Winter 2009

 

Winter 2009

     by Leigh Aventur

Back in the winter of 2009 I decided to do again what I regularly did once a year, spend part of my February break (from lecturing English at the University of Manitoba) at our cabin. The cabin nestled In a small bay on a remote lake in Northwestern Ontario. It was a small log building (16x26) built in the thirties as part of a fishing camp. Ten cabins of various shapes and sizes lay around the bay as well as a marvellous lodge, all built of redwood pine.  Each cabin was heated by a wood stove. Because they were all fairly small, heating them was no issue really, even in the coldest weather. 

     My cabin lay ten miles from the place I parked my car, as near as I could get. From there I would take my snowmobile (2001 Yamaha Phazer 500) with a bagged moose sized pull-behind sleigh loaded with food and other essentials (eg snowshoes, gasoline, tarp). The snowmobile was a new enough model to be reliable. 

     Being alone meant being careful. By the time I arrived at the parking spot for my vehicle, a blizzard had begun to blow. Being careful does not always suffice in such weather. I would have to be lucky, too. I needed to get going because the darkness was settling in and I had a half hour trip ahead of me. Maybe three quarters.

      I started the motor, made sure the sleigh was properly hitched and tarped, and headed out. A few minutes later when I got to the edge of the lake, I realized that I needed to change my contact lens. I should have done it back in the car! It had been irritating my eye (I only wore one) since I’d left home, and without it I’d be lost. Especially in the sort of weather this was building up toward. I had only one lens left and I opened the case, put it on my fingertip. Shielding it from the wind as best I could, I gingerly lifted it toward my eye and then, hurray! I got it in. It was only after it was in my eye that I realized how lucky I had been not to have lost it.

     A snowmobile ice trail crossed the lake marked every seventy five yards or so by wooden slats with small orange flags. In the wind and snow I could see them only when I arrived right next to them. Visibility, even in the headlight, was at best ten or fifteen feet. Now and then the wind let up for two seconds and I could see further. So, for the most part, the trail was invisible but I could feel my sled track bumping over its ruts. 

      Occasionally, too often, I felt myself veering off  and losing the trail and then I’d  have to make long zigzags back and forth, praying to cross the track again. I knew that I wouldn’t see it, only feel it. Each time fortune chose to keep me alive. When you find yourself in such danger, where a dozen mistakes are made, any of which can mean death, you simply relax and survive. Or not. You don’t have the leisure at that moment to be worried about such minor irritants as dying.  

     Eventually, half an hour on, the trail left the lake and rose up into the forest where the path was more visible and the wind much abated. Here the snow piled around trees and in branches. It settled on the sled, rocks and fallen logs, on the trail where now no previous sled tracks were to be seen and on the very sky above, it almost seemed to me then. All of this more sheltered world felt peaceful suddenly and my spirits rose.

     I was that grateful when I actually finally arrived at the cabin!  Of course, because it was about thirty below zero, my first instinct was to start a fire to warm things up. I knew it would take three or four hours before all the log walls were heated through and coziness started. I collected wood from the stack in the veranda, chopped kindling and then lit the fire with newspaper that we’d left there specifically for times like this. The sight of the fire taking hold and slowly building into an orange inferno inside the old Regency did most of all to dispel the anxiety I felt, anxiety that I always felt when I arrived here in winter alone. Would the fire take? Would the fire take? Would the place actually get warm?

       The problem was not that I couldn’t start the fire but that I shouldn’t have. Unbeknownst to me, the previous year the chimney had suffered damage up towards the peak of the cathedral ceiling where the stovepipe had rusted through. Ignorant of this, I had started this good blaze. I walked about to keep warm, I stamped my feet and hands and did a bunch of jumping jacks. I emptied the sleigh of food and bedding and what not and then ran back inside to see if I could begin to feel heat. I could, and within a couple of hours I knew that I would be removing my parka and snow pants.

      But what I did not know was that a danger lurked around the corner. It wasn’t too long before I began to feel slightly dizzy and headachy. I had brought with me a battery operated carbon monoxide tester. I turned it on, thinking to myself that all would probably be fine and that it was just my imagination. But sure enough, the monitor registered carbon monoxide.  

     What now? This was a serious dilemma. Head back down the trail to the truck in the blizzard, darkness already fallen? Then load the machine back up on the box of the truck, drive out down this very strange, curvy, snowbound narrow path called Edison’s Trail and make my way back almost two hundred miles to Winnipeg? 

     The last thing I felt like doing was driving this thing back down the trail and the truck back to Winnipeg. I decided to stay. I said to myself, “Doug, you can do this. Men have gone to the Arctic to explore it with each only one big Hudson’s Bay blanket and a bunch of dogs and they’ve survived many, many nights of forty and fifty below. They’d dig a deep hole in the snow, get down in it with their dogs and together they would keep warm enough to survive.” I knew that I had lots of blankets around somewhere in the cabin. I was just missing the dogs. 

    I collected all the blankets I could find, and because it was already dark, maybe nine or ten o’clock, I got into bed. I wore my longjohns, my jeans, a snowmobile suit, a hoodie, my toque and, over everything, a parka with hood. I had laid down half a dozen wool blankets for under me and once I was in bed I began to pile them over me. Over the top I laid eleven wool blankets of the Hudson’s Bay style and for half an hour I was cold. Then I began to warm. Eventually, I became quite comfortable and then fell asleep. Sometime during the night I got overheated and began to shuck off blankets and clothes. I know that I had felt fearful whether I would wake up in the morning. But, when morning came I was alive, I was not frozen, I had not to gone to an icy hell or heaven, and now the day with it’s thirty below was mine to do with what I wanted. I got a ladder, checked the chimney bottom to top, found the issue, took out a rusted section of pipe about 2 1/2 feet long, went back outside and scrambled under the cabin where, with application, I found a replacement section, took it back inside, jammed it up into the chimney hole above and then slid it back down over the stovepipe below so that it was properly in place again, and got back down off the ladder.

     I started the fire and waited four hours (checking for monoxide every once in a while). I took off one or two layers every hour until I wore only my shirt, jeans, longjohns, wool socks and warm boots. I was so keen and excited by the possibility that I had made it through this frozen night without a fire, that I had survived this icy challenge without any extra heat, that I had faced the blasting wilderness (blasted only in the sense of trees being blasted by storm), that I had finally gotten warm under my four inches of blankets and here I was in a warm cabin at what seemed like a hundred miles from anywhere, enjoying my cup of coffee made on the woodstove the way that I loved. I felt spectacular! I felt grateful, proud, humble because the winter could have killed me. I felt big because I was big. And I felt hungry, invigorated, blessed and immensely joyful at the possibilities that fire and flames handed to mankind each and every time a match was struck.