Adventure Spawn

I had the unique opportunity to participate in what we’ll call an expedition canoe trip into the Canadian wild at age fifteen. The trip was organized by a youth summer camp and our group consisted of eight kids and two leaders. We were in the wild nineteen days paddling and portaging our way through the picturesque Quetico Provincial Park. We traveled a circuitous route, finishing where we started and covering close to 150 miles of the world’s best smallmouth and walleye lakes in the world. The trip had a profound impact on me, and my appreciation of God’s creation.

Eleven years later as I was planning to marry my sweetheart, I revealed my desire to take our potential son to Quetico when he turned fifteen. Over the next eight years my wife gave birth to not one, but three sons and a daughter. (The trip she took with our daughter at 15 is a whole different story!) I frequently considered not one but three wilderness trips to Canada, while calculating my age when the youngest would reach fifteen and speculating on the physical condition I would find myself in at fifty years of age.

I’m now forty-seven and have the first of those three trips under my belt and am beginning preparation and planning for the second father/son expedition into the Canadian wilderness. This second son, now fourteen, is reaching the age that doing things with Dad just doesn't hold quite the intrigue it once did. He enjoys a wide variety of activities and is aching to make his mark on the world and isn't sure that a wilderness trip is the way to get there. I know that this experience will help propel him to become the leader he can be, and will actually be a passage from boyhood to manhood when he looks back on it. His attitude reflects his older brother's, mine at age fourteen and probably a majority of boys his age. Fortunately he has seen first hand the affection and regard his older brother holds for his Canadian wilderness trip and, in spite of all the contrary influences, he is embracing the adventure to come.