Disappointment River

by Brian Castner

  “You’re new. How can I help you?” he said. His whole face smiled as he spoke.

  “Hi, I’m Brian, from New York. I’m looking for Chief Frank Andrews,” I said.

  “Well, you’ve found him, Brian from New York,” he said and stuck out his hand, and I marveled at my good luck.

  “My friend and I are paddling the whole Deh Cho,” I said. “I left Hay River a few weeks ago. Thank you for allowing us to paddle through your land.” Jonas had said it was important to be respectful and ask permission.

  But then Chief Andrews said, “Turn around and go back!” and I just looked at him a moment, before everyone else laughed.

  “It’s good water this year,” the chief continued. “The Sans Sault Rapids ahead, you’ll be good. There is a ledge that runs all the way across the river. One fall, I was flying back from Inuvik, and the plane was low, and it looked like a giant beaver had built a dam all the way across the river.”

  “I actually have a friend flying in tomorrow,” I said. “We need to stay the night. The guidebook says there’s a campground in town. Is it still there?”

  “Well, I don’t think it floated away!” he said, and a woman next to him almost fell down giggling. “But it’s at the base of Bear Rock, eh, across the river.” That was another hour paddle, and then returning to town, against the current, would be an even tougher chore.

  “Well, what about the showers, at the public pool?”

  “Oh, there are no showers, Brian from New York,” Chief Andrews said. “The kids broke in and broke the pumps.”

  “And they threw crap in the pool,” said another man.

  “Yeah, pool’s closed I think, eh,” the chief said.

  We started to attract a little crowd, and I felt like the daily village curiosity. A white man pulled up on a quad. He had a mustache and a tank top, and introduced himself as Ron.

  “My wife and I run a B&B,” Ron said. “We can get you a room. Or just a shower. Whatever you want.” And he gave me his phone number.

  I felt discouraged, so I walked the rest of the way into town, to scope it out before returning to Jeremy with the bad news. There was a ramshackle fire department, a two-story building decorated with strings of lights that read “Merry Christmas,” and a small village square with a sheltered fire circle hosting a card game. The Northern store was a prefab metal warehouse on stilts, and to soften the bad news, I stopped in to buy a treat to take to Jeremy. Nine-dollar gallons of milk and four-dollar candy bars and a frozen Slurpee machine, but no cups.

  “The kids steal them,” the white manager said, apologizing, and then he poured me two raspberry-flavored ices.

  I was walking down the hill, back to the canoe, when a man crossed the street to speak to me. He had a gray buzz cut and six hairs of a gray beard, and wore galoshes with no shoes or socks and a black T-shirt that read, “Aboriginal Day ’08.”

  “You, what’s your name?” he said. His eyes looked past me, and I had to listen hard to understand his words.

  “I’m Brian,” I said. “What’s your name?”

  “My name is Richard,” he said. “I am one of the last Mountain Dene. There are only three or four of us left now. I grew up on the other side of the river, in the mountains”—and he pointed across the river to a forested ridge well inland—“and I used to make the moose-skin boats.” Now he made great scooping motions with his hands to indicate their size.

  Then he put his head down. “I wasn’t going to say that,” he said quietly, “but I just did.”

  He turned back to me and stuck a finger back toward the river. “See that creek, you go up that creek, all the way to the mountains, that’s where we lived, until my parents died.”

  I didn’t see the creek, just the standard black spruce blur.

  “How long did it take, to get to your home?” I asked. The mountains looked far away, nearly to the horizon’s edge.

  “A month! The old-timers, they didn’t rush. You have to hunt, fish, trap, go slow to feed yourself.” He made to leave, took a step, and then abruptly stopped and turned back to me and grabbed my shoulders with both hands.

  “Brian. Pass it. Pass it.” And then he shuffled up the hill.

  The Slurpees were half-melted by the time I got back to Jeremy. We were hot, exhausted, filthy, and hungry. Paying a little money to stay in the bed-and-breakfast with Ron was the easiest decision of my trip.

  * * *

  ————

  Ron Oe is a small-engine mechanic and runs ground control at the airstrip, and his wife, Wendy, works at the church, but to help make ends meet, they rent out the spare rooms of their modest home. In the yard are silver willow bushes and rhubarb and raspberries, stacks of wood for heat in the winter, plus a small stockpile of white birch bark, the same as I had in my canoe, to start a fire each day.

  The Oes are Pentecostals from Alberta but talked of themselves as transplants rather than missionaries. A friend invited them to Tulita to help out in the church for a summer. One year turned to two, then three. They left and returned, to buy a house and minister full-time. “There is so much need up here,” Wendy said. Plus, they fell into the lifestyle, the freedom of no time all the time. “We’re completely ruined on nine to five,” Wendy said. “Ron just told me he’d rather work seven to midnight than nine to five.”

  Wendy is a sturdy woman who smiled more and more as the day went on. She did our laundry and said we could take a shower, after she and Ron discussed how much water was in their basement tank and when the next delivery would arrive. Wendy did the math, then said, “You can take a five-minute shower, if we’re going to do laundry too.”

  “It’s okay, take your time,” Ron said, “make sure you take a good shower.”

  “Yes, a good five-minute shower,” she repeated.

  While the Oes made water plans, a young woman sat in their kitchen, a church volunteer who came north to run the pool for the summer.

  “They threw crap in it, so we had to close it,” the young woman said, in a tone of disbelief. It was starting to dawn on me that the “crap” thrown in the pool might have been actual human feces.

  “It’s good they closed it,” Wendy said. “Maybe the young people will learn that there are consequences for their actions.”

  I read widely in Canadian newspapers before my trip, and seemingly every day there was another story about the crisis among young indigenous men and women in the north: suicide, unemployment, alcoholism, isolation. Most of all, idleness, acknowledged in the name of an indigenous ecological movement: Idle No More.

  “I know there are a lot of struggles up here,” I said, hoping vagueness would sound like tact. “Lack of opportunities. It must be tough.”

  “Yes, but some of them are just bored,” she said, and there was disapproval in her voice. “Ron told me about your trouble in Fort Providence. Doesn’t surprise me. So we’re going to bring your canoe up to the house, and you can lock your gear in our trailer. You have to be careful.”

  For dinner, Wendy made us pork chops in the frying pan with mashed potatoes, carrots and rutabagas, plus coleslaw with cabbage that she had picked fresh from the community greenhouse. Ron said grace, and other than one brief implication that global warming is continued melting from Noah’s great flood, that was the end of the proselytizing. Jeremy and I tucked in, took seconds and thirds, and I had to consciously slow myself to stay polite. Jeremy and I both eyed the last two pork chops.

  “Please, eat,” Wendy said. “That’s why we made extra.”

  Later, Ron insisted on giving us a driving tour of the town. I thought this odd—a roadless town, disconnected from the rest of the country, where could we drive?—but later discovered the few streets clogged with trucks and quads. It seemed to be Tulita’s primary form of entertainment; one old man, who could barely see over the steering wheel of his massive pickup, we passed seven times.

  Ron started by showing us where the winter road enters town. It was barely more than a rutted cut through the b
oreal, a swampy overgrown track that looked impassable even for hikers. The year-round road to Wrigley was completed in the 1970s, and the Oes blame politics for it ending right there. The lack of an all-weather road turns Wendy and Ron’s otherwise working-class lifestyle on its head. Once a year, when the marshes freeze and snow tamps down the brush, they drive the winter road twenty-four hours south for a weeklong shopping spree, buying all the clothing, electronics, home improvement supplies, and frozen food they’ll need for the next year.

  Our driving tour was exhaustive and included the airport, the lake that serves as an emergency landing strip when frozen in winter, and the town dump, where ravens and sandhill cranes pecked the rotting food and plastic. We stopped at the water pumping station and stepped into the clear and frigid Great Bear River, and Ron told us the story of how the uranium for the first atomic bombs was mined up on Great Bear Lake, then floated on a series of barges, all the way up the Mackenzie to railroads that bore it to American ordnance factories. Ron took us to a road officially named Sesame Street, for the many “characters” who live there, such as a snow-machine mechanic who is a giant grouch. Last stop was the old church, now a landmark. The floor of the old 1880 mission has heaved in the permafrost and is now curved like a bow. A gold-leaf scroll above the pulpit reads, “Till He Come,” and a page of the pastor’s concordance still rests on the rail. A padlock keeps the door shut, and the dovetailed log walls are caulked with mud.

  It was impossible to ignore the poverty of the town, and I was reminded again that when humans live in wilderness, true wilderness far off the highways, almost by definition it must be in material want, because population density is required for the conspicuous consumption most Americans consider normal.

  What work could there be up here, beyond the government jobs—schoolteacher, game warden, police officer—almost always taken by white outsiders? Because few indigenous young people take up the traditional lifestyle of living on the land, they are left with rampant inactivity, and thus hopelessness, the unintended consequence of globalization for those so marooned. They can see the culture on satellite television but cannot touch it, except to purchase the veneer on Amazon—yoga pants and smart phones and straight-brimmed New Era baseball caps with the gold foil sticker.

  None of this is new. In 1931, for National Geographic, Amos Burg noted “a certain moral and physical decline” among the indigenous population, and that “the death rate exceeds the birth rate among the tribes.” Burg was a product of his patronizing time, and attributed it to a new sedentary lifestyle, the Dene clustered in towns rather than following herds and living off the land. I read a similar story in Ultimate North by Robert Douglas Mead, who paddled much of the Mackenzie River in 1974. Most of his stories are of alcohol and pickpocketing kids prowling around his canoe, trying to swipe his gear.

  I thought it was all dated racism, and myself suitably awakened, until Fort Providence. “A bunch of drunk Indians stole your shit,” the cop had said. The drunks come out at three in Fort Simpson. We skipped Wrigley entirely. Now Tulita. My aspirational empathy and daily reality were in conflict.

  On the way back to his home, Ron stopped to talk to a young man walking on the side of the road. “Roy, what’s going on?” Ron asked. Roy mumbled something I didn’t understand and swayed slightly, and Ron opened the back door of the truck to give him a ride. We drove a few more streets and passed a group of young men with brown bags, and Roy banged on the truck door to indicate he wanted to get out.

  “Roy knows he has problems with the drink,” Ron said, when we pulled away. “But he’s such a good person. He cares for the elders. He takes tea every day to his grandmother. He has a good heart.”

  “You’re a good man, Ron,” I said. “You can see past the alcohol. Not everyone can.” But then Ron was quiet.

  That evening, Ron and Wendy and Jeremy and I talked long into the sunlit night. We talked about everything you shouldn’t, guns and politics and religion and the environment, and were still friendly and laughing by the end. Wendy brought out bowls of vanilla ice cream and glasses of cold water. Jeremy was the chosen favorite, and both Oes dropped Torah quotations. We played Ron’s guitar, and told stories of our travels, and I mentioned that earlier that day I had met Richard, one of the last Mountain Dene. “Ricky, you mean?” Ron said. “He is a great boat maker.” And then Ron pulled up a video on the Internet of a moose-hide boat landing on the shore at Tulita, only three years before. “Ricky has struggled lately,” Ron acknowledged. In the video, Richard stands at the tiller, tall and strong.

  Past midnight, the sky nothing but red, a pair of foxes approached the window of the Oes’ living room, looking for peanut butter. By then, my eyes were closing of their own bidding. I begged off, and lay down in a bed for the first time in weeks. I was asleep in seconds.

  * * *

  ————

  Landon Phillips was my third paddle mate, and he flew in, right on time, the next afternoon. By then I had cleaned and dried all of the gear, restocked our stores at the Northern, and taken a shower. I felt awkward in the shower, more wistful than satisfied, and when I stepped out, warm and wet, I mostly felt regret, that it would be so long until my next one.

  Landon was flying from Italy, where he had just finished a tour as the commander of the engineering squadron at Aviano Air Base. He was still a lieutenant colonel in the active-duty military, and coming off a workaholic assignment, he had agreed to spend nine days of leave with me instead of his wife and three sons because I promised to take him through the two biggest landmarks on the trip, the Sans Sault Rapids and the cliffs of the Ramparts.

  Some people wonder how their lives might have been, had they taken a different fork in the road. I never have to, because my doppelgänger is Landon, and if I had stayed in the military, I’d be living his life. We met as brand-new second lieutenants, attended initial training together, and then met up every year, hitting the same career milestones. When I ran a bomb squad in Kirkuk, Landon did the same in Baghdad. Then our paths diverged, but not our friendship, so that by the time he got off a plane in Tulita, we had known each other almost half our lives.

  I met Landon at the airport. Any passenger on his flight could tell he was the military guy: trimmed hair, stocky, broad shoulders. His call sign is Short Round.

  “Your hired voyageur has arrived,” he said in a Tennessee twang. “I’ve been looking forward to this for months. Let’s do it.” After his stressful job in Italy, he smiled like a man just let out of jail.

  We hit the water right away. As I packed the canoe, Jeremy gave Landon pointers, on how to set up the tent and filter water. I hugged Jeremy and thanked him. With a shower and cell-phone signal, he was a happy man, off the next day to meet up with his boyfriend in Colorado. There was little ceremony, and Landon and I left quickly; if we stayed much longer, I would have wanted another shower myself.

  It was four miles to the campsite at the base of Bear Rock. We crossed the Great Bear River, crystal clear and icy, and I stopped and gulped two bottles before filling all of our water bladders; too soon this beautiful water would be lost in the dirty Deh Cho. The campsite itself was marked with a sign—“This is what it’s like every night, right?” Landon asked, sarcastically—and downright posh, with a grill and an outhouse and a picnic table. There was little room to pitch the tent, though, so we put it directly on the trail. “That’s like hot dog in a hallway,” he said of the setup.

  Landon was jet-lagged from four days of flights, but we woke early anyway, to follow the trail to the top of Bear Rock, twelve hundred feet above the river. I had been in the wilderness almost a month, but had barely walked, and I wanted to stretch my legs. I was winded almost immediately; what a strange activity paddling is. The view was a carpet of flat green, occasional ridges of rock poking up in isolated mountain ranges. I felt as if I could see the curvature of the earth, but no sea was in sight.

  After only thirty minutes, the trail petered out. We scrambled up a ledge, surpri
sed a fox, and then thought we found a very faint path, heading into a copse of trees. We followed, but the trail ended immediately in a massive pile of bear scat.

  “We found their shit spot,” Landon said, and we turned around.

  The day stayed fair, and we made good time. The current was definitely slowing, but Landon’s fresh arms pulled massive strokes. Landon describes himself as “short but very dense,” and he muscled us forward, kicking the paddle at the end of each draw so that we rocked, chine to chine, to reduce drag. I had become accustomed to compensating for Jeremy, and now I laid back and rested in amazement.

  By evening, we had fought our way to the outskirts of the oil town of Norman Wells. Along the way we passed a wildfire. From the river it looked relatively small and manageable—a few smoking pockets in the black spruce that hazed the sky a sickly brown—but it was fought with the ferocity of a major blaze. At least three orange airplanes dropped retardant in a continuous circuit, and helicopters toted huge buckets of water via steel cables attached to their undersides. The aim was to keep the blaze away from the refineries, I realized, or the town. I wondered, briefly, if I should add fire to the plagues of the Deh Cho.

  We stopped that night at McKinnon Territorial Park, the first spot that felt like a domesticated campground from back home. The beach was full of oversized Easter eggs, multicolored rock, but the bluff above hosted gravel pads for tents, picnic tables, water reservoirs, freshly chopped wood for a fire. It was almost too perfect, completely empty, and we couldn’t believe our luck.

  “Two for two!” Landon said. “This trip is a breeze with me around.”

  The park was an easy drive from Norman Wells, and eventually a few families drove up, the kids fishing and swimming. They stayed a distance away, but then a young boy and his older sister appeared at our tent with tea bags and two dinners wrapped in tinfoil: steamed salmon in one, zucchini and peppers and celery in another. “Thank you,” I said. “We have some granola bars. We’ll give you some, but go ask your parents if it’s okay first.” But the children never returned.