That the people who stole our gear needed it more than we did would eventually provide some consolation, but not right away. In a similar situation, Mackenzie himself concluded, “I suppose they think provision should be common Property among all People.”
“Should we worry about further on, down the river?” I asked, thinking of the advice from Gilly and Mark last night.
“You need to be careful. Towns with no roads are sometimes better,” she said. “Except Wrigley. It’s really bad in Wrigley.”
* * *
————
It grew hot. Great Slave Lake had been cool and damp, Beaver Lake sunny but breezy, and in town there was air-conditioning at the Snowshoe Inn. But after Fort Providence, the wind died and the sun never truly set.
Just above Mills Lake, that pond slapped by a giant beaver tail, David and I stopped on an island, sandy where the point broke the current like an arrowhead. It was our first chance to take a bath in the clean cold water, and I wanted a fresh start after the theft at Fort Providence. But while washing my clothes in the current, one of my convertible pant legs, unzipped from the shorts, floated away. I only noticed it was missing when I got dressed, and discovered one leg, not two.
“We didn’t give the river a tobacco offering today, did we?” I said.
“No, I forgot, with everything else going on,” David said.
“I guess the Deh Cho took its share anyway,” I said. If I keep losing things at this rate, I thought, I’ll be naked in a canoe by the end.
We had been warned that Mills Lake was dangerous—easy to get wind-bound, unsafe in a storm, stay to the south no matter what—and because the weather was hot but calm, David and I decided to paddle late once more, to cross the lake in one day. We snaked through islands, and then the river widened again, into a gargantuan view.
Before us, no horizon, only a single steel-blue vista as water and sky merged, cotton-ball clouds perfectly mirrored in the lake surface. “Such sights as this are reserved for those who will suffer to behold them,” wrote Eric Sevareid in David’s favorite Canoeing with the Cree. The sun was so bright and continuous that every exposed bit of skin burned. Then the breeze came up slightly, and the light reflected off the ripples like a strobe.
No wonder Mackenzie had no idea which way to go, and his guide had never ventured farther. How to know where to find the exit of such an expanse?
The south shore was swampy. After we paddled for several hours, the north bank reappeared. The land was rising there, looking firmer for a tent, so once Mills Lake tapered back into a river, we dared to cross. It took forty-five minutes of open-water paddling. The wind was down, there was no obvious danger, but still David and I talked the whole time to keep our minds off the agoraphobia until we closed in on the far bank.
“Oh yeah, that’s good camping right there, eh?” David said in an exaggerated northern Wisconsin accent that came off as vaguely Canadian. It had become a game, since the lack of options at the Kakisa River: all day long we called out good camping spots not mentioned in the guidebook. This time, David found us a beach full of seashells, an open flat piece of country, like an alpine meadow, purple wildflowers and wild strawberries with runners that looked like red wires crisscrossing the ground. We hoped to catch a bit of breeze on such open land, but our camp remained triple buggy: mosquitoes, horseflies, bulldogs. David and I sat on a log and watched two thunderstorms roll away into the distance.
“This river is so big it’s like the size of Lake Winnebago,” I said, using a reference from his home.
“This water is different than any water I’ve ever been on,” he replied. “The scale is really daunting, when I think too much about it. I’ve never been anywhere that made me feel so small and insignificant.”
* * *
————
In the morning there was no dew, because it didn’t get cool or dark at night.
The Mackenzie kept narrowing and finally began to resemble a river from back home. So far, David and I had paddled three lakes, and we were sick of them. But once past them, suddenly we had a cushion of a day or two to arrive at Fort Simpson, and I realized how stressed I had been to make time at the start of the trip.
There were two sounds: the headwind and David’s constant chatter. The current was still sluggish and the going slow. On either side, banks of pale dirt were followed by walls of black spruce, so tight to the water that no wider view was available, only the impression of unending flatness and forest beyond. The sun was unrelenting, no shade on the water, so we gave ourselves a break after so many stressful days and stopped early, at only half past eight, at a flat spot just short of White Man’s Point.
But there was no shade onshore either, crumbling driftwood and wolf prints dried into the mud. Resigned to pitching the tent in the sun, David and I unrolled it and dozens of bulldogs, trapped in the seams of the tent since we broke camp that morning, roused to life and swarmed. It was too hot and sweaty to rest inside the tent anyway, and I wondered how I might ever get out of the sun again. Mackenzie made his trip in the Little Ice Age, when summer crops regularly failed. How different this June.
I stood in the river to cool my feet and avoid the bugs, made notes in my journal, and used the inReach to text Jeremy, Landon, and Senny, my future paddling companions, that the most important piece of gear was a floppy hat to keep the sun off. My left wrist—a strip exposed between my long-sleeved shirt and my paddling gloves—was blistering from sunburn; I covered it with gauze and surgical tape. Eagles floated on the thermals. A swan honked and it echoed down the valley.
It was quiet. I heard a dripping and babbling, and I followed the sound and discovered a tiny brook emptying its brown tannins into the green of the Mackenzie. It was a short stream, spilling down the bank. I could see and understand its entire length. The stream emerged from a dense thicket, so dense I could only see a few feet in. There was no way to pierce the tree line. The Mackenzie River was too big to comprehend, and yet beyond it was somehow a wilderness many times larger still.
The breeze came up. The air said a storm was coming. “The cottonwoods are gonna be all worn out,” David said, as puffballs filled the air.
I looked in the sky and saw three enormous flying saucers descending on us from the west. The clouds were layered, like plates or shelves, the sky behind nothing but black. The temperature dropped twenty degrees, and David and I took shelter.
None too soon. The front hit like a concussion, a wall of thickened menacing air. The tent recoiled as if struck, the outer shell suddenly pummeled by wind and fat drops of rain. The whole shelter was vibrating.
“They’re here…,” David said, imitating the little girl from the movie Poltergeist.
Then both stakes on the tent’s front sloped vestibule, the side facing the storm, suddenly tore out.
David turned back to me, this time with a bit of fear on his face. “It’s not going to blow away with us in it,” he started to assure me, when all at once the rear stakes ripped, the back vestibule popped, and half the tent collapsed on us.
David crawled out and started to reset the stakes, but too late, the remaining half of the tent fell with me inside. I scrambled and saw David retrieving boulders to weigh down the tent anchors. The river had turned as dark as the sky, and whitecaps stood like bared teeth.
We had to get the tent sheltered and out of the wind or it would rip to pieces.
“Is it calmer up there?” I called to David, and pointed at the woods. I had to yell to be heard over the wind.
“I’ll check,” he replied, and ran up the bank and plunged into the trees. I gathered the corners of the tent, our sleeping bags and other kit still inside, and started to drag it up the slope, as if it was a giant hobo handkerchief. At the wood line, I saw David making a space to put the tent; the clearing was chocked with primrose, and he was tearing out huge hunks by hand. But he quickly tired.
“There’s no way to pull it all out,” he said, and then showed me his palms. The
y were bloody and already swollen, pocked with thorns.
“Then we put the tent back where it was,” I said. “The wind will be better once the front passes.”
“How long will that be?”
“I don’t know!”
“What do we do until then? Just stand outside and hold it?”
“If we have to,” I said. We were both soaked in the driving rain and only half-dressed, boxers and no shirts, as we had been ready for sleep.
I pulled the tent back to the original spot on the beach. The wind was merely howling now, and grommet by grommet David and I set the tent up again, using additional emergency stakes from the spare shelter and then piling rocks on each corner. When it looked like the tent was out of danger, David single-handedly dragged the half-loaded canoe up the beach until it was level with the shelter. With much of our gear, not to mention all our food, still inside, it weighed at least five hundred pounds.
“Is it high enough?” I asked.
“If it gets water, we get water,” he said.
That night, I stayed awake long after David fell asleep, exhausted, watching and listening to the rain and thunder.
* * *
————
The next day we arrived at the hamlet of Jean Marie River.
The level of activity along the river grew and grew as we approached the town. A thousand trickling brooks fell off the steep banks, and a beaver slid on its belly down the mud and then swam with us for miles. Three long barges were anchored along shore, loaded with dump trucks and backhoes returning from the Arctic winter construction season. David pointed to a dead spruce in which a golden eagle perched. It spread its wide wings—the feathers curved in anticipation of flight, majestic as a silver dollar—and then let loose a giant shit that splattered down the tree trunk.
Even the current built as we approached the Head-of-the-Line, named by boat captains to indicate where the Mackenzie starts to drop and accelerate. At the channel markers, the water sounded like a jet engine as it rushed past, a massive hydraulic pillow on the buoy’s leading edge. The river tightened into a narrow channel. The mountains were coming soon, and in the distance we saw a long low mound of a hill, the first change in elevation we’d seen.
At Jean Marie River, we beached the canoe on a grassy bank next to a few Lund aluminum fishing boats, and I walked into town while David stayed to nap next to our gear. Jean Marie River barely qualifies as a settlement: seventy-odd residents, no stores of any kind, a cluster of log homes and prefab trailers and a volunteer fire station. A bicycle lay abandoned on a dry ice rink. The First Nations band office has solar panels, but a power plant drones away near the gravel airstrip; mail is delivered on Thursdays.
The song of the north is not a loon’s call or a wolf’s howl, as many famous outdoor writers contend, but rather the hum of the diesel engine. Three massive diesel generators per power plant: one to run, one in maintenance, one emergency backup. Harmonizing with this perpetual rumble is a symphony of extended quad-cab pickup trucks, four-wheelers, dirt bikes, powerboats, personal home generators, and heavy construction equipment. Fuel is expensive, and yet motors run all day and night.
I wanted to stop in Jean Marie River because I had heard that it was hosting the annual Deh Cho First Nations assembly, drawing Slavey members from Hay River, Fort Providence, Fort Simpson, and Wrigley. I didn’t know what to expect and found something like a county fair paired with congressional testimony.
Inside the round ceremonial hall were plenty of traditional elements—fire at the center, fresh-cut willow branches blocking the sun—but the tone was official and high-tech, interpreters in soundproof boxes translating English to Slavey and back in real time. The theme of the conference was nominally “Adapting and Thriving with Climate Change in Denendeh,” referencing the lands of the Dene people in the upper Mackenzie River valley, and appropriate to the subject matter it was wickedly hot.
Outside the hall, though, was a carnival. Children playing tag, vendors selling survival gear, a free cafeteria line for First Nations members. I was far from the only outsider. A few RCMP cops stood idly, a white woman passed out flyers about solar panels, and I spotted a lone black man who turned out to be the government-assigned economist.
Tacked to the outside wall of the meeting space were a series of notices. One declared the assembly an alcohol-free zone. Others depicted a timeline of the Dene and Slavey land claims process. According to the history cards, it began in the late nineteenth century, when “Southerners find minerals, oil, and gas.” After brusquely noting the illegitimacy of the first federal treaties of the early twentieth century, the story quickly jumps forward to an almost month-by-month rehash of every legal maneuver, sidebar working group, threat to walk away from talks, and judge’s ruling. To the layman, the timelines were nearly incomprehensible, filled with jargon and acronyms.
“They never should have hired the lawyers,” said a thin older man sitting nearby, passing the heat of the day in the shade thrown by the ceremonial hall. He introduced himself as Allan, a Dene elder.
“This is just like the Indian Brotherhood days, back in the ’60s and ’70s. Remember that?” Allan said, elbowing another elder next to him. “They start with the lawyers, and that confuses everyone and gets them off track, and then they talk about treaty claims and not climate change.”
“Thirty years from now, all these kids”—here Allan gestured to the children running around, raiding the communal cafeteria food line in the adjacent tent—“will still be sitting here, having the same talk.”
“Fishing isn’t like it used to be anyway,” the other man said. “It’s too warm. The fish are slow. And too many otters. You put out a net, they take the fish before you get there.”
Allan asked what I was doing in Jean Marie River, and I told him my plans to paddle the entire river.
“No one paddles anymore,” he replied. “Everyone has a motorboat. Are you going to stop at Pandaville in Fort Simpson?”
“What’s Pandaville?”
“It’s a Chinese restaurant. Have you ever had Chinese food? And you have to stop and see Jonas. He lives at the Willow River. Look, he’s right over there.”
Allan pointed to another elder eating at the cafeteria. I walked over and introduced myself. Jonas had thick glasses and wore a long-sleeved purple shirt left over from an American 5K run. He made me promise to stop when I paddled past, which I told him would be in a few days, though honestly I had not looked far enough ahead on the maps to have any idea how far away the Willow River was. One day at a time; I only wanted to get David to Fort Simpson.
We camped for the night just below Jean Marie River, at an open spot on a point where, according to Michelle’s guidebook, there once stood a sawmill. We could find no trace of it, only the charred stumps of trees from a large wildfire. The land was covered in flowers full of blimp-like honeybees, and it seemed perfect bear country, Winnie-the-Pooh’s favorite haunt. I kept the bear spray and flares next to my pillow.
That night, as part of the annual gathering, there was a talent show. We could hear the oompah oompah of polka music echo as we tried to sleep in the brilliant hot sunshine.
* * *
————
I developed a morning ritual that grew in importance as the trip progressed. The sun said we lived in a continuous now, but my body, after only a week of travel, was already showing wear. So I’d wake up and, while still in bag, do a status check from head to toe. I might be day to day on the map, but physically I couldn’t lose track of the long term. Not the next thirty miles, but the next thousand. Be extra cautious and not strip my gears. That morning, I had a growing sunburn-induced blister on my left wrist and four more converting to calluses on my hands. My legs and arms were covered with bulldog bites—they don’t sting or suck blood but rather take huge bites of flesh, especially on the shins and ankles and forearms—and my lower lip was still numb from my sole application of DEET. I’d never use bug spray again. Only physical barrier
s, like head nets, kept the mosquitoes away anyway.
But I had no major injuries, no pulled tendons or ligaments from incorrect paddling technique. My shoulders and triceps ached, and my ankles and knees were sore from being crammed in the boat all day, but I was holding up.
I was grateful, and so that morning, when we loaded the canoe and pushed off, I paid extra attention to David’s tobacco rite.
“Dear Mackenzie, please bless us on this day,” he said.
“Are you making the offering to the river or to Mackenzie?” I asked.
“Mackenzie,” David answered. “I think he’s watching over us, saying, ‘Look at what those two idiots are doing.’ ”
“I think you’re supposed to thank the Deh Cho, make the offering to the river.”
“Okay,” he said, and pulled out more tobacco. “Dear river, old man river, please don’t fuck with us today.”
We made good time. An aft wind sprang up, and we could deploy the sail again, attaining ten miles per hour for a stretch. Through a section called the Green Island Rapids we found swift water, but nothing dangerous, and could easily steer around the few standing waves. We stopped to eat bagels and peanut butter and honey and mandarin oranges on a beach full of skipping stones, and when a powerboat sped by, the driver yelled, “See you at Willow River!” and I figured it was Jonas.
To avoid camping in Fort Simpson—and thus make ourselves vulnerable again to the poor and desperate—we stopped an hour upriver, at a small stream where beaver and jackfish jumped. There was a trail to a clearing on the ridge above the Mackenzie, an area of high grass and unskinned two-by-four cabin frames. A laminated sign tacked to one read, “Dene Youth Camp. Connect to the Land. Many Elders Will Be Here, Ask Them Why.” The mosquitoes were unendurable, so David and I returned to the big river.
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