Disappointment River

by Brian Castner

  We tried to enjoy the site, stay awake, and play cards, but it didn’t last, and we crashed in the tent. “Okay, I’m going to switch-off mode,” Landon said, and two minutes later his whole body jerked violently, and he slept without moving for six hours.

  In the morning, the sky was bloodred, and the tent was covered in a layer of ash. Landon was awake before me, made a fire and breakfast, and brought me a mug of tea with honey. For two weeks, I had done all the cooking and had to poke Jeremy with a stick to get him to wake up and eat breakfast. I was overwhelmed.

  Norman Wells was only an hour away, and though we had just left Tulita, I craved a greasy breakfast and coffee. The guidebook said it was the last restaurant until Inuvik, five hundred miles away.

  “Let’s go get some fried moose nose and whatnot,” Landon said.

  * * *

  ————

  In northern Saskatchewan and Manitoba I had found poor indigenous towns and white resource towns, and under that taxonomy Norman Wells is the second.

  Canadian geologists struck oil in the 1930s, but large-scale production didn’t kick in until the Japanese invaded the Aleutian Islands in World War II. To fuel the fight in the Pacific, Canada and America teamed up on the Canol project, six hundred miles of pumps and pipeline from Norman Wells directly west over the mountains to the coast. Across the north, they laid airfields to bring in men and equipment, and built the now-famous Alaska Highway through the Canadian Rockies.

  The Canol pipeline pumped four thousand barrels a day between 1943 and 1945, and then it was abandoned; the roads, the pumps, the pipeline, were all simply left to rot in place. They say you can still find rusting jeeps out there in the boreal forest.

  The river at Norman Wells is extremely wide, and today man-made islands—platforms for drills, pumps, bobbing oil derricks, and generator stations—dot the harbor offshore of the town. Landon and I stopped at a busy dock choked with barges and commercial vessels and tugs and tenders, and above, on the bluff, hunched oil tanks and the bright refinery flame.

  We agreed to eat in shifts so someone could stay with the gear, and I walked into town alone on a gravel road sprayed with grease to keep the dust down. Everywhere I looked, there were pipes, culverts, shipping containers, radio towers, front-end loaders, trailers on stilts. The diner was named the Yamouri Inn, but it felt like stepping into a greasy spoon in Omaha, except for the prices, twenty-dollar omelets and thirty-dollar steak and eggs. The two waitresses wore push-up bras and see-through tank tops and skintight yoga pants, surely useful in collecting tips from the roustabouts. I tried not to stare, but seeing a woman dressed so triggered hormones I had not needed in quite a while; I felt like I was in middle school and had just discovered an older brother’s stash of Playboys. The two women ignored me, except to bring me my food, as they complained to each other that last night they had held the restaurant open late for forty firefighters but they never came in.

  I felt fat and spoiled: bed and shower two nights ago, two campgrounds, a breakfast of eggs and potatoes—the Colossal Scrambler, they called it—so big I had to force myself to finish it. But I took it where I could; I was fattening up for harder times to come.

  Landon took his turn at breakfast, and I sat at the harbor. Jet aircraft came in and out of the busy airport. A family loaded plywood in their Lund boat to take out to build or repair a fishing camp. “Someone’s been sleeping in here,” the boat driver said, tossing flattened cardboard and a pink blanket into the dirt. He couldn’t properly dispose of the trash because the nearby bear-proof garbage can was so stuffed with empty cans of beer as to be overflowing.

  * * *

  ————

  Landon remained a lucky charm. He was optimistic, the energetic shot in the arm that I needed. Torrential rains upstream raised the water level, picking up driftwood from shore and clogging the channels, but when we found beaches flooded, and thus few places to camp, he remained undaunted. “Throw some more tobacco in the water, I bet we find something,” he said.

  Near the Carcajou River, everything was low and swampy, terrible for camping, and the sun was unrelenting. Landon wanted to check the island across from the Carcajou’s mouth, a silty brown lump with drunken spruce tumbling down, mounds of muck along the water. I was unconvinced, having spent weeks scouting riverbanks for flat spots, and I thought I knew all the tricks. But behind a large mound—“everyone knows to look behind the mound; it’s always flat,” Landon said—there was a little shelf, an oasis of grass and sand and mosquitoes.

  “The streak is alive!” he said with relish. “Greatest shelf ever.”

  To get out of the sun, we hid beneath some bushes, among piles of goose shit. I was thirsty and filtered brown goose-shit water; in the silty river bottom, right below the surface, were fields of baby goose prints waiting to become fossilized museum curios in millions of years.

  In the morning, Landon again rose first, and I asked what he did while I slept in.

  “I got up, piddled about, washed my such and such and whatnot,” he said.

  I did not wash my such and such. The night before, squatting in the mud to relieve myself, mosquitoes attacked every inch of bare flesh, and my balls and inner thighs were covered in bites. I was reminded again of Sigurd Olson, and how simple and idyllic everything in nature was to him, and briefly considered using his book as toilet paper. We had left the bulldogs behind, but the mosquitoes were growing thicker as we went north, and I resisted DEET or putting on my head net too early, as I knew the delta would be many times worse and I needed to toughen up.

  That day we were due to face the Sans Sault Rapids, two and a half miles wide, the largest on the river. Michelle’s guidebook claimed they were easy to run on the left, because the main rapid was to the right, though on Google Earth that portion of the river was covered by blurry cloud, so I couldn’t confirm. Chief Andrews, in Tulita, said we’d be fine at this water level. But back in Hay River, Doug Swallow had provided us special nautical charts that showed rapids spread across the entire river. Capsizing would mean disaster. An insurance adjuster might define the risk as low-probability/high-impact.

  We pulled up short of the rapids to scout, and while they roared ominously in the distance, we could see nothing at the horizon line. The guidebook also said there was a memorial near the beach to several young men who had drowned in the rapids a few decades ago. Like a voyageur wooden cross, but sheet metal. From the water, we saw a small fishing cabin up the bank, and so Landon and I thought to start there.

  We climbed the beach and entered the tree line, an overgrown path revealing itself only a few feet at a time. The mystique of the bushwhacker is found in the potential that a hidden city might be revealed by the next machete thwack, but we proved failed explorers, finding nothing but mosquitoes and more bush. The willows closed around us, and swarms attacked us in waves. In a moment, simple annoyance morphed into panic as they layered our eyes and ears and throats, and I coughed out whole clouds of the bugs. “It was a mosquito mirage! A hologram to draw us in,” Landon yelled, and we gave up on the cabin and memorial and ran for the beach. The mosquitoes attached themselves and followed us to the coast, back into the boat. We had to get out on the water and kill them all one by one before they were through with us.

  Landon took off his shirt to check the damage. “I look like Frankenstein, like I’ve been stitched together by mosquito bites and whatnot,” he said.

  And then there was nothing ahead but the Sans Sault Rapids. I threw extra tobacco in the river, and Landon, who developed a taste for Red Man while working with Special Forces in Afghanistan, said, “I gave up a chew for you, Deh Cho, so be cool today, dude.”

  The current rose, and the swells rose, and the sound with it, a white noise building to our right. There was a sense of momentum, a volume of water in motion that I remembered from the Slave, and with that flashback my knuckles whitened. The roar ahead of us grew, a mighty sound accented with the popping of whitewater, and suddenly I feared
we were not nearly far enough left. The surface of the water started tilting in all directions, rolled like ocean waves without the breakers, and then ahead of us a sandbar appeared, studded with driftwood trunks.

  There was no such island on my map. Which side of it were we supposed to be on?

  I cut us hard to the left, nosed upstream to gain us time, and ahead of me Landon, with no Slave memory to haunt him, happily paddled away. The canoe undulated and pitched like a storm-tossed whaler, and when we reached the far western side of the river, we ran along a high buff wall. We were in the heart of a wave train now, and square to it, through one crest, two, three, but then the whitewater receded and we drifted safely in simple current.

  For curiosity’s sake, I grounded the canoe on the uncharted island. It was completely flat and made of gravel, obviously submerged during spring melt. Landon and I walked across the plain to view the main rapid. Mountains were all around, though half as tall as those at the Camsell Bend. In the far distance, I spied only a few whitecaps in the meat of the Sans Sault Rapids. I tried to take a photograph, but it was too distant to look like much. It turns out we could have run the river straight through the center, along the barge buoys with the tugs and freighters.

  The Sans Sault Rapids lived up to their French name: the Rapids Without Rapids. In the end, the most difficult bit was the end, sinking to my crotch in the silt while trying to walk the canoe to the island.

  * * *

  ————

  It was hot all day, and we were surrounded by it, the sun above and radiant heat coming up from the ground as the whole country was continuously barraged by never-ending daylight. I felt like I had been left under the heat lamp at Burger King, shrunken and dried.

  Seeking shade, we stopped for dinner on the south bank of the Hume River, on a wide lawn covered in primordial grass, some sort of mini-horsetail with tiny branches. We hoped to eat in the shade of the hedgerow, but the mosquitoes owned that territory, so we were forced back onto the sunny green field. The grass seemed to grow as I watched it, like the lawn of Eden, fresh and new, like the first idea of a lawn. To celebrate surviving the feared Sans Sault Rapids, I made Pad Thai, the best of our dehydrated dinners, and we ate sitting on a dried mud bank full of wolf and grizzly prints. My full stomach made me sleepy, and I lay down right there, my bowl and spoon on my chest.

  “You mean we’re gonna fall asleep on a shitload of bear tracks among a stack of dirty dishes?” Landon asked.

  “Yup,” I said, and then I stretched my aching back and closed my eyes in the bug-less breeze.

  We finally camped that night a few miles farther, on another shelf that Landon, the good luck charm, spotted from the river. Nearby lay a dead spruce, half the needles still attached, and piles of driftwood, and so for the first time on my journey, we made a real campfire. It looked huge, compared with the tiny twig-and-grass smokers I built in the cooking stove. “Now it’s a fucking adventure!” Landon said, and I craved a little alcohol, to sit and reminisce with my old friend whom I had met so many summers before.

  We were two days ahead of schedule and, if all went well, would make Fort Good Hope the next afternoon. Landon didn’t care about thieves and wasn’t leery about spending too much time in towns. “You contracted me to get you from Tulita to Fort Good Hope. Whether that takes five days or eight days, I don’t give a shit,” he said. My voyageur wanted to get moving.

  In the morning, we approached the Ramparts, a set of limestone cliffs that temporarily squeeze the Deh Cho into a tight gorge. But the river digs so deep no cataract is formed, and though Doug had provided a special marine chart, we saw no great hazard after a close study. We hoped only for scenery, a break in the monotony of the black spruce funnel.

  As we paddled the western shore, the cliffs a thin yellow line on the horizon, I had a sense of déjà vu to the day before. A driftwood-clogged island on our left, where there should be none, a familiar white noise ahead. Suddenly it became very shallow, a rock garden of boulders rising from the water, so we ferried out to the center of the river, still over two miles wide ahead of the Ramparts.

  But the current had caught us. I could see now whole formations of standing waves, blocks of whitewater with calmer channels between. We had waited too long to cross, and though I angled the nose of the canoe upstream, the far shore receded even as we dug in. Our exertions bought us a little time to work around one cluster of rapids, but no matter how we paddled, it was clear we’d never stay upriver of them all. It was all too big. The river was too wide, the current too strong, the lines of rapids too thick, the cliffs of the Ramparts rising from all shores.

  “I can’t hold the nose,” I called up. The water beat on our starboard side, shearing waves that relentlessly knocked our bow downstream.

  “Then let’s do this!” Landon yelled.

  So I ruddered the boat around, and the rapids were so close the brown water raised like teeth in a saw, and when Landon reached out and pulled his next stroke I could feel the boat lurch forward. We sped up, face to the rapids, right on the line, and for a moment I was in disbelief that I was attempting a whitewater raft maneuver in a canoe, alone but for Landon, laden with expedition supplies, thousands of miles from home, days from safe rescue.

  We cleaved the first wave, and it fell away from our prow. Then the second, and the third. Our boat was so long, and so heavy, and moving so fast that we pushed the waves aside. In seconds, it was done, we had cut through them all and were floating in a pool of still water.

  Before us, the Ramparts stood like the pale walls of a fortress, stretching to the horizon in each direction, and us through the gate, the Arctic Circle on the other side.

  And yet, as our tiny canoe floated to the base of those bulwarks, the Ramparts seemed to diminish in strength, overwhelmed by the width and depth of the Deh Cho. Nothing compared with the scale of the river or withstood its scrutiny. Every mountain bowed to foothills, adjoining streams but trickles, and at times even the sky seemed to shrink. Each lost its sublimity, cowed to submission. And us, just bits of yeast, alone, insignificant motes upon the water, subservient in all ways to the current. If even the Ramparts were so reduced, then what were we? The vast river swallowed all.

  Of all the plagues of the Deh Cho, the worst is emptiness.

  — 21 —

  YOU CAN STARVE ON RABBITS, JULY 1789

  The old man stood alone on the beach. He was pathetic, deserted by his people, standing among empty cooking fires. The camp smelled like fish entrails and wet wood smoke, and in the distance rose a front of limestone cliffs.

  When Mackenzie’s canoes approached this camp, several families fled up the steep gravel banks and disappeared into a wall of spruce trees, as had the Dogrib two days before. Awgeenah and their commandeered guide disembarked and spoke to the old man, who then proved not quite solitary; behind him, an old woman poked her head out of a lodge.

  The elder said he was “pitifully worn out with old age” and that he had not run away, like his family, because “for the time he had to live it was not worth while.” Then he started yanking on the hairs on his head so they fell out in clumps, and he passed them to Landry and Barrieau and the other voyageurs, “begging that we should have Mercy on him & his relations.”

  Awgeenah eventually calmed the man and convinced him to call back his family. A dozen or two Dogrib returned down the hillside, and Mackenzie immediately dug through the stores in the bottom of his canoe and began handing out gifts, metal knives and sewing needles and decorative beads. This improved everyone’s mood, and they offered Mackenzie’s men fish to eat, just boiled in their wooden pots. The Chipewyan hunters had not killed fresh game in several days, and Mackenzie had allowed no time to set out nets, so there had been nothing to eat but pemmican and rotting crane and scraps of caribou. Mackenzie accepted and thought the fish “very well boiled.” And the Dogrib proved so overjoyed by the new friendship with the Pale Men that they wished to accompany Mackenzie downstream to keep him safe,
as there were large whitewater waves ahead. Mackenzie had grown suspicious of every Indian’s “many discouraging stories,” but he accepted the assistance. The villagers said they had other families living farther down on the bank, so four of the men agreed to be their guides in their own canoes, to “shew us where to take the Road to go down the Rapid.”

  When it was time to push off, Mackenzie’s new Dogrib guide tried to escape and refused to board the canoes. He said he had no use for more rapids and “wanted absolutely to return” to his family, under the shadow of the great rock two days upstream. But Mackenzie bodily dragged him into the boat, and the brigade of seven canoes launched.

  Ahead, the cliffs formed a wall, only one small gap to pierce. “The River appeared quite shut up with high perpendicular White Rocks, this did not at all please us,” Mackenzie wrote. No experienced voyageur would ever enter a canyon blindly. There was no way to prepare for the hazards, nowhere to swim in case the boat was upset, no way to know how long or narrow the gorge might be. The Dogrib were insistent that the rapid was severe and “made a great Noise about it,” so they landed the canoes above the rocky mouth to try to scout the rapid and see the best line to avoid the whitewater, but nothing ahead was visible.

  Awgeenah and Mackenzie conferred and decided that if their four guides could make it, so could they. The Dogrib boats were pointed at either end, encased completely in bark, and no bigger than a casket, space enough for only one person. If those small solo boats could breach the rapid, then surely Mackenzie’s party could pass in their much larger canoes, loaded with freight and passengers and skilled paddlers.

  So they let the Dogrib lead. This whole country, the Dogrib knew, had been formed long ago by a giant: boulders thrown at a huge beaver, an island formed by the giant’s overturned canoe. Mackenzie sped past those landmarks unaware of their origin and “came between the steep Rock,” the river narrowing into a funnel. Somehow, though, the current never accelerated. Mackenzie was confused. Awgeenah and their guide called over to the Dogrib to ask when the rapid was coming, and “they told us there was no other but what we saw,” Mackenzie wrote. He dropped a plumb line to sound the depth of the river and called fifty fathoms to Steinbruck. Over three hundred feet of water was below them.