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Accent: Paddler finds his port

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Endurance canoeist Mike Ranta credits the late John Zuefle with bringing him to Killarney

 

It’s a midweek day in midwinter, and the village of Killarney feels eerily still, not so much abandoned as battened down.

Its docks, so busy in the summer, now form silent white rows, like muted piano keys. There is one truck in the lot of the Sportsman’s Inn. Otters are probably belly-sliding somewhere — they don’t hibernate — but at the moment there is sadly no sign of this entertaining species.

One block inland, on a sleepy side street, Mike Ranta may seem equally scarce at first, but he’s definitely awake.

“I don’t sleep very much,” he says, after opening the door to a heated garage strewn with wood shavings, strips of bark, and a menagerie of animal mounts that includes a buck and a lynx. (None, it should be noted, were shot by Ranta, who doesn’t mind catching and eating fish, but has never felt good about pulling a trigger.)

“I’m always doing something.”

Today, that includes toiling on a vintage VW Beetle, which he plans to adorn with a Canadian flag and tributes to various local attractions and businesses. As he puts it: “I’m going to Killarney that little car right up.”

He’s also adding to a growing pile of coasters and miniature canoes he’s been carving from wood. Some of the boats are so tiny they would fit in the palm of your hand; others stretch eight inches or more and are etched with black tendrils that evoke climbing plants, or the after-image of a lightning burst.

“I’m getting into fractal burning,” he explains, gesturing to a couple of electrical boxes, and what look like little jumper cables, that apparently deliver the decorative jolt.

With his wild mane of hair and near-manic energy, there is a bit of the mad scientist to Ranta. But he is also a mad paddler and something of an atavist, eschewing technology and embracing the bygone era of the coureur de bois.

When he heads out into the wilderness, he has been known to dine on cattails and dandelions, and to don a hat he fashioned himself out of birchbark.

Those forays into the forest have been frequent for Ranta in recent years, and, in most cases, epic.

In 2014 he paddled and portaged the breadth of Canada, from the Pacific to the Northumberland Strait, along with canine co-traveller Spitzii. Unsatisfied with that feat — he had hoped to go a couple hundred kilometres further — he set out again in 2016, this time canoeing from Vancouver to Cape Breton Island.

The first sea-to-sea haul — 7,500 kms over 214 days — already qualified as a solo paddling first. The next, which Ranta undertook in honour of military veterans, eclipsed his own standard.

He went farther, and faster, reaching Dominion Beach on Cape Breton — about 20 kms east of Sydney — in 200 days.

 

A canoeing companion

While paddling, Spitzii often curls up on the covered bow of Ranta’s craft, or stands erect, nose thrust forward, like a furry figurehead.

Today the purebred Finnish spitz, nearly 10, is snoozing in a cushiony recliner. Until the treats come out, that is, at which point his insistent bark gives you a sense of what various wild beasts in the range of Ranta’s tent might encounter when the two are traversing the country together.

“On the 2016 trip, we saw 18 bears and two mountain lions,” he says. “That’s where he comes in. When I see a mountain lion or a bear I’m actually really happy, because I love wildlife. Him, not so much.”

The dog, which Ranta rescued as a six-week-old pup and introduced to canoeing a week later — “he couldn’t even look over the edge” — also provides great companionship on the trail.

“It’s the bush, and I’ve never felt alone,” Ranta says. “But I can’t remember a time without the pup. He’s quite the ham, and knows how to get me in a better mood.”

A couple of times Ranta thought he’d lost his pal. Once the dog took off for 24 hours, either chasing wolves or the other way around. “They put the run on him, or he drove them away from me,” he says. “I hollered so much I lost my voice, and fell into a creek bed and hurt my back trying to find him.”

The next time, near Kakabeka Falls, the spitz was gone for several days, and Ranta was beside himself. He got the word out through a phone call and social media and “half of Thunder Bay came out to look for him,” he says. “There are a lot of Finlanders there.”

In each case the hardy little canine — the Canadian Finnish Spitz Club’s choice for ambassador of the year in 2017, by the way — reappeared unscathed.

The scare that really welded the two together, almost literally, came in 2014 on the Winnipeg River when they scrambled ashore in a microburst, but not in time to escape harm. Both were indirectly struck by lightning.

“It fried my camera and took me right off my feet,” says Ranta. “When I came to, I couldn’t see out of one eye, but my first concern was for him. He yelped and took off running. I found him behind a rock, shaking.”

Since that zapping, Ranta says he’s lived with synesthesia, a kind of blending of the senses that creates odd, vivid associations. “If I hear somebody sneeze, I taste mint,” he says. “With the number 8, I taste wild strawberries.”

It also causes insomnia and restlessness, which can be a source of frustration but often supplies him with “a unique energy and strength.”

He says he once paddled for 47 hours non-stop, and he doesn’t seem to have any trouble hefting the seven-pound beast of a blade, inlaid with copper, that he built for himself. “I can go for two days with that.”

Now that it’s winter, he’s finding other ways to expend energy and fill his sleepless hours.

“I take Spitzii for a run, I tinker, I carve,” he says.

And of course sometimes he fires up the fractal burning gear and sears the sides of his little carved boats until they look like they’ve burst a few capillaries or survived a hairy ride through the heavens.

 

Bonding with Johnny Z

The journey that brought the 46-year-old Ranta, a native of Atikokan, to Killarney is both logical and kind of magical.

He landed in the village this fall, on his birthday, after crazy weather on Lake Superior interrupted a canoe odyssey that began in Bella Coola.

The seed was planted much earlier, however, during his first big expedition in 2011, when he set out from Rocky Mountain House for Montreal.

Ranta says he had done lots of paddling and camping prior to this, in the ample canoe country around Atikokan, but was inspired to undertake the longer trip by a couple of mentors.

“There were two old guys in my hometown, Don and Joe Meany, who did Rocky Mountain House to Montreal in 1967 with the Ontario team (in a canoe race to mark Canada’s centennial),” he says.

Ranta was also trying to follow a healthier path and outgrow his badass (his word) reputation.

“I wasn’t a good person,” he says bluntly. “Drinking, drugs, all kinds of juvenile stuff. I spent my 21st birthday behind bars.”

He took up boxing, but that led to scraps outside the ring. And seven charges of assault.

“I was just kind of a wild child and got mixed up with the wrong people,” he says. “I came to a crossroads of where I was going in life, and decided to make a change. That shocked a lot of people.”

He shed 55 pounds on that first major canoe trip “and felt great,” he says. He also survived — and fell in love with — the north shore of Lake Superior. “Once I did that, I got the bug in me.”

The same trip introduced him to Killarney, and a man who would become a huge influence and great friend.

“I got windbound here for three days and ended up spending a lot of time with John Zuefle,” he says. “He was just such an amazing guy, the kind of guy every Canadian wanted to be.”

About 90 at the time, Zuefle was a Second World War veteran and former manager of the silica quarry on Badgeley Island. Before that, he had coincidentally lived and worked in Ranta’s hometown, where he founded the Iron Range Boxing Club.

“He was a legend back home,” says Ranta. “He had a 39-0 record as Canadian western champion, no knockouts, no losses. I knew about him but didn’t meet him until I got to Killarney in 2011.”

The two hit it off, drinking together, swapping stories, playing cribbage and reciting poetry — the latter being a particular skill of Zuefle’s. “He could rattle off all of Robert Service’s Sam McGee,” says Ranta. “He insisted I stay with him, and he taught me about how to learn from your mistakes and show compassion. I’d never had a grandfather, and Johnny Z was that guy for me.”

The two stayed in regular contact afterwards, and when Ranta began to feel less sure about his life in Atikokan, it was Zuefle who encouraged him to move to Killarney.

“I felt like I didn’t fit in anymore,” says Ranta. Zuefle referenced the Robert Service poem The Men Who Don’t Fit In — another one he knew by heart — and reassured him: “Don’t worry about it, move to Killarney, there are lots of those kind of guys here.”

Sadly, just a couple of months after Ranta made the village his home this past fall, Zuefle was found dead, shockingly the victim of an apparent slaying. A woman three decades his junior, who had been staying with him, has been charged with second-degree murder.

“Losing John was heartbreaking,” Ranta says. “I thought I was going to spend the next four years hanging out with him (at which point Zuefle would have been about 100). But it was an honour just to know him, and I learned so much.”

 

The giant paddle project

While Ranta inclines toward mini canoes in his carving work — and a Beetle when it comes to cars — he does have a bigger woodworking project in mind.

In fact, it will be the largest of its kind, anywhere, once complete.

“In April, I am going to start building the world’s biggest paddle in Killarney,” he says. “It will be 80 feet, and will take nine months to build.”

He says the paddle will be built in 15-foot sections out of 8-by-8, laminated beams.

He’s already created a model, on a scale of 1”:1’, which is big enough. It’s taller than Ranta, and heavier than his seven-pound copper-enhanced paddle.

The canoeist/craftsman says he originally wanted to build it in Atikokan, but the reception there wasn’t as enthusiastic as he’d hoped. Killarney welcomes the addition to the landscape, he says, and he plans to honour the village, too, by raising the giant paddle in conjunction with the community’s 200th birthday.

The mega paddle will have a hollow core, allowing for a time capsule to be placed inside. And it will honour Second World War veterans — like Zuefle, who served, he says, as a sniper in the special forces — and be prominently displayed in the village.

“This is a tourist town, so people understand,” he says. “Everyone has been so kind to me, and it’s such a feel-good place, with room to explore. It’s a good spot for a fresh start and to hub myself out of.”

He also loves that it’s a town rooted in the fur trade era, when voyageurs passed through annually and goods were exchanged at its trading post. The original name for the community means “canoe passage” in Ojibwe.

“The builders of our nation walked on these very rocks,” says Ranta, who has a trace of Ojibwe blood himself. He often quips that he’s one part Finn, one part French and one part Ojibwe, “and it takes a man and a half to paddle across the country.”

Ranta spent some time this fall working aboard a Herbert Fisheries boat, which took him out of his comfort zone, given the trawler braved heavier seas on Lake Huron than he is used to attempting in his 18-foot canoe.

“It’s different with those big rollers on the go,” he says. “You get off the boat and feel like you’re still on it. It took me a week to get used to that.”

He’s dealing with a few nagging injuries from last year’s journey — including a shin splint that developed while trailering his canoe by foot across 880 kms of B.C. roads, and an ankle strain incurred on the Height of Land portage in the Boundary Waters area near his Atikokan home.

Come summer, though, he’ll be back in a canoe, with Sudbury judge Stephen O’Neill as a travelling companion, for a six-week trip from Fort McMurray to Cumberland House — including a trek over the infamous, 12-mile Methye Portage.

It’s the first of a three-part journey the two plan to complete over as many years, with the final destination being Tuktoyaktuk.

Meanwhile, Spitzii is eager to stretch his legs, so Ranta leashes him up, cinches a Canada 150 bandana around his neck, and takes him for a stroll to the end of Commissioner Street.

Here, at the entrance to Killarney Mountain Lodge, a giant inukshuk has taken shape, perhaps adding more motivation for that trip to the Arctic.

The dog may be nearing 10, but Ranta is optimistic he’ll be in the bow when he pulls ashore in Tuktoyaktuk in 2020.

“I think he’s got another trip or two in him,” he says.

Read Accent every Saturday in The Sudbury Star.

jmoodie@postmedia.com 

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