St. John's of Manitoba and Lake Timiskaming

by Pierre Bedard

I've never been to Lake Timiskaming. The furthest East I've canoed is on Lake Superior - from Thunder Bay forty miles south to Grand Portage. My brother and I both attended St. John's in Selkirk, Manitoba. I graduated, my brother went for one year.

I found out about the Timiskaming tragedy on my first day back in California after a year studying abroad, in the Rockridge Cafe (located in north Oakland, just south of Berkeley). I was sitting down to breakfast. I opened up the San Francisco Chronicle and on page 2 was a picture of some bodies on a dock and a story. A little piece of me died that morning.

I knew the one adult (young adult, one year older than me - Mark Denny) who died that day. He was a great classmate - a good guy who cared and got along well with everyone. Many of my fellow graduates (and nongraduates) went back to the school to work in one capacity or another - teach, supervise snowshoe runs, and steer on canoe trips. Mark was one of them.

What happened might have happened on any other St. John's canoe trip - but it didn't. I spent two years at the Manitoba school and graduated in 1975, three years before Timiskaming, I logged about 1500 miles in a St. John's canoe and 500 miles snowshoeing the frozen rivers, marshes, and flatlands of Manitoba. Many logged many more miles over the years, retracing the steps of the Voyageurs, emulating the spartan existence, the mental and physical challenges of each day. St. John's was just a brief time in my life which shortened my adolescence and hastened the onset of adulthood. They were some of the best years.

I did things at St. John's that make the rest of my life seem inconsequential. The challenges I faced, just to survive the snowshoeing program, make everything else in life seem trivial - even though it's not - life is a challenge from day to day.

I never regretted attending the Selkirk school once I had left. Timiskaming was unfortunate, something that happened that cannot be retracted. When I see a chop across a bay, I say a prayer for the thirteen voyageurs from St. John's who met the spirits of the lake on June 11, 1978. All brigades eventually meet on the other side of the traverse.

A little piece of me died that morning in Oakland - but the rest of me moved on. This branch of bedard.com is a little bit of what helps me move on.