•	Features
•	Hotline
•	Surf Zone

< May/June
	Features
The Keewaydin Way At 110 years old, Camp Keewaydin shows that canoe camps are still at the heart of paddling culture Frederick Reimers

I owe one of my life’s great lessons to mud and a canoe. I was halfway across the muskeg-laden 1,000-yard portage between the Brightsand River and Lake Kawaweogama in western Ontario, a 125-pound kid shouldering an 80-pound canoe. It wasn’t normal for someone my size to portage the heavy wood-canvas boats, but at Camp Keewaydin carrying the canoe was the sternsman’s job, and I craved the prestige of that role. The portage, known in camp lore as Gidley’s Run, was infamous for its camper-consuming mud—holes that suck you in up to your waist; holes you have to fish around in for your boots.

I’d already fallen in a few times, but each instance had managed to lurch out, mud-coated and wild-eyed at the fear of laying down the boat. Putting it up again solo was a Herculean task, one I usually needed help with. I cursed from root to rock across the soupy trail, the 17-foot-long load swaying on my shoulders, dodging stubborn jackpine trees. I was like a steam train, leaving a plume of profanities down the trail.

Then suddenly, as easily as jumping into a swimming pool, I fell in up to my waist. The canoe scraped down my back, bending me in half, shoving my face into the mud. The boat’s ends rested on the ground, completely covering me. I was turtled. I yelled out in pain, but also from the indignation and humiliation. I kept yelling, hoping for help, but mostly raging against the canoe, the camp, my parents for sending me and the whole God-forsaken, bug-infested nation of Canada. I yelled that bratty roar for five minutes, but no one came. When finally I’d yelled myself out, something had changed. I’d accepted the indifference of the canoe and the wilderness and was resigned to the fact that if I was going to get across the portage, I’d better just do it myself. I rolled the canoe off me, dug my boots out of the quagmire and, straining with everything I had, flipped it back on my head. When I arrived minutes later at the lake, greeted by my camp-mates, I was well on my way to self-reliance.

While canoes and summer camps are about drifting on the lake with pals, or trolling for walleye at sunset, they can also be teachers, brutal ones at times. And at Camp Keewaydin on Lake Temagami, Ontario, canoeing is all they do. While the world of summer camps has lately shifted into something akin to clinics—hockey camp, space camp, acting camp—there are still a handful of tradition-laden outfits centered around canoe tripping (see sidebar). Keewaydin, at 110 years old, is one of the best. It was a relief to see how little had changed when I returned for a visit last summer.

The minute my brother Will and I step foot on the camp’s 50-acre island, we are conscripted to judge the camping contest. The contestants, mop-haired teenagers tanned from three weeks out on the water, are splayed out on the ball field, a rustic stab at a baseball diamond that is Keewaydin’s sole nod to an activity other than canoe tripping. Campers visit base camp only to resupply and for such midseason festivities as camping and cooking contests and canoe races. The rest of the time they’re paddling and portaging 10-20 miles a day. Every one of the camp’s 120 kids, ranging from 10 to 18 years old, spends the summer on expeditions. The youngest take five- and 10-day trips around the Lake Temagami region, a veritable camping paradise where hundreds of routes are possible without ever crossing a road. Fourteen- to 18-year-olds carve 21- and even 50-day voyages through the Canadian wilderness nearby and on such storied rivers as the Missinaibi, Winisk, Dumoine and Great Whale. It’s canoeing to the core.

Will and I stride the ball field with our clipboards, playing grim-faced judges behind mirrored sunglasses (it’s common practice that all camp functions must be overdramatic). The kids are arrayed by sections, groups of six to 10 who travel together for the entire season. Each section competes against the others as a team, and each camper can be called to perform any of the skills they’d learned the first half of the season: knot tying, setting up a rain tarp, or tumping wannigans or double packs. "You and you, tump these packs," says Will, picking out the kids most obviously shrinking from sight.

A century after Keewaydin was founded, the kids are still using the same gear: wood and canvas canoes (with 105, Keewaydin has the largest active fleet of wood/canvas boats in use anywhere); canvas duffle bags for personal gear; wooden boxes called wannigans for the mostly canned food; and the cornerstone of the Keewaydin system, the tumpline—a 20-foot-long leather strap that’s used to bundle loads across a portage. It’s wrapped around wannigans or packs in such a way that its center point forms a headband. The same system is still in use by Sherpas in the Himalayas today.

Why the Rip Van Winkle outfitting? While struggling under awkward, heavy loads certainly builds character (as my portage experience attests), there’s more to it than that. "It’s not the easiest or cheapest or most efficient way," says camp director Doug Mosle. "But it’s a way that preserves tradition above everything." After 110 years, methods aren’t easily discarded. But in addition to an "if it ain’t broke don’t fix it" mentality, Keewaydin’s staff take pride in the fact that the traditions they’re using were handed down directly from the Native American guides who led the camp’s trips until as late as the 1960s. Unlike the pretend Indian rituals in place at so many summer camps, the Indians at Keewaydin were real.

In fact one of the camp’s most notorious alumni was nearly Native American. In the main lodge, a veritable museum stuffed with canoe race trophies from the ’30s, a 42-pound lake trout caught in 1904 and a bona fide birch-bark canoe paddled back from Hudson’s Bay in 1911, are plaques listing every camp member. On the 1911 and 1912 plaques is the name: Archie Belaney, only a young Englishman then, but later internationally famous as the Indian author Grey Owl. Brian Back, author of Keewaydin’s history, The Keewaydin Way, theorizes that the camp is where Grey Owl really learned his renowned canoe-tripping skills.

After the two-minute time limit is up, the kids hoist their tumped duffels onto their backs. We walk around checking their knots and how the loads ride. One camper has made his headband so long that the duffels hang clear down to his butt, echoing his underwear-revealing, low-riding jeans.

"Little low, isn’t it?" says Will.

"That’s the style, bro," comes the reply.

"Don’t think you’d care much about style on a two-mile portage when you’d sprained your neck with that job," replies Will, making a mark on his clipboard. "But I’ll give you a point for clean underwear."

Other than underwear fashion, the only real change at Keewaydin in the last century is the addition of girls. It wasn’t until four summers ago that the first girls section was formed under the name Songadeewin. "It was obviously long overdue," says the camp’s assistant director, John Lehrman, like Mosle a former Keewaydin camper. "We just wanted to make sure we did it right." At Keewaydin, this means adhering to the rigid systems the camp holds sacred. Those systems include using the anachronistic equipment like wood and canvas canoes, wannigans and tumplines, but also cooking over an open fire, and felling and splitting the firewood—hearty skills long since gone from most suburbanites’ lives. Far from seeming antiquated to the kids, the traditions are comforting, making them feel like they fit in to a larger design, which translates to a real pride. "You just know at Keewaydin that you’re doing it right," says Liza Neusater, 17, both of whose brothers attended the camp.

That pride is evident to everyone on hand to see Songadeewin 1, the eldest girls section, off to the Outpost. It’s a warm morning the day after the midseason festivities, and all the kids are heading back out for the second half of the summer. A fresh breeze rises out of the northwest, an omen for good weather, and a crowd mills about the dock sipping coffee and watching the teenage girls load up their canoes with everything they’d need for three weeks in the wilderness.

While every section is sent out with the largest crowd that can be mustered, this crowd buzzes. They are here to see history, after all. These girls are the first to ever attend Keewaydin, and after three years of tripping and learning together, they are the first to tackle the challenges of the Outpost, a second base camp 800 miles from Temagami in western Ontario. From the Outpost sections travel the renowned routes of the Kopka/Nipigon region. While those waters are arguably poorer than those surrounding Temagami, they’re held in esteem because campers who go there must have prior experience at Keewaydin and must be invited.

Like most successful camps, Keewaydin depends on a graduation system to keep enhancing its campers’ experiences. Every year kids have a longer and grander trip to work toward. Eventually, the die-hard campers set their sights on Section A, the eldest group. Section A is also known as the "Bay Trip" for the fact that it has traveled to Hudson’s Bay by sundry routes every year since 1911. Every Bay Trip creates a commemorative plaque that hangs in the dining hall, listing the names of each participant and displaying souvenirs from the trip such as moose or caribou antlers, or Native American beadwork from the native settlements. When Section A and the Outpost trips return to camp at season’s end, they’re greeted like heroes. Later that night there’s a closing campfire where groups tell tales of the big rivers they’ve traveled, the rapids they’ve run and the fish they’ve caught. Every younger camper sits spellbound.

Of course, that rosy glow of accomplishment doesn’t come easy. Keewaydin can be pretty harsh for the first few weeks. Soft, suburban kids find themselves shipped miles away from home, Game Boys and convenience stores. They’re thrust in with kids they’ve never met and are forced to paddle hard for hours on end and to struggle across rocky portages under staggering loads. And then there are the relentless mosquitoes and black flies. To many it feels like boot camp. In fact, a cherished Keewaydin tradition has every kid marching to the infirmary the day after arriving to weigh themselves on the doctor’s scale. When they return to the scale at the end of the season, it’s not uncommon for some of the flabbier campers to have lost as many as 25 pounds. Camp director Mosle was one such kid.

But most kids come around by midseason. "The bugs are gone, they’re in better shape and they finally understand the skills they’ve had to learn," says Mosle. "The group starts traveling efficiently. When the group is clicking, most kids love it." Unlike in school, where abstract tasks like math or writing can be bewildering, and in competition sports, where only the coordinated shine, canoe camps reach most kids. "Wilderness tripping is about the group experience," says Mosle. "Only if the group succeeds do they succeed personally. It prepares a kid for a realistic view of life—having to deal with others in work, in relationships. Because the group’s goals are pretty simple—get to camp each night—most groups achieve success."

By their third year together, the Songadeewin girls have all found that success, and travel together like a canoe-tripping machine, albeit a gentler one. The girls all sport stylish flower leis as they load their canoes. It’s a ritualistic sight to me: The bowman (or -woman) holds the boat steady beside the dock while the partner loads first the heavy wannigans, the tumped duffels, tents, and lastly the Keewaydin signature, an axe placed handle up behind the stern seat. After a century of being an all-male camp, it’s a little startling to see the ritual performed by girls.

The young women move quickly, completing the pageant in less time than the crowd would have wished. Suddenly, there is nothing to do but say goodbye.

"How does it feel?" I ask Katie Tanz, 16, sitting in the stern of her loaded, green wood and canvas canoe. She smiles a beaming grin. "Nervous," she replies. "Nervous but proud. Any advice?"

I think back to my own time at the Outpost,

18 years before.

Finally, I reply,"Watch out for Gidley’s Run."

—Info: (802) 352-4709, www.keewaydincamps.org.