Disappointment River

by Brian Castner

  * * *

  ————

  I asked Leif Anderson and John Blyth, members of the Fort Smith Paddling Club, to take me out on the river, so I had no one to blame but myself.

  As a lover of whitewater, I knew the Slave’s reputation—incredible volume, world-class rapids—and the chance to kayak even a section would be like getting to play catch in Yankee Stadium. So I found Leif on Facebook, and he said that if I made it up to Fort Smith, he and John would show me around.

  There was no cell service on the way to Fort Smith. On my phone’s useless green blur of a map, the dirt road looked like a paper cut on a whale. Google Maps’ coverage of the Northwest Territories—an area the size of California, Texas, and Montana combined—is primarily low-def, feeding the impression most southerners have of this rocky socket of Arctic wilderness: it’s big and it’s empty.

  Big, yes. But empty, not quite. Fort Smith proved to be a densely built town of tidy houses and government offices, home to twenty-five hundred people, roughly half indigenous. I arrived on the eve of Aboriginal Day. Smoke rose from the cookout at the fire circle, and volunteers set up white tents and teepees for the men to play Hand Games, a popular traditional Dene guessing game. I stopped at a convenience store to buy beer, the housewarming gift for many a paddle club, but I discovered only overpriced soda for sale. I had heard that some villages in the north were dry, so I asked the clerk at the counter.

  “This might sound like an ignorant question,” I said, “but do you guys not sell alcohol?”

  “Not this time of night,” he said. “We can only sell beer a few hours in the afternoon. Now, this may sound a little strange to you, from outside, but there are bootleggers if you really need it.”

  “How much?” I asked, mostly curious.

  He shrugged. “Hundred bucks a case?”

  I did not really need it, so I bought iced tea instead.

  Driving around town, I found a public park on a bluff above the river and walked down to the water.

  The Slave River is immense, as wide as five normal rivers, and crisscrossed with pour-overs and channels. It reminded me of the rapids above Niagara Falls, but many times wider. The Slave drains northern British Columbia, half of Alberta, and upper Saskatchewan, and the rapids at Fort Smith are formed where a northern quadrant of the Canadian Shield meets the tar sands. Flocks of white pelicans, the northernmost breeding colony on the continent, perched on rocks or floated in eddies, serene among the boil.

  Sand and granite, gulf coast seabirds amid black spruce, it was all juxtaposed and spectacular. My mind reeled at the view.

  Leif had warned me that he and John would be out on the river with a visiting film crew all day, recording their extreme-sport flips and tricks in the waves, so I hiked back up the ridge and decided to find a place to sleep for the night. The municipal campground was on the edge of town, and at the park office the same massive flies I had seen in Manitoba swarmed the windows and door frame, looking for a way in.

  “Aren’t the bulldogs awful,” said the middle-aged woman who opened the door for me and then quickly shut it.

  “Bulldogs?” I asked.

  “The flies. Oh, they’re bad!” she said, as she crushed one that had crawled between the screen and the windowpane. The bulldog popped, and the guts dripped down the glass.

  She told me her name was Toni Heron and then offered me a cup of coffee. She and her husband, Peanuts, run the campground in the summer but return to the land in winter to hunt caribou, she said. Toni spoke with an indigenous lilt, lightening the end of each sentence. She asked what I was doing in Fort Smith, and I said I was going out on the river with Leif the next day.

  “Oh, Leif. Everyone knows Leif,” she said. “He lives in the yellow house. It looks like his hair. And he organizes the rafting festival every summer.”

  “Actually, I’m just here the night,” I said. “After the Slave, I’m going to paddle the entire Mackenzie River.” I caught myself. “Or, I’m sorry, do you prefer to call it the Deh Cho?”

  “Some elders, they say Deh Cho. Everyone else says Mackenzie. Me, I’d never do the river,” she said, noting that she was Chipewyan. She pronounced it “CHIP-you-on,” revealing I had been saying it wrong in my head for months, reading my musty history books about Awgeenah. This gave me an opening to ask a question that had been on my mind.

  “Is there a respectful way to ask someone I meet on the river what band or tribe they belong to?” I asked. “I don’t want to be rude, but I’m curious.”

  Toni made a little face, but answered kindly.

  “Well, I wouldn’t ask like that,” she said. “I’d ask them what language they speak. And if they say they speak Slavey, then you know, well, they’re Slavey.”

  “You can always tell the Eskimo,” volunteered Peanuts, from the other side of the room. He had a round belly and a thin mustache. “Indians and Eskimos hate each other. They formed their own territory a few years ago. It’s like the Berlin Wall.”

  “And now the Slavey don’t want to be called Slavey, I just read, because they aren’t Slaves,” Toni said. “I can’t keep up.”

  Many First Nations are seeking to regain their identity this way, because the common names for many peoples are not their own name but rather the name given by the interpreter working for the European fur trader upon first encounter. It was the Cree who named the Slavey, and “Chipewyan” is a Cree word as well, for “pointed skins,” the tail of the shirt worn by those people hundreds of years before.

  Peanuts wanted to know more about my Mackenzie trip and made sure I had a whistle, to let any bears know I’m nearby. He said that because it’s been so warm in the winters lately—“it used to be minus forty-five, but now it’s only minus twenty-five”—the bears come out of hibernation sooner, which makes them grumpy.

  “They don’t sleep as long,” Peanuts said. “They wake up fat, instead of skinny. We can’t trust them anymore. You can’t trust a fat black bear when he hasn’t slept.”

  “Not to scare you,” Toni said, “but a bear got a guy and they didn’t find his remains for years. Bear dragged him away.”

  When I left, Toni made sure I took her bannock recipe, to cook the traditional biscuits on my journey, and then she and Peanuts wished me luck.

  In the morning, I met up with Leif and John. Toni gave me directions to the house: on the main road, just east of Paddle Street and Portage Avenue. Right away, I could tell I was in the right place. The yard was full of racks of kayaks, sheds stacked with paddles and vests. It let off a pitch-perfect vibe, bright yellow siding and purple paint along the door frames, like Disneyland for paddlers.

  Leif does match the house, as Toni said. He is a giant blond Viking with a raging mullet haircut. He’s also a member of the U.S. Freestyle Kayak team and travels all the way from Idaho every summer to train. John, in contrast, is small and dark, with good looks that I’d call all-American if he weren’t Canadian, born and bred in the north. In the videos I found of him online, John has long dreadlocks, but he had recently lopped them off; Leif picked on him for looking respectable. Like a ski-bum kid who doesn’t know his good fortune to grow up in Vail or Snowbird, John learned to kayak on the Slave and has no need to travel like Leif.

  Inside the yellow house I found tropical plants, open bags of potato chips on the counter, fresh dark coffee, but only a few beers in the fridge. There was a hole, with a decorative iron grate, through the ceiling of the ground level to let heat pass from the wooden stove. People came and went, barefoot on the wooden floors. A few were in town for the annual Summer Solstice Paddle, planning to kayak in the bright midnight. They all told me stories about rivers, rivers to run and rivers that have been run. This is how you run the Ottawa at full flood. This is how you descend the Yukon. This is how you skip the floatplane ride and portage to the Nahanni, the Grand Canyon of the Arctic.

  One stout German man, his fingers the thick sausages of a construction worker, had become a Canadian citizen just for th
e canoeing. He was back from a trip with his wife on the William River, a remote winding waterway that cuts through the sand dunes of northern Saskatchewan and deltas into Lake Athabasca.

  “We had portaged the first four rapids, all Class IV,” he said, “but my wife, she wanted to run the last rapid, near the end of the trip. We entered on a good line but then got too high on the wave. We were sideways and I was looking down at the water and I knew we were going to go over.” As he talked, he laid out the geography of the wave with his hands.

  “My wife is in the nose,” he continued. “I knew we were done. And I said to her, ‘This is the end!’ But then she reached out with her paddle. One huge draw stroke and she pulled our nose down and we made it through.”

  He paused.

  “That’s love,” he said, and smiled.

  “You’re going to dig the Mackenzie,” John said to me.

  “I did it,” said the German man.

  “Lots of people do it, just take a few months and go,” John said.

  “Really, lots?” I asked.

  “A few dozen people a year, I bet.”

  “That’s a lot of people?”

  “Well, this is the Northwest Territories,” John said.

  This place, I thought, it’s defined by the absence of humans. So much space, but only forty thousand residents total.

  “There are so many amazing people up here,” another paddler said, “you’re not even going to write about the Mackenzie River in your book. You’re just going to write about all the people you meet.”

  “I went to Alaska once,” John said, “and I thought it would be like the N.W.T., but it’s not. In Alaska, you have hippies and rednecks and Indians, and everyone fights. Hippies have money, it causes problems. Here, we just have rednecks and Indians. We have a bush code. Be generous, don’t steal. It’s more harmonious.”

  * * *

  ————

  After I officially joined the paddle club—for insurance reasons, to hold them harmless in case I died—Leif and John discussed which of the four main rapids to do for my orientation tour. Even today, the final cataract is still known as the Rapids of the Drowned.

  “They actually aren’t that bad,” said Leif. “Just a small feature in a channel on river right. We figure that’s where they got caught. You could get in trouble, if you don’t know it’s coming. Cassette is actually the worst rapid.”

  The best choice for me, John and Leif agreed, was the Mountain Rapid. I borrowed a sit-on-top self-bailing plastic kayak from the club, grabbed my gear, and we loaded into John’s beat-up truck for the short drive to water. We parked on a sandy dune overlooking the river and stripped to our skivvies to put on dry suits. We had to work fast, the bulldogs and mosquitoes swarming as cotton balls and pollen clouded the air. An orgy of life in summer. Every tree was mating with every other tree, and every bug mounting every other bug, in the brief time they had.

  Once dressed, we threw our boats over our shoulders for the hike down to the water. Give us boards instead of kayaks, and we could have been getting ready to surf at the beach.

  The small cove at the bottom of the hill was piled with driftwood, enough for Pond’s or Cook’s reports. Leif hopped from log to log, toting his fiberglass kayak. He shuffled out each progressively skinnier trunk as if he were on a balance beam, surprisingly agile for such a big man, and after reaching the farthest log, he sat down and put on his kayak as he would a pair of pants.

  I followed, with less grace. Out in the water, the river was full of wood, blown out of the Embarras Portage upstream, record rains on the Peace River. The water was brown with mud, and deadheads hung heavy, just below the surface, and bumped against the underside of my kayak as I paddled, as if the drowned or the blue men of the Minch were knocking on the door, asking to be let back in.

  “I’m sorry, but to get to the rapid, we have a very boring flat-water paddle ahead of us,” Leif warned. It took almost an hour to cross the river, to reach the whitewater line that Leif thought I could handle. The current was so strong we had to angle our kayak noses upstream, a technique called ferrying. On our way, we passed rust-colored granite islands, and while I could hear the roar of the river, I could see nothing downstream, so precarious the drop that the whitewater was hidden below the horizon line.

  “Think of the Slave as a ski resort,” Leif said, explaining why we were bypassing so many rapids to find a specific one to run. “We’re at the top of the chairlift now, each line is named. We can pick the black diamond run, the double black.”

  “What are we running?” I asked.

  “Sambuca is a solid blue.”

  We floated to the back of an island with a single hardy tree, and the roar ahead of us grew louder and louder. As we portaged our kayaks across the tumbling rock face, suddenly the water fell away on our left. It was a massive flume, a two-story hill of water that swept away whole tree trunks with ease.

  “That’s Sambuca?” I asked.

  “No, that one’s called Molly’s Nipple,” John said. “They used to run this river commercially, with big rafts, and one of the guides named it. Said it looked like his girlfriend’s nipple.”

  Whether it matched Molly, I couldn’t say, but the entrance to the hydraulic was the right basic shape, the squared-off tip of the chute ending in a frothy churn. There was a hole down there on the river bottom. Nothing that entered could escape.

  Leif and John wanted to surf and practice tricks a while, and I played amateur photographer. In whitewater kayaking, “surfing” means to enter a rapid, point the nose of the boat upstream, and paddle forward just enough to stay stationary. The effect is Zen-like, peace found in the tumult due to the focus required, the water pouring in and over and past as you float. Freestyle experts, like Leif and John, skip the meditation and add acrobatics instead, always landing on the same crest of wave.

  As I watched, each man took turns in the thick of it. Leif surfed heavy, nose up, stern plowing the water, as if he were planted on a throne in the midst of the rapid. John surfed light, seemed to skip along the waves like a flat stone. Through it all, the wood kept coming, sometimes whole trees.

  “It’s a bit of a shooting gallery in there,” John said afterward.

  We left Molly’s Nipple to take on Sambuca, named for the producer of that same river guide’s worst hangover. I was nervous after watching Leif and John take on such big water, but I paddled hard all the way into the top of the rapid. Intention, I had learned in my first basic class, is most important in whitewater kayaking. Intention. Hesitancy flips boats. If you want to enter the current, if you want to run the rapid, if you want to eddy out, then do it; not for nothing do kayakers have a reputation for sounding like a pack of Yodas.

  But my book knowledge and enthusiasm far outstrip my actual ability. I’m still in that intermediate phase, where my mind knows what to do but my body reacts half a second too slow, because I am relying on conscious decisions and not instinctual muscle memory.

  In Sambuca, the slalom course came in a blur, and I was swimming upside down in seconds.

  At Flipper—named for its tendency to toss even large twelve-person rafts—I lost my edge after the main wave train and went under once more.

  On my way to the surface, I hit my head again, this time on John’s boat. This knocked him upside down, though he rolled himself back up with ease. I popped like a cork, caromed painfully off a rock, felt myself swept away. A maelstrom crashed on either side. I drank the river. The current bludgeoned me with volume, pulled on every bit of me, opened the waist of my dry pants and filled the legs with heavy sinking water. I was overcome in a deluge, caught in a prairie gale while tornadoes tore up farms all about me.

  The river stripped me. Paddle gone, kayak floating downstream. My helmet was off the back of my head, and the strap choked me around the neck. I couldn’t see, and I put my hand to my face and discovered my prescription sunglasses were gone. They had survived two tours in Iraq but not an afternoon on the Slave.
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  Leif chased and retrieved my boat, while John again helped get me to shore.

  “That was a yard sale,” I said, using the jargon for a particularly ugly swim that scatters gear. I was embarrassed; better I admit the humiliation before John and Leif said so.

  “We’re all in between swims,” John assured me, also a common kayaker saying, and while true it rarely makes the swimmer feel much better.

  Onshore, I emptied my pants of water and tightened the straps on my helmet and vest. I squinted in the sun, and all four limbs shook. I felt as if I had swallowed half the Slave, but my mouth was so dry. More effects of the adrenaline.

  Leif was quiet, and I sensed frustration that he was spending more time rescuing me than running rapids. John offered to guide me back to shore, because even if I was done attempting named rapids, I still had to paddle an hour back across the breadth of the swirling Slave.

  “You’ve got to put on your Slave goggles,” John called out ahead of me. His head was shrouded by a cloud of bulldogs.

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  “Slave goggles. Like beer goggles. Make some really bad decisions. Ignore how big the river is, and just go anyway,” he said, and I followed him across the spinning current.

  I had never experienced a river like this. The boils and eddy fences were so powerful, driven by such volume, that seemingly innocuous flat water proved dangerous. My kayak was constantly tugged in one direction or the other; I jittered keeping my balance. I felt as if the basic laws of hydraulics, in their magnified state on the Slave, were being undone, and I didn’t trust myself with even the most rudimentary moves.

  “Eddies within eddies,” John said, and he laughed.

  When we finally approached the shore, John made a turn upstream. “We need to end on a good note,” he said, and I followed him among the pelicans until we got to the top of a small rapid named Playground.