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Born to Walk

The Transformative Power of a Pedestrian Act

ECW PRESS

BODY

"Each step we take is an arrested plunge, a collapse averted, a disaster braked. ... We perform it daily: a two-beat miracle – an iambic teetering, a holding on and letting go."

– Paul Salopek, National Geographic

"Do not judge your neighbour until you walk two moons in his moccasins."

– Cheyenne proverb

Dr. Stanley Vollant was desperate for sleep. He flew to Rotorua, New Zealand, for an indigenous health conference in October 2007, landing drained and depressed after a full day of travel. His second wife had just left him, taking their toddler son. Despite stellar credentials, including a term as president of the Quebec Medical Association, he was overwhelmed by shifts in the operating room, clinics in remote communities and his duties as director of the University of Ottawa's Aboriginal medicine program. Vollant, a charismatic role model with modest roots, had recently put a gun in his mouth and come close to pulling the trigger.

At his hotel in Rotorua, a friend recommended going for a short run to ease the jet lag.

"I'm so tired," Vollant protested.

"You're a marathon runner, Stan. Go for maybe 15, 20 minutes."

"I don't have any strength. I don't feel good."

"Go."

Too weak to argue, Vollant laced up his shoes and jogged into the volcanic valley on the outskirts of town. The primordial landscape, a paradise of geysers and hot springs and bubbling mud pools, was energizing. He had the sensation that he was flying.

During the run, which stretched into three effortless hours, Vollant had a vivid daydream. He was walking in a faraway place. He did not know where.

One night after returning home, back in his rut, he turned on the television. A man was talking about El Camino de Santiago, the popular Christian pilgrimage in Spain. Vollant, who believes in the values but not the hierarchies of Catholicism, looked at his bedside table. On top sat a book, bought five years earlier and pushed aside unread: The Pilgrimage, by Paulo Coelho, a novel inspired by the author's experiences on the Camino. The Aboriginal part of Vollant's brain pulled rank on his Cartesian training. He knew what to do next.

The following spring, still squeezed for time, Vollant set out to complete the Camino at an ambitious pace — 26 miles a day for 18 days. Most people take nearly twice as long. "I'm a marathon runner," he told his girlfriend before departing. "I can do this."

She lifted his 45-pound red backpack. An avid long-distance hiker, she never carried more than 20 pounds. "Stan," she warned, "you're going to feel every ounce of this."

"Honey, I'm a strong man. For me, 45 pounds is nothing."

After his first day in the Spanish Pyrenees, Vollant had a half-dozen blisters. With each step, he felt every fucking ounce of his pack.

Stubbornly, he continued without shedding any gear, even though there was too much snow to use his tent, forcing him to bunk in communal albergues. After 12 days, shivering uncontrollably, he stumbled toward a small-town hotel, fainting twice before reaching the front desk. A long bath and a restaurant meal restored some strength. He pared down his pack in the morning and, ignoring the festering blisters, walked for another two days. Excruciating pain in his toes and an expanding red spot on his shin finally convinced him to take a train to León, where he went straight to the hospital. Doctors diagnosed the infection — fasciitis, a precursor to flesh-eating disease — and pumped intravenous antibiotics into his blood for five days. "Go back to Canada," he was instructed at discharge. Instead, because doctors do make the worst patients, he returned to the Camino. Which is where the second vision came.

In a barnlike refuge, with the mountain wind blowing bursts of rain in through gaps around the doors, Vollant had a dream as clear as HDTV, right down to his red backpack. This time, he was walking in a familiar forest with Aboriginal youth and elders. They were abstaining from alcohol and drugs, eating healthy food, talking about their cultures, healing bodies, minds and spirits.

When he awoke, covered in sweat, Vollant described what he had seen to a fellow pilgrim. "What am I supposed to do?" he asked. "Why? How?"

"Your people believe that dreams have meaning," André, a Frenchman, reminded him. "They are the call of destiny."

Vollant came home from Spain wondering whether he was crazy. Walking across a chunk of Canada was an intriguing idea. Maybe when he retired. When he had more time and money. When his children, a pair of daughters from his first marriage, and his young son, Xavier, didn't need him around so much. The journey in his dream would require the better part of a year. He could take time off work to attend medical conferences. But not for this.

Nonetheless, friends and relatives encouraged Vollant. Like him, they saw an escalating need for the type of project he had in mind. Not in the future. Now. Thus divined, bolstered by a compelling creation myth, the Innu Meshkenu — Innu Road — took shape. A six-year, 3,800-mile series of walks, in all seasons, between every Aboriginal community in Quebec and Labrador, and a few in Ontario and New Brunswick. Vollant wanted to demonstrate the power of believing in yourself. That any change was possible, as long as you approached it with perseverance. And that walking, at its core a physical tonic, was an ideal way to start.

Canada's 1.4 million Aboriginal people are a diverse group. Urban and rural, rich and poor, digitally savvy and subsistence hunters, doctors and dropouts, in harmony with the earth and struggling into the gale, there are vast differences within and between southern First Nations, northern Inuit, mixed-race Métis and the 16,000 or so eastern Innu. Demographically, however, when you compare them to the country's non-Aboriginal population, the statistics reveal an alarming truth: many endure health challenges on par with people in the developing world, despite living in one of the wealthiest nations on the planet.

Aboriginal men and women die an average of seven years earlier than other Canadians. The infant mortality rate is 1.5 times higher. (Among Inuit, life expectancy is 15 years lower than the national average and the infant mortality rate is four times higher.) Aboriginal people are 1.5 times more likely to have at least one chronic medical condition, such as diabetes, high blood pressure or arthritis. Fifty-six percent of First Nations children between the ages of two and 17 on reserves are overweight or obese, compared to 26 percent of non-Aboriginal children, the Public Health Agency of Canada reported in 2009. A year later, in a report called "A Perfect Storm," Canada's Heart and Stroke Foundation issued a warning about heart disease, citing skyrocketing national rates of high blood pressure (a 77 percent jump), diabetes (45 percent) and obesity (18 percent) between 1994 and 2005. Unless something changes, cardiovascular emergencies will overload the country's health-care system. Aboriginal people, the foundation declared, are already experiencing "a full-blown crisis."

Statistics on alcoholism, substance abuse, incarceration (4 percent of the population, 25 percent of inmates) and suicide — the most common cause of death for Aboriginals aged 44 and under — show the severity of this crisis. And there are signs that it will deepen. Canada's Aboriginal population is the youngest and fastest-growing demographic group in the country, increasing by 20 percent between 2006 and 2011, versus 5.2 percent among non-Aboriginals. The median age is 28, compared to 41 in the rest of the country, and almost half of all Aboriginals are 24 or younger. These numbers have dire implications. If today's health inequalities are not addressed, the social and financial costs will balloon out of control.

Centuries of economic and educational apartheid, and the lost generations abused by Church and State at residential schools — the persistent echoes of colonization — have led us here. Acute concerns abound: decrepit housing, domestic violence, toxic water. Triage is required in many of the communities that Innu Meshkenu passes through. And while the project emphasizes the importance of mental and spiritual strength, and the need to re-establish a connection to the land, to tradition and to one another, as any physician will tell you, it's tough to go far without a healthy body.

Vollant's first walk, in October 2010, was a 385-mile solo hike west along the St. Lawrence River, from the Innu reserve in Natashquan, Quebec, to Baie-Comeau, the city closest to Pessamit, the village where he is from, about 370 miles northeast of Montreal. Flying to the starting point in a small plane, he stared down at the terrain he would soon be travelling, questioning once more his sanity. On a map, 18 miles per day seemed reasonable. From 15,000 feet, it looked deadly. Maybe if he went to the nursing station in Natashquan he would be put in a straitjacket and locked away? But then he landed and saw cardboard signs written in Montagnais, his language, welcoming him home. Route 138, the paved highway that extends east from Montreal, terminates just past Natashquan. White people call this the end of the road. To Innu, it is the beginning.

Vollant's momentum has snowballed since he walked to Baie-Comeau in 23 days, with supporters literally coming out of the woods to set up tents and cook meals of moose and salmon. He completed seven more walks in 2011 and 2012, most lasting two to three weeks, distances ranging from 200 to 450 miles. A couple were short excursions, such as the two-day march from Wôlinak to Odanak in southern Quebec in September 2012 for the opening of an Aboriginal college, a trek that drew 150 participants. Even the long walks have been getting more crowded. In some ways, they're similar to Survivor, I would discover, only the goal is to get more people onto the island.

The winter 2013 leg began in Manawan, an Atikamekw reserve at the end of an icy 55-mile-long gravel road, a four-hour drive north of Montreal. Three months after my knee surgery, I got a ride there with a pair of Québécois walkers, and after I insisted we take a shortcut where the snowbanks soon reached the roof of our hatchback, we retreated to the plowed route and arrived a little late, although not too late for the feast in the elementary school gymnasium. The festivities would begin on "Indian time."

This can be a derogatory term, used to connote an aversion to schedules. But re-appropriated by Aboriginals, ingrained within a long history of adhering to the seasons or the weather or the migratory patterns of animals, not the confines of calendar and clock, it is really, in the words of Ojibwe author Drew Hayden Taylor, "an enigmatic idea based on a uniquely cultural relationship with time. Simply put, things happen when they happen. ... The universe has its own heartbeat, and who are we to speed it up or slow it down?" As I watched a slideshow of photos from previous Innu Meshkenu walks while listening to seven men pound a drum and chant, European time already felt out of whack.

Vollant was still in transit on the eve of the expedition, en route from the Université de Montréal, where he lectures at the medical school when not working as a locum — or stand-in — surgeon throughout the province. The logistics were in the calm, calloused hands of his project manager, Jean-Charles Fortin, an outdoor recreation and adventure tourism instructor at Université du Québec à Chicoutimi. "I grew up in the Mohawk community of Kanesatake, Quebec," he told the group when we gathered on folding chairs in the gym for the first of many circles, confiding to me later that this introduction is mostly a "social lubricant" — he might have some Métis blood. Fortin, with his shoulder-length dark hair and shiny dark eyes, does have a problem-solving, those-are-not-my-rules attitude. A diehard mountain biker, he knows all the backwoods trails around Kanesatake. During the month-long armed standoff between the Canadian army and Mohawk warriors over the expansion of a golf course on tribal land in 1990, before the proliferation of cellphones and digital cameras, he ferried rolls of film and notepads around police barricades for reporters, charging $100 per trip. At the end of the conflict, he had enough cash for a new car.

Fortin found spare rooms in a local's basement for my Québécois companions and me — beds and breakfast from a family without much to spare — and we reconvened outside the school in the morning. My pulk was packed and secured to a padded waist belt with nylon rope fed through cross-hatched aluminum poles. About 300 people came out for the ceremonial departure. There was only one problem: no Vollant. He was making a presentation to students in the gym, a cornerstone of every Innu Meshkenu stop. We stood around and waited, stamping our feet to stay warm. This turned out to be a blessing, because there was in fact a second problem. Fat snowflakes were accumulating and melting on my stuff sacks; my bedding and clothing were getting soaked. Everyone else had a plastic tarp, cinched tight with bungee cords, to keep their gear dry. Despite weeks of planning and provisioning, despite the shelf of tarps in my garage, despite Lisa's suggestion that a waterproof cover might come in handy, I did not bring one.

My aluminum poles clanged like the bell at a railroad crossing as I ran down the hill to Manawan's gas station/general store, the only retailer in town. Rushing up and down the aisles, which were thick with shoppers on a weekday morning, I saw no tarps. Trying not to panic, I broke out my broken French.

"Je cherche pour un ... tarp," I said to a young employee, extending my arms wide to compensate for my woeful pronunciation and Grade 9 vocabulary. "Un grand tarp plastique. Pour un bateau?"

He shook his head. Maybe because boating season was months away. Maybe because the short, sweaty guy in front of him clearly required the type of assistance that a general store cannot provide.

Outside, a man wearing a hunting cap was admiring the sleek lines of my baby-blue $20 sled (purchased at a Canadian Tire outlet with a bountiful selection of tarps)."Le marcher avec le docteur," I mumbled, then repeated my "plastique, bateau" appeal. Amazingly, he nodded. After a series of hand gestures, I understood that Mario would meet me at the school with a tarp. Or that I was a fool, and he sincerely wished I would not freeze to death in the bush. Not long after I got back to the staging area, Mario appeared with a grey-green tarp large enough to gift-wrap a rowboat. I gave him a $20 bill, shook his large hand with both of mine and managed to cover my gear by the time Vollant arrived.

Sweet grass and sage were burned, elders recited prayers in Atikamekw (an Algonquian language) and French, and then the doctor addressed the crowd. Six feet tall and a little over his running weight at 195 pounds, Vollant had light brown skin, a broad Roman nose and kind eyes. With his long, greying hair tucked away in a bun, the 48-year-old looked like a cross between Kobe Bryant and Mario Lemieux. "My ancestors walked on this land for thousands of years. I am doing as they did," he said in English with a warm, rich French accent, like narrator Roch Carrier in the National Film Board's classic animated film The Sweater. "These walks are all about individual and community empowerment. People start to believe in their own dreams and become more of a presence in their own lives." Old and young, women and men nodded, several with tears in their eyes. In an airport hotel banquet room, these words might sound cheap. On the rez, they had heft.

Well-wishers lined both sides of the path and showered us with handclasps and high-fives as we walked single-file into the woods. I stuck close to Vollant. He told me about his feverish vision on the Camino. Then the trail narrowed and I fell behind.

Innu Meshkenu participants are supposed to be autonomous. The route is discussed in advance, and signs are planted in the snow to indicate how far you have travelled and where to turn. You carry enough water and food for the day, and Fortin's logisticians rumble back and forth on snowmobiles to make sure nobody is in danger. "Our job," one told me, "is to keep you alive." We were starting soft: an 11-mile kickoff, with backcountry cabins for cooking and eating the first two nights. I was warm, my knee was fine. Still, the pulk and snowshoes were cumbersome, and by afternoon I was weakening.

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Excerpted from Born to Walk by Dan Rubinstein. Copyright © 2015 Dan Rubinstein. Excerpted by permission of ECW PRESS.
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