Disappointment River

by Brian Castner

  Current. We had finally found it. Our moods improved dramatically, and as if on cue the sun broke free.

  The storm and rain of the previous day were forgotten. A breeze stirred from the east, and I unfolded our small round sail and lashed it to the front of the canoe. Sun, wind, sail, current, we surged ahead of the waves with each gust, our prow cutting the water. No more struggling to make three miles per hour, now we charged ahead at eight.

  A feeling had been building in me, since I crossed the 60th parallel into the long summer sun of the Northwest Territories, and in that moment it coalesced. I felt solar powered. I didn’t want to eat or sleep. The continuous daylight was a manic party drug, and I felt as if I could go all day and night.

  We got cocky, pushed past normal dinnertime, and stopped late on one small island, no bigger than a suburban ranch-style house. A few trees on one end hid a tent, but when David and I checked, no one was there. I was cooking spaghetti on the white gas stove when we saw a motorboat approach, our first encounter with anyone out on the land. The old woman in front was bundled in a winter coat, and a man in back ran the outboard motor. They pulled up right to us, staying just off the bank.

  “This one’s for fishing,” the old man said, pointing to the island.

  David and I gave each other a look. Did we hear him right?

  “We’re just having dinner,” I called back.

  “This one’s for fishing,” the man said again. “You go out here. I’ll show you.”

  And he turned his boat around and jetted away to the shore, pointing at trees in the distance.

  “I think he wants us to leave,” David said. Our noodles were almost done cooking.

  “Let’s eat quick and go,” I said.

  When the couple returned, they drove the boat up onto the bank near their tent. There was a lot of frantic movement in the trees, and I eventually figured out they were taking down their shelter.

  “They really don’t want us here,” David said. I had to agree. We cleaned up our supplies and pushed off.

  Michelle’s guidebook said there was a good camping spot at the Kakisa River, a major tributary coming in from the south. Reaching it would require several more hours of paddling, but energized by the sun, we felt we could make it. Plus, history was now on our side; we were about to finally link up with Mackenzie, whose route thus far had tracked the northernmost channel. At the point our travels merged, Mackenzie had found clear sailing for the first time, as did David and I. On the calendar, we were even a few days ahead of him; it was June 23, but Mackenzie didn’t make it through the fog of Great Slave Lake until June 29. The swampy shore provided few immediate options, so we pushed hard, knowing that stopping short a second night wouldn’t get us to Fort Simpson on time.

  Once at the Kakisa, though, no campsite appeared. Only the same marsh, grass, and occasional twisted bushes, no earth above the waterline. It appeared that full trees rose farther inland, so we fought upstream on the Kakisa, but we saw nothing dry enough to call a campsite. After exhausting ourselves paddling against the current, we gave up and drifted out.

  “If the English Chief was here, he’d have thrown Michelle in the river for that,” said David.

  According to the guidebook, the next good spot for camping was at Burnt Point, four hard hours away. It was almost ten o’clock—according to my watch, not the sky that just blazed away—and suddenly I wasn’t sure solar power would see us through. We paddled to the next small point, hoping for something rocky—like Point Roche, which we had so haughtily abandoned the night before—but saw only waterlogged reeds along the shore.

  We were in the heart of Beaver Lake now; the far bank was over five miles away, a ninety-minute open-water paddle. We pressed on, sun slowly sinking lower. My back hurt, legs cramped. Ironically, large hidden rocks rose from the river bottom, scraping the canoe. According to our map, there was one more major point ahead and then a wide bay. Hope rested on that peninsula.

  On our arrival, we chased off seagulls from a bare patch of wet mud and bird shit and soft sticky fledgling feathers. The very tip of the marshy point was just large enough for our tent. David and I looked at each other, and I was so tired I considered it. White goo soaking up through the floor.

  “I’m sorry, David, we can’t,” I said.

  “Oh, thank God,” he said. “If you had said to stop, I would have.”

  Eleven o’clock. We had been paddling for sixteen hours and were four thousand miles from home and had no idea where to stop for the night. Gulls squawked at us, and I got out of the canoe, stood in the two-foot-deep water, stretched my back, and then rolled out the paper topo map. David got out too, held the canoe with one hand.

  “My knees and hips are screaming at me,” he said, and they made popping sounds as he bent over.

  On the topo map, every bit of shore between us and the camping at Burnt Point was labeled “swamp.” But how could we trust the book about Burnt Point anyway? According to her notes, it had been twelve years since she had paddled this way, and the river and water levels had clearly changed. The book was proving as reliable as Mackenzie’s Red Knife guide.

  David started to shake, from head to toe.

  “Are you cold?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said, but his face looked worried. After the sweat of the afternoon, standing in the cool water, hypothermia was a possibility.

  “Let’s keep paddling and warm you up,” I said, as the dad and trained wilderness guide in me kicked in.

  “You know, we might not find anywhere,” David said, and his teeth chattered. “What do we do then?”

  “We keep going,” I said. He was a former college football player; I had gone to war. “We’re tired, but we’ve both been through worse. At least it won’t get dark.”

  We crossed a small inlet. The shore was a continuous thin green line. Waterlogged horsetails. Demoralized, we paddled into a furious midnight sun.

  My thoughts mirrored David’s. There was no reason there had to be somewhere to camp nearby. We weren’t in a designated park; no human had worked to make this piece of wilderness more accessible. It could well be—in fact, it was becoming probable—that there was simply nowhere to stop. We would just have to be lucky.

  And then we were. It was David who spotted it.

  “Could that be something?” he said, and pointed, tentative. Through the green soda-straw reeds and masses of dead seaweed, beneath a line of bushes: grass growing from dirt. I didn’t trust my eyes until we made it to shore, a real shore, small pebbles that crunched under my feet. When I knocked down high brush to make room for the tent, I could smell mint in the broken stems.

  “I just want to close my eyes,” David said when we got in the tent, and he was asleep in a moment. I don’t think I moved in my bag all night.

  Forty-five miles that day.

  * * *

  ————

  In the morning, my body registered its objections: sore muscles, sunburned skin, calcified sweat. The trip was only two days old, but already felt way too big. How to keep doing this for another six weeks?

  David was more cheerful. “I usually like the smell of my crotch,” he said. “It’s got a Frosted Flakes vibe.” He rubbed two fingers between his legs and then lifted them to his nose. “But today it’s rotten vegetables.”

  Our goal for the day was Fort Providence, and after only two days I imagined a restaurant meal and maybe a shower at a campground. My paddle felt heavier in my hand, but we made good time. Bald and golden eagles hunted the river for fish, and when we passed Burnt Point, we saw no campsite. We ate a lunch of pemmican and bruised peaches outside a small decrepit fishing shack. No one was home—a padlock kept bears and squatters out—and in the water dead freshwater shrimp floated in clumps.

  And then civilization reappeared. Tall nautical markers, as big as billboards, to indicate the shipping channels. Then on our left, a wide gravel road—the ice road, I figured—drove straight into the water. Then a monstrous
bridge, two hundred yards high and over a mile long, held up by a series of massive rusting Ys. The current grabbed us and swept us under as we tried to ferry across. The green water was roiled, and we saw fishermen along the bank trolling the Providence Rapids. This name had worried me when I saw it on the map, but it proved only a strong current that tugged at the nose of the canoe. The fishermen called to us, “Where are you going?” and I replied, with pride, “We’re doing the whole river, but we’re staying in Fort Providence tonight.”

  A white steeple appeared first, then other small structures high up on the riverbanks, cut away by the fast-moving water. Providence Island, across from the town, looked like a cupcake, black spruce icing and dirt cliffs for the wrapper.

  After our struggles the night before, we didn’t want to worry about finding a campsite, so we decided to stay in a designated spot in town. We stopped the canoe at the public boat launch and on the bluff above found empty flat grass; such luxury, I was overwhelmed. Two Slavey men sat there, drinking beer and watching the river.

  They introduced themselves as Gilly and Mark. Both had sparse mustaches and baseball caps and held cans of warm beer that came out of a cardboard box at their feet. They fished the river, they said, but only this small section, between Beaver Lake and Browning Point farther on.

  “The water on the Mackenzie is high this year,” Mark said. “I remember in 1964, the river went dry, and the whole town had a picnic on the river bottom. But then the water started to rise all of a sudden, and one fat nun, she had to pull up her skirt and run.” He laughed at the memory.

  “You call it the Mackenzie?” I asked.

  “We say ‘Mackenzie,’ ” Gilly said. “The elders say ‘Deh Cho.’ Deh Cho means Long River, eh? The elders say, ‘He only paddled it once, why did they name it after him?’ ”

  I wanted to talk to Mark and Gilly more, but my stomach was rumbling. Our guidebook said you could get a hot meal at the Snowshoe Inn.

  “David and I are going into town to get dinner. Are you going to the bar later?” I asked, but Mark laughed.

  “Only white people go to the bar. It’s too expensive,” he said. “Indians buy a case a day and go home.”

  “But you guys gotta be careful,” Gilly said. “Here, you’re okay, because we’re watching your canoe. We’ll keep an eye on it for you, but downriver they’ll steal your stuff.”

  “Especially in Wrigley,” Mark said. “They’re terrible in Wrigley. Thieves. But here in Fort Prov, you’re fine.”

  Our walk into town was very short. Ravens had taken over the belfry of the church, and the scattered homes consisted of single- and double-wide trailers, some well maintained, some not. A few had teepees, for drying fish, skinned with plastic tarps to keep the smoke in. For curiosity’s sake, I tried to spot the house of the richest man in town, a habit I continued the rest of the trip, but didn’t spot an obvious Old Man Potter in Bedford Falls.

  A few indigenous locals stood in a group outside the Snowshoe Inn, and when we passed, they asked us to buy them beer inside. One woman, Edna, had the small wide-spaced eyes indicative of fetal alcohol syndrome. She was already intoxicated and asked what the two new white guys in town were doing.

  “We’re paddling the whole Mackenzie River,” I said.

  An old man in a plaid shirt shook his head. “You’re crazy,” he said.

  “We used to have a Mackenzie festival here,” Edna said. “Then a girl went into the bushes and came out pregnant. They stopped it after that.”

  The interior of the Snowshoe Inn recalled my 1980s childhood: dark wood paneling, jukebox, low half-moon cushioned chairs, billiard tables with padded pleather legs. We ordered breaded chicken wings, bison burgers, and French fries with gravy, all frozen food tossed in a fryer.

  After dinner, two white men, obvious outsiders like us, asked if we wanted another round of beers. Steve and Jim were wildfire researchers. Steve was quiet, chose his words with care. Jim was a gregarious engineer, glasses and stubbly beard, a smiling but intense look. The Northwest Territories provided them plenty of space to set forest fires—the biggest, nastiest, hottest fires possible—to test new heat-resistant materials, such as emergency foil shelters for firefighters using the skin off NASA’s reentry vehicles.

  Steve and Jim seemed eager for conversation with newcomers, and David and I too, but the longer we talked and drank in that dim tavern, the more I sensed an odd fur-trading fort vibe from our surroundings. It was clear we were drinking far slower than the rest of the clientele. Teenage indigenous women sat with the few older white men. Loud youngsters shouted about their drunkenness while playing pool. When an older gentleman woke up and tried to order another beer, the bartender said she couldn’t legally serve him and told him he had to go. The sign behind the bar read, “If You’re Asked to Leave and Refuse, You’ll Be Bared Entry for 1 Month.”

  Jim and Steve wanted to get another round of Kokanees, but I begged off, and David agreed. We walked back to our boat, checked to ensure our canoe was tied up, and then went to sleep in the sunshine.

  Groggy, I roused to the sound of pickup trucks and quads barreling past us, honking the horn. It was bright in the yellow tent. I checked my watch. Three in the morning. Still in a stupor, I grumbled about kids playing pranks to keep us up and then rolled over and went back to sleep.

  I awoke to the sun in my eyes. Eight o’clock. It was quiet. David offered to walk down to the canoe to get our cooking supplies and oatmeal for breakfast. I dressed slowly and was just emerging from the tent when I saw David’s head poke up above the bluff. His face was blank.

  “Our canoe’s been ransacked,” he said.

  I ran down the bluff. The boat was still right where we had left it, but every bag and container was open and tossed and all the contents were scattered on the ground and in the water. The food barrels and shrink-wrapped cube of toilet paper were floating in the river eddy. Seagulls were eating dehydrated peas from dinner pouches that had been opened and poured out. Every pocket of my parka was emptied. The bottom of the canoe was full of dumped medicine bottles and unwrapped granola bars.

  Something righteous and bigoted boiled up in me from the lizard stem of my brain. Drunk thieving fucks. I was angry at Doug and Michelle and all the paddlers in Fort Smith for persuading me to let go of my suspicions, and I was angry at myself for prioritizing open-mindedness over security and safety. I wasn’t naive. I had been around the world and made a deliberate choice to trust that I could sleep fifty yards away from my boat without incident. But now that choice looked more enlightened fool than careful pragmatist. Why would the poor and desperate in the Arctic really behave differently than anywhere else?

  David and I did an inventory. We had the Wallet and the Office—our passports, money, maps, computer, inReach—in the tent with us, but much of our survival gear was stripped out. They had taken a haphazard combination of supplies: the ax, small food barrel, multipurpose stove that would burn any fuel, the gas canisters for the stove they left behind, one stockpile of pemmican, and all of our energy bars. Much of the rest was soaked or scattered or ruined.

  Mosquitoes drank from my neck and arms. My empty stomach rumbled. I had to take a shit, but there was no such thing as a public toilet in Fort Providence.

  David was cleaning up the food that was strewn about the boat launch, scaring away seagulls as he went. “You’re so Wisconsin polite,” I said. “Someone rat-fucks your canoe and you pick up the litter?”

  “What else would you do?” he asked, and continued his work.

  Then I took a breath, and the sober and well-trained military problem solver in me regained control.

  We could buy more food and could make do without the ax, but we needed a stove to cook breakfast and dinner. So I called Doug—“our first trouble in twenty years,” he responded, extremely apologetic—and asked for help. “Can you drive up a new stove, so I can buy it from you?” I asked. Fort Providence was three days from Hay River by canoe, but only ninety minutes
by car. Doug offered a brand-new kind, a BioLite that burned wood and grass, so we didn’t have to worry about buying fuel. I wasn’t in a position to bargain, so despite my misgivings about being at the mercy of the weather to start a fire every night, I just said thank you, and Doug said he was on his way.

  David pulled out his toothpaste, and I gave him a curious look. “No matter what happens, you always feel better after you brush your teeth,” he said. I joined him, and he was right.

  About noon the town woke up, people drove by in their pickup trucks and quads. I felt like all of Fort Providence was watching. Not just curious stares, but knowing ones. So much for the bush code, I thought.

  Then my phone rang, with a blocked number. Curious, I answered.

  “This is Corporal Shoeman with the RCMP in Fort Providence,” a woman’s voice said. “I hear you guys had some trouble last night.”

  Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Doug must have contacted them.

  “We did. We had some things stolen from our canoe,” I said.

  “Balls!” she said, with surprising vehemence.

  “Yeah, we’re not too happy this morning. We’re canoeing the whole river; they took some essential gear.”

  “Oh, that sucks so bad!” she said, and I could hear her sigh on the phone. “It was a late night for me,” she eventually went on. “Give me a bit to shower and I’ll be down to see you.”

  Corporal Shoeman arrived in a white pickup truck, the crown and maple leaf crest of the RCMP on the side, and was fully kitted out: vest, Taser, boots, turtleneck, heavy coat. She was young, vaguely Italian, cute under different circumstances. I gave her an inventory of what we lost, and she was professional, until I showed her the sopping-wet toilet paper.

  “Dicks! Am I right?” she said, again with commiseration.

  “I feel dumb, like I did something wrong,” I told her. “Like I’m a tourist who just got mugged in the subway because I didn’t know to put my wallet in my front pocket.”

  “You didn’t do anything wrong,” she said. “A bunch of drunk Indians stole your shit. They steal from each other. Some around here, they don’t have anywhere to live, they just scavenge. This is my fourth call from last night.”