Disappointment River

by Brian Castner

  At Point Separation, the Deh Cho’s unchanging valley forks into the delta, the three major routes each as wide as any normal river. On a map, all distributaries bear the likeness of a tree canopy, trunk and associated branches. The Mississippi’s delta, from above, looks like a southern live oak, as wide as it is long. Similarly appropriate, the Deh Cho appears as a spruce, constricted but tall, 50 miles wide but over 150 miles long. This is a matter of geography and not design, of course, because the Deh Cho is trapped between two mountain ranges. The accumulated flotsam of the river can only expand outward, a cone of silt stretching ever northward, speckled with innumerable tiny ponds. When Senny looked at the map the first time, he came up with his own analogy.

  “It looks crazy, like an earth sponge!” he said.

  Using our chart, navigating the earth sponge, I had this new thought: Am I going the right way? To the left, the western channel, to the Yukon and Alaska. To the center, the main flow, where Mackenzie first glimpsed the midnight sun. To the right, the eastern channel, where the next day we hoped to reach Inuvik and Kylik. Unlike Mackenzie, I intended to seek out the Inuvialuit, the western Arctic Inuit whom he called Esquimaux. I felt a hint of regret that surprised me, as I realized that for the first time there were parts of the river I would never see.

  Senny and I tracked east, with hope that smaller waterways would support less wind and thus fewer waves. But instead, gusts blew from the north, the current disappeared entirely, and the bulldogs, mercifully absent for weeks, flew out to greet us. Somehow our pace slowed further, the channel winding and looping. On the banks, the spruce leaned a kilter, tipping into the water; scientists call it drunken forest. It was a landscape composed entirely of silt, flat shelf islands, and mushy shore. And overhead, in contrast, was a snake’s nest of contrails, so many jets leaving white streaks across the sky. Where were they all going? Beijing to New York? London to Vancouver?

  “Maybe they’re Russian Bear bombers and the world is ending. Would we even know?” Senny asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “We’d know immediately, because our GPS would stop working.”

  That night, we camped on the only gravel spit we could find. The mosquitoes were a terror, worse than ever on the trip, worse than I had ever experienced in my life. I wanted nothing but ibuprofen and sleep in the Fortress of Solitude. So we ate dinner quickly and, as a brief reward, added dessert.

  “Dried mango in the Arctic,” Senny said. “What a world we live in.”

  * * *

  ————

  If the upper Deh Cho valley is an enormous cathedral, a sheer nave of repeating spruce and rock, then its delta houses every associated cloister and crypt and sacristy and side altar. The river had finally shrunk to reasonable human scale, and we were grateful for it.

  In the morning, mist off the water, and a blazing sun above.

  It took all day to reach Inuvik, but the time passed more quickly in the tighter channels. I felt as if I could get my head around the delta. I started to wonder what was around the next bend, a feeling I never had on the upper river because the view was too broad, too slow to shift, or simply unchanging. The sun warmed our backs, and we stripped down to our T-shirts, but still wore long underwear and pants and wool socks and boots below, because my toes were still numb in the shade of the canoe even as my face and ears sunburned.

  There was almost nowhere to stop. The river was chocolate milk, and the banks were like a trampoline that won’t spring back, so we were careful not to stand in one place too long, for fear of breaking into the quicksand. It was easier, we discovered, to take breaks on the water and avoid the mosquitoes. Sun’s out, bugs out.

  We approached Inuvik in the early afternoon. On the way in, random cliffs sprouted from the tree line, and a few supported extravagant vacation homes, more costly than anything I had seen since entering the Northwest Territories. There were more fishing camps as well, not rotting particleboard shacks but sturdy cabins, each with a satellite dish. There was money in Inuvik, I predicted, though only relatively. The Mackenzie delta is the size of Connecticut, but only forty-five hundred people total live there, in three human settlements.

  The largest by far, Inuvik, the Place of Man, is a modern invention, barely a campground in Mackenzie’s day, built by the Canadian government over the last several decades. The traditional delta home for the indigenous peoples lies a few dozen miles to the west: Aklavik, Place of the Bear. And Tuktoyaktuk, a small Inuvialuit fishing village, is on the far Arctic coast. Inuvik and Tuk, as everyone calls it, are reachable by road, on the gravel Dempster Highway. The end of the line.

  We knew we had reached Inuvik when we spotted the marine debris, rusting freighters tossed onshore. On the side of the river, a long banner hung from a fence: “Welcome Home, 2008.” The first sight of the town proper was the power plant, three large mufflers from the diesel generators pointing in the air, and a hum that carried across the water.

  We broke from Mackenzie’s path and took the brief detour to Inuvik for one reason: to see Kylik Kisoun. He could confirm the charter boat pickup on Garry Island, and I planned to ask for advice on the best route through the delta. I steered our canoe around one tug and then another. Since Hay River, I had seen only three or four barges total plying the river, but here in Inuvik whole squadrons were tied up—the tenders that served the tiny Inuit communities in Nunavut and the Queen Elizabeth Islands—lashed to various industrial docks.

  I eventually found the public boat ramp, packed with trucks and clusters of men and women loudly passing bottles in brown bags. A white woman in trendy athletic gear ran past, clearly on her afternoon jog, and she gave us a quizzical look. Senny walked up the gravel boat launch and found a Porta-Potty to sit in, and I turned on my cell phone and called Kylik to let him know we had arrived.

  Kylik did not match any of my preconceptions. He rode down to the dock on a bike with fat snow tires, and wore a green skateboarding helmet, a checkered shirt, and a bandanna around his neck. I figured he was in his thirties, though he looked younger; when he took off his helmet, he revealed earrings and a mop of stylish hair. Kylik ran an Arctic charter boat company, but of the two of us I looked like the river rat and he the urban sophisticate.

  “You made it! It’s been windy lately, but I don’t need to tell you, eh?” Kylik said as a greeting, and laughed.

  I asked for advice on the best route to Garry Island and handed over our topo map. He looked thoughtfully, carefully folded it into smaller squares, and started tracing tiny twisting curlicues with a borrowed pen. “I want to show you the good ones,” he said, explaining his choice of the thinnest blue lines that cut through major islands, avoiding the main channels. “I think wind beats current,” he said. “There isn’t much current anywhere, but we take the boat through the small ones because it’s sheltered.”

  The route he marked struck north out of Inuvik on the East Channel, then almost immediately ducked into a maze of tiny creeks. At one point, we’d take a shortcut through Richards Island, the largest in the delta, at a place called the Yaya River. Then we were back to the main channel, to Niglintgak Island, in the Kendall Island Migratory Bird Sanctuary, and finally the two open-water crossings, first to a flat unnamed mud patch, then to our destination. It was those last two legs that had made me queasy from the start of planning months ago, and my experience on the river thus far made me even more cautious.

  “From here, it’s about a hundred miles. When people go out to Garry Island, that’s how they do it,” Kylik said.

  I felt a little better when he said this, as if we were doing something commonplace, and the path would be well trodden.

  “Oh, a lot of people go out there?” I asked.

  Kylik laughed and made a face. “No!” he said. “One every five years? I’ve run this business fifteen years, and I’ve seen three total. But powerboats. In a canoe, never.”

  On my entire trip, I never did see a single other canoe on the water.

  We asked about th
e Northern store, to restock our larder, but Kylik said it was a long walk into town, so we decided to skip it. Before we left, Kylik and I exchanged cell-phone numbers and confirmed that the inReach could text him using the satellite system. He made me promise that we’d call him for rescue if we got stuck by the weather or found any trouble at all. It might take a few days, he said, but if we hunkered down, their boat could get through eventually. And he repeated the promise he had made me months before: “If you guys can get out to Garry Island, we’ll come get you.”

  I had been saying that to myself as a mantra the whole trip.

  That evening, Senny and I made camp a short distance north of Inuvik, on a silt bar covered in green horsetail grass. With no current and the constant headwind, one hundred miles meant several long days of hard paddling.

  The afternoon had been warm and sunny, and thus instilled with hope, I checked the long-term weather report off the satellite. Nothing but strong storms for the next week, sustained winds and rain turning to snow. I made the mistake of showing Senny. “That looks terrifying,” he said.

  But then I switched to the hour-by-hour forecast, and nestled between predictions of twenty-five-knot winds and high seas, I found a single break. Four days away, for a few hours early one morning, broken clouds and a light easterly breeze. A tailwind, for the last five miles in the Beaufort Sea.

  We had a goal. If we could cover most of the one hundred miles in three days, then we could camp at a launch point just short of the final crossing, wait out the night, and make an attempt. The Deh Cho had provided us a window, but only one.

  * * *

  ————

  Whenever I awoke that night, the tent looked like it was swaying back and forth, as if I was still in the canoe, matching the rocking of Senny’s hips. It wasn’t a dream. This rhythmic sensation of our paddles, I had begun to feel it whenever we got onshore. The only difference was now I felt it as I slept as well.

  No wonder. I had just passed a thousand miles of paddling.

  I lay in my bag and did my morning check-in. My hands were cramped, fingers split and bloody, dirt in every crack. Wrists, elbows, and back sore, tired in a way I had never felt before. During the night, when I woke up swaying, I found my arms bound up, in a palsy position, as if all my muscles and tendons had retracted. I consciously extended them, forcing my biceps out of their contracted state, and when I did, my hands had no strength. I could barely raise my arms, like a stroke victim. Eventually, I dropped them, exhausted, and went back to sleep.

  I felt more wasted away than ever. Mackenzie had done this trip at age twenty-seven. I was a dozen years his senior, the age of the old-timer Peter Pond when he crossed the Methye Portage. I used the selfie camera of my phone and saw a stranger, visibly aged. Gaunt. Skin hanging, new creases on my face, eyes sunken, almost given up on hygiene. I looked like my cooking pot, covered in a layer of blackened potato. I gave no more thought to smell or dirt or clean clothes. We were just trying to make it.

  And yet, after I stretched and had oatmeal and tea, both doused in honey, my spirits were high. We had a route, a plan, everything was set with Kylik, and we were in sight of the goal. Free from Inuvik, no more towns; since Fort Providence, I felt more comfortable in the wilderness in a tent, where I didn’t have to worry about the security of our gear. Other than two bags of pockmarked bagels, we had eaten through all the spoiled food. What remained would be plenty, as long as we weren’t wasteful and avoided disaster. We were tired but healthy enough. The river had already soaked us, baked us, blown us around. What else could it do? We had done the work, done our part, and might really make it. We’d at least get a good look at it. You can get anywhere if you have the time.

  We launched the canoe and immediately took one of Kylik’s secret channels, a narrow creek that split the island’s muddy bank. “It’s a secret garden,” said Senny. “I hope there’s nymphs, but not sirens. They’re obnoxious.”

  Senny would be disappointed, because the islands, predictably, held no hidden gems, only the same willow and black spruce and soda-straw reeds. The channels were so narrow I felt as if I could reach out my paddle and touch both shores. Yes, the ways were sheltered, out of the wind, but that meant they were also infested with mosquitoes and offered no good camping, the banks as overgrown as my beard. No side channels—we were on the side channel, after all—meant no peanut-butter-jelly lines to filter water. The few trickles leaking out of the tree line were clogged with dams.

  “This stream is rich with beaver,” I said.

  “Story of my life,” Senny said.

  The day extended. Initial annoyance at nowhere to stop eventually turned into frustration and then genuine concern. We were nearing the end of the marathon and too tired to paddle all night looking for a campsite. It’s not that there was nowhere good to camp—this was an anxiety I had dealt with every day on the water—but that there was nowhere to camp at all. Even tying off would be a challenge, as the shores were nothing but brush and deep reed beds.

  Late that night, we pushed out of the small corridor and back into East Channel, miles wide, and found a familiar shelf above the waterline. We started to get out, but a flock of arctic terns attacked us, dive-bombing Senny. It was funny, then unnerving, then downright dangerous, as they snapped and pecked at Senny’s head. “Fine! You win, bird,” Senny yelled, and we paddled on, finding a small sandy spot on the back of an eddy, festooned with garbage-dump-sized piles of driftwood.

  The next day, we passed the Caribou Hills, mounds of dirt that hem in the delta to the east. They bore the last spruce of the boreal forest, an ecosystem that I had first entered thousands of miles away in Ontario. Newfoundland to the Yukon, a giant arc across the continent, the traditional home of the voyageurs, was spent.

  The land was opening, and for hours at a time Senny and I paddled down channels flanked by nothing but flooded grass, home to cranes and seagulls, but not a speck of dry land to be found.

  At Tununuk Point, the southern tip of the large landmass known as Richards Island, the current momentarily reappeared. We had a tailwind and crossed to the west of Tununuk, near a solitary hill rising from the deep water in the center of the East Channel. It was called Burial Island, and on its northern side was a totally flat beach, like I had not seen in a week.

  “I’d camp the fuck out of that,” I said to Senny, “even though it’s probably haunted by a thousand years of Inuit dead.”

  “Maybe it’s just where they keep their time capsules,” Senny said.

  We put out the sail and were pushed all the way to the Yaya River. The Yaya was another of Kylik’s secret passages, “the good ones,” that avoided the wind. While the main channels wound back on themselves, the Yaya went straight north and west, cutting Richards Island in two, like a shortcut to our final destination.

  This Deh Cho delta is so large, I thought, that the islands have their own named rivers. Rivers within rivers.

  Richards Island’s hills look like an Irish postcard. The Yaya River itself was green, made not of Deh Cho water but of rain and snow filtered through that gentle island. We stopped at a rocky beach and drank freshwater and made dinner, Vegetarian Chili—with only a few days left we were eating all our favorites—and I stretched my legs by walking up a slope of twisted brush.

  It had been sunny for two days. I turned my face to the sky to feel the warmth, but when I did, I saw the return of the mare’s tails and mackerel scales. I didn’t tell Senny.

  We paddled a little farther and found a narrow sandy shelf tucked into a cove, barely big enough for the tent. While I set up camp, Senny scrambled up the slope and then called to me, excited. He had discovered tundra.

  Rolling mounds stretched to the horizon. Beauty in miniature, as giant honeybees buzzed like zeppelins over blueberry bushes and soft beds of moss and lupine. Senny found a king-sized section that sank like marshmallow under his feet, and he stretched out, spread eagle. I rested my aching back and stared at the sky. Senny fell sleep in t
he lichen. I picked at club moss that looked like tiny pine trees laden with black berries, ate one, and then thought better of experimenting with unknown foraging and stopped.

  I lay down and considered the perfect blue. Clouds rolled past. The smell was intoxicating, mulched soil and pollen and cracked mint. Warm sun on one side of my face, cool breeze on the other. My head net kept the mosquitoes off, and my brimmed hat shaded the sun from my eyes, and my back, spasmed from a thousand miles of paddling, eased into the moss.

  It was a place of peace, the likes of which I had not yet experienced on the river. A moment of pure solemnity.

  “This might be worth the whole trip,” I said.

  “Pretty close,” Senny said, groggy. “I feel like I lay down in the soap aisle. With mattresses.”

  I wanted to sleep all night there, but dark clouds were forming on the horizon, and we needed to take shelter. That night, before bed, I took off my boots and warmed my feet in the sand and I knew it would be the last time.

  The storms returned before morning. All night, waves beat against our low beach, and I felt the tent rocking. But there was an odd sound as well, water breaking on the side of the boat, and finally I got up to discover the canoe, which had been up on the sandy beach when we crawled in our bags, was now in the water and tugging at its emergency line. The storm had washed away half our campsite, including the sand under the boat. I dragged the canoe higher, set it in the bushes, and then had trouble sleeping, for fear that the ground beneath us might wash away too.

  In the morning, the mosquitoes were huddled in the vestibule of the tent for warmth. I checked my watch and the weather off the inReach. The window was still there. If all went according to plan, in thirty hours we’d be on Garry Island, though we might not sleep much between now and then.

  * * *