The delta of the Ochre River, where it joined the Deh Cho, was clogged with gravel bars and flotsam and stumps of spruce trees, floated down from the upper reaches of Horn Mountain. Every bit of flat ground was silty and scummy, under a thin layer of water, and full of fresh moose tracks. We continued in the rain. Our canoe kept getting stuck, and on the north side of the delta we found more boulders and small patches of silt covered in bear and wolf tracks. I told Jeremy to get out the tarp, to keep our gear from soaking any further, and he tried to attach the covering to the canoe using a few of his new mini-carabiners, each the size of a paper clip.
While Jeremy held on to the canoe against the surf, I ran around the north shore of the beach, searching for any patch of sand bigger than a dinner plate. I ran a hundred yards across the plain to the bluff, along an impenetrable hedgerow, down the shore, and eventually found it, half a mile away: a sandy triangle in the center of a pile of driftwood trunks, just large enough for the tent. Fresh wolf and bear tracks were everywhere, but we decided to brave it, because our tent’s profile would duck below the woodpiles and thus be somewhat sheltered from the lightning. After five hours of struggling in the rain and wind and thunder, we camped at the watering hole of the region’s big game.
After midnight, another round of close lightning came through, shocks that lit the air. We squatted in the lightning position until almost two o’clock, and though I saw Jeremy shivering in the damp chill, he kept drinking from his water bottle.
“My mouth is so dry,” he said, and I thought of my adrenaline on the Slave.
Early the next morning, the rain unremitting, I texted my children using the inReach, looking for some small comfort in the normalcy of their lives at home. I also texted David, guilting him into sending us hourly Doppler radar checks. I no longer trusted the inReach’s forecast, a vague percentage chance that it might rain or thunderstorm. For several days, the forecast had been the same: rain today, but sunny tomorrow. Perpetually optimistic, and yet always wrong.
I wanted to understand the prevailing paths of the storms, and David confirmed that according to the radar they grew all day, drifted east, and then turned northwest. My perception was correct: yes, they really were chasing us. Were they following the cold river? I didn’t know enough meteorology to say.
Jeremy and I got a late start, sleeping until the rain let up. The sun broke through and the clouds shriveled, revealing brilliant golds and reds overhead.
“It’s like it never happened,” Jeremy said.
“That’s the funny thing about the sky,” I replied. “It’s always wiped clean.”
We loaded the canoe, and when I made my daily offering to the river, this time I didn’t ask for anything. As I dropped in the tobacco, I simply said, “You’re in charge, Deh Cho. Please be cool to us.”
“I love how your morning ritual has changed,” Jeremy said. “You used to ask for good camping, like you were sitting on Santa’s lap. Now you tell the river that it’s all powerful and you accept your fate.”
“I can imagine it was hard to be a missionary up here,” I said. “Imagine the response: ‘What do you mean all the old stories aren’t true? And some old guy thousands of miles away from here is really god? Um, I can see the river right here.’ ”
“If I lived here, I’d believe in the river,” Jeremy said.
I felt it then, how “Mackenzie River” is just a geographic label, a reference from a white man’s book. But on the water, when the skies darken and the water turns a putrid green and the whitecaps spring to life, then the river reveals itself.
It is truly the ancient and mighty Deh Cho, and we humbly beg its mercy.
* * *
————
Brought low by a powerful god, and paired up in a boat with a Jew, it is no surprise that Jeremy and I started counting the plagues of the Deh Cho.
Lightning for sure. Rain and wind and sun, never-ending sun. Plus the bugs, mosquitoes and bulldogs. That was five, though I was sure, without too much trouble, we’d soon find a perfectly biblical seven. Not all the plagues hit at once—the wind often blew away the bugs—but you could never hope to be really free from them all.
For a time, though, we were free from thunderstorms. As if the sky had exhausted itself and couldn’t muster the energy for rain. Instead, the heat grew rapidly, and the wind, shifting to the south, never ceased. Caught in a hair dryer, and no shade on the river, my skin turned dark, darker than I had ever been, even in Iraq, where I was covered in armor from head to toe. Every scar on my arms and legs showed as bright white, but I didn’t feel tan as much as dried out, like a fish left to hang on a line.
The silt of the Liard had finally, and thoroughly, mixed with the original Mackenzie, and there was no more escaping to a clean side. When we washed our pots and bowls, a film of dust was left upon drying. For drinking water, we started searching out tiny side streams; the main Deh Cho packed our filter with grit. At Birch Creek, the water was clean and clear, tinged the blue of a Bombay Sapphire gin bottle, and icy cold, like draining permafrost.
The current accelerated further, and the land seemed to slope away from the river in all directions, like the inner surface of a bowl, and the mountains beyond appeared to be at eye level, so the effect created, with so much tailwind and current, was not traveling along the river but sinking into a depression, swept forward and falling. It was a re-creation of the feeling I had driving my truck over the ridge into the Mackenzie watershed, down and down, but magnified and accelerated so close to the Deh Cho’s heart.
Then the land opened. Mountains dwindled, sporadic peaks above the flattening plain, including one lonely cone that looked like a volcano. “It looks like the Long Island pine barrens,” said Jeremy, of the scraggly beach with stunted pines. Unlike his childhood home, though, here there were moose prints everywhere and massive logs chewed by beaver in barber pole patterns. The banks were a mixture of ash, silt, sand, and mud, bleached white in the sun. There were still very few places to pitch a tent, though, because the shore looked as if it had been torn up by construction equipment, a function of the power of floodwaters to shape mud and gravel, the swirling currents petrified on the beach.
The terrain became so flat my paddle hit bottom even when I thought I was in the main channel: two feet of water below us, two miles to shore on each side. And yet the current was still fast, no correlation between the river’s width and speed. Gradient is king, and we were losing so much elevation so far inland I began to dread how much sluggish water and wind there was to come at the exhausted end of the journey.
The river braided among mud islands, twisting, high dirt banks alternating on the outside edge of each curve. It was clear, though, that we were headed straight north, and I still didn’t know how Mackenzie could have thought otherwise. “Wind, water, and denial are three very powerful forces,” Jeremy said.
All day, we paddled. To the point, the intersection of water and land at the horizon, the shortest distance on the winding river. Then, to the next point. Then the next. And the next. I measured distances not in miles but in hours and minutes, how long to reach each new landmark, indistinguishable from the one behind it.
It is important to say this again: all day we sat in a boat and did nothing but swing a two-pound weight, first on one side of the canoe, and then the other, and then back again. My paddle drank every stroke. The rhythm and form perfected—a downward thrust with the top hand, sweep the shaft along the gunwale—I made great guzzling sounds every time I pulled, whirlpools and vortices in my wake. Sometimes I put my blade in a boil and pulled, and there was no resistance. I used to fear the boils, back on the Slave and the upper Deh Cho, but now I looked for them, because within their uneven surface the water moved just a hair faster downstream.
The river was a funnel of mud cliff and black spruce and nothing else. For a week, the view never changed. The emptiness smothered comprehension, like a heavy blanket draped over my head. Jeremy always volunteered to set up the te
nt, lay our bags, and blow up the pads, and I didn’t blame him for wanting to retreat to the tent, where at least the objects were of human scale.
“Things out here change so slow you’re hyperaware of every current, every bug, every cloud. That’s actually the point of minimalism,” Jeremy said, referencing the artistic movement. “When you constrain everything else, the one thing you change really pops.”
But I wasn’t thinking about art. I thought of Kylik, the owner of the charter boat outfit in Inuvik, and his promise to retrieve us if we made it to Garry Island. I had come to understand—by paddling point to point to point—why he also measured distance in time. “You can get anywhere if you have the time,” he had said. That was right. If you live in a city with traffic, sometimes it takes ten minutes to cut across town, and sometimes it takes an hour. You can affect the time—avoid rush hour, go an alternate route, drive faster—if not the distance. But it worked different up here. There are no shortcuts. If it takes twelve hours to paddle somewhere, it takes twelve hours. All it takes is time.
In camp, all I thought of was time. The days felt so long, doing the same monotonous repetitive task, in this timeless land.
At the poles, conventional timekeeping loses meaning as the time zones collapse; your feet could stand twelve hours apart at the apex. That fungibility trickles down the side of the globe. Even a thousand miles south of the pole, I was caught in an endless day. The sun didn’t rise and set so much as rotate. And in the winter, in endless night, the sky is a permanent mask of stars, reflecting the universe not as it is, but as it has been through all time, as the light from each sun and galaxy and nebula takes millions and billions of years to reach earth.
Endless day, endless night, endless now. I felt caught in the northern recirculation. Every day was the same. But on the river, at least there was current and a wind from the south; if the tunnel of the Deh Cho was infinite, we were nonetheless moving through it at speed.
* * *
————
Three o’clock, and the sun shone brightly outside the tent when the noise pulled me from sleep. A huge sound, a storm barreling down the valley toward us. The air was vibrating, and I stuck my head out of the tent, expecting the worst.
But instead of dark clouds and trees blown sideways, I saw a massive ship motoring down the river, hugging the red and green buoys to find the deep channel. Nine hundred feet long, tall white tugs pushing flat decks, each laden with construction equipment and shipping containers full of toilet paper and cans of soda and diesel fuel hidden in the double-hulled holds. I looked for my truck but didn’t see it. The barge displaced so much water that the wake crashed to shore like an incoming ocean tide.
It took a moment for me to understand. It was the barge that woke me, not a storm. I was afraid it was a storm. I realized, I was afraid all the time.
Paddling the Deh Cho felt like walking a tightrope. Don’t look down, don’t look around, don’t think too much about what you are doing, don’t think about being small and exposed, just put one foot in front of the other, paddle to the next point. That’s it. If you pick your head up, look around, you’ll realize how far from help you are, and the enormity of the task.
I had a dream that night, that I could punch the ground and make it submit to me. That I went to dinner with an overweight friend, and we ate three hamburgers, made of beef patties and chicken breasts, and then we had chocolate-covered strawberries for dessert.
I told Jeremy that I was having food dreams and fantasies of hitting the earth.
“Feeling pretty powerless, huh?” he said.
Even our gear was starting to wear out. Our stove was a blackened husk. There was a small hole in our tent. The leather on the palms of my paddling gloves was rotting, and smelled like the elephant house at the zoo. People say, “I love my camping gear; it’s lasted for years.” But how often have they actually used it? One or two weekends a year? Most popular brands, I was learning, are simply not durable in continuous use.
To his credit, though, Jeremy was listening to instruction, had proved a quick study, and was small and fit easily in the tent, which, with David gone, had seemingly grown to twice its size. We had learned to work together and function as a team, and Jeremy had gotten good at setting up camp, keeping everything as clean as possible.
And he taught me an obvious trick that I should have figured out long before. I had been losing things, including a spare cord to charge the GPS, and it was bothering me, like my head was somehow not in the game.
“I’ve figured out the problem,” I said to Jeremy. “We all drop stuff all the time. The sock falls out of the hamper on the way to wash clothes. But it falls in your living room, so you can find it. Out here, the living room is the last campsite, way upriver.”
“So put everything in your pockets,” he said. “Make that the living room.” And it worked. My pockets filled with lids and cords and socks, but they were safe in the living room, and I never lost anything on the river again.
* * *
————
That day, with a strong tailwind, we put out the sail and made our best time yet. The water was green and disorganized, choppy, yanking at the canoe and pushing us around, but Jeremy was unfazed. His high school rowing team practiced in Long Island Sound, and one summer he worked the docks, ferrying boat captains out to their anchored ships. “This feels like home,” he said, over and over, and it made him fearless. In his narrow view off the front of the canoe, he wasn’t walking the tightrope in a foreign land; he was back at a crew meet.
But then the south wind, at first a blessing from the Deh Cho, became another plague. Battling a headwind is tiring work, but too strong a tailwind is dangerous. We went fast, too fast. The water was serrated. A gust twisted the boat and then nearly ripped the sail. I stopped paddling and it was all I could do to hold the rudder, slowing us to keep control while Jeremy struggled to take down the sail.
“We’re surfing” said Jeremy, and he was right. The waves were breaking all around us, under us, to the side, above our gunnels, above my shoulders, pushing us at cross-purposes. One came from behind and lifted us high and then as we dipped in the trough the canoe wallowed like a fat sow settling in the mud, our nose swinging one way and the tail the other, sinking into the soft water between breaking crests.
“This is fun,” Jeremy called back to me.
“That’s only ’cause you aren’t responsible for steering. You’re too trusting,” I said.
“You know, the third movement of Debussy’s La mer is called ‘The Discussion of Wind and Water,’ ” Jeremy replied, but I ignored him.
The river turned, and in the crosswinds the waves became confused, slosh in God’s bathtub. We cut to an island, to get in the leeward shadow, but the chop grew worse. “Is this a mistake?” I asked, nervous at how the canoe was twisting, the nose riding up and smacking down. “No, we’re good; I haven’t felt weightless yet,” said Jeremy.
Eventually, the river forced us sideways, and I just ferried back and forth, dodging islands while the current and wind on the boat’s broadside pushed us along. On one crossing, to make it around a shoal, I turned our nose upstream to gain time. “Paddle hard!” I yelled, like I was in my whitewater raft guide job back home, and we dug in, but the current beat against our chine and threatened to pull under the upstream side. “I can’t hold it,” I said to Jeremy, and we had to turn the nose downstream to regain control.
We had learned that the Deh Cho was a series of localized wind tunnels. The windy places stay windy, the calm places calm, according to their geography, and there is no waiting it out. To make it safe to launch the boat, you have to stop in a calm place. But no way to apply that lesson now. To keep from foundering, we just needed to get off the water as soon as possible.
I pointed the canoe straight downriver at a bank of dried mud, and the gale drove us up on shore. We made camp there, on a floodplain, placing our tent in a tiny cleft out of the wind, and added a new plague to th
e list: dust. The hot south wind kicked up clouds, choking brown funnels and devils. All of our gear was impregnated with the talcum powder. We could do nothing but hope it would be cooler and calmer the next morning and were stuck waiting out the day, confined to the sweatbox of a tent.
Above, a jetliner flew overhead. A silver speck, and two perfect white contrails against a blue sky, while our feet were stuck in a dusty past, the future far out of reach.
In the morning, the winds were low enough to launch, and eventually we approached Tulita. I had paddled 557 miles since Hay River, three weeks before. Jeremy and I had not spoken to another person in ten days, since we stopped to see Jonas. Michelle’s guidebook said there was a campground and showers at a public swimming pool, and we looked forward to both.
“I think I’m admirably grimy,” Jeremy said. And he was. What a difference from the man who jumped in my canoe at Fort Simpson.
— 19 —
THE DOGRIB, JULY 1789
Heavy gray columns rose on the distant shore, and Mackenzie’s spirits with them. Those were cooking fires surely, fed with wet wood. Mackenzie checked his pocket watch: three-quarters past seven o’clock in the morning. It was July 5, and they had not seen another human being in ten days. But there ahead was a most welcome sight, signs of life. “We perceived several Smokes, which we made for with all speed.”
They had traveled seventy miles the day before, through embankments of orange shale and grim mud walls rimed with ice, inhospitable to waterfowl, and the Chipewyan hunters had secured very little fresh meat. Barrieau and the voyageurs spotted one beaver and killed it themselves, but in its throes the rodent filled with water and went to the bottom before they could retrieve it. They ate pemmican again that night. Mackenzie sat awake to count the hours of darkness, in truth mere twilight, as the sun only dipped below the horizon for four hours.
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