Fire Season

As forest fires burn across Canada this season, I am reminded of a canoe trip we took a few years ago where we had to travel through an old burn. We were up north for a canoe trip in the area of Lady Evelyn Lake, and travelled briefly through Smoothwater Provincial Park, and finished on crown land. I suppose we were rather naive when planning our trip but we came across a situation that we hadn’t before, that being for the second half of our trip we were in the area of an old forest fire. Three years prior, a huge fire had ravaged the area, and the focus of the rescue efforts had gone into saving the Provincial Parks, and as soon as we left the boundary of the Park, we saw the full devastation. The fire had charred the forest and land as far as we could see. 

For two days we paddled and portaged through lakes surrounded by nothing but blackened tree stands, the remains of a once luscious boreal forest. What had once been thick with green was now ashy black remains. with pops of fire weed and young saplings coming through. The portages, which used to be boulders just peeking through the rich, moist earth of moss, lichen and duff, were now boulder pathways, where you could see down empty crevices in the rock, as deep as 5 to 6 feet. Everything, including the ground, had been obliterated. On one portage  the desiccated skeleton of a snake almost made me weep, imagining the heat and pandemonium of a fire blazing above. It is hard to wrap your head around the millennia of buildup that create the forest floor, and even more incredible to see that nature, in its most amazing way, had already started to regenerate.

We carried on, however that magical feeling of tripping was illusive. Where usually the beauty of paddling across a serene lake, and the reward of completing a hard portage make it all worth while, here we felt robbed of that experience. With each portage we hoped that at the end we would be back on a lake with green shores. Eventually we did make it back to the green, bursting out of the burn at the end of a particularly long portage, at the end of a long day. The relief was palpable; the aliveness of the forest like a balm on our nerves. We left that trip with new resolve to do more, to take more care, to be more involved in protecting our sacred places, near and far.

This story was originally published in the Spring 2023 issue of North Simcoe Life.