by David Finch
Calgary, Alberta
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While canoe trip journals can be excruciatingly boring, the recently published writings of P. G. Downes are a treat. American schoolteacher Downes is best known for his classic Sleeping Island, first published in 1943 and republished in 2011. Now the material upon which Sleeping Island is based is available in these two edited volumes: the first containing the journals for 1936–1938 and the second containing the journals for 1939, 1940 and 1947.
Of course, the fact that an adventurer and good writer kept a diary is not reason enough to publish the papers. Better possible reasons include the author’s insights into the times, his sketches of interesting personalities, and his insightful comments on factual material. The journals also serve as historical research documents and illuminate the personality of the author.
These lavishly illustrated journals also offer room for the reader to ruminate, wander and plod. Sometimes they answer questions we did not even know to ask. Maps, Downes noted, were “absolutely inaccurate & unreliable” given that they were mostly “hurriedly sketched and dependent upon the angle of observation & distance for their shape.” Instead, he suggested that long eskers provided a much more reliable guide to the country. (II, p. 96)
Additional information in these volumes fills out interesting biographical sketches within the Sleeping Island text. John Albrecht—paddling partner to Downes in 1939—figured prominently in Sleeping Island, as his skill with a pole in tricky waters was pivotal to the summers’ travel. A Prussian who had spent time in a British prison camp, Albrecht apparently disappeared after war broke out in 1939. In the Epilogue to the 1939 Journal, Downes recounts his partner’s reaction to hearing that Canada was at war with Germany: “He made no comment but packed his outfit, took our faithful canoe which I had managed for him to have, and that is the last record we have of him….” (II, p. 134)
R. H. Cockburn, the editor of these journals, followed up on the disappearance in an appended single-page biographical update in which he explains that Albrecht went trapping and prospecting, married a California actress with whom he fathered a son, and died in retirement in British Columbia in 1991 at 93 years of age.
The journal also explains poling—where one stands in the canoe and works upstream against the current. An ancient skill, it was one Albrecht had mastered. At times, Downes and Albrecht poled the canoe together—a true test of a relationship. “The important point is to keep the nose of the canoe pointed in toward the bank; if it swings out you stand a good chance of having the canoe rolled over or at least catapulted down the rapids.” (II, p.48) Sounds like the voice of experience!
The journals also partially explain the age-old question: How bad were the bugs? “Along the west bend I saw what I thought was mist or smoke,” Downes wrote early in the 1939 account. “We went over to get some poles and discovered it to be not mist but a mass of small dun flies, millions undulating in the slight breeze. I have never seen bugs worse, mosquitoes, black flies, sand flies, & bulldogs. They follow us closely even on the river…. Even with a head wind, they perch on one’s back & creep up behind your ears.” (II, p. 28)
This may account for the state of Downes’ wardrobe by the end of the season. Schoolteacher and missionary Bill Buxton ran into Downes that summer and later shared recollections of the man with Cockburn: “He carried only the essentials, this included clothing,” Buxton wrote in 1982. “When he returned from his wild adventures in the Barren Lands, he stank, and worse, he didn’t know it.” One guard against bugs is to avoid bathing, and to allow bodily secretions, smoky fires and other travel odours to repel the hordes. “We made him burn some of this clothes and wash the hell out of the rest. I guess I didn’t smell all that sweet either, but he was impossible….” (II, p. 277)
The editor of these journals, R. H. Cockburn, is to be commended for his attention to detail, his careful insertions of explanatory material into the text in square brackets, and for adding copious amounts of useful information. Though the 1939 journal will most attract those who love Sleeping Island, the other diaries are also worthy of review. Downes’ 1938 travels took him into country beyond his usual haunts in Manitoba and Saskatchewan—into Alberta and the Northwest Territories.
At rail’s end in Waterways, Alberta, Downes purchased a small canoe and travelled the Athabasca and Slave rivers to Great Slave Lake. “It is so strange here,” he wrote of the area now booming with oil sands development. “Everyone intent on their immediate business and no time for anyone or anything else.” On 15 July 1938 at Bitumount he witnessed the development by Robert C. Fitzimmons, at the world’s first commercial oil-sands plant 80 kilometres downstream from Fort McMurray. He commented: “The cook was most enthusiastic about the possibilities of the tar sands. Some day, if a method is ever found to extract petroleum, etc. from them, they will supply the world. They ooze oil.” (I, p. 266)
Downes died in 1959, in his fiftieth year. The two-page Sequel that follows the 1947 diary offers a concluding biographical sketch. Of his travels in the Canadian North, Downes wrote, “I like the life and I like the people there. I saw a lot of it just as the old north was vanishing; the north of not time, of game, of Indians, Eskimos, of unlimited space and freedom…. Well, I suppose I shall never be so happy again.” (II, p. 338)
Until someone writes a proper biography of P. G. Downes, these words will do.
Page revised: 6 January 2018
