Herb Pohl - The Lure of Faraway Places: Reflections on Wilderness and Solitude

The Lure of Faraway Places

Front cover: Herb Pohl had a very distinctive look and style in everything that he did, and his choices of canoe and paddle were no exception. Because he travelled alone so much of the time, there are not a lot of photographs of the man paddling the canoe. But two of his paddling cronies, both of whom have since died, adopted the identical looka 15 8 Femat CDR-C2 with double-bladed paddle. This lovely shot, taken by Herb on the Petawawa River on Thanksgiving weekend, 1983, is of his friend Dave Berthelet who, except for the natty fedora, could be a stunt double for the singing solo Austrian himself.

The Lure of Faraway Places

REFLECTIONS ON WILDERNESS AND SOLITUDE

Herb Pohl

Edited by James Raffan

NATURAL HERITAGE BOOKS
A MEMBER OF THE DUNDURN GROUP
TORONTO

Copyright 2007 by Maura Pohl

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanic, photocopying or otherwise (except for brief passages for purposes of review) without the prior permissio of Dundurn Press. Permission to photocopy should be requested from Access Copyright.

Published by Natural Heritage Books
A Member of The Dundurn Group
3 Church Street, Suite 500
Toronto, Ontario, M5E 1M2, Canada
www.dundurn.com

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Pohl, Herb, 19302006
The lure of faraway places : reflections on wilderness and
solitude / Herb Pohl ; edited by James Raffan.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 9781897045244

1. Pohl, Herb, 19302006. 2. Canoes and canoeingCanada.
3. CanoeistsCanadaBiography. I. Raffan, James II. Title.

GV782.42.P64A3 2007 797.122092 C20079017266

1 2 3 4 5 11 10 09 08 07

All photographs are by Herb Pohl, unless otherwise credited.
Cover design by Neil Thorne
Book design by Norton Hamill Design
Copy editing by Jane Gibson
Printed and bound in Canada by Marquis Book Printing

Care has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright material used in this book. The author and the publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any references or credits in subsequent editions.J. Kirk Howard, President

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and The Association for the Export of Canadian Books and the Government of Canada through the Ontario Book Publishers Tax Credit Program and the Ontario Media Development Corporation.

To Maura and Wilderness, the two loves of Herb Pohls life

Contents

by James Raffan

by James Raffan

The surprise of working on the posthumous publication of a self-described curmudgeons writing is the number of people who came out of the woodwork, after his death, with genuine affection for the man and heartfelt offers to assist in projects to honour his achievements. Many members of the Toronto-based Wilderness Canoe Association, particularly George Luste and the delegates at the annual Wilderness Canoeing Symposium held in Toronto in February 2007, came forward with donations to The Canadian Canoe Museum in Herbs honour as well as with suggestions about how he might be remembered in that context. Deb Williams and attendees at the Snow Walkers and Paddlers gatherings at the Hulbert Outdoor Centre in Fairlee, Vermont, did the same, all expressing interest in the publication of his book. Without this broad base of support and affection for Herb Pohl, this unusual publishing venture and plans to donate his canoe and his books, maps and journals to The Canadian Canoe Museum would never have been launched.

Although Herb was an intensely private person, there were friends and colleagues in whom he confided about his route making and writing and whose editorial advice he sought (and occasionally heeded). Among those were his ping-pong partner and fellow traveller, Dr. Bob Henderson; Aurelia Shaw of the Hamilton Association for the Advancement of Literature, Science and Art (of which Herb was a much valued member), who gave Herb detailed editorial feedback on the early drafts of this book; veteran paddlers and correspondents Pat Lewtas and John Mclnnes, whose wilderness knowledge and pluck Herb truly admired. The person we have perhaps most to thank for Herbs canon of wilderness writing, besides Pohl himself, is Toni Harting, who for twenty years (19852005) was the editor of Nastawgan, the newsletter of the Wilderness Canoe Association. Toni edited most if not all of Herbs accounts and published them for the first time, taking care always to make the best possible black-and-white renderings of his photographs; but he was also the one who poked and prodded the occasionally reluctant scribe to draft another fine trip account when Herb might rather have been rambling instead of writing.

As editor and principal shepherd of this project, I am indebted to Maura Pohl for her always warm welcome in Burlington as well to her for the offer to donate the royalties of this project to The Canadian Canoe Museum; to George Luste who extracted files from the dim recesses of Herbs antique hard drive and to my daughter Molly who re-transcribed a goodly portion of this book when corrupted electronic versions went astray in translation between PC and Mac platforms; to Rob Butler for his patience and tireless effort on his good friend Herbs behalf; to Larry Ricker (a.k.a. Nibi Mocs), Toni Harting, and Bill Ness for permission to use their photographs of Herb; kudos as well to Bill Ness for his information about Herbs canoe; to Bob Henderson for looking after Herbs canoe and helping to make the book happen; to Janice Griffith and the gang at The Canadian Canoe Museum for their help in bringing Herbs boat to the 2007 Wilderness Canoeing Symposium in Toronto; to WCA stalwarts Bill King and George Drought for their comments on the prologue to the book as well as their general advice as the project proceeded; and finally, to Barry Penhale, Jane Gibson, Shannon MacMillan and the production team at Natural Heritage Books who, from the very beginning (a scant six! months ago), believed in this project and worked magic to make it happen. My thanks to all of you.

JAMES RAFFAN

Foreword
The Remarkable Life and Legacy of Herb Pohl

In the summer of 1987, I had the good fortune to paddle the Clearwater River in Nouveau Qubec on an assignment for the National Geographic Society. Along the way, I had the opportunity (and the means, for at that time National Geographic story budgets knew no bounds) to talk via Inuit and Cree translators to a number of people in the area who knew the old travel routes from tidewater to Lac lEau Claire and beyond.

In a presentation about this grand adventure, given some time that fall or winter, I mentioned that one of these informants had drawn a detailed line on my map showing the old paddle and portage route that the Cree in the Whapma-goostui/Richmond Gulf area would use to get to the Eastmain height of land. Mention of the line was a small point in an otherwise rambling travelogue that focused on our journey down the Rivire lEau Claire, but it was a point not missed by one member of the audience. And thats how I met Herb Pohl.