Photo: Facebook
Doug Hissom
Doug Hissom
I hadn’t gone to Facebook for many years so when a friend texted me that she saw something about Doug Hissom dying, I poked around for a few minutes and decided that, no, there was no confirmation, just another reason not to go to Facebook.
Indeed, Doug Hissom (1963–2023) did die. He was the best paddler I ever knew. Doug could go from dawn to dusk without even stopping to pee. He could guide us through the most confusing, island strewn lakes in the world. He could dodge the wind on the lee side of the islands on the same lakes. He knew how to call out a brace when we needed it to assure stability as the gunnels tipped perilously into the water.
Images; Doug carrying the canoe through the willows and brambles that were up to his armpits, alongside the Dubawnt Gorge; Doug, sawing the winter deadfall off the trail on the famed Robinson Portage on the Hayes River (this is why he insisted on bringing the bow saw); Doug lowering the canoe and packs 75 feet down the bluff to me standing at water level at the Gates of the Dubawnt (this is why he made sure we had 100 feet of rope on the trip); Doug yelling out, “we’re surfing!” once he directed me to brace on the left as we were perpendicular to a fast rapid. The brace allowed us to “surf” out of danger. With a canoe full of water, we limped to shore to empty out and then continued. My legs were shaking and I was pulling hard on a cigarette as he calmly bailed out the canoe from his sitting position in the rear.
But my favorite image is from a day when we were sidelined by the wind on the Dubawnt River. Doug was sitting on a hillside, half obscured by the bushes, hungrily munching on handfuls of blueberries as quick as he could pick them. I call the picture I took, “Bear Eating Berries on Whalebone Island.”
Doug was a large man. He was over six feet and shoulders as wide as a Prospector canoe. On the Canadian Tundra, the wind blows free with little to stop it. I tried several times, but I couldn’t carry that damn canoe across open tundra. The wind would spin me around, under that boat. Doug handled it without a stumble or a thought.
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Doug was respectful of everybody. He contacted the head of the Oxford Lake band of Cree along the Hayes River months before our trip. He asked permission to paddle through tribal land. We camped near the town and paid our respects to the leader and his fellow officials the next morning.
Doug had a journalist’s memory. Paddling along the Seal River in Manitoba, we visited the cairn built as a memorial to paddling legend and filmmaker, Bill Mason. Inside the pile of rocks making up the cairn was a container with notes and tributes from other paddlers passing through the area. We found a note from a few days before we were there. It was from a group of 10 teenagers and two young adult leaders. They were from a YMCA outside Toronto. All of their names were there. When we caught up to this group several days later, Doug started asking, “Who is so and so, who is … until he rattled off all 10 teenagers and the two leaders, by name.
I first became aware of Doug through an article in the Milwaukee Journal about paddling across Lake Michigan in an open canoe. he story, as I remember hearing it later, is he and Ed contacted the Coast Guard to let them know they were going to paddle across the lake. The Coast Guard person they spoke with told them the Coast Guard does not want to know about this. They painted a huge orange X on the bottom of the aluminum canoe so they would be found if they capsized. They left the bar around 2 a.m. and 26 hours later, landed in Michigan, in time for breakfast. We learned later that 26 hours was the fastest open boat paddle on record.
A year or two later, I met Doug at a demonstration for or against something or another. We stayed connected through e-mail and a Boundary Waters on-line forum. We soon paddled together on several local waterways. That fall as we were paddling, Doug brought up the possibility of taking a wilderness trip together. The following June (25 years ago this month) we loaded up the truck and drove to Thompson, Manitoba and my life was transformed.
Doug was a writer. I kept a journal of our trips. One time I sent him what I wrote asking his opinion. I finally asked if he read what I sent and he said, “I don’t want to read about something I may want to write about later.” He was concerned he may inadvertently re-write somebody else’s sentence or paragraph.
Doug was in the midst of a break-up with a woman, and he called to ask me if I could take some of his canoeing equipment as he was moving and didn’t have space for the gear. He was having some health issues and didn’t think he would canoe again. My storage shed is now bursting with his gear and my gear and because of my health issues; I am not paddling any longer.
We spent over 800 hours in the same canoe, 21 days on the Hayes River to Hudson Bay in 1998. Next up was nine days on the Seal River. Then 31 days on the Kazan River in Nunavut. Two years later, we paddled 33 days on the Dubawnt River in the Northwest Territories and Nunavut.
We considered ourselves two solo canoeists, paddling together here and there. There were countless trips to the Boundary Waters and the Buffalo River in Arkansas for our early spring trips, just to shake the winter rust off. These were always with each of us in our own canoe. We were two soloists joining together, here and there.
