We woke up early planning to make a few last-minute packing decisions and load the car and looked out the window to find a fresh inch of snow with a steady drizzle of sleet dumping down from the heavens. So, you know, exactly what you WANT to see when you’re about to embark on a month-long paddling excursion that starts several hours north of your current location.
Steve’s coworker Ben had gallantly volunteered to drop us off at the St John’s headwaters in Lac Frontiere, QC. (We suspect the only reason that was the case was because he had no idea how many bad jokes he’d be subjected to during the ride.) He pulled into the driveway and expressed reasonable skepticism at the wisdom of beginning a canoe trip in the snow; we laughed at him, hollered goodbye to Steve’s roommate Adam through a locked bathroom door, and piled into the fully-laden car for the trip north.
As we headed toward Canada, things appeared to improve and our spirits rose with the temperatures. The border crossing into Quebec was uneventful; the guard asked us (more than once) if we were aware of the current weather conditions, but when we assured him that we were, in fact, fully cognizant of the white stuff on the ground. We also let him know that we’d checked with customs at the points we’d be flirting with the border, and he waved us through without incident. This interaction was the first indication we had that Canadians are pretty accepting of people who want nothing more than to make themselves miserable in the woods.
Sadly, that was the last easy event of the day. Almost immediately the weather shifted and the remainder of the drive alternated between long stretches of eerie, dark, evenly-spaced reforested evergreen plots and open expanses of well-manicured farmland… all covered in snow. Not a small amount of snow, or even anything that would be within the normal (or slightly above normal) range for mid-April. We’re talking full-bore early-March-quality coverage. Snowmobiles ripped past periodically, and we saw more than a few folks out shoveling their driveways. The sleet continued to fall steadily and as Steve and Ben dozed off leaving me alone behind the wheel, I was left to mull over the series of questionable life choices that had brought me to this point.
I kept thinking “as long as the ice is out on the river, everything will be fine”. We’d looked at ice-out dates for the St John going back to the sixties, and since 1980 there were less than a dozen years when things hadn’t cleared out by the 17th of April. Since we figured we wouldn’t be on the water until the 18th, and because global warming is a thing, the odds should have been in our favor… right? We passed a series of small- to mid-sized rivers, all of which were ice-free and merrily babbling their way downstream. Surely we weren’t completely fucked.
And then we passed our first major river. It looked like the ice had gone out fairly recently… and the banks were lined with what can only be described as French Canadian icebergs. Huge, sediment-striped, car-sized blocks of ice- in some places leaning out over the river in a manner that would easily crush an entire canoe and its passengers if it cut loose at the right moment.
I woke Steve up and made him look at it. His reluctant reaction was that we should probably wait at least a day before getting on the water. Mine had been that maybe we should abort and go paddle the Potomac or the Susquehanna or something near the Mason Dixon line where it was, you know, A RIVER instead of A BRICK OF ICE, but whatever. We were already in Canada.
Lac Frontiere (both the town and the lake) is tiny, and the initial headwaters of the St John were in fact fully open, but they immediately opened up into a swamp that was blocked by a few hundred yards of very sketchy looking ice. We found a spot along the slash (the cleared strip along the international boundary) off a snowmobile trail where we could inconspicuously set up camp without getting run over by anyone participating in seasonally-appropriate outdoor activities and Ben left us and all our gear in a snowbank on the side of the highway. Miraculously, the sun came out, and that made hauling our fully-laden canoe a mile across the snow like a pair of poorly-built sled dogs a little less miserable.
We had just enough time to get camp set up before it started raining and got dark. We cooked our first rice side of the trip in the vestibule of the tent, had some celebratory swigs of scotch (we had packed two liters’ worth) and planned to get a closer look at the river first thing in the morning.
