Tent dwellers paddle celebrated centennial

Albert Bigelow Paine wrote the book chronicling the fishing trip through the interior of southwest Nova Scotia in the early 1900s.

Sandra Phinney and seven others launched their canoes from Kejimkujik National Park on May 17 to follow the same route.

The trip took a week and started off with a two-mile portage shortly after the launch. After the canoes were transported, up to two more trips were required to carry the remaining 400-pounds of gear.

Phinney described the experience as: “Gruesome. Uphill. In the rain. Going sideways.”

The eight spent one night on an island in Paskoweski Lake and made a detour, as the original characters did, to the Little Tobeatic where they caught the most fish. That portage proved to be even more challenging than the first.

“It was grueling. I thought they’d have to take me out by helicopter. It was beyond wicked,” said Phinney.

“I don’t know if anyone had been there in the last 100 years since the tent dwellers. There were all kinds of tree falls and really fresh bear tracings.”

She used her own insect repellant made from oil of citronella and non-scented skin cream to deal with “fierce” clouds of black flies and also wore a borrowed bug jacket.

Phinney says the group encountered eerie similarities to the trip taken a century earlier, including the rain that poured upon them “sometimes sideways” almost every day. They saw a porcupine where one was mentioned in the book and a member of the group fell into the water in the same spot where a net was lost a century ago.

“It was as if their spirits were with us,” said Phinney of the original characters.

Each night around the campsite the group would read a chapter and discuss their location and happenings in relation to the Tent Dwellers.

Group member Bob Thexton read the book 17 times since 1975 and could quote passages by heart.

Alain Belliveau (22) wanted to remain true to the period so he fished with a bamboo rod, wore authentic costumes, and learned how to fly-fish on the trip.

Like the adventurers before them, the re-enactors also went up the Mersey River.

“Normally people would go down a river, but in order to do the true journey of the tent dwellers we went that route. We had a roping, pulling the canoes through rapids, going upstream,” said Phinney.

After that, the rest was a piece of cake, she says, from Loon Lake to Keji.

“It was a great trip, an amazing trip,” she concluded. Reviewing the 600 pictures she took along the way will help keep the trip forever fresh.