OK, Moosewhizzer it is.  (Or maybe Moosewhizzer Dave).  Here is the re-telling.

My first Algonquin trip was with my Boy Scout Troop, in August 1979 or 1980.  I was fourteen or fifteen.  First canoe trip, first time this far north.  Summer camp always bored me, and this sounded like 7-days of additional boredom to me, under more primitive conditions.  Thankfully I was talked into going by one of the guys in the troop, who had visited every summer since infancy.  (His dad, Mr. K., delivered mail to Algonquin park rangers in his youth.)  So, off we went, a bunch of eager boys with adult leaders.

The geology, trees, habitats, were all very different from my prior experience.  Back then the surrounding area near Huntsville was not so built up, so to me the park felt like a vastness within a vastness.  I had a life-changing moment that day.  Our access point was Magnetawan.   My first portage ever was Magnetawan to Hambone.  I put down my pack, looked at Hambone, and that view is what got me.  It was a beautiful day, cliff on the right, inviting lake before us….I immediately wanted to be IN that place.  Part of it.  Enveloped by it.  Even today those are the sensations I get.  My love of canoeing and canoe camping was born right then, and I knew it when it happened.  Forty years later, the fire still burns bright.  I can’t measure my debt to Robert for talking me into going.

Now.  I told you all that to tell you this.  We spent our last night of that trip camping at that very same spot; illegally on that portage.  We arrived very late in the day, there had been some debate between adults about continuing to the cars, but settled on awakening very early the next morning, crossing the portage, and heading toward some unsuspecting restaurant.

I slept in Mr. K’s tent.  From left to right were Mr. K., Robert, myself, and…..I can never remember the other boy.  Overnight I woke up with a need to pee that could not be ignored.  Uh-oh…my flashlight was not where I left it.  I searched, but didn’t want to wake anybody and I was kind of short on time, so after a couple of very frustrating minutes I decided to do without the flashlight. 

Our sneakers (yeah – instead of boots) were just outside the tent, so I got them on, and stood.  It was crazy dark.  I could see nothing.  Nothing.   It must have been a new moon.  You know that expression about not being able to see your hand in front of your face?   I tried it and saw nothing.  It was like standing in a closet.

I had two choices.   Walk toward the left, trying to remember where the other tents were, to work my way to good area to pee.   Upside: away from the tents.   Downside: afraid I’d get lost.  Choice two, pee in proximity to the tent.  Upside: I wouldn’t get lost.  Downside: what If Mr. K. awakened?

I took the second option.  I felt for the corner line of the rain fly on the tent, and followed it with my hand down to the stake, then jammed my left heel against it.  That was as far from the tent as I dared go.  I started taking care of business.  In the silence it was like Niagara Falls hitting the forest floor.  Mr. K.’s feet could not have been more than three or four feet away from where I was. 

Then, immediately in front of me, I heard (and felt) the very slow footfalls of hooves moving from my right to my left.  I had never seen a moose, but I knew there was no way this was anything else.  I could feel the impact of the steps.  Deer aren’t slow and their steps don’t resonate through the soil like that.   It was so close I could have reached out and touched it, but so dark I never once saw it.  So there I stood, every hair on my body standing straight up, still peeing, terrified I would awaken Mr. K., with a moose walking slowly from right to left past me, with me splashing pee all over its feet.

It walked off, I finished up, and that was that.  My memory is that I did not tell anybody about it the next morning.  Mr. K. was not a man to fear, quite the opposite, he was a man I respected and revered every bit as much as my own father.  There is a little brass plaque in his honor at the Park’s visitor Centre.  But when you pee right next to a guys’ tent, you have to expect he’d have something to say about it.

I always figured the moose was a female.  In August a male would have given me a face full of antler.

It took me a good fifteen years to realize there were other ways this could have turned out.  What if I had located my flashlight?  I would have stood up, shone the flashlight in that direction, and illuminated a moose.  Who knows what the moose’s reaction would have been in terms of fight or flight, maybe even stumbling over tent cords with me producing such bright light right next to it.  The only certainty is that I would have peed sooner. 

What if I had tried picking my way through the tents to find a suitable peeing area?  I would have walked right into the side of the thing, probably the neck.  Again I would have peed sooner, but who knows what the moose’s reaction would have been? 

Now complicate either of those two possibilities by me waking up Mr. K…..

In 2018, I took my family (along with my daugther’s best friend) on an Algonquin trip.  We took that portage, and while my family had heard that story many times, I kept it a bit of a secret that we were on that very special location until we were standing there.  The place where I fell in love with Algonquin, and the site of the famous moose-peeing incident.

I describe myself as the only living person to have peed on a moose – because I figure anybody else who did so probably got killed doing it.   So there you have it.  My first Algonquin Trip, and my first moose experience, and the reason “MooseWhizzer” is a name.