Rough and Ready [return to News]
By Nora K. Froeschle World Staff Writer
Click here to read the trip log
Lots of boys go to camp, but Nick Tatum and Jonathan Huggins took the tradition to the extreme when they took a 19-day, 300-mile canoe trip into the deep into the wilds of northern Canada this summer.
Tatum, a senior at Edison High School, and Huggins, a junior at Bishop Kelley, began their journey at Camp Chippewa on Cass Lake in Minnesota. The late Cap Endres, former athletic director at Rogers High School, started the camp in the 1930s. The camp is directed by John Endres, a Tulsa native.
Both boys had been attending the camp for years, but this special journey on Canada’s rivers and lakes was by invitation only and only happens every few years. Both boys said that they were honored and excited to make the trip. So, with two leaders from the Camp and eight other campers, they set off into the wild.
To begin the trip, they were flown by floatplane from Thompson, Manitoba to Campbell Lake where they would begin their adventure. All of their equipment and food for the trip had to be flown in because of the remote nature of the trip. The six canoes that would carry the group to Hudson Bay were strapped onto the floats of the planes. By the end of the second day on the Little Churchill River, with the wind blowing and the rain coming down, four of the 12 campers became chilled and had to change into dry clothes and get in their tents for the night. Tatum was one of the four.
“I felt like I almost got hypothermia,” Tatum said, adding that he neglected to bring waterproof pants necessary for the inevitable rainy days. In addition to the rain, the temperature in this extreme part of the world ranged from the twenties to the nineties, “We got soaked. Huge raindrops and a mist that would soak you to the bone,” he said, shivering from the memory. While lying in his tent, he was wondering if the trip was a big mistake.
“I thought ‘What am I doing?’ but then I got up and put on my boots.
Tatum has never participated in any organized sports, although he is an accomplished archer and kayaker, but he lost 15 pounds and added some bulk to his biceps, for which he is rather proud.
“He works out,” Tatum said of Huggins, his friend and canoe partner. Tatum had the bow and Huggins, who didn’t lose any weight, had the stern.
The mosquitoes and the blackflies were nothing short of predators preying on the almost defenseless young men who had all suffered from bites upon their arrival at Hudson Bay. Insect repellents were of little use, they said.
They were bitten so much; Tatum said he didn’t even notice by the end of the trip.
“Going to the bathroom was the hardest. You had to get psyched up and you had to be fast because if you’re not moving fast, you might as well not be moving at all,” Tatum said.
Once accustomed to the insects and the weather, which was sometimes sunny and hot, the boys had a lot of time to think and they did a lot of talking -- about what, they won’t say exactly.
“All forms of masculinity and doing what men do – trail talk. Girls, past times, what you want to be,” Huggins said. “We’d talk about where we wanted to be…at times home in bed,” Tatum said.
They ate fish they caught one day, but they were not overly thrilled with the food in general.
“We had a lot of rice and beans,” Huggins said. “No perishables, lots of dehydrated vegetables.”
“One day we got oatmeal pies and we thought we’d died and gone to heaven,” Tatum said.
Wildlife was all around them, they said. Huggins has pictures of a moose, startled by the canoeists, hustling out of the water into the cover of heavy brush on shore. But it was the polar bears that lived in the Hudson Bay area that would have been really scary, they said.
“We carried pepper spray designed to ward off bears,” Huggins said. Tatum said he would have liked to see one, but Huggins was decidedly relieved they did not.
On one day, forest fires to the south sent smoke billowing across the water and through the air. The smoke was so thick that all of their clothes and equipment reeked of smoke for several days following the incident.
They also had to go through a significant amount of rapids and it was during one of those runs that Tatum had his scariest moment of the trip.
“We were last to shoot the rapids and there was a four to five-foot drop off and the stern got turned to the side and we were about to go down it sideways and I realized we were going to capsize,” Tatum said.
The realization gave him some extra adrenaline perhaps, because he furiously helped to paddle them into a better position. Though they went down the wrong way, they made it.
“It was three drops right after another and I was scared. We’d taken in a lot of water,” Huggins said.
The boys continued down the Churchill River in their boat named Shirley. Tatum wanted to name it Jessica after his girlfriend, but another boy had the same idea and a girlfriend of the same name. He came up with another flamboyant redheaded girl -- Shirley Temple -- because that is how he describes Jessica.
On the last day, countless beluga whales swam with them at the mouth of the Churchill River where it emptied into Hudson Bay. Four of them, including a baby beluga, dove down into the water to avoid the canoe. With several 17-foot creatures weighing thousands of pounds disappearing while in a trajectory toward them, it was a tense moment for the boys.
“It was scary. You could hear them communicating,” Tatum said.
For a finale, they all skinny-dipped in the 39-degree water of Hudson Bay. It’s a tradition, they said.
“The average dip was probably around 2.2 seconds,” Tatum said.
Aside from the hardships, or maybe because of them and their perseverance in surviving them, both Tatum and Huggins said they would go again.
“In a heartbeat,” Tatum said while Huggins nodded his head.
