The Off-Grid Book Shelf

An occasional review of related literature

Beyond the Trees fails to see the forest

Beyond the Trees

By Adam Shoalts

Published by Penguin; 272 pages; $22.00

I really wanted to like Adam Shoalts’ adventure story and travelogue, Beyond the Trees, but ultimately it left me as cold as the terrain in which he traveled. Subtitled A Journey Alone Across Canada’s Arctic, Shoalts’ book had all the makings of a ripping read: a perilous trip by foot and canoe across what at points was uncharted territory. Among other things Shoalts would attempt was paddling upstream the mighty Mackenzie River; the individuals he broached the idea with believed him mad.

The idea was completely off-grid as well: no digital media Twittering at him; human-powered travel; a propane stove, and not a whole lot else. For anyone who ever fantasized about escaping our connected world, this was about as far away as you could possibly get.

A retired professor of chemistry presented Shoalts with the idea of an epic paddle in 2010. The occasion was a talk on canoe tripping that Shoalts delivered to an Ontario nature club. After, the professor approached Shoalts and noted that 2017 would mark Canada’s 150th anniversary, and that Shoalts should consider commemorating it with a memorable trip; a similar journey was undertaken in 1967 to mark Canada’s centennial celebration.

Shoalts forgot about his conversation with the professor for three years, but as 2017 loomed he began to think more and more about a big canoe journey, and where he might travel. He ultimately settled on a nearly 4,000 kilometre trip “across the largest expanse of wilderness, free of roads and cities, yet remaining in the terrestrial world outside of Antartica.”

He would begin by hiking Yukon’s remote Dempster Highway to the world’s 13th largest river, the Mackenzie, where he hoped the ice would have by then broken up in time for him to begin canoeing upriver. “And that would be the easier part of my journey,” Shoalts wrote.

From that point, he would labour up the “mysterious” Hare River; undertake a number of arduous portages; and then cross the Great Bear Lake before entering the “wind-swept Dismal Lakes.”

Sounds like fun, does it not?

But wait. There was more.

Shoalts would next paddle upstream the “fabled” Coppermine River, which boasts a current even stronger than the Mackenzie’s, before crossing into the Hudson Bay watershed. If he survived all that, he’d journey down two more rivers before completing his journey in Nunavut, at the tiny community of Baker Lake.

You can bet that if he did, there wouldn’t be any friendly voice chirping at him from a GPS, announcing: “You have arrived at your destination.”

It’s impossible to minimize Shoalts’ journey and achievement. Spending months on his own in the wilderness, he encountered grizzly bears, wolves, muskox, and more, all up close - sometimes too close. One night he opened his tent to find an agitated muskox bull right outside. He struggled through thousands of kilometres of wilderness on his own, and realistically risked his life repeatedly to finish his journey.

Shoalts possesses many titles: historian, archaeologist, geographer, Explorer-in-Residence of the Canadian Geographical Society, PhD, and author of two previous books. However, he’s no Paul Theroux, Farley Mowat, Redmond O’Hanlon, or any other number of travel writers whose works springs to mind.

The first half of Beyond the Trees is actually engaging. Shoalts’s voice is whimsical, and as he prepares for his big journey he confides in the reader with many amusing asides. But the further along he ventures the less engrossing the trip becomes. The flies, the portages, the wind; the flies, the portages, the wind; the flies, the portages…well, you get the idea. If Shoalts wants the reader to feel his pain, understand his endurance, and embrace the tedium of his journey, he’s succeeded, but somehow I don’t believe that was his intent.

Now and again, Shoalts breaks up this litany of things to be endured with a smattering of history, all of it fascinating. He travels the river named for its explorer, Alexander Mackenzie, but that August individual is dismissed in a single paragraph. Shoalts is a bit more generous when it comes to the fur traders Warren Dease and Thomas Simpson, who built an outpost named Fort Confidence. With a name like that of course it came to a bad end. Simpson went insane and killed two voyageurs before turning the gun on himself.

Shoalts could have written more on characters such as this - not to mention on the region’s Indigenous people, who barely rate a mention in his book. As well, given the nature of the trip and it’s isolation and challenges, I imagine it as life-altering. We’d never know it from Shoalts’ telling. He spends little time on introspection, and instead goes on about the flies, the portages, and the wind.

Shoalts’ journey must have seemed interminable; unfortunately, toward the end his book gives that impression as well. For readers willing to persevere, Beyond the Trees gives a glimpse of a harsh world many of us will never have the opportunity to see. But while Shoalts’ trip is the opportunity of a lifetime, Beyond the Trees just seems like a missed opportunity.