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The Big Easy (cont.)

The journey begins at one of the most evocatively named lakes in North America: Temagami ("tuh-MAHG-uh-mee"), the perfect eponym for every child's Platonic ideal of summer camp. About 250 miles north of Toronto, up on the 3.5-billion-year-old Precambrian Shield, Temagami is a big lake, with 300 miles of shoreline, 50,000 surface acres, 1,200 islands, and disconcertingly at first, hundreds of summer cottages.

The cottages are the giveaway: The main body of Temagami is not wilderness. There's electricity here, and ski boats, and floatplanes. But Temagami is also a lake with long arms—seven of them—and each limb has an outlet that leads to another significantly less developed lake. And another after that, and another, and another, and so on, ditto, into peace and quiet and solitude, until empty, primitive campsites open up among towering red and white pines, or beneath granite cliffs, beside the most amazing water you'll ever be privileged to immerse yourself in.

Excuse the hyperbole, but eastern American forest lakes are usually tannin-dark, and these are not. These are sunlit, and of a stunning clarity. They vary subtly in tint—Temagami itself is the deepest blue, the others flashing subliminal hints of green, red, even yellow—but they are always startlingly transparent, drawing the eye, not to mention the unclothed body, into seductive depths.

When I was a kid in Texas, one of my aunts came back from a Canadian vacation babbling about the lake swimming in that mysterious foreign nation. It was like diving into champagne, she said. That descriptive phrase leaped out of my memory the first time I slipped over the side of my canoe and into Lake Temagami's blue, blue waters. The coolness closed around me. Bubbles broke and rippled across the surface. I shut my eyes, sipped, and decided yes, a very fine vintage.

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