of his latest dog, Sonny, which he hopes to soon scatter at McGregor Point, in the North Channel. The dog before that, Chester, who was run over by a truck, is buried on a hill at Grace Lake, in Killarney Provincial Park. Garf, his first dog, was shot by a farmer on Manitoulin Island; he's been laid to rest at Killarney Lake. Taggart canoes all his dogs to these beautiful spots. His pets' remains provide a kind of macabre key to the places he's always been happiest.

It didn't take long for him to amass memories of other animals on the trip as well. During his journey he saw an ample representation of what the country has to offer. "It's a zoo out there," he says, laughing. "But it's good. We were all neighbors." Elk, caribou, moose and deer all came within range of his tent. He also heard plenty of coyotes. "They'd holler at night--that very chippy sound, almost like laughing and crying at the same time." It was Taggart's turn to laugh and cry when a black bear bowled over his tent in the middle of the night. "I was camped on an animal trail, and the whole tent came crashing in at about 2 a.m.," he says. "I didn't see him, but the prints were there in the morning." (Fortunately, neither Taggart nor his tent was any worse for the wear.) Other bears came within view of his campsites, but generally Taggart was able to discourage them from coming closer. "I'd just use a few choice words in Italian or French that I picked up from the construction sites," he says.

Portages were less avoidable, and became increasingly arduous. After the 9-mile Grand Portage, Taggart faced an even 'grander' one in northern Saskatchewan--the 13-mile Methy Portage. Being on the water, though, wasn't always a preferable option. Especially the big water. The North Channel of Lake Huron, parts of which he knew by heart, was a literal 'breeze' compared to what he would encounter on Lake Superior. There, in order to get a jump on the wind, Taggart was getting up at 3 or 4 in the morning, and was often done paddling by noon. "I don't recommend crossing Superior by canoe," he cautions. "You should really use a kayak." Taggart lucked out on the west side of the lake, though, where he says that for a good week or so it was perfectly calm. It's something Taggart still marvels over. "It's amazing that such a big lake like that can be so still." The smooth conditions allowed him to make large fetches of 5 to 6 miles; he was able to jump the Nipigon Straits, for instance, and thus cut off a lot of the distance between Wawa and Thunder Bay.

Perhaps the most uncanny part of Taggart's whole trip, though, occurred during his very first day on Superior, near Sault Ste. Marie. There, at the end of a spit of land, the canoeist says he believes he saw his biological father. "I actually knew he lived on Point DeChenes, but I'd never seen him before," he says. To this day, he's still not sure if he has; but as he paddled past Point DeChenes that day, he saw a man standing on a dock, watching him. "This fellow gave me an over-exuberant cheer, a kind of two-arms-in-the-air motion. It was like, 'go do it.'" So Taggart did.

That he didn't stop to confirm the man's identity might sound curious, but Taggart wasn't, after all, on that kind of mission. When he set out to do this trip, he says, "I didn't want to think about family too much, because you just worry about things. You have to just put that wall up, and consider yourself alone."

It's a tough approach that not many would be prepared to take. For Taggart, it was essential to the journey--the physical one, of course; but also the more inward journey. And, because of it, he believes he's come out a better man. "I feel better about everything," he says. "Up until a couple years ago, I was still enjoying the excitement of being carefree. But now, with the things I've learned, it's tempered a lot of my adolescence. It's been a real moral awakening. The discipline I learned, that strength--I can use to conduct myself in society as well. I don't have my folks anymore; now it's me that I have to answer to."

One of the biggest questions Taggart would put to himself in the months following the trip wasn't so much ethical, however, as spiritual. Could he live with having completed 95 per cent of what he set out to do? Part of him--the part that knew he'd given it his all, even forced himself back into that hunk of wobbly-bottomed Royalex at the very moment when, underweight and exhausted, and with winter setting in, all he'd really wanted to do was call it quits--said 'yes.' But another part of him was haunted by what could have been. By those final 300 miles that, monstrously, maddeningly, denied him the Pacific.

This past spring, Taggart set out to confront his nemesis, stuffing some supplies in a new pack and hitchhiking from Sudbury to the West Coast. There he met up with Max Finkelstein of Parks Canada, a river enthusiast he'd encountered during the '97 tour. The two agreed to tackle B.C.'s Grease Trail--the famous overland route between Bella Coola and the Fraser River, named for the eulachan (candlefish) oil that once literally soaked the path, as leaking crates of the precious trade good were hefted over the mountain passes by the Nuxalk Indians--together, but with a couple twists. Instead of attempting this route from east to west, as Mackenzie had done when he discovered it, and as Taggart himself originally intended to do, the pair would do the reverse. And instead of hiking the full 225 miles, as Mackenzie and most sane individuals have done since, Taggart and Finkelstein would do just a third of that distance on foot. The rest would be by canoe.

It's now January 1, 1999, and the slide show Taggart's giving me on the wall of his room--cluttered, as always, with camping gear--is proof positive that the duo's mad scheme actually worked. After a seven-day, 75-mile slog uphill, over the Mackenzie and Caribou passes of the Coast Mountains, carrying 50 pounds apiece, Taggart and his partner reached the headwaters of the Blackwater River, where they'd arranged to have a canoe flown in. "The top part of the river meanders through plateau country, but then it gets into 200- to 300-foot canyons and is whitewater all the way," Taggart says. "When we talked with people about the lower Blackwater, they said 'don't do it.'"

Nine thrilling days later, the pair was spit out, slightly rattled but surprisingly dry, onto the Fraser River. Taggart was now just 60 miles downriver of Prince George, the place he'd ended his trip the previous year. He was three days away from closing the loop. Taggart, a relative novice when it came to whitewater, had let Finkelstein command the stern during the duo's heady ride down the Blackwater. Now he assumed that post for himself. Grinning, he steered the 17.5-foot foot Helman steadily forward until he reached his goal. In all, Taggart had spent 20 days tying up the portion of the country that had eluded him the year before.

Having a partner along certainly made last year's grudge mission easier, he admits, and he enjoyed the camaraderie. Yet when describing future mega-routes he has planned for himself--his goal for 1999 is to trace a wide, 3,000-mile arc through Ontario, following the province's border and crossing the Hudson Bay watershed twice--Taggart really does mean, 'for himself.' "I've found my little niche," he says, shrugging peacefully. "I'm a solo tripper."

It's the kind of line that demands a bemused half-smile. Solo tripping, a niche? Taggart will be in no danger of achieving hockey or movie star status any day soon for choosing this curious occupation; for many winters to come, he can surely count on being the same Sudbury subterranean he is now. But it's also, of course, a better conception to have of himself than the ones he might have had previously--weekend bass fisherman, milkman, party animal.

And heck, when it comes right down to it, what better pedestal is there than a height of land?