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Book details

  • Genre:travel
  • Sub-genre:Special Interest / Adventure
  • Language:English
  • Pages:532
  • Paperback ISBN:9798317818029

The Wolf Faces Backwards

Personal Odysseys on the Northern Forest Canoe Trail

By Peter Macfarlane

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Overview

This travel journal, laced with memoir, traces a pair of long-distance, solo canoe journeys along the Northern Forest Canoe Trail. In a self-made canoe, the author faced numerous obstacles on his first through-paddle, yet triumphed. Five years later he set himself the challenge of being the first to complete this journey in the unconventional direction, a trek which promised to raise the bar of difficulty. How he fared, and how much his attachment to his canoe developed, unfolds along the way.
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Description

'The Wolf Faces Backwards' traces a pair of long-distance, solo canoe journeys along the Northern Forest Canoe Trail. But it is much more than a travel journal, being embellished with enough memoir to reveal what drives and equips someone to undertake such journeys, together with other interludes which help to guide the reader along the trail.

Author, Peter Macfarlane, had a comfortable, if hard-working, life as a biology and chemistry teacher for the top two years of high school in the UK. He also had a part-time musical career, playing fiddle in Scottish dance bands. In 2003 he gave that up in order to emigrate to the USA to marry, and to make music his full-time occupation. But in his spare time he pursued another dream: to design and build cedar-strip canoes. His first canoe took to the water in 2007, and that was the year he first became aware of the Northern Forest Canoe Trail. It took another six years for him to feel ready to tackle this trail.

The first half of the book describes his 2013 through-paddle of the NFCT, using a journal that he kept along the way as its basis. Numerous challenges came his way, described in the daily entries, as he made his way from Old Forge, New York, to Fort Kent, Maine, a distance of over 750 miles. Originally this was to be the whole book. But the lure of the trail drew Peter back five years later, this time to face a personal challenge he had set himself: to try to become the first person recorded to have through-paddled the NFCT in the unconventional direction. There were very good reasons that nobody had attempted this, and the magnitude of the challenge tested hidden depths in Peter's stamina and determination. Would they be sufficient?

The second half of the book similarly draws on a journal kept en route, and recounts the struggles as well as the joys of this second journey. The addition of the second half necessitated much rearrangement and re-write of the first half. These two journeys, which are effectively bookends, now form the two halves of this book, and a set of maps in between allows the reader to follow along, to see the daily progress, and to identify the camping sites.

'The Wolf Faces Backwards' is also a love story, not just the reason for Peter's emigration, but a celebration of the affection that he developed for a small wooden canoe that he had designed and crafted, and which carried him reliably through the rough and the smooth.

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About The Author

Peter Macfarlane left a life of science teaching, biology and chemistry at sixth form level, to emigrate from his British homeland to the U.S.A. in order to marry. Here he turned his previous part-time career of performing music in Scottish dance bands into more of a full-time occupation, playing fiddle and other instruments in traditional bands as well as giving lessons. The change of lifestyle allowed him the freedom to design and build cedar-strip canoes, something that had been tugging at him for several years, ever since salvaging a wrecked stripper and rebuilding it with his wife-to-be. He and his now wife occupy as much of their summer as possible canoe-camping along the waterways of the Adirondack Mountains in northern New York State, a short hop across Lake Champlain from their Vermont home.

And so Peter was introduced to the Northern Forest Canoe Trail, at 740 miles the longest marked inland water trail in the country. A through-paddle—from end to end in a single trip—proved too much of an enticement, and in 2013 he completed a solo journey from Old Forge, New York, to Fort Kent, Maine. The weather conspired against him for much of the trip, but he persisted and triumphed. Five years later, unable to put the trail bug aside, he set out on the NFCT once more. This time, though, he started at Fort Kent, something that nobody previously had been known to do. What faced him was a journey with many more miles of upstream than downstream paddling. Despite some intense challenges along the way, he paddled triumphantly into Old Forge to become the first (and, at the time of writing, the only) person to have a completed a through-paddle in the 'wrong' direction.

Although never previously an author, various people suggested to Peter setting down his experiences in print. His occasional missives had received compliments for their lucidity, turn of phrase and humour, and so he put fingers to keyboard, starting fairly soon after his first journey. The story of that odyssey was nearing completion when he embarked on the second. It seemed only natural, then, to continue the story, and so further years of writing ensued, coupled with rewrites that became necessary with the new format. The book expanded to become two books in one.

Peter is still married, still lives in Vermont, still plays music and teaches fiddle, as well as leading the Vermont Fiddle Orchestra, and is still building canoes under the guise of Otter Creek Smallcraft. And, of course, he is still embarking on noteworthy solo travels in a canoe that he crafted.

www.petermacfarlane.net

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