The Lure of Faraway Places: Reflections on Wilderness and Solitude.

John Abbott is a professor of history at Laurentian University’s Algoma University College. He is the co-author of The Border at Sault Ste Marie and The History of Fort St. Joseph.

Herb Pohl’s wanderlust, his passion for solitary expeditions into unexplored and challenging territory, was whetted during his Austrian childhood. His mother, widowed during the Great Depression when her sons were still children, and struggling to support herself and her family on the slim returns from her small farm, often (if unwillingly) left the boys to their own devices, a circumstance that suited young Herb’s curiosity and wanderlust. That same compulsion to test the limits brought Pohl to Canada in the summer of 1950 and inspired him to work his way in a variety of jobs from Quebec City to Vancouver and back to Chalk River, Ontario. There, in a period of employment with the Department of Lands and Forests, he discovered the canoe and the potential of that small craft to take him far beyond the end of the road, into the most remote and rarely traveled crannies of the country. From 1978, beginning with his inaugural wilderness down the Moisie River which debouches into the St. Lawrence near Sept-Iles, Quebec, to July, 2006, when his canoe and body were recovered from Lake Superior at the mouth of the Michipicoten River, he fed his passion with expeditions in watersheds feeding into the north Atlantic out of Labrador, into Hudson’s Bay out of Ontario and Quebec, and into the Arctic out of the Northwest and Baffin Island.

The promise made in the first half of the title is amply illustrated; that made in the second half is not. Instead of reflection there is an abundance of description: of water, weather, geography and geology, flora and fauna, and an environment where biting vermin top the food chain. The chapters offer descriptions of the constant campaign to keep paddler and canoe together and ensure the integrity of each, and to maintain an optimistic spirit when rushing winds, hurtling waters, cold rain, and voracious insects threatened to overwhelm it. In fact, most of those who publish their accounts of paddling adventures are too distracted by the discomforts and the time required to mitigate them, to spend much time in reflection. That said, his description of territory rarely traversed by foot or canoe, before or after his own passage, is superb.

Recommended.