North America > Canada > Ontario > Lake Superior > Articles > Beyond Superior

One-third of the planet’s fresh water is in Canada. To the west of Lake Superior, between Thunder Bay and the Lake of the Woods, almost half the surface is covered by water. Here, water flows through the land like blood through the body. The rivers are the arteries, the streams the veins. At this region’s heart is Quetico, an 1,800 square mile wilderness park of 600 lakes and a thousand tangled waterways, a destination without roads or airstrips, inaccessible by foot, accessible only by canoe. Straddling the American border, it is one of the finest - and certainly among the most empty - international sanctuaries in the world.

My wife Katrin and I crossed the Atlantic, flew up the Great Lakes to Thunder Bay then drove west along Highway #11 to Aitkokan on the edge of the park. In summer every other car carries a canoe on its roof. But by September most of the tourists, as well as the mosquitoes and black flies, had gone.

At Quetico North outfitters, Clint Taylor equipped us with Kevlar canoe and paddles. With hands broad like a sculptor’s, he filled our Duluth pack with tent and sleeping bags, tarp and axe, firegrate and Ultra- Lite food pack. All cans and bottles - except for fuel and medicine - are banned in the park. Everything taken in must be packed back out again or, if appropriate, burnt. For once inside, in a park larger in size than Cornwall, there are no litter bins, no corkscrews, no signposts or telephones. A strict quota system limits numbers entering the park - from our Entry Station only two canoes per day - and, once we had registered our intended route, Clint loaded us and our kit into his pick-up. On the drive to Baptism Creek he told us that the point where trips begin are known as jumping-off places. He left us at ours, with few words and no ceremony, a deserted beach on the edge of North America as it once was, before the coming of the Europeans, then the greatest frontier in the New World. We slipped the canoe into the creek, dipped our paddles in the water, and jumped.

Quetico opened its arms and folded us into its embrace. We followed the silver curve of the river through its dense, green forest. Water spiders skated over the surface like minute balls of mercury. Dragonflies mated in mid-flight, their wings knocking the rushes to make a sound like licking flames. A raven cried from a tree top, its caw echoing over a beaver-meadow of scarlet pitcher plants. Copper branches reflected in the water. Around each new bend I expected to see a white clapboard cottage or to be hailed by fellow campers but there was nothing and no one. The pine sentries at the river’s mouth stood aside to draw us onto Pickerel Lake.

The movement of a canoe is like a reed in the wind. It shivers in a breeze, runs with the current, dips at the slightest shift of weight. The quiet is a part of it; as is the sound of lapping water, the pull of the paddle, the drips from the poised blade. We glided past unnamed woods and snarled riverbanks where man may never stand, hushed and still.

A painted turtle, sunning itself on a rock, watched our approach. A muskrat slipped into the water. Five young loons - a relative of the Great Northern Diver - surfaced around the canoe, calling out to each other as they fished in voices like puppies’ barks.

We put effort into our paddling after lunch, stretching forward through the warm afternoon and the shoals of islands. Toward dusk we made camp on a mossy outcrop of rock shaped like the prow of a ship. A tumbledown forest of conifers rose up behind us, the skeletons of old trees lying where they had fallen, their saplings rooted in their remains. The tent smelt of smoke and spruce. Katrin built a fire from deadwood, it being illegal to cut living vegetation, while I trawled for bass. We grilled the fish over the embers, then hung our food pack in the trees out of reach of any curious black bears, and waited for the stars. There wasn’t a soul on the water, no sounds of man or machine. No other fires glowed on the far shore. I came across a pocketful of change and wondered for a moment, what are these shiny tokens?

In a place so isolated from the modern world, it was hard to appreciate the waterways’ rich history. At the start of the 19th century, Quetico was the busiest region of interior North America and in the peace of morning, if one pauses to listen, the ghosts of the old fur traders can still be heard stalking the portages. In the slap of waves against the rocky shore one can imagine hearing phantom brigades moving across the lakes, paddling in close line astern, their canoes piled high with beaver pelts destined for Bond Street and the rue de Rivoli.

The next day we woke early, drowned the campfire and pushed deeper into the park, each paddle stroke taking us further away from familiar comforts. At midday Quetico lost its sunny good humour. The high blue skies of morning vanished behind furrows of thick cloud. Mist cast a gauze over the land, draping the horizon in a pastel haze. The first, innocuous shower stroked the lake’s surface but, when the wind came up, the loons began to call madly. Sky and water turned leaden grey and we headed for the safety of the nearest island. The rain slapped into us before we reached cover, putting three inches of water in the canoe in as many minutes. We paddled on through the wet, monochrome world, reaching across the pock-marked waves for landfall, soaked to the skin but laughing, cleansed, alive.

We set up the tent and huddled out of the storm. Our clothes dripped from a cedar bough. The temperature had plunged and there was no dry wood to start a fire. In between downpours I lit our camp stove and fried omelettes, spiced by windfall pine needles.

In the indigo dusk after the rains, as columns of mist rose up out of the forest like the smoke of so many bonfires, the Lord’s Prayer suddenly came to mind. I am not particularly religious but, I reasoned, the beauty of the place had touched me. I realised that I had been moved by Quetico’s hard, unforgiving loneliness as much as its beauty. Kneeling on a rock scored by the last Ice Age makes one aware of the utter insignificance of our most noble efforts and petty concerns.

Some historians believe that Quetico’s name is a kind of Native pidgin for the French phrase la quête de la côte, the search for the coast, for along its channels nearly every explorer passed looking for the elusive water route across the continent to the Pacific. Another definition put forward is that it is an acronym of the Quebec Timber Company, in memory of the loggers who - but for the work of environmentalists - would have clear-cut its forests. But there is one story - more persuasive in both its source and meaning - that Quetico is a very old Ojibwe word, borrowed from the Cree, which describes the presence of a benevolent spirit in particularly beautiful country. For me, it is a sanctuary of deep quiet where man’s passing has left not the faintest trace.

• More from Rory MacLean