There is a dignity about the social intercourse of old Indians which reminds me of a stroll through a winter forest.
- Frederick Remington

A Journaling Guide

In my journaling, I consult guides. These are people I’ve met, however briefly, who I regard as having special insight into life. I meditate, and during meditation, ask them questions or for advice, and write their answers in my journal. This is a story of one of those guides.

            In my early teens, in the late sixties, my parents bought a cottage in Quebec, about 40 miles north of our home in Ottawa (Canada).

            The shore on the other side of the lake was undeveloped – no roads or buildings except for an old trappers cabin. I spent a lot of time exploring that shore and the woods beyond. One afternoon, while canoeing by the cabin, I saw someone walk out of the doorway. He waved and I swung the canoe over to the shore. He was about twenty-five or thirty years old, Algonquin I think now. And probably from the reserve at Maniwaki, where I lived for a couple of months a few years later. But that’s a digression. Unrelated. Anyway, he told me that the cabin had been part of his family’s trapline, which they had abandoned ten years earlier. Since then he would visit it every year or two for a couple of weeks.

            He welcomed my interest in his background. He invited me back later that evening for a paddle along the shore near some beaver lodges. The beaver were active just around dusk he said, and if you were really quiet you could often see them swimming back and forth, bringing poplar sticks to their lodges.

            I went home for dinner and returned as soon afterwards as I could. When I returned he showed me how to paddle silently. The first notion to give up was that there was any hurry. Silence in a canoe is mostly a matter of moving slowly. He showed me how to paddle without taking the paddle out of the water. At the end of the stroke, turn the paddle sideways, parallel with the side of the canoe, and slowly move it up along the gunwale without touching the side of the boat. We set off, each in our own canoe.

            The sun set behind the trees at the end of the lake. A few minutes later a beaver swam by with a stick in its mouth. A loud whack reverberated through the air as we drew closer. We paddled along, my canoe behind his, for about an hour that evening without talking. We returned to his cabin. He invited me in for a tea which we drank, again with few words between us. I think we both wanted to preserve the quiet of our paddle. When I went back to see him again the next morning, he was gone. I never met him again, but the quiet beauty of that evening, the gentle nature of that young man, have stuck with me. To some extent maybe I idealize him. During the short time I spent with him, I picked up on his peace, but also the thought kept recurring to me that part of the reason he returned to that cabin was a personal search for something he had lost.

            Now, fifty years later, I am left with the images of the young Indian, the peace and quiet he embodied, a warm summer evening, the sunset, the beavers, the calm lake. Over the ensuing decades, he’s give me some pretty good advice.