Disappointment River

by Brian Castner

  My long johns and knit hat were wet, my wool socks were wet, every wicking high-tech layer was wet; the only dry piece of gear I had was my sleeping bag. Senny was in the same situation, and with a howling and freezing wind, we crawled into bed early. Then we heard a rumbling outside.

  “That’s a powerboat,” I said to Senny.

  I stuck my head out of the tent, and there, right offshore, was an idling Lund with three Inuvialuit hunters on board. Two middle-aged men and a teenager, wearing fluorescent-yellow rain jackets and pants. All three looked curious but unconcerned, despite the pitching of their boat.

  “You guys okay, eh?” the man at the helm said. Or I thought he said. Between the storm and his accent, it was hard to tell.

  “Yes, thank you,” I called out.

  “Where you guys going?”

  “Garry Island, tomorrow.”

  “Oh,” he said, like that was the answer he expected. “We’re hunting beluga tomorrow. See you there.” And then he drove the boat away.

  “Did he really say he’d meet us out there?” Senny asked.

  “That can’t possibly be right,” I said, and we zipped the tent back up.

  I was a bit unnerved by the visit, and sleep left me, so I wrote the day’s events in my journal; checking the map, I realized the island we were camping on had no name.

  “What should we call this place?” I asked. Senny was lying on his back, eyes closed. He shrugged.

  “I think we should call it Senny Island,” I said. He smiled at my joke.

  “Do you remember that crossing at the Thunder River and the lunch that ended the War Against the Weather?” Senny asked. He said it like it was capitalized, a military campaign he had fought in, reminiscing already about a time little more than a week past. “We built a fire, had tea. It was nice. We need one of those lunches again.”

  “No more lunches, Senny,” I said. “Tomorrow we cross.”

  The forecast had not changed all week: between nine o’clock and noon, thirty-eight degrees, ten-knot winds from the east. That predicted window had proved stubborn and fixed, and we had a shot at the thing, if we could ride out the night’s gale.

  The frigid north wind off the Beaufort Sea pelted rain against the tent. We did not sleep. We merely passed the night, prone in our bags, shivering until morning.

  * * *

  ————

  The next day looked the same as every other day. It was July 30, but the sun still never set, barely dipped to twilight. Ostensibly the days should have been growing shorter, but I had paddled north in equal measure to the earth’s orbit, and so the proportion of sunlight in each of my days had remained unchanged since I got in the canoe.

  Now, though, our destination lay in sight. Which is to say, I had hope that the timelessness would soon end.

  You can get anywhere if you have the time.

  The morning was cold and overcast but dry, and the wind had slackened just within tolerance. Rain had become sleet in the wee hours, and I got up long enough to make sure the ends of the tent were still anchored and our gear had not blown into the sea.

  “It was expensive, but this has been a good tent,” I said to Senny in the morning.

  “So far,” he said, as if there was still time for it to betray us.

  I tried to make tea, but my numb fingers barely functioned, skin cracking anew between my knuckles so my hands bled. My gloves had rotted through, my palms were exposed, and they provided little warmth. Without wood to start a cooking fire, I used our emergency backup gas stove, and broke a box worth of matches trying to light it. The canoe had filled with rainwater, so we had to unload everything, dump it, and then pack again from scratch. That seemed appropriate, somehow. I brushed my teeth and felt better, as David said. Senny and I didn’t speak much, bundled in layers of Gore-Tex and wool, and then we broke camp and pushed off.

  The drizzle started right away. Then a wave front hit, surprising in the low wind; I figured it to be ugly disorganized chop left over from the storm the night before. Dark clouds hung all around, but the sky was lighter ahead. Senny wanted to follow a small channel to the left, which we did, staying close to shore.

  Despite the slosh, I felt confident. I had been nervous about this last leg from the initial planning months ago, but now that we were here, I felt calm. There were two crossings, three miles to an unnamed island, then one and a half to Garry. I couldn’t see it, but I knew Garry Island was there, hidden behind the profile of our first target. We had made crossings of similar length on the main river, and the weather was scheduled to cooperate. Plus, I was a much better canoeist now. We had survived all the plagues. Whether the Deh Cho let us cross or not, I was content.

  The shore of our prairie-island ran out. “You ready, Senny?” I asked. He grunted, and I turned the nose of the canoe out into the sea and we began our grande traverse.

  I thought of Mackenzie and Awgeenah and their flotillas of birch-bark canoes. The challenge of reaching Garry Island had not changed significantly in 230 years. True, we had a fancy GPS and life vests, but Senny and I had a much smaller boat and were all by ourselves, and in that moment I felt both vulnerabilities acutely.

  Our topo map said the first section was shallow, and the forecast promised light easterly winds, so we knew this was the easy crossing and the hardest test would come on the final approach to Garry.

  But as we got out into the bay, the north wind—north, not east, I thought, too late—only grew, until it was screaming in my ears. The surf never faded, the whitecaps rose, I pushed my paddle down into the water and never struck bottom, and that’s when I realized that our official government map and the revered forecast were both wrong.

  The whitecaps came in at forty-five degrees, threatening to snatch our gunnel, just as they had when we nearly capsized above the Thunder River. I angled the nose to cut the waves, but then the rain began to stick, frozen sleet, and my hands were still numb, though maybe from gripping the paddle. We were out in it, but it didn’t smell like salt. It smelled fresh, and I understood why; though we had reached the point where the river and ocean and north wind were finally all free to collide head-on, still the Deh Cho was triumphant, dumping half a continent of freshwater into the sea, defeating a thousand miles of fetch. The waves tumbled against the gunwale, and Senny paddled like a machine. Our battered canoe twisted along all three axes. If we flipped we’d live—I knew that, I repeated it over and over—but what a swim it would be to shore. We’d activate the beacon and then sit, cold and wet, for days maybe, until Kylik could make it through the weather.

  All these thoughts, the waves and the wind and the swim, spun in my head as my muscles kept the nose of the canoe true. Senny and I didn’t speak a single word on the crossing, not a peep, until almost an hour later, when we approached the far shore.

  “That wasn’t shallow,” I finally said.

  “Nope,” he said.

  “Or calm.”

  “That was terrifying,” he said, and we left it there, because the harder crossing was still to come.

  As we curled around that unnamed mud clod, though, Garry Island reappeared, and suddenly it looked so close we could touch it. I pulled out the pouch of tobacco, and emptied it in the water. “Deh Cho, here’s the rest of the Red Man,” I said.

  “Please don’t be offended,” Senny said quickly.

  But the worst was behind us, and we knew it, because the easternmost leg of Garry Island was a stone’s throw away. There was no pomp or ceremony as we paddled the final fifteen minutes of the journey. As we approached our goal, as we completed the crossing I long feared, we laughed and joked. Because what did we see on the point directly ahead? A hunter’s bush cabin.

  I felt as if I had just found a yak pen on the top of Everest. The wood-framed hut was skinned with plastic sheeting, and next to it was a teepee frame to build a smokehouse. We had heard the hunters right the night before, I realized. Like so many “discoverers” before me, I had traveled to a place I considered
one of the most remote on the planet, and what I found was another person’s home.

  I swung the boat through the strait and then lined it square to the gravel beach. Without consultation, Senny and I both dug in with our paddles. Finish the race strong. The bow of the canoe hit, scraped up the beach, and Senny jumped out and pulled us forward as he had for weeks. I waded to shore, sat on a driftwood log, put my head in my hands, and wept.

  “I just need to sit a minute, I’m so tired,” I said. “But I’ll take a Snickers, if you’re getting one.”

  * * *

  ————

  There was no one home at the cabin. After so much time alone, it felt weird to camp next to a building—we didn’t want to be rude and crowd the hunters if they came back—so a few minutes after landing, Senny and I got back in the boat and hooked around the island. We picked a spot a few hundred yards away, beaching the canoe among huge piles of driftwood, so much wood it was as if Garry had a magnet for the stuff.

  I needed to walk, so Senny and I hiked up Mackenzie and Awgeenah’s hill to get a better view of the ocean. To the west, the island stretched on and on in a wedge, a carpet of orange moss and pale green lichen, small bushes that dug themselves holes to escape the wind. We tromped the incline, and the land fell away as cliffs to our south, a wide bay to the north. The whole thing smelled unexpectedly rich and earthy as we balanced on unsure footing, tussock to tussock, like soft sand. Up the slope, we gained a ridge and looked out, our faces to the north wind.

  We saw open water. Not a sliver of ice anywhere. The ocean was not a shocking polar blue, as you imagine from the movies. It was dull, the color of a worn-out coffee mug, all the way to the northern horizon.

  Senny didn’t bother to pull out his camera. “Photos never look like eyeballs, which drives me nuts,” he said. So I put my camera away too, and we just took in the view together.

  I knew it was likely I would see open water—since 1980, summer pack ice in the Arctic is down 80 percent, as the whole region warms twice as fast as the rest of the planet—but it was still unsettling, knowing how the ice completely shaped Mackenzie’s experience. I had only seen that single dirty lump just south of Tsiigehtchic, but for Mackenzie the ice was definitive. And permanent, because the climate was fixed; the concept that it could change was more fantastical than his giant sea horses.

  I checked my GPS and took a photograph of the screen. It read 69 degrees 26.5 minutes north, “the extent of our travels,” as Mackenzie said. In 1915, Ernest Shackleton’s famous ship, the Endurance, was crushed in the ice, near Antarctica, at 69 degrees 5 minutes south. In that context, it really felt like we had accomplished something.

  All I had done, though, after 1,125 miles of paddling, was make it to a place that Mackenzie did not want to be. My success was his failure. There was no pot of Chinese gold waiting for him at the end of this journey. He would return empty-handed.

  And yet, I had just canoed his Northwest Passage. The way is open. Mackenzie was simply two hundred years too early.

  Senny and I decided to fire the bear banger for the first time, a victory volley as the voyageurs did. We screwed in the flare, pointed it in the air, pulled the trigger, and nothing happened. I pulled again. Click. Senny tried, and it finally fired on the third go.

  “Good thing we never had to use it for real,” he said.

  I sent Kylik a message on the inReach. If you can make it out there, we’ll come get you, he had said so many months ago. I texted him the good news, and I got a message back in only a moment, beamed from the satellite.

  “We will be there.”

  * * *

  ————

  We passed two days on that island, waiting for the charter boat, sitting by a fire on a rock beach at the end of the world.

  Not a single bit of land lay between us and the pole, and the north wind never relented. Senny and I used large driftwood logs to hold down the sides of the tent. We filtered the water and drank deeply. It was fresh Deh Cho water, no salt, not a hint of brackishness. When it was raining, snowing, sleeting, we slept. When it was dry, we restoked the fire and simply sat next to it, silently. A hundred years’ worth of driftwood lay around us, an island full of bones, and we built the fire generously; when it grew very hot, the wet rocks beneath boiled and exploded. I cooked valedictory Pad Thai, our favorite dinner, and Senny skipped stones in the sea.

  I grabbed a few bags of tea, as a gift, and walked over to the Inuvialuit shack, but there was still no one there. It did not appear recently lived in. The shit bucket was frozen tight. Fish drying racks were empty. No blood on the rickety butcher table or two ulus, their traditional skinning knives.

  So I returned to our fire, ate whenever I felt hungry, and when the snow returned, I slunk back in my bag and slept.

  The last afternoon, I took a walk alone, along the base of the island’s southern cliffs. The beach was made of sand and silt and gravel, and I saw bear tracks imprinted in the mud. I wondered what he ate, this bear, and where he slept, and I laughed to myself, that he had been born in the very place I worked so hard to get to.

  Does the bear walk and wonder at his fortune to be on this island at this time? Or, like me, does it come upon him an absolute necessity to move?

  No, of course not. How foolish.

  I followed the bear tracks for a while, along that lonesome beach, but eventually they turned inland, attained the slope, and disappeared.

  — 27 —

  MANY RETURNS

  Mackenzie slept four nights on Whale Island. The tide came in and soaked their baggage and they moved farther up the beach. His men spotted white whales in the distance, and Mackenzie grabbed several voyageurs to launch the canoes and pursue them, but fog came in and they nearly wrecked the boats on the ice floes and returned to camp with two men bailing for their lives. “Never was happier than when we got safe to Land.”

  Just hunting for dinner had proven a near catastrophe; how could trade ever transit such floes? Later polar explorers would fall in love with the ice, the echoes, the bare hues, the extreme majesty of it all. Not Mackenzie. He was a practical man. All he saw was the barrier to commerce and progress.

  They were hungry, short on pemmican, short on time to return to Fort Chipewyan, and so Mackenzie “engraved the latitude of the Place, My own Name & the Number of Men with me & the time we had been here” on a wooden post and drove it into the spongy ground, and then he ordered his brigade south and they paddled back up the river.

  No white man would stand on that island, or anywhere in the Deh Cho delta, for three decades. In that time, the Esquimaux called it home and thrived as they had for ten thousand years.

  It would take Mackenzie and his party two full months to get home. For the first time on the journey, the river beat at the noses of their boats, and once back within its banks their Quarreller guide deserted. Progress was slow, but the Chipewyan hunters’ luck finally improved. They snared a few fish and waterfowl, and then, salvation: two caribou. They gorged for the struggle ahead. For weeks, there was so much current they were forced to tow the boats while walking onshore. “We make much more way with the Line than Paddle,” Mackenzie wrote. The jagged rocks were unforgiving; the men constantly wore holes in their leather moccasins, and so the four women, floating in the canoes while the men pulled, stitched them a new pair of shoes every single day. When violent summer storms raged, they “were obliged to throw ourselves flat upon the ground to escape being hurt by Stones that were hurled about by the Air like Sand.”

  Mackenzie would not let go of the promise of the Northwest Passage, and so he perpetually interrogated the Indians he met on where to find the true river of the west. Nothing but frustration came of it. “I made the English Chief ask them some Questions which they did not, or pretended not, to understand.” Some said that a river lay on the other side of the mountains, but that it was guarded by giants who “have Wings but don’t fly” and are “very wicked and kill Common Men with their Eyes.” None knew mor
e than conjecture and hearsay, and they refused to accompany Mackenzie over the mountains to search for the river that “ran towards the Midday Sun.” When Mackenzie persisted with the idea anyway, they begged Awgeenah to stay, saying that “if he should go he should be killed.” Mackenzie stewed at the lack of cooperation. That night, when one of the Indian dogs scavenged his provisions, he shot it dead. Awgeenah was in no better humor, saying that “it is hard to have come so far” and not return with plunder; the Dogrib “hide all their Goods and Young Women.”

  Their pemmican ran out, and they had to eat mashed corn, their final staple. “Yesterday the Heat was insupportable, and today we can’t put clothes enough on to keep us warm,” Mackenzie said. And ever, the river current hampered all progress. “All Day upon the line.”

  Finally, after weeks of upriver labor and recalcitrant Indians, Mackenzie could stand it no more. He was convinced that a path to the Pacific lay just over the mountains flanking their western view. So they stopped to camp early, and Mackenzie enlisted one of the Chipewyan hunters, his voyageurs “being more fatigued than curious,” and hiked directly toward the closest, highest peak. The trees were so thick they had trouble forcing their way through; three hours of labor and the mountains “appear’d as far from us as when we had seen them from the River.” Mackenzie pressed on anyway and fell into a marsh “up to the Arm Pits & with some difficulty extricated myself. I found it impossible to proceed.” He and the hunter retreated, beaten, under a sky full of stars. Summer was spent, and darkness ruled midnight again.

  The party started to fracture. Mackenzie broke up a fight between Barrieau and Landry; frustrated by the hard labor, they “wanted to land to see who was the best man.” A rifle fell overboard, from careless exhaustion. One of the hunters mocked Barrieau for his method of paddling, and another became “too intimate” with one of Awgeenah’s wives. Throughout their trek, Mackenzie had consciously kept the voyageurs separate from the women, lest the English Chief grow jealous and despondent, and now, just as he feared, Awgeenah fell into a stupor at the news that his wife had taken a new lover. Like his patron Matonabbee, Awgeenah lost interest in the journey.