Disappointment River

by Brian Castner

  We arrived a few minutes early, and I spotted the priest immediately: Father Innocent is Nigerian, skin as dark as winter’s night. He said he’d immigrated first to New York, settled in Staten Island, but after running afoul of the IRS—“Why do you have to file taxes if you don’t make any money?” he asked me—he decided to move north. “There is such great need here,” he said. “Only nine priests for the whole Northwest Territories.” Every two weeks, Father Innocent travels from town to town by plane, performing a season’s worth of baptisms, confessions, and Communion deliveries to sick elders. Another priest wouldn’t arrive for a few months; Lucy sees to parish business in their absence.

  Father Innocent said the Mass in English, but the readings were done twice, once in each language. There was a separate North Slavey hymnal too, and an old five-octave organ in the choir loft, made by the Thomas Organ Company of Woodstock, Ontario, though they didn’t use it. During the homily, Lucy translated, sentence by sentence. Father Innocent’s sermon was about Jesus and Martha, the importance of hospitality. At first, I thought he was talking about Landon and me, and I felt grateful to be included, but then, at the end of the service, he asked, “Can anybody give me a ride?”

  That Nigerian accent, full of clipped consonants and long vowels, had not faded with his time away from Africa. Wilfred’s accent was also tough, an indigenous lilt sprinkled with occasional Canadian “ehs.” I had to strain to understand both men.

  “Father’s accent is very thick; do you have trouble with it?” I asked.

  “We don’t understand him at all,” Wilfred said.

  * * *

  ————

  The Catholic missionaries are gone. The original Oblate fathers left long ago, and even the nuns packed up for good a few seasons past.

  The Hudson’s Bay Company trading post is gone, and the unpopular Northern store has taken its place.

  The snow is gone, missing really, later each year. Wilfred said they only saw four inches last December. “I like to do all my trapping before Christmas,” he said, “but I can’t anymore.” The lakes freeze, but with little snow, it’s hard to run the Ski-Doo, and the winter road opens for an ever-shorter window.

  The coney aren’t gone, but the water is warm—the fish hardly chase his lures—and so full of driftwood Wilfred can’t get his powerboat through without damaging it.

  “Almost all the old-timers are dead,” Wilfred says, and worse, few young people are learning to live on the land. Wilfred said that in Tsiigehtchic—a place he pronounced “SIG-a-check”—they still make dry fish, the traditional smoked trout, pickerel, char, grayling. A woman comes to Fort Good Hope to sell it, for as much as a hundred dollars a fish. “People go crazy for it,” Rayuka said in amazement. I could tell this bothered Wilfred, not only that the young people of his town won’t take up this lucrative business, but that they would rather buy dry fish than smoke it themselves.

  Wilfred’s children are mostly gone. Wilfred and Lucy have nine sons and four daughters, including Rayuka, scattered across northern Canada. They also have eight grandchildren, but they don’t see them much.

  “They hardly bother me for money at all,” he said. “I give them a dollar to go to the store and buy candy. But they hardly come around.” He paused a moment, looked at his hands. “They don’t bother me at all.”

  * * *

  ————

  Wilfred’s wide-screen television stays on all day and night, pinned to a satellite channel that alternates between CNN and CBC.

  “I never used to care about news,” he said. “I was in the bush. But now I want to know what’s happening in my world.”

  The day before he and I met, Wilfred was watching television late at night when he got a call for help. Lucy had taken several young women blueberry picking in the hills on the far side of the river, but somehow the group got separated from one another and then panicked. July is the traditional time to pick blueberries, but the ripe fruit also attracts bears. In the middle of the bright night, the town organized a search.

  Not that Wilfred himself was concerned. “My wife knows the mountain. I wasn’t worried. They could just follow the creeks down to the river,” he said. Eventually, Wilfred went out in his boat and trolled up and down the Deh Cho until they appeared onshore, retrieving the whole group at three o’clock in the morning. “Now we tell them, better go pick your blueberries at the store!” he said, laughing.

  Wilfred told me this story while watching the news, coverage of the Republican National Convention and the shooting of six police officers in Baton Rouge. Prompted by the headlines, Rayuka asked me to explain Donald Trump, and why Americans carry guns, if we live in cities and not out on the land. “It would be scary to live down south,” she said.

  “But I want to say to you,” she continued, “it was nice to meet you. I told my friends, there is someone from New York at the B&B. They couldn’t believe it. Said you must be famous. How did someone from New York make it to the B&B?”

  I assured her that I was far from famous, but I did want to write about my time in Fort Good Hope. Wilfred jumped in.

  “There was a white man who wanted to write a book, so he went up the Mountain River,” he said, “and he spent a year up there. He built himself a crappy cabin and heated it all winter. He shot one moose and lived on it all winter. But when he paddled out, he capsized his canoe and lost everything. All his notebooks to write his book. He walked for days, maybe weeks. No matches, no gear. He couldn’t build a fire. Finally, I picked him up when he made it to the Mackenzie.”

  I had never heard a clearer warning.

  * * *

  ————

  Anthony Sennhenn’s plane was right on time. Wick Walker, my graybeard expedition sage, had said my team was the biggest hole in my plan, relying as it did on bush planes to ferry my rotating crew. So I had spent months in useless worry about flight delays and had pushed hard to hit each airstrip on time. And in the end, all that stress was for nothing, because every trip was on time, no hiccups.

  When Senny got off the prop plane, he was wild-eyed but grinning like a kid at Christmas. Same old Senny, I thought. The nickname had stuck because it matches his disposition: boyish, familiar, bright. I asked Senny to come on the trip because he was competent in fundamental ways. Like me, he was a bomb tech and veteran of Iraq. But far more important, he was an experienced sailor, owned his own twenty-two-foot Catalina sailboat, and, as a present to himself, had spent a post-deployment vacation as crew on a three-masted ship touring Antarctica. Senny was tough in an uncomplaining sort of way. He knew hardship, having grown up on the Bad River Indian Reservation, in far northern Wisconsin, on Lake Superior. For a time, he lived on an island accessible in winter by an ice road. I wanted someone to navigate the delta and brave the ocean with me, and when I asked Senny, he said he’d bring his sextant.

  I left Landon and Wilfred and the comfort of Fort Good Hope with more than a few regrets. Ahead of me lay the longest sustained stretch of wilderness of the trip, a full two hundred miles to the next town, Tsiigehtchic. After that, more than a hundred miles to Inuvik, and even farther to Garry Island, at the far end of the delta. It was gut-check time.

  Wilfred offered Senny and me the use of his hunting camp, sixty miles downriver; he looked over our map for a long time, then marked the cabin with a very careful X. “The key is by the door,” he said, “in case anyone needs to get in.”

  It was raining the day Senny landed, a change after nearly two weeks of sunshine and occasional tailwind. The weather finally broke by evening, and I told Senny it was time to go. Wilfred volunteered to drive us a few miles farther north, to a put-in at the Hare Indian River, across from Manitou Island. But I declined, not out of stubborn pride, but because I didn’t want to take advantage of the man’s generosity any further, after he fed and hosted me for two days.

  As Senny and I hefted the canoe, ready to portage down to the river, a marked First Nations security truck pulled up next to us.
For a moment, I was nervous, as one is when approached by police in a strange place. A young man in a canvas jacket rolled down the driver’s window.

  “Aren’t you the guy paddling the whole river?” he asked. He held up his phone, tuned to Facebook. There I read my own posts, loaded using my GPS inReach, and then shared in some unknowable string—the modern version of the “moccasin telegraph,” the running joke of northern communication—until it arrived in Fort Good Hope.

  “My friend says, ‘Better get this guy some bannock for the trip!’ ” The young policeman laughed.

  “Well, yes, that is me,” I admitted.

  “You’re famous, in the N.W.T. anyway,” he said, and laughed again. “Good luck on the Deh Cho.”

  After he drove away, Senny said, “That must happen all the time, huh?”

  We launched under a sky of swirling clouds. A dark band from the north pushed off a clear patch in the south, the clouds moving in opposite directions at different layers. The rain restarted, then grew, then more. Terrible soaking rain; at Wilfred’s B&B, I had spent an entire day cleaning and drying gear, and all that work was undone after an hour of paddling.

  We stopped to put on our ponchos, but then the wind rose, from the north, and a crosswind too that raised the waves. “I find the waves endearing,” Senny said, smiling through the misery. It felt like we had ground to a halt, no forward progress in the lax current. As a reasonable goal, I had hoped to reach the Loon River twenty miles away, but now that would be impossible. I was determined not to burn out Senny on his first night, for no purpose.

  We achieved a point, and as we rounded the bend, somehow the wind grew still stronger. The water was now all big lolling combers, which I had not seen since Great Slave Lake. “They’re not endearing anymore,” Senny said, as we rode up and down each crest. We made for the point, saw a gravel beach—“that’s good camping,” I called—and ground the canoe in. The fierce winds scattered the clouds and revealed a double rainbow against a backdrop of dark gray seas.

  We set up the tent quickly, in case the rain returned. Senny had just attended Marine Corps Mountain Warfare school, a course he dismissed as “advanced camping.” His outdoor skills were newly sharpened, but as we crawled into our bags, his first night in the bush, he did have a question.

  “So, remember before I came, I joked about that bear throat-slashing thing, to put it on my grave?” asked Senny.

  “Sure.”

  “Um, seriously now. What is the bear plan?”

  “We avoid them. Never sleep where we eat. If they get curious, we have bear bangers and bear spray. If that doesn’t work, there are two of us. We stand our ground. They stole my ax, but we have knives, rocks. Keep your vest on. We fight.”

  “Like in Predator?”

  I nodded.

  Senny thought a moment. “I’m good with that,” he said, and we went to sleep.

  * * *

  ————

  We crossed the Arctic Circle that afternoon, and my journey—thus far beholden to heat, sun, and lightning—was irrevocably altered.

  All night, the wind and rain drove waves against the shore in a regular rhythm, as if we were sleeping by the ocean. The morning was ugly and cold, impervious to hot tea and oatmeal, and we shook our limbs for warmth. The clouds were very low. We ate a dirty lunch shivering on a sandbar, as seagulls dove and squawked to protect their rookery. I put away my sandals and laced up boots with wool socks for the first time. According to the inReach, the temperature was thirty-eight degrees, a drop of more than thirty from the day before.

  We paddled hard in the chill. The current had slowed so far that I now actively sought out every slight advantage, boil to boil, the slight acceleration along curved cliff faces. The water was still warm, though, relative to the air, producing a shimmering mirage effect. The ridges to either side of the river appeared cantilevered out over the waterline, and islands floated in the air.

  “I wonder how many flat-earthers believe it,” Senny said, “and how many are just contradictory buttholes. I can watch islands appear out of the horizon.”

  The wind shifted to our tail, and Senny, the mariner, put out the sail. He seemed disappointed by the lack of nuance—it’s little more than a big closed wind sock, a lever for the breeze to push against, no real sailing and tacking possible—but we made good time until the wind shifted again. Senny said he felt fresh and eager, and so I kept driving him on. It would be our biggest day, fifty miles in eleven hours of paddling, just fighting the cold.

  All afternoon and into the evening, we searched for Wilfred’s cabin. I felt we must be close, that around every bend it would appear on the bank. “There’s some wild tree parallax,” Senny said, noting the optical illusion that closer spruce moved by more quickly than those farther away. But close or far, it was all spruce, and I started to wonder, maybe we’d passed the cabin because, like the memorial at the Sans Sault Rapids, it was swallowed by the thick bush.

  Eventually, the headwind and bursts of rain exhausted us, and we camped on a low bluff above a stream, hard against the willow bushes, to block the worst of the gusts.

  “This is the weirdest weather I’ve ever seen,” said Senny, noting the different layers of clouds. All day, they seemed to produce different kinds of rain too, big and fat from one layer, small and stinging from another. But then, after we set up the tent, it cleared, leaving very, very high clouds, on the edge of the atmosphere, and so thin that through them the sun looked silver, as if there was moonlight on the water.

  “Mare’s tails and mackerel scales,” Senny said, and pointed to the sky.

  “What are you talking about?” I asked.

  “Mare’s tails are the wispy stringy clouds. Mackerel scales are the ones that look like cottage cheese. When they’re in the sky at the same time, that’s bad. It’s from the old sailing rhyme”:

  Mare’s tails and mackerel scales,

  Something something something,

  The weather’s going to suck.

  * * *

  ————

  We would be stuck in the tent for the next thirteen hours. The storm blew a bitter damp cold, and I lay in my bag, shivering with stubborn wet wool socks that kept my toes numb. I had long underwear and a parka stuffed away, but avoided succumbing to them, on Senny’s advice. “We have too far to go, and it will only get colder. You always need another layer available to step up to,” he said. Outside, I heard trees falling, and rocks plinking the water as they tumbled from the bluff. Was the bank eroding away beneath us? Would the tent fall in the water? Had the canoe already floated away? Occasionally, I stuck my head out to check. Still there.

  Our plan was to wait for the rain to pass, then paddle against the wind and cold; I could only take on so many of the plagues of the Deh Cho at once. I drifted off in the midst of writing these notes in my journal.

  “I think I fell asleep,” I said to Senny. “Did I snore?”

  “Yup,” he said. “It was adorable.”

  Eventually, hunger got the best of me, and I got up to make lunch in the drizzle. I discovered rotting food crushed in the bottom of our barrels. Landon had caught a few bagels turning green, but sitting in Wilfred’s warm B&B, the mold had secretly and rapidly spread. Plus, a bag of nectarines had been smeared in the surf the day before, creating a sticky bug attractor. I had purchased some fresh supplies in Tulita and Fort Good Hope, but it was all past the sell-by date and already covered in blue as well. Somehow, the apples from Edmonton were in the best shape of all.

  I ditched the decrepit new pears that had deteriorated straight from frozen to brown paste, molting off their skins. Then I threw two bags of bagels and all our English muffins in the water. That left twenty bagels flecked with green; I picked off each growth like a gorilla looking for ticks and carefully repacked them. All the pemmican, granola, dried fruit, peanut butter, chocolate, and honey was still good too. We’d have enough, if we were careful.

  The rain dwindled, and we pushed off at
noon. We rounded a point, and Senny shouted and waved. There, on the bank, above the spring flood, was Wilfred’s cabin, right where he said it would be. Plywood and shingle, bent sheet-metal chimney, a pine tree trimmed to a lobstick to mark the spot in the traditional way.

  Fifteen more minutes of paddling, just one more mile, we could have made it the night before.

  “Do we need to stop and see what it looks like?” I called up to Senny.

  “Kinda,” he said.

  I had no intention of stopping long—after a month of occasionally seeing such shacks from the water, I was curious to get a quick peek inside one—but when we got to shore, the west wind slammed our canoe against the gravel beach. We were soaked regaining control, dragged the canoe off the water, hiked up the bluff, and then all of a sudden we found ourselves in a different world. The wind was gone, the sun warmer, the ground soft with moss. Blueberries grew everywhere, and I picked a handful. There were two cabins in the clearing, plus several unskinned teepees to smoke fish, two Ski-Doos, an overturned boat, piles of unchopped firewood. We approached the first cabin and saw the key hanging by the padlock.

  Inside, Wilfred’s camp was almost as well furnished as his hostel, and that’s when I knew I wanted to stay. A woodstove and kitchen stocked with canned food. Next to the door were several rain jackets and a new pair of traditional moccasins. A crucifix hung over two beds and a cot. A wooden pot holder displayed Jesus in His Glory. A sign above the kitchen table read, “Hello Welcome to the Jackson’s Bush Cottage!! make yourself welcome But clean up after yourself Have respect.”

  We looked through a dirty window, out on the river, and saw raging whitecaps and black clouds. “Are we pussies to stay?” I asked. “Or smart?”