Disappointment River

by Brian Castner

  The rain abated that afternoon, and they launched into swirling waters, the mountains rising in layers into the far distance. “The Current became strong and rapid amongst Rocky Islands, the first that we saw in this River, and which we thought a sure indication of soon meeting with Falls and Rapids.” The peaks retreated on the left bank but climbed ever higher on the right, the river splitting the ranges. The eastern arm was tall and stood pink in the afternoon sun. Ahead, four distinct mountain ridges rose in succession, each a progressively paler blue, cobalt down to a shade nearly indistinguishable from the sky.

  One string of mountains crossed the river, and the water cut right through them, “the North Shore part of it perpendicular with the River,” the sloping rock face a thousand-foot mound. Mackenzie ordered camp at the base of the hill, and then he and Awgeenah and two voyageurs and the hunters trudged up its flank, to see what waterfall or ocean awaited them. All of Captain Cook’s reports of Alaska described their scene: snowy mountains, thick forests, piles of driftwood, a wide river with unbreakable current. Surely the sea was around the next bend.

  The way was difficult, gravel that fell away beneath their feet, and a cold wind blew. When they finally reached the top, “I was very much surprised to find a Campment on top of it,” Mackenzie wrote. But Awgeenah was not surprised, for he saw it for what it was: sanctuary and refuge. He said that “it was the custom of all the People who have no Arms to make choice Places of this Kind for their residence, as they could easily make them inaccessible to their Enemies.” All lived in dread of the Cree, who made constant war upon them. In any case, the camp was abandoned, a lonely shrine to past defeats.

  Mackenzie was discouraged. Mountains lay all about, so “our view was not so extensive as we had expected.” They saw hills clothed in thin forest, small lakes filled with swans, and, of course, the river in an unbroken valley dominating the scene. All day, the current had been so strong it “makes such a hissing and Ebbilition as a kettle moderately Boiling.” But there was no sea, no falls, no end to the river. It just stretched on and on, to a point far out of sight.

  Only a few minutes later, they retreated down the hill in disappointment. “We were obliged to shorten our Stay here on account of the Swarms of Muskettoes that attacked us and were the only Inhabitants of the Place.”

  — 18 —

  THE PLAGUES OF THE DEH CHO, JULY 2016

  The air was electric. Too late I realized how badly I had misjudged the thunderstorm. It was towering, and fast, far too fast, and it chased Jeremy and me north; we got under way and then it was nearly on top of us. With David’s bulk out of the boat, I had retaken my position as guide in the back of the canoe, and almost immediately, upon leaving Fort Simpson, I began looking for somewhere to take shelter.

  I had never seen so much silt. The banks were the color and consistency of dark chocolate mousse, and though the thunderstorm loomed behind us, there was nowhere to stop. Silt bars rose from the riverbed like hands grasping at the underside of our canoe, and the low deep banks were squishy and eroded sloughs slumping into the water.

  “We have to look for good camping,” I said. “You can’t trust the guidebook.”

  “What guidebook?” asked Jeremy.

  “Michelle’s guidebook,” I said. “We have to find good camping on our own.”

  “What does good camping mean?” Jeremy shook his head. “And who’s Michelle?” But I didn’t answer, because I was distracted by the search and the crash of thunder behind us.

  I wanted to camp in the tree line, so as not to attract lightning as the highest point on the beach, but our options seemed either cliff or boggy floodplain. Finally, the lightning all around us, I simply picked the firmest bank available, even though the nearest cover was a field of bushes hundreds of feet in. I tried to drive the nose of the canoe hard into shore, but we stuck fast in muck. I waded through, ran up the silt, and found a spot for the tent, flat but overgrown with willow that rose to my shoulders. I yanked at a root ball but it was surprisingly sturdy, so I started snapping branches, flattening stems, carving out a bed. I was so intent on my work and the ink-sky above that it took me a few moments to realize that Jeremy had not followed me. He was waiting at the canoe.

  “Bring the tent!” I called through the wind.

  “Which one’s the tent?”

  “It’s red. Plus, the sleeping bags—they’re in stuff sacks!”

  “What are those?”

  I ran back to the canoe, loaded Jeremy with gear, and then we waddled up the beach together. Mosquitoes rose from the malarial plain and surrounded us like a biting fog, the thickest swarms I had yet seen. They crawled up inside my head net, found my ankles, covered my exposed hands. Swat, crush, pound a tent stake, smear, swat, pound again. My hands were covered in my blood.

  The rain came while Jeremy was still toting gear from the canoe. Hard and cold and wild blown, splashing silt. I had never done such a poor job setting up the tent, and by the time I was done, Jeremy and our gear were soaked and broken willow stems poked at the floor and sides of the shelter. I dumped everything—Jeremy and equipment—inside the tent anyway and then returned to the emptied canoe, to pull it farther up the beach.

  The rain struck in waves, and lightning and wind lashed the hillside.

  I finally crawled into our shelter and saw Jeremy had set up the sleeping bags all wrong. His shirt was off, and every bit of revealed skin was covered in hives.

  “The mosquitoes?” I asked. “Are you allergic?”

  “I don’t think so,” he said, shaking, and I realized it could be stress and fear, a reaction to physical danger. Who knows what unfamiliar hormone cocktail was loose in his veins?

  The lightning strikes were approaching, growing closer and more regular, and the thunder rolled down the valley like a tidal wave.

  “We’re not high enough into the trees. We need to get into the lightning position,” I said to Jeremy, and then crouched so that only my feet touched the floor of the tent, arms around my knees.

  “What does that do?” he asked.

  “Minimal height and surface area on the ground. I studied before I came.” I got the information from the website of the National Outdoor Leadership School. “Don’t worry,” I said. “No one has ever died in the lightning position.”

  The storm raged for hours, finally letting up in the early morning twilight. Two miles behind us, David was snug in bed, in a civilized cocoon.

  * * *

  ————

  Jeremy Howard Beck is a compact man, with a shaved head, heavy brow, and long crinkly beard, so Jewish as to look Amish when he wore a wide-brimmed hat. Clean and a bit fussy, he had a special waterproof case for his iPhone and brand-new hiking boots tied to the outside of his bag. He brought beard oil and citronella for his skin and washed his hands in the river with soap.

  I learned later that Jeremy had never before spent more than one night in a tent, had barely camped in any capacity at all, and had never, not even once, shit in the woods.

  “I googled it,” he said. “I watched a video. It said to make a little hole and then cover it. Like a cat.”

  We both knew that Jeremy’s primary qualification for coming on the trip was his availability. Several other friends of mine, military buddies and outdoor enthusiasts, signed up and then had to cancel. A month away from leaving, I was desperate. So I called Jeremy because he’s an opera composer and makes his own schedule. I hoped he could drop everything for two weeks, and I was right.

  “I was on the rowing team in high school,” he said, and though he initially held his paddle wrong, with two hands on the shaft, that sounded enough like canoeing experience to me.

  After ten days with David, everything was packed just so. No more awkward ungainliness; every bag had a place and every bag in its place. But Jeremy knew none of that. Not how to pack the canoe, not how to unload it, set up and break camp, gather wood for the BioLite stove, filter water.

  I thought of Amos Burg, who, in
June 1929, traveled much of the Mackenzie River basin for National Geographic. Journeying by rowboat, and occasionally towed by motorized craft, Burg explored the valley with an unlikely companion, Professor George Rebec, the sixty-six-year-old head of the philosophy department at the University of Oregon. Burg encountered dirty blocks of ice as far south as Lake Athabasca and torturous pests. “Each bite of bacon is punished by six bites from the mosquitos,” he wrote; eventually, he ran up and down the shore as he ate. But Rebec couldn’t similarly adjust to the rigors of river travel. He didn’t paddle, exhausting Burg, and, with no wilderness experience, quickly became sick. A few days past Fort Simpson, Burg put Rebec on a steamship home.

  I needed Jeremy to learn quicker than Rebec. My next paddling companion was due to fly into Tulita, hundreds of miles and ten days away.

  The next morning, Jeremy tried to load up the canoe. “This is like walking on cake,” he said, bowing the silt as he carried gear. The sun came out, and I showed Jeremy how to filter water as David did, with the bag hanging from his head. “Teach a man to fish,” I recited to myself as a mantra.

  After the Liard’s mountain flow fell in at Fort Simpson, the Mackenzie became bipolar: clean on the right, dirty on the left. Not toxic, not contaminated, not diseased, but dirty. Full of dirt. Stick your hand in the river up to the wrist and you lose sight of your fingers. The water filter clogged on chunks of espresso, and when I dipped in my paddle, it came out grimy, like it needed to be washed. Cold green Great Slave Lake water on the right, the loam of British Columbia on the left. As soon as we could, we paddled across to the other shore; I wanted my old river back.

  All day, the current steadily increased; we made forty miles with ease. On either shore, we saw big blowdowns caused by the storm, mighty spruce crashed into likely camping spots, and suddenly our exposed field of willow bushes didn’t look so bad. The banks were high, no more marshes, and no more waterfowl or the bald and golden eagles they attract.

  That evening, we camped on the north shore, just past a few islands at Trail Creek. It was July 1, and on the same night in 1789, Mackenzie persuaded Awgeenah to cache pemmican on those Trail Creek islands and then make camp. For the first and only time, Mackenzie and I were sleeping on exactly the same rock on exactly the same day, united by both calendar and geography, precisely 227 years apart.

  And then the next day he woke at two o’clock in the morning and paddled on, farther and faster than we could ever hope to match.

  * * *

  ————

  The mountains. By midday they rose in the distance—hazy, broken-toothed, relentless—and our spirits, of their own volition, did the same. First a big blue, with three sisters to the south. Then a lone peak, bare topped and gray. It was easy to paddle into such a view, and I felt the coming of the Camsell Bend with great expectation.

  The Camsell Bend is the great turn of the river, like the Big Bend of the Rio Grande but on a far larger scale. The flow hits the Rockies and makes a hard right, to become a fundamentally north-flowing river, rather than western. The mountains would never be closer, the landscape never more sublime, than in this pocket of crags.

  This is a new notion, sublimity via elevation. As the British mountaineer Robert Macfarlane has written, “Three centuries ago, risking one’s life to climb a mountain would have been considered tantamount to lunacy.” To Mackenzie and the pre-Romantics, mountains were a wasteland full of terrifying beasts, nowhere to farm, nowhere to build. Ideal beauty was to be found in the pastoral, agricultural plenty. Only in the early nineteenth century, when Europeans began to creep out on alpine glaciers for a thrill, did perceptions and art change.

  Consider, for example, Edgar Allan Poe’s incomplete 1840 novel, The Journal of Julius Rodman, about a fictitious first man to cross the Rockies. Even macabre Poe stirs the mountains with romance and redemption in solitude. Nature is full of “majestic novelties,” and Rodman’s account, full of “affectionateness” for “the severest hardships and dangers,” is meant to stir “envy” in the reader. In contrast to Mackenzie, Rodman was not searching for something as crudely commercial as the Northwest Passage, but rather had an “ulterior hope,” to get “beyond the extreme bounds of civilization—to gaze, if I could, upon those gigantic mountains.” He was “urged solely by a desire to seek, in the bosom of the wilderness, that peace.”

  It is worth noting that in Poe’s book, Rodman never does cross the Rockies. The novel is cut short, because Poe wasn’t paid on time by his magazine patron, and he stopped writing. The story ends mid-chapter, in a heroic fight to the death with a grizzly bear.

  As for myself, I admit that after several weeks on the river, bug bit and thunder shook, my eyes had calibrated to the pre-Romantic notions of Mackenzie and Awgeenah. I felt more vulnerable than peaceful.

  In the far distance, the mountains appeared mighty, grew and grew, and then all of a sudden we had arrived, we were at their bases, before and behind us and all around. Their height had been an optical illusion; once we were among them, the mountains proved more modest than they appeared from miles away. Nahanni Mountain, at 4,038 feet, was the closest, standing nearly by itself. The Camsell Range ran to the north, each lump only rising to three or four thousand feet. Tall for Mackenzie, but midgets compared with the Rockies of the south and farther west. These peaks obscured more majesty than they showed.

  We camped directly at the bend, a 270-degree swing of peaks as our view, and the scenery was so welcome after the low marshes off Great Slave Lake we took our time cooking and doing laundry, drying our clothes on a rope in the inexhaustible sunshine. The rocks on the beach were laid out like cobblestones, flat on the surface, rounded on the edge, gravel and mud fitted in between as mortar. Perfectly level, like a patio, or a Roman road. I found it hard to believe that natural processes had crafted such unity, but could find no explanation other than the scouring force of high rushing water.

  To mark the occasion, I cooked Vegetarian Chili, a particularly good dinner I had been saving. Jeremy pulled out a titanium spork he had purchased for the trip. “I thought, I’m a titanium atom. I was forged billions of years ago in a far-off star. I came to earth and was lodged in the crust for millions of years. Now I’m in your spork.”

  I added tinder to the coals in the BioLite stove and Jeremy asked, “Do you want me to blow on the fire?” Was this a gay joke that I was missing? Jeremy correctly guessed my thoughts and said, “I also play the trombone, remember?”

  I laughed.

  “How does it feel to be the first gay Jewish opera composer to do a major descent of the Mackenzie River?” I asked him.

  “Pretty good,” he said, and smiled.

  From shore, I could see no navigation aids or signs, no buoys, no channel markers, no fishing shacks, no boats, not even a contrail in the sky. This had surely been true previously, somewhere on the trip, but I never consciously noticed. Maybe the Romantic mountains spurred a closer observation.

  “Do you know how this valley looked five thousand years ago?” I said to Jeremy. “Exactly like this.”

  “I feel like a little smudge,” he said.

  In the morning, I awoke eager to push my head out of the tent and see the front-lit mountain faces in the eastern sun. The whole Camsell Range was pink and gray, streaked with landslides of sloped sedimentary rock, but verdant behind, green with summer.

  The birds, whether compelled by instinct or joy, sang all night into the rosy sky, in perpetual anticipation of a dawn that never ended.

  * * *

  ————

  “These mountains were a storm center,” Amos Burg wrote in National Geographic, “for below the North Nahanni River their summits seemed to spout clouds that spread across the heavens and resulted in a gale that blew for two days.”

  After the Camsell Bend, unbroken heat produced nothing but gales. The towering mountains of the valley were made not of stone but of cloud; some looked like tightly packed bags of coiled rope, and others were frayed and b
lown out when hit by the upper jet stream. They formed to our east and west, and the only section of sky free from thunderheads was above the cool water, as if the river had thrown up some magical shield.

  All morning, storms grew in the thermals thrown off by the mountains, the radiant warmth rising from bare rock. Then, in the afternoons, when sufficiently tall and menacing, they would swoop in from every direction, chasing us off the water with lightning and rain. While Jeremy took a siesta in the tent, I stayed up and watched the clouds scatter, some dissipating, others stacking to turn the horizon black. They moved in all directions, seemingly at random.

  I enjoyed writing outside the tent while the storms rolled. You could see the entire rain cycle, tight and crisp thunderheads reduced to fuzzy remains as they lost their moisture. The breeze was strong and cool, and even the bulldogs were kept at bay. But there was also a sense of giddy dread in the face of such a powerful force. For a combat veteran, it was a familiar and unwelcome sensation, this particular combination of helplessness and trepidation. Crouching exposed inside a lightning storm felt a little too much like taking cover in Iraq, and I was relieved to see the storms move away.