Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/144909
Saskatchewan is an inventive place. We gave the world Medicare, Joni Mitchell and watermelon football helmets. Sadly, what should have been our greatest invention never quite succeeded. It was in the spring of 1885 that Riel, Dumont and the Metis came within a whisker of creating multiculturalism a century ahead of time. I've never mustered for guerilla war, but I guess it might resemble the scene on Cliff Speer's front lawn. For years I've heard good things about his CanoeSki Discovery Company and innovative theme-based trips in my proverbial backyard. What I assume will be a quiet party of maybe six paddlers is a rowdy two dozen, plus some well-wishers. Like any irregular militia, there's no way to know who's in charge, but presumably it's the folks shouting for everyone to put their stuff into dry bags, get sized for a paddle, pick up a whistle and a map, and choose a seat in one of the canoe-topped vehicles. John A. MacDonald would certainly think us a ragtag western mob. Our flotilla includes two sleepy teenagers, a senior citizen motorcyclist, a conceptual artist, a retired scientist and a mother-son duo who won the trip in a local contest. We pile into vans to reach the launch point at Hague Ferry, downstream of Saskatoon. Here we are joined by an archaeologist who is as close to a real-life Indiana Jones as I've ever met, with an actionhero name to match: Butch Amundson. It takes a long time to get afloat with such 24 W E S T W O R L D p22-27_MetisCountry.indd 24 >> a large crew, many of them novices, so it is pressing noon before we are paddling. I am paired with a big guy named Al, one of Speer's cadre of deputies who regularly accompany him on a work-for-passage basis. We are assigned to the rearguard, to keep the stragglers moving. Lacking the authority to hang, flog or even cut their rations, there is little we can really do, and progress is slow. Well, the point of a flatwater trip like this anyway is to enjoy the view. There's plenty of it. I've always felt the Saskatchewan River is an unsung paddling gem. The valley spreads to nearly a kilometre wide, and to descend into it is to leave the gridded monotony of the prairie behind and enter a vestige of the West that remains much the way Gabriel Dumont would have seen it. On this late summer day it is a wild corridor where bald eagles gyre their way south in pursuit of the migrating geese flocks. At each meander of the river, a low SUMMER 2012 4/13/12 12:00:59 PM