Cut Off

by Jamie Bastedo

  Woody’s approach to wilderness training seemed to be: give us a few crumbs of technical skills, then throw us to the wolves. It was all about “turning challenges into growth experiences,” he kept telling us.

  Great, Woody. That is, if I live through them.

  I remember standing at the edge of the Wheaton River, staring at a jumble of waves and spray and rocks, feeling the vibration of crashing water come up through my feet. I’m thinking, There’s no way I’m getting in a canoe and paddling through that stuff!

  But after watching Obie and Carrie somehow make it through alive, accompanied by massive cheers from the rest of us, I figured, what the hell. Besides, William and Morris were set up downstream with safety ropes, right?

  I lost some nerve when Woody put Alyssa and me together. She was still pretty much a zombie around camp. But when I steadied the canoe for her, watching her creep toward the bow, I could tell by the way she moved that she had some experience in a canoe.

  At least, more than me.

  I managed to slip into the stern without dumping us. I knelt low, spreading my knees to grip the sides like Woody showed us. My stomach was tight as a drum as I pushed off from shore with a cautious poke of my paddle. We drifted into a calm eddy just above the rapids.

  “Focus!” Woody shouted from his canoe upstream of us. “Aim for the V!”

  The so-called safe route we’d scouted from shore was invisible from the water. I didn’t recognize one wave, one rock.

  I felt the river suddenly grip our canoe. There was no turning back.

  “Okay, Alyssa,” I hollered over the rushing water. “This is it! Yell if you see trouble.”

  I think I saw her nod.

  We quickly gained speed. I lined us up and we hit the top of the V dead on. We tobogganed down it and sliced through a big standing wave. “All right!” I shouted as the spray hit my grinning face.

  We flew through the curling, twisting water, skimming past big rocks and rollers that could’ve eaten our canoe.

  What a rush!

  Must have been beginner’s luck.

  The second time, we flipped at the top of the rapids.

  The shock of hitting the cold water took my breath away, and I cried out like someone had slapped me hard. As we bobbed through the rapids, I remembered to stick my feet downstream, like we’d been told, and I shouted to Alyssa to do the same. My butt still took a serious beating from bashing into rocks.

  The current finally loosened its grip on us. But we got stuck in an eddy in the center of the river, and a huge roller blocked us from shore.

  “Rope!” I heard William shout, and his throwbag zinged out of the woods, trailing the rescue rope behind it. I let myself drift downstream toward it but, before I could grab it, I heard Morris’s voice—“Rope!” —and another throwbag flew past me on my upstream side.

  “You go for that one!” I shouted to Alyssa.

  But the wonky currents had other ideas. They took the ropes in opposite directions and, before I could grab either, they’d crossed and closed around my neck.

  I hadn’t really felt the strength of that river until I tried ripping those ropes off my neck while fighting for air. Till my dying day—and I truly thought that was it—I’ll know I never could have done it alone.

  It wasn’t really anybody’s fault. The tangled ropes, I mean.

  But I know who saved me.

  Alyssa.

  And it wouldn’t be the last time.

  HOT SPRINGS

  It had been five weeks since I’d last sat on a real toilet seat. What a wonderful invention. This one was in a roofless outhouse parked beside the Redstone hot springs. Civilization was pretty thin on the Keele River, and we took what comforts we could get. Of course I was whistling, so my jailers knew I hadn’t run off into the mountains again.

  I was sitting there on that real toilet seat, enjoying a form of Canadian culture that was new to me. A dog-eared journal hung by a string on the outhouse wall. On the cover were the words, SHIT LIT.

  Paddled 8 hours to make it here last night. Got caught in a freak blizzard, snow filling our canoes, wind up our asses, shivered all day in wet gear. Worth every paddle-stroke once we jumped in the hot springs! So surreal! So beautiful! Thank you, Mother Earth!

  Man, I wish I could shit here every day!

  From southern Chile to northern Canada. Worth the trip! Please take care of God’s country!—Alejandro

  Got charged by a mother grizzly and her cubs as we did a “float-n-bloat” down the river. Mama bear kicked up quite a spray along the shore, then stood up and shook her fist at us. I shit you not! Never paddled faster!!

  Knock on the door. “Is that you in there, Ian?”

  I don’t think Obie had shit in the woods once since the camp van had dropped us way back at the Canol Road, at the headwaters of the Keele. Obie was deathly afraid of bears. “How’d you like to die with your pants down?” he had asked me one day when we were paddling together. His solution was to eat like a bird, in spite of Carrie’s lectures on anorexia. The guy had lost about twenty pounds. But he’d gained lots of muscle, like the rest of us.

  “Yeah, yeah. Just give me a minute,” I said.

  “You’ve only been in there for like—”

  “Just hold tight, Obie. You’re the sphincter expert.”

  I grabbed a pencil jammed between the logs and scribbled the first thing that came to my head.

  Believe in the music! Love, Indio.

  I stared at the words, wondering who wrote them.

  Knock, knock.

  I slapped the journal shut. “It’s all yours, Obie.”

  “Hurry! I can’t hold it!”

  “Is this the gain part?” I asked Woody, as I slipped back into the steaming pool dug into the riverside rocks. The swirling hot water penetrated my bones. My head was giddy with the sulfur fumes.

  Carrie nudged a floating barrel lid over to me, loaded high with fancy cheeses, crackers, and chocolates she’d kept hidden for weeks. There were even some Oreo cookies and a jar of Nutella.

  “No harm in rewarding the pain it took to get this far,” Woody said. “But your team is still pretty rough around the edges.”

  Obie returned from the outhouse, still whistling. He rolled into the water almost drowning the barrel lid. “Ahhhhh.”

  Morris pretended to cough, horked up something gross, and spit in the water in front of Obie.

  “Would you kindly fuck off, Morris?” Obie said.

  “See what I mean?” Woody said. “Rough around the edges.”

  “You seem to be in a good mood, eh, Obie?” William said.

  “That was the best shit ever,” he said, leaning his head on a boulder and closing his eyes.

  “I’ve been wondering, Obie,” William said. “Where’d ya get that name?”

  “I’m special. It’s short for Oberon, King of the Fairies.”

  Morris choked on a chocolate.

  “You okay?” Alyssa said, thumping Morris on the back.

  “Thanks, yeah,” he said, his eyes watering.

  “It’s also one of the moons of Uranus,” Obie added.

  “Whose anus?” Morris asked.

  “Up yours,” Obie said.

  Carrie joined in, trying to de-escalate as usual. “So … uh … Morris, what does your name mean?”

  “Conqueror of fairies.”

  “You’re full of it,” Obie said, reaching for a handful of crackers.

  However rough the team might have been in Woody’s eyes, Obie was definitely going places. He was talking twenty times more than when he arrived. He was standing up to Morris. More than that, he seemed to know who he was. Took pride in his name.

  I couldn’t help feeling a twinge of envy.

  “How far did we paddle today?” I asked Woody.

  “Best day yet,” he said. “Nearly forty miles. At this rate, we’ll be at the Flats in a couple of days.”

  “Almost home,” Alyssa said.

  “Your home,
maybe,” I said.

  “Where’s yours?” she asked.

  “Dunno,” I said honestly.

  “What’s the Flats?” Obie said.

  “You’ll see,” was all Woody said, like he’d already told us too much. After all these weeks on the river, he was still zipper-lipped on location details.

  As if I was about to run off into these bear-infested mountains!

  “We’re getting to be a pretty well-oiled machine, eh, Woody?” Obie said, now working his way through the chocolates and Oreos. “Oh, my God … mmm … oh … I think I’m having a mouthgasm.”

  Woody studied him for a moment, then pulled the barrel lid away. “Beware, Obie. Get too cocky and shit happens, especially on the home stretch.”

  William reached for the barrel lid and built himself a triple-decker of crackers, Nutella, and chocolates. “This may be the world’s only job where, when things start going really well, you know you’re doing something wrong.”

  “What kind of shit?” Obie asked Woody.

  “This river isn’t done with us yet. As the valley opens up, changes in wind or water levels can play hell with your canoe. Riverbanks are more apt to come unhinged and drop on you. More moose down here, too.”

  “Moose? Obie said. “What’s the big—”

  “No matter how many of Carrie’s chocolates you eat, Obie, you’ll be no match for the fifteen-hundred-pound moose you surprise on a portage.”

  William cupped his hands around his mouth and grunted at Obie like a horny moose.

  Obie slid closer to Carrie.

  Woody continued his sermon. We’d almost made it through the day without one. “Then of course, no matter where you are, you can always do something stupid, like get cocky in the rapids, or forget to tie up your canoe, or let your guard down and hit a rock, and then …” Woody twirled a hand in the air, then plunged it into the pool. “… shit happens.”

  I looked at William for a reality check. “The Beast, right?”

  William made a Halloween face and popped his claws out of the water.

  “The beast?” Obie said.

  I pointed at his hairless chest. “You.”

  Obie held up both hands. “Me?”

  “Well, I don’t mean you, exactly.”

  “You do mean you,” William said.

  “What is this shit?” Alyssa said.

  William squinted at her. “You, too. Beast alert!”

  Carrie nailed William with a slap of steamy water. “He’s saying that, out here, you are your own worst enemy.”

  “Back home, too,” Woody said. “Especially back home.”

  “So … what are we supposed to do?” Obie asked.

  “You’re doing it,” Woody said. “Shaking out your junk and flushing it down the river.”

  William put on his best noble savage face. “Obie, just stay calm, be brave, and watch for the signs.” Then he dropped his head below the surface under a storm of bubbles.

  The howling started while he was underwater.

  I kicked William’s leg, harder than I meant to.

  He exploded to the surface. “What’s the pro—” His eyes went big.

  So, I didn’t imagine it.

  A long shrill howl gushed out of the mountains, filling the whole valley.

  The hair on the back of my neck wanted to fly off.

  “What the fuck?” Morris said. His movie-star mask cracked open, revealing the chicken face of a ten-year-old.

  All heads turned upstream where the sound spilled from.

  Carrie looked spooked but tried to keep it together. “Sounds like when I was in labor with my first child,” she said. “Refused to come out no matter how I screamed.”

  Obie slid closer to Carrie, and I saw her reach underwater for his hand.

  Woody was as unreadable as ever. Any emotions that might’ve leaked out were trapped in his beard, which, in the hot springs, looked like a nest of snakes.

  “We’re lucky,” Alyssa said calmly.

  I sculled toward her and noticed her breasts bobbing like ripe mangoes beneath her T-shirt. “What do you mean, lucky?”

  She wouldn’t look back at me.

  The howling went on and on, for maybe five minutes. It rose, fell, seemed to circle around us, then whooshed downriver. It ended as fast as it started.

  “It was the wind,” Carrie assured us. “Yes, some kind of wind-tunnel effect. Did you hear the way it …” She glanced back at the spruce trees lining the river. Not a branch stirred. She looked at the fingers of steam rising unruffled all around us. “Hmm, maybe not the wind.”

  “It was an elk,” Obie said matter-of-factly. “I’ve heard them just like that down in Banff.”

  Woody shook his head. “Nearest elk is a thousand miles away. It was definitely a wolf. Caught in a trap by the sound of it.”

  Long silence broken only by the gurgling river.

  “Trolls!” said Obie. “That’s it. Had to be trolls.”

  Nervous laughter all around.

  Butch came blasting out of the willows and did a running leap into the pool. William grabbed his collar and pulled him close. The dog shook in his arms.

  Then, moving as one well-oiled team, everyone sank deeper into the pool, hiding behind a wall of steam.

  Listening.

  “Is this one of your signs?” I whispered to William.

  He shrugged. “Dunno. Maybe somebody’s just working out their karma, eh?”

  THE AMERICANS

  At breakfast, nobody talked about the howling. Like it didn’t happen. But there was a new edge in the air that infected even William. He kept glancing upstream where the sound came from. Or he’d squint up at the mountains like he was peering at something we couldn’t see.

  I couldn’t shake this feeling that things were disintegrating.

  Half a day’s paddle away, we rounded a bend and saw two figures sitting on the edge of a bald gravel bar in the middle of the river. Woody suddenly waved his paddle and signaled for us to land. He and Carrie booted over to it.

  I was sterning that day, with Morris in the bow and Alyssa in the middle as “mojo.” Woody had called this crew configuration an “experiment” when we’d set off that morning. “To help rub off those rough edges,” he’d said. Right now, it felt like the experiment was not working. “Come on!” I yelled. “Paddle, you lily-dippers!” Morris put more effort into flipping water in my face than paddling. Alyssa’s back went limp and she almost dropped her paddle in the river. “Don’t give up on me, Alyssa! Gimme all ya got!” The current was stronger after a night of rain, and we had to paddle our asses off to avoid sailing past the gravel bar.

  I lost control as we hit a calm eddy near the shore and we T-boned Woody’s canoe at full steam.

  “Please!” Woody said as he and Carrie dragged their canoe onto the gravel.

  I looked upstream for William and Obie’s canoe and saw them cruising with the current, right on target, facing the wrong way. As William tried to spin them around, they ran broadside into a big standing wave that almost swamped their boat.

  “Ran into a bit of a speed bump,” William said as they crunched ashore.

  The two figures on the gravel bar watched the whole show like statues. Butch jumped out, soaking wet, and ran circles around them. No reaction, not even when Butch shook water all over them. As we walked closer, I saw it was an old guy and his girlfriend. Burned-out hippies. They were sitting on river boulders, both dressed head-to-toe in buckskin and looking like they’d been in the bush far too long.

  Woody went up to them with his hand extended. The man shook it limply without standing.

  “Who are you?” the man asked suspiciously.

  American, I thought. Deep South. Living their dream. Or their nightmare.

  “We’re a bunch of drug addicts and thieves,” Morris told him, his signature smile glued back on. “Better watch your stuff.”

  The woman stood abruptly. The man took a long drag on his cigarette and looked up at Woody
.

  “Camp Lifeboat,” Woody said. “Heard of it?”

  The man shook his head. I noticed a carton’s worth of butts at his feet.

  “Wilderness therapy program,” Woody said proudly.

  “I could sure use some of that ol’ therapy right now,” the man said. “Did you hear somethin’ strange last night?”

  We all looked at each other.

  It traveled this far?

  “A sound?” Carrie said.

  “A bloody wailing sound. Did you hear that? What the hell was it?”

  “I’m not sure what you mean,” Woody said.

  The guy stood up, a cold light in his eyes. “Oh, yes, you do. You heard it, all right. What the hell was it?”

  Obie stepped forward. “We think it was trolls, sir.”

  The man laughed crazily. “Hah! Trolls. Ya hear that, Wendy? Bloody trolls!”

  “Enough, Ben,” she said. “Let’s go.”

  The man sprang off his boulder.

  Butch growled at him.

  “Yes!” he said, as he shoved Butch aside with his moccasined foot. “Let’s go. Let’s get the hell outta here!”

  The man flicked his half-smoked cigarette into the river. William watched it drift away like he might go after it.

  The Americans broke into a run straight for their canoe, a cheap plastic model, hand-painted to look like birch bark. We watched in silence as they randomly fired their stuff into their boat, dragged it to the river, and took off, paddling like devils.

  “Impressive team,” said William. “Zero to sixty in a minute flat.”

  THE FLATS

  Except for pee and snack breaks, we’d been paddling all afternoon. With our heads on swivel, we’d drifted past some incredible mountain scenery. We’d shot some decent rapids that would’ve scared the shit out of us weeks ago, when we were still bumbling beginners. I discovered that I could tolerate paddling with Morris as long as there was lots of whitewater to keep him busy. His strength actually allowed us to tackle some kick-ass rapids that the other interns couldn’t touch.