Disappointment River

by Brian Castner

  The frenetic pace continued upon arrival at the Old Establishment, where there was significant work to do. Every spring, when the ice broke and the Peace River swelled with runoff from the mountains, Pond’s creaking old fort flooded, water rising through the floorboards and up to the windowsills. Plus, the Cree had become unreliable traders; many were off to war. So to entice more Chipewyan to trade, Alexander ordered a new post built, to be named for their people, and he sent Roderic forty miles north, to the Lake of the Hills, to oversee construction.

  Roderic chose a “conspicuous projection” on the south shore, “which appeared in the shape of a person with her arms extended, the palms forming as if it were a point.” He established a fishery, which Alexander found a “very cold branch of business,” sending a pair of mittens to Roderic in sympathy. But his cousin wouldn’t use them. Roderic “visited six nets three times a day from under the ice,” but “no mittens can be used during that serious operation,” because he had to disentangle the fish from the nets while they were still underwater, or else everything froze stiff.

  Under Roderic’s care, the new Fort Chipewyan became a place of comfort and civility. They dug furrows for turnips and parsnips and rutabagas; Pond had the best kitchen garden in the backcountry, everyone said, and so the vegetables were easily transferred. They put glass in the windows and stored maple syrup to flavor the white fish, and Roderic gathered dozens of books to create the largest library in a thousand miles. Tristram Shandy, the Perpetual Almanack to count the days, Greek classics—the fort became known as “the Athens of the North.”

  At Christmastime, Alexander trudged the forty miles through the snow for a glass of wine and dinner with Roderic. It was company, a break from the loneliness, a chance to speak one’s native tongue, bourgeois always at a distance from the voyageurs and even one’s à la façon du pays wife. They toasted the new endeavor, and Alexander shared one final bit of good news, essential for his expedition.

  That fall, Awgeenah and seven of his warriors stopped at the Old Establishment. He and the Scot had come to a mutual understanding of the benefit of their partnership. The two men had grown as close as eighteenth-century manners allowed; alone among traders, Alexander called him Nestabeck. The Chipewyan was in a good mood, said he was heading to Slave Lake to collect debts and furs from the Red Knives. They had parted with promises to meet for trade soon.

  And more. Awgeenah agreed to bring several wives and hunters to Fort Chipewyan in the spring, to accompany Alexander through the Northwest Passage. Just as Awgeenah had seen Matonabbee escort Hearne to the Far Off Metal River almost two decades before, the English Chief would serve as Mackenzie’s guide, his protector, his translator, his partner.

  There was only one difference, and an important one.

  Matonabbee knew the way to the copper mines, but Awgeenah had never yet traveled the great river to the sun.

  — 12 —

  ALL IT TAKES IS TIME, 2016

  I began serious planning for my own journey six months out. I found a book online, The Mackenzie River Guide, written by Michelle Swallow. It was self-published, and about a decade old, but its mere existence meant I wasn’t crazy to attempt this trip. Some sections seemed a massive construction site, other stretches country even wilder and less populated than in 1789. Michelle wrote that the villages were safe and the people friendly, and the book was filled with photographs and maps and telephone numbers for grocery stores. It displayed confidence on every page.

  It also provided a mileage chart and timeline, the rough number of days from town to town. I counted: only nine settlements total along the route. Some sounded welcoming, like Fort Good Hope, and some were unpronounceable, like Tsiigehtchic. As a daily planning factor—knowing with sun and strong current I could do more, but during storms and wind I’d be stuck—I made a goal of thirty miles. A six-week trip. Taking into consideration daylight, bugs, temperature, and the dry summer, June 22 seemed the best day to start, just after the solstice. I’d be at 61 degrees latitude, or, as the sun sees it because of the 23-degree tilt of the earth, 84 degrees up the globe, almost to the top. Hard to get more light, and I’d only be climbing higher from there.

  I told family and friends about the trip, but they didn’t share my irrational fear of falling from a great height. They wanted to talk about bears, and all asked the same two questions: Are you going alone, and are you taking a gun?

  The answer to both was no. Every kind of bear would be up there—black, brown, grizzly, even a chance of polar at the end—but the best defense is avoidance. Never take food in the tent; don’t sleep where you cook: I planned to always paddle for an hour after dinner each night, to a clean campsite. If a bear did get too curious, we’d use bear spray, a kind of concentrated mace, or a bear banger, a pen flare that shoots a blank shotgun shell. Taking a gun would change the tenor of the trip. I wanted to meet people without a sidearm and not worry about a rifle left in the canoe.

  Far more challenging than leaving a gun at home was finding someone to go with me. Practical concerns abounded. Safety, foremost, in case of sickness, injury, catastrophe. Plus I’d need a canoe to carry so much gear, rather than a solo kayak, and they are much easier to navigate with a second paddler. There were psychological reasons too; I wanted to paddle the whole river, not experiment on myself to see if I could spend two months alone.

  But as I asked friends to join me, I quickly discovered that people with real jobs have much less flexibility to take so much time off. No one had a whole summer to devote, so I came up with a plan to divide the trip into quarters, ask four friends to each join me on a leg; they would be like runners in a relay race and pass me as the baton.

  Four men signed on. David Chrisinger, a bearded writer from Wisconsin. Jeremy Howard Beck, the composer of the opera adaptation of my first book. Landon Phillips, an old military buddy from Iraq; while I led a bomb squad in Kirkuk, he did the same in Baghdad. And Anthony Sennhenn, another fellow bomb tech, whom everyone calls Senny. Only Senny had thoughts on bears, as he’d do the last leg with me above the Arctic Circle.

  “If I get my throat slashed by a motherfucking polar bear, promise me you’ll put that on my grave,” he said. “Just like that. ‘Here lies Senny. He had his throat ripped out by a motherfucking polar bear, bitches.’ That would be badass.”

  We decided the logistics would go like this: I’d drive up through Canada and rent a canoe in Hay River, a small town on the south shore of Great Slave Lake. David would fly in and paddle the first leg to Fort Simpson, where he’d fly out and Jeremy would fly in. The pattern would repeat for Landon and Senny, switching at Tulita and Fort Good Hope, respectively. Senny would fly out of Inuvik, the last town on the river, where I’d pick up my truck; there is a barge that delivers freight from Hay River to Inuvik twice a summer. Then I could drop my canoe on the barge for shipment back to the rental shop and drive home unencumbered.

  This plan was suggested to me by a man named Doug Swallow, who happens to be Michelle’s father. Doug runs a small company that ships medical and survival supplies through the northwest Arctic, and he agreed to rent me the canoe. I asked for the longest one he had, for the sake of cargo space, steadiness, and speed; a boat’s maximum possible velocity is governed by the length of the hull.

  I had a timeline, teammates, and a canoe. Now I needed gear. For inspiration, I checked a favorite battered paperback on my shelf, Nicholas Crane’s Clear Waters Rising. Crane walked from Cape Finisterre, on the northwestern Spanish coast, to Istanbul, always keeping to the mountains. The Cantabrians, Pyrenees, Cévennes, Alps, Carpathians, Balkans. One portion of the book stuck with me in particular: Crane’s indulgence in taking four socks. His friends proposed that three would be sufficient; two to wear, one sock to wash and dry each day. But Crane insists on four, so he can use the spare set as mittens if required.

  I intended no such monasticism. I was renting a giant canoe so I could take almost any gear I wanted. And I would use an old military planning rul
e of thumb: two is one and one is none. Everything critical would have a spare.

  As I reread Crane before my trip, however, the rest of his choices seemed either overly British—he considered an umbrella essential—or downright irresponsible. The first night of his trek, he unrolls his cotton sleeping bag and discovers it “perforated with no fewer than twenty-four holes.” He hadn’t bothered to check it before leaving. In contrast, Crane takes much more care choosing a hat, a Herbert Johnson trilby, à la Indiana Jones. But, I thought, didn’t Harrison Ford have to staple that fedora to his head to keep it from flying off? I was much more practical and chose a Tilley hat. Polyester, not felt. Breathable. Keeps the sun and rain off, a strap to secure it on one’s head. I tried it on at the store and looked in the mirror, and I realized I had reached an age when wearing such a hat was no longer ironic. I was not playing dress up, impersonating my father. I am a father, a middle-aged man in a brimmed hat.

  I trusted the Internet, rather than Crane, for my other gear recommendations. New inflatable sleeping pads and bedrolls. A gravity-powered water filtration system. A curved Hudson Bay–style Snow & Nealley ax, handmade in Maine. Three-panel solar array and battery pack. Old-school paper topographic maps of the entire route. A squat Hilleberg tent, shaped like a bunker and rated for the hurricane winds of the Himalaya; before the trip, my youngest son and I tested the tent in the backyard, so he could imagine where I was during our long time apart. Another military friend lent me his DeLorme inReach: a GPS and mapping device that also sends texts and drops virtual bread crumbs, so friends and family could follow my progress online at home. I didn’t know what cooking fuel would be available for purchase in the towns we would pass through, so I brought two stoves, one that ran on white gas, and another that professed to run on anything, including diesel. Dr. Bronner’s biodegradable soap to take the occasional bath in the river and wash clothes. A kayak paddle that breaks in half, as an emergency backup. A rechargeable headlamp. DEET and sunscreen. An old pair of fireman’s boots as improvised waders. Head net and bug shirt. Second pop-up tent, for emergencies. A throw bag of rope for rescues, also usable as a clothesline. Rain gear and parka, for extreme cold. “It will snow on one of you,” I told my paddle mates, “I just don’t know which one.” A collapsible sail, from WindPaddle in Hood River, Oregon, a very breezy place along the Columbia River. In a nod to Crane, who kept all of his papers in a plastic bag he called the Office, I brought a waterproof case for my computer and electronics and gave it the same name. I also had a small dry bag we called the Wallet, for passports and money, and a larger bag for the cooking gear that Senny eventually named the Kitchen.

  For meals, I packed simply, for minimal preparation. Oatmeal and tea is my old camping standby for breakfast, and bagels and peanut butter, plus fruit, for lunch. To add extra calories, I also packed honey and chocolate and bars of pemmican. It was sold by a Sioux company from Pine Ridge in South Dakota and still contained bison meat and cranberries, though presumably less hair and shit than the traditional blend.

  Variety would come at dinner; I wanted something besides the standard dehydrated meals I bought in sporting goods stores. I discovered a company called Happy Yak, in Quebec, that sold French cooking in small packets. I bought a few and fed them to my children for lunch one weekend. Mushroom Risotto, Pad Thai, Vegetarian Chili, Seafood Delight. They were excellent, and I bought ninety, enough for forty-five days of camping. It seemed appropriate, following the voyageurs, to be a pork eater and get my food from Quebec.

  But as June approached, and the practical considerations were largely set, a very specific fear began to intrude.

  I had resolved to make it to the Arctic Ocean, cup my hands in the water, and drink the salt. And since I had first looked at a topo map, one section of the trip had given me pause. The last two hundred miles, navigating the delta and then the open-water crossing all the way to Garry Island, the last of the barrier islands. Out into the Arctic Ocean, in a canoe.

  The rest of the twelve-hundred-mile trip was daunting, but this last section had the potential for disaster. Lost in the labyrinth of the delta, or capsized in ocean swells, or both.

  I needed a rescue plan, so I spoke on the phone with Kylik Kisoun, an Inuvialuit guide in Inuvik. He and his uncle owned a small charter boat company, and Doug Swallow said no one knew the delta like the Kisouns. For a hefty fee—the cost of gasoline in Inuvik is obscene, over eight dollars a gallon—they agreed to retrieve Senny and me, once we reached our destination.

  But I still felt uneasy, thinking I could not have clearly communicated where I intended to go, if Kylik had willingly signed up for the job.

  “I want to make it all the way to Garry Island,” I said again. “Is that crazy?”

  “No, you can do it,” he said. “All it takes is time, right? You can get anywhere if you have the time.”

  “And you’re sure your boat will make it out there?” I said. “And it can fit my canoe and all my gear and…”

  “Listen, I get it, I get it,” Kylik said, laughing. “But don’t worry, we run the delta all the time.” And then he paused a moment, before making this promise.

  “If you can make it out there, we’ll come get you.”

  * * *

  ————

  When the appointed day finally arrived, I got in my truck, alone with a load of expedition supplies, and drove across the Niagara River, up along the east and north rim of Lake Huron, around Lake Superior, past the Grand Portage, and into the boreal forest.

  In mere hours and days, I logged weeks of voyageur travel. Over Grand Portage’s height of land, separating the Atlantic watershed from the Arctic, northern plant species start to creep in. Less grass or soft moss, more sickly green lichen, the color of a child about to vomit. It was the start of the muskeg, the nefarious northern swamp. The ground was neither rock nor dirt nor plant nor dead, but rather a combination of all those, too wet to walk on and too dry to paddle through, impossible to traverse in summer.

  On the drive across central Manitoba and Saskatchewan, up through northern Alberta, I avoided the main Trans-Canada Highway and stayed on the small two-lane roads, well maintained but lonesome. Canada is drunk on its northern mystique. On billboards as I entered towns: “The Spirit of the North,” “North Woods,” “Northern Frontier,” “True North,” “Last North,” “Ultimate North,” “Crown of the North.” The award for truth in advertising went to “Gateway to the North,” another way of saying “we know you’re just passing through.”

  I found white resource towns, like Flin Flon, a copper mine perched on a bronzed granite cap, and neglected indigenous towns, like Grand Rapids, home of unemployed men and dirt paths and cages on every window. Between outposts, an abstract painter’s tableau: against the uniform canvas of spruce—short or tall, swampy or burned out, always spruce—the roads seemed just a painted accent streak, the color of the local crushed stone. Salt white near The Pas, purple in Cranberry Portage.

  In Manitoba, I pulled over on the side of the road at a random spot to take a piss, no towns for hours. The paved road was built on a raised man-made gravel berm, and I walked down the ramp to the tree line. The ditch was full of soda cans and Tostitos bags, and the trash continued well into the forest, as far as I could see. Mosquitoes rose from small pools of standing water and attacked me as I pissed, so I quickly returned to the truck. I found it engulfed in giant flies, undeterred by the wind, banging themselves into the glass and door panels. I snuck into the driver’s seat, slammed the door, chased down four flies that followed me in, and smeared them against the windows. They were as big as the main digit of my thumb, and when I pushed on them to kill them, their bodies cracked and the meat split under my fingers, as if I had smeared a fat green grape across the kitchen table.

  Except to pump gas, I saw almost no one for days. My windshield was a murder wall, the stuff of nightmares for giant flies. I was driving 140 kilometers an hour but felt hemmed in. No view, no perspective, all day an identi
cal sight: only the slightest ripple in the flat spruce monoculture, days upon days unchanging.

  How did they build these roads, have the heart to work in such a vast land? Early America, full of colonists, was comparatively compact, and the forest fell away as they traveled inland. Americans could tame their wilderness because they could see it. Man is the master of all he surveys. Americans surveyed open plains from horseback. The peddlers from Montreal surveyed impenetrable forest from their canoes.

  No wonder Canadians seem to be natural socialists and praise collective effort, I thought. Their land is too big, they too few. On the drive through rural towns, I saw statues of voyageurs, lumberjacks, miners, hockey players. All nameless, faces a composite. I thought of something a Canadian historian named Douglas Hunter told me as I researched my trip.

  “Down south, you guys grab guns and play Cowboys and Indians,” he said. “But up here, we play Cowboys with Indians.” If they didn’t work together, they’d die.

  At the Alberta border, oil derricks and hammer-headed pumps and huge yellow hazard signs shaped like moose, big enough to walk into the road themselves. Lloydminster, boomtown of the booming sands, hosts every corporate chain restaurant and retail big box on a single highway through town. In one parking lot, black ten-thousand-gallon water tanks were lined up like soup cans on a grocery store shelf, a banner draped in front. “In Stock!” it said helpfully.