“Maybe what you heard was a moose pissing”, hollered Monty.
Monty was a random guest that had turned up to our annual canoe trip to the interior of Algonquin Park.
I really don’t know how he ended up with us. One Sunday he showed up at church with his two really pretty daughters and the next thing I knew, I was sitting at the front of his canoe as he yelled at Bill for getting us lost. Again.
Bill was my church youth leader. He was in his late-30s and had a family of his own. Still, he would plan activities for us every Wednesday night plus a couple of overnight trips a year – including this one to Algonquin Park. Bill was a good guy.
He was also a dreamer. As they say, his imagination would write cheques that his abilities couldn’t cash.
I was 14 at the time. My church youth group was small, but every year Bill would take us up to Algonquin Park for a week of interior camping.
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The lurking Opeongo turtle
We would always ‘put in’ at Lake Opeongo.
Sometimes we were so tired from the four-hour drive to Algonquin that we’d jump into the water as soon as we arrived, then change our clothes, board our canoes and be on our way.
There was a big old turtle that lived under the dock at Lake Opeango. It would often feed off the live bait that anglers would dangle in the water.
I had no idea about this turtle when I would swim there. Many years later, my wife (who I met at university) told me about it.
As was often the case in my youth, I dodged a bullet at that dock, always seeming to escape with my fingers and toes intact.
There was always so much wind at that dock. As 14-year old boys, we never really knew whether we’d be strong enough to make it through the first kilometer of gale-force winds to make it into the interior of Algonquin Park. Somehow we always did.
The tall tales of Monty
The weekend before our trip to Algonquin, Bill met Monty at church. Monty was a large, gregarious American entrepreneur. He told me that he owned a tow-truck company. He owned some other assets as well, but I don’t remember what they were.
I do remember Monty telling me the story about how an empty bus slipped off the road in Arkansas and slid down an embankment.
The first tow trucks to arrive on the scene tried to pull the bus out of the ditch but were unsuccessful. In fact, one of the tow trucks actually slid down the embankment as well.
Then Monty got the call. Apparently, he owned one of those really big tow trucks that are used to tow buses and transport cabs.
Monty pulled the tow truck out of the ditch and then proceeded to pull the bus out as well.
He was a competitive guy and was all-to-pleased to be paid by the bus company for rescuing its bus as well as by the tow truck company, a competitor no less, to rescue its tow truck.
This competitive nature was put on full display during our trip to Algonquin Park.
The super-hot daughters are coming!
Monty knew that he had good-looking daughters. Like, Zoolander ‘Ridiculously good-looking’, good-looking.
Bill introduced Monty and his daughters to us boys at church the Sunday before we were planning to head North. He asked us if it would be ok if Monty and his daughters joined us on the trip. The answer was an easy one.
So, as I spent the next week packing for the trip, I paid particular attention to the soaps I would use and the clothes I would wear, so that I could impress Monty’s daughters. I even packed cologne (if you can actually call ‘High Karate’ cologne). This was going to be a trip like no other.
The complex arithmetic of young love
Monty wasn’t going to put-in with us at Lake Opeongo. His plan was to arrive late with his daughters and meet us at our first-night destination sometime before midnight.
So, Bill and us boys arrived at Lake Opeongo late in the morning, packed our canoes and started paddling.
Interestingly, this was the first time I had been to Lake Opeongo when it wasn’t windy.
We paddled for a couple of hours. I was in a canoe with a friend that I had known for years.
All we talked about the whole way was Monty’s daughters. That’s it.
By my math there was going to be six boys and two girls. The odds were stacked against me and I knew it. At least the mathematical odds were, anyway. I figured that I would be able to charm my way into the heart of at least one of these young ladies, if not both.
But, we all thought exactly the same thing. For no legitimate reason at all, each one of us was supremely confident that we would end up with a daughter on our arm, by the end of the trip.
We finally arrived at our destination.
Location is everything
Us boys had been tasked with lugging all of the communal gear that Monty and his daughters would require on the first night and now we needed to figure out where to set it all up.
I quickly scoped out our piece of camping real estate and concocted a plan that would place my tent (along with my tent-buddy Brigham) in an out-of-the way location that would be closer to the girl’s sleeping quarters than any other tent.
Amazingly, nobody challenged us!
Finally…the arrival
Dutifully, we set all the equipment up. We gathered kindling, cut firewood and boiled bags of freeze-dried protein cubes that they say astronauts eat. (Whatever. That would explain why astronauts lose so much weight, they go on hunger strike.)
With bellies full of space-age-faux-chicken, we all gathered around the campfire to wait. Each one of our chairs was positioned with a perfect view of the beach.
It was twilight. Not the vampire movie, but rather the time of day.
However, much like the vampire movie, we each felt that on this trip, we would become the Edward to one of Monty’s daughters – Bella 1, or Bella 2.
Daylight gave way to night. The stars burst forth as they always do in Algonquin Park, reflecting in the black sky the twinkling possibilities that we all anxiously felt deep in our stomachs.
The minutes turned into hours. We waited and waited. And waited.
Then, in the distance, we saw a faint light. It was small at first, but it grew as it approached. Finally, we began to hear the splashing of water as the paddle strokes reached the beach.
The moment had come.
And just like that, the confidence and bravado that we had paraded all day, vanished. We sat in our chairs and didn’t move a muscle.
Then, through the pitch black we heard “Hey, can someone come over here and give me a hand?”
Bill jumped out of his chair first and quickly made his way to the beach. The rest of us played it a little cooler, lagging behind in that way that makes you look competent but in a kind of rebellious no-one-tells-me-what-to-do sort of way.
But our hearts were fluttering with anticipation.
We could hear Bill and Monty exchanging hellos as we collectively approached the beach, like six dirty, stinky, mid-puberty Arthur Fonzarellis.
As we arrived at the beach we heard words that cut like daggers into our hearts: “Hey Monty, where are your daughters?”
His daughters hadn’t come. Only Monty was in that canoe.
We were devastated and Bill knew it.
We helped Monty carry his belongings to the campsite.
Bill dug deep into the tuck bag for some treats. He had been saving them for later but decided to break them out now.
Freeze-dried lentil flour cookies. Poor astronauts.
Us boys were done. We headed back to our tents in silence, intent on mourning the loss of love that never would be, while listening to The Cure on our yellow Sony Walkmans.
I suggested to Brigham that he could sleep in the girl’s tent and I would sleep in ours, or vice versa. He didn’t want to. Well, he should have, because that night I went to sleep with gum in my mouth. The next morning, Brigham woke up with gum in his hair. I was just as surprised as he was, or so I said.
In search of a mystery waterfall
The next day we woke up and things looked brighter. In fact, we decided that we liked our campsite so much that we would stay there for the duration of our trip.
Later that day, we all hopped in our canoes. Bill had been told that there was a waterfall in the area and he thought it would be fun to try and find it.
I shared a canoe with Monty. He was the stern paddler and I sat at the bow.
We set off on our quest to find this mystery waterfall.
Tales of Monty 2.0
As we paddled, Monty regaled me with stories.
I learned that Monty wanted, nay needed, to be number one. He wanted to own the best, to have the best and to be the best. He had to own the best car (he drove a Cadillac). He had to have the prettiest girl (judging by his daughters, his wife must have been a knockout, because he sure wasn’t.) He needed to be better than everyone at everything.
But just underneath the posturing and the peacock feather strutting, lay a distinct vulnerability. I recognized it, even as a 14-year old. Because of this, I came to be very fond of Monty.
Monty’s genius (but highly illegal) plan
As our troop of canoers glided across the Algonquin waters, Monty hatched an idea.
Algonquin Park, especially the interior, is littered with moose. It’s like, each time you swat away a mosquito, you find a moose hiding behind it.
Monty’s big idea was to ride a moose (because that’s what winners do, right Charlie Sheen?)
Having not had any luck on the hunt for the waterfall, Monty and I quietly disconnected from the group. We spotted a small bay with shallow water and thought it might be a good spot to find a moose.
Now, at the tender age of 14, I knew perfectly well that mounting a moose was not only against the rules, but contrary to the spirit of everything that Algonquin Park stood for. We were guests in the Moose’s habitat and were expected to conduct ourselves accordingly.
But more importantly, trying to ride a moose just seemed like a really bad idea that had exactly zero chance of ending well.
‘No hour of life is wasted that is spent in the saddle’ – Winston Churchill
Monty and I continued to gently paddle our canoes into the small bay. Sure enough, Monty’s intuition proved correct. There was not one, but two moose standing in knee deep water grazing on a mid-day moose-snack. (Probably better than the reconstituted, freeze-dried egg-white powder we had choked down for breakfast.)
It didn’t take long for the two moose to spot us.
We stopped paddling but continued to drift towards the two moose (they were less than 100 yards away).
Monty began to whisper to me his genius-of-a-plan that would get him on the back of a moose.
We didn’t want to scare the moose away, so we would continue to drift towards them until we reached a certain patch of lily pads that was about 10-15 yards in front. Then, if we were lucky to get that close, we would turn on the jets and paddle furiously until we came up alongside the moose, which would probably start to run away. Monty would jump from the canoe onto the back of the moose and then take a victory lap on top of Algonquin’s most prized symbol of wilderness and conservation.
That was the plan, in all of its delicious imperfection.
We continued to drift closer to the moose.
One of them began to slowly, but intentionally, make its way back to shore and into the thicket. The other one – the bigger one – stayed put, continuing to eat.
We reached the pre-determined landmark and the bigger moose hadn’t given up an inch.
The time had come, we kicked into overdrive and began to paddle at warp speed towards the moose.
Now, I had already seen plenty of moose in my young life. If I knew anything about moose, it was that they spooked easily. I knew, without question, that as soon as we began paddling towards the moose, it would pick up its huge legs and trot into the thicket, leaving us to depart with a cool story (that we would most certainly embellish in future re-tellings).
As it turned out, this was a different breed of moose. Rather than turn and run, this moose squared up to our approaching canoe. It lowered its head, cocking it to one side.
Our canoe was gliding at speed right into the moose and I was the guy in front. Just before we ran into it, I made a couple of quick strokes to veer us away from certain collision.
Now, the shoulder of a moose can get as high as seven feet tall, but when you’re a 14-year old sitting in a canoe, it might as well be 20 feet. Those beasts are huge.
Monty pulled our canoe to a stop. The moose didn’t move. We were mere feet away from each other.
For a moment, it felt like time stood still. As I stared (what seemed like) certain death in the face, I had somehow never felt more alive.
I looked at the moose. The moose looked at me.
I looked at Monty. And as he looked at me, I realized that he didn’t think we were going to get this close to a moose, either. The moose was calling Monty’s bluff.
Monty stared at me for a long moment, then turned back towards the moose.
The moose took a step back. Good. I thought we were done. But then it took a step forward. I thought we were done for.
Then in a single graceless motion that only a middle-aged dad of modest fitness could ever craft, Monty leapt. He did it. But, he didn’t do it well.
As he tried to leap from the boat, he grossly overestimated the stability of a canoe floating on a lake. Rather than propel himself towards the stationary moose, he simply kicked the side of the canoe into the lake.
I proceeded to tumble out of the canoe. I was the lucky one.
The far edge of the capsizing canoe flipped over the top and hit Monty right in the gut.
It was like the Karmic forces of Algonquin Park were trying to knock the bad judgement out of my good friend. They may not have knocked his bad judgement out, but they did knock his wind out.
As I lifted my head back above water, I looked up to see two things: Monty leaning over the capsized canoe, gasping for air, and the backside of the moose as it trotted back into the forest.
It took Monty a couple of minutes to fully catch his breath, as he lay sprawled over the hull of the canoe. Then he looked over at me. A huge grin began to form on his face. He stood up, raised his arms victoriously to the heavens and howled with delight. So did I. While it was clear that he would never be my father-in-law, at that moment, he was my brother.
Where is that waterfall, anyway?
Monty and I got back in our canoe (ungracefully) and proceeded to try and catch the others that we assumed were still hunting down a mere waterfall.
We paddled around the various rocky islands and wind-swept foliage that characterizes Algonquin Park. All the while, we de-briefed our adventure. And already, the facts began to blur with the fiction.
As we discussed how soaking wet we had become, we began to hear voices echoing across the water.
We followed the voices and over time, found ourselves at the back of a group of young 14-year old canoeists, and their leader, Bill, who were still in search of an elusive Algonquin Park waterfall.
‘Sorry guys, I was sure I heard it back behind that island’, apologized Bill.
‘Maybe what you heard was a moose pissing’, hollered Monty.