by Kirk Landers
It would be a full day’s paddle. She gave a silent, noncommittal shrug. She was pushing the pace, even though she made it look easy. They were making time.
He was surprised she didn’t shoot down Blueberry Island, figured she must be very distracted, needing her space. The island was way too popular. This late in the season it would be littered and maybe in use. Worse, the island’s blueberry patch would be ripe now, calling to Quetico’s bears like a candy store to children.
By himself, Pender would never stay on Blueberry in August unless there was no other choice. But with Chaos it might be fun. With Pender and Annette banging pots and pans and Chaos barking like a maniac, it would be interesting to see how long a bear would stick around. Of course, Chaos might just turn tail and run, but Pender figured him to stay and make a lot of noise.
The short creek portages came up quickly, and they swept through each one in a hurry, hustling on the trails, digging hard on the water.
It was still morning when they arrived at the delta at the south end of the big lake, passing the island where Gus and Bill had camped. The fishermen had already left, heading south for the Maligne River and on to Minnesota. Annette and Pender swung northeast.
22
As Pender and Annette traversed the creek system and Gus and Bill prepared to leave for the Boundary Waters, multiple storm cells formed fifty miles southwest of them. The cells formed quickly, like summer storms often do, blowing up from a collision between competing weather systems. But these storms were different. They merged together to form a single violent system, much larger and more terrifying than the average summer storm on the northern prairie. Its fast-breeding cells multiplied like a supersonic cancer as it merged into a single terrifying front. It began moving northeast in a line twenty miles long, expanding and becoming more violent by the minute.
Minutes later, people in Ely, Minnesota, saw black clouds coming their way from the southwest. The clouds came fast, and they got darker, denser, and lower. It was as if a nightmare was rolling across the prairie, black and angry, like a wall of doom. The U.S. Weather Service posted a severe-weather warning, but the storm raced across northern Minnesota so fast there was little time for people to react. Those who looked at the southern sky didn’t need a government warning, though. They ran for cover and made sure their loved ones did the same.
As it passed over Ely, the front of the system drenched the area in rain and pounded it with the highest winds in memory.
Between Ely and the Ontario border, the storm expanded to a fifty-mile width and became a full-fledged derecho, its winds building to hurricane levels, the rain falling in horizontal currents. It traveled fifty miles in its first hour of life, flattening forests like matchsticks, whipping the waters of lakes and rivers into frothing seas, creating a trail of terror and destruction no one in the northwoods had ever seen or imagined.
* * *
Annette and Pender were oblivious to the storm. Their view to the southwest was obstructed by land as they paddled the creek system, and when they swung northeast onto the big lake, the storm was behind them, in their blind spot. They could feel a gathering wind out of the southwest, but that seemed like good news. It would push them on their way, the wilderness tripper’s fondest dream. They paused to quench their thirst, reload water jugs, and down a snack. As their canoes drifted, they gradually turned sideways to the prevailing wind, giving them their first good view of the southwestern sky. Pender was chewing a mouthful of trail food when he saw the black curtain filling the horizon as far as he could see.
“Jesus Christ!” The dread in his voice caused Annette to look up, first at him, then following his gaze to the southwest. “Here comes Mr. Death.”
He knew they should be fleeing for cover, but he was mesmerized by the wall of doom coming to swallow them like a voracious predator.
“Oh my God!” Annette gasped. She focused on the near shore, looking for a safe place. “Let’s go!” she commanded, turning her canoe toward a fingerlike point jutting into the lake a kilometer or two away. Pender heard her paddle slap the water. It shook him from his trance. He followed, stroking fast and hard, thinking they might as well try to escape—what else would you do with the last fifteen minutes of your life?
They sprinted flat out, machine gun cadence, Pender drafting behind Annette, admiring her perfect form and speed, hoping she survived this. They were moving at lightning speed for canoeists, but they were racing a wall of disaster that was closing on them so rapidly it felt like they were hardly moving.
He could see where she was going, wished the little peninsula was longer and taller and closer because he figured the black wall was going to eat them just about the time they reached the tip. It would piss him off, to come that close and fail, thinking it was like a short-timer in Vietnam getting zapped with a week to go in his tour.
Annette stayed focused on the peninsula, planning what to do when they got there, if they got there, aware of the specter closing in on them. Her arms and shoulders burned from the breakneck paddling but she kept whipping her paddle back and forth without slowing down, as if fighting back a sea filled with snakes.
Chaos sensed the tension and started to stand from his perch on the pack, but Annette shrieked at him to get down and he did, saving her the need to miss a stroke to crown him. Every stroke counted. The wind was building. They could smell the moisture in the air. They could see sheets of rain in front of the black wall, a terrible waterfall followed by a black void that seemed to engulf the land it passed over, hills and forests disappearing into the gaping maw of a ravenous beast.
The first huge raindrops hit them like ice-cold water balloons, hard and fat, the peninsula still a dream and a prayer away. The pellets of rain sounded like gunshots when they hit the packs and hulls of the canoes, and they savaged the surface of the lake as if sprayed from a monstrous shotgun, slamming into the lake like rocks, sending drops of water exploding into the air, creating an epidemic of spray as far as Pender and Annette could see. The raindrops became a torrent, and the canoes started taking water. Then the wind lashed them, and Pender wondered if the wind would capsize them before the rain made the canoes impossible to handle.
The wind rose to howling velocity as they reached the tip of the peninsula, a low, muddy projection that gave them little shelter. They leaned into the gusts to stay upright and kept paddling, trying to make the hundred yards or so to higher land before their world ended, hoping to God there would be a place to take out and some place to sit out the wrath of the heavens.
The elevation of the peninsula increased as they paddled. Pender thought Annette would stop when it got to a six-foot elevation, but she kept going, even though they were fighting crazy waves and stiff winds and could capsize any second. He admired her courage, wondered if he’d ever get to tell her so, thinking if he went over, she wouldn’t know it until she got wherever she was going because he was in her blind spot and the wind and rain made too much noise for anyone to hear the muffled splash of a canoe going over.
The lake was boiling with whitecaps when Annette broke for a small rocky beach where they could land the boats. The land rose steeply from the narrow landing, leading to a vertical rock wall about five feet high. Above the wall, the land rose again to a forest maybe twenty feet above the lake.
Annette pulled her canoe ashore, snatched one of the packs and all the loose items in it and scrambled up the slope to the rock wall. Pender followed her lead. The ripping wind and pounding rain swallowed their words, but he understood what she was doing. They dropped their gear at the base of the wall and slid back to the canoes, water pouring down the slope and soaking their bodies and clothes. Annette gestured for Pender to hold his canoe so it wouldn’t blow away as she shouldered his second pack, and then went to her canoe. She pointed to him, then to the canoe, and mouthed the word “Okay?” He nodded. He’d take care of the canoes. She slung the second pack from her boat over her other shoulder and headed for the cliff with both bundles.
Pender dragged the two canoes up the slope. He slipped on wet rocks and soft soil but got to a crevice at the foot of a large boulder halfway up the slope. He stashed the canoes in the crevice and tied them to a tree, wondering if the tree, the canoes, or anything would still be there when this was over, because it was still getting worse and this seemed headed for some kind of biblical cataclysm. The trees up above the wall were bent at impossible angles by a wind that had surged to a demonic pitch, blowing rain and detritus in a jet stream over his head and into the void.
He crouched low, like someone ducking under a helicopter rotor, and made his way to the wall where Annette was preparing a shelter. A tree snapped in half nearby, the sound so much like a gunshot that Pender dove for the ground. As he righted himself, he looked up above the wall where the sound came from. Jack pines, he thought. There was a stand of jack pines right above their wall. Trees with the most superficial root structure he’d ever seen, in the craziest winds he’d ever seen. Trees that had no chance of surviving this gale. Trees that would start coming down any moment.
The bitch of it was, the wall was the safest place they were going to find. In the forest, they’d surely get crushed. Here, if the trees coming over the cliff fell at an angle, they might survive in the nook between the wall and the ground.
Annette positioned the packs to mark off two sides of a shelter, with the cliff forming the third side. She pulled the tarp from her pack to fashion shelter from the rain, trying to secure the sides under the packs. Even in their protected nook, the swirling winds ripped the tarp loose. She had to anchor it with her back, feet and arms. When Pender was done stashing the canoes, he slid under the tarp with her, wet and cold, and helped her hold it down. They took deep breaths, trying to relax, like they’d done all they could. Then Annette startled and yelled in Pender’s ear, “Where’s Chaos?”
“I thought he was with you,” he yelled back.
He bolted from the shelter, back into the driving wind and icy rain, staying low and casting about for Chaos. The big yellow dog was thirty feet away, disoriented, panic-stricken, swirling in circles, barely able to stand in the severe wind. Pender half crawled toward him. Another tree cracked and fell, sending waves of fear through Pender’s mind, but he kept moving. When he drew near, the dog saw him and tried to leap and run around him in ecstasy, but the wind knocked him off balance. Pender just turned and crawled back to the shelter, Chaos following him like a shadow.
They positioned the dog between them under the tarp and pulled the sides closed, forming a claustrophobic tent. It shed the rain and trapped their body heat but lent no sense of security. The tarp flapped and shook in the rising wind, and they could hear trees snapping like firecrackers on the mesa above them.
Annette tried to say something to Pender, but he couldn’t hear her. She pushed Chaos toward their feet and pulled Pender to her side, merging their bodies into one soggy mass. She leaned her face to Pender’s ear. “We have to keep each other warm!” she said. “Hypothermia!”
Pender nodded. Yes, he understood. He started to kiss her on the cheek, but she turned and they locked in a full embrace powered by adrenaline and fear.
Outside their fragile hovel, the air was filled with the sounds of tree roots giving way and trunks snapping, two, three, four at a time, like bullets shot from automatic weapons. They huddled blindly in a chorus of demons for what seemed like an eternity, unable to speak, trying to keep their shelter together, trying to stay warm, dreading the moment a towering jack pine crashed to earth and crushed them where they sat.
The violent din eventually ebbed enough for them to shout back and forth to each other.
“Have you seen anything like this before?” Pender yelled to Annette. He glimpsed her face as he spoke. Her expression was taut.
“No,” she yelled back, her lips inches from his ear. “I’ve heard stories . . . I can’t remember what they call these things, but they’re like hurricanes.”
As she spoke, a crack as loud as a thunderbolt exploded above them. They ducked reflexively. Chaos barked, then whined. They heard more cracking, the sound of a large tree trunk splitting. They knew it was right above them, knew it was coming down on them. They hugged their knees to their chests and pushed into the wall with all their strength.
The tree fell directly over them, its lower branches snapping and cracking as the base of the trunk hit the ground above them, a precarious moment of silence as the rest of its length teetered on the edge of the wall, then the final crash as the top of the tree touched down just below their feet. Branches brushed against Pender’s head and legs. He felt the press of the boughs and had a fleeting mental image of the three of them being spiked to death by the limbs of falling trees. Chaos felt branches push against him and slithered back between them.
“How long will this last?” Pender yelled in Annette’s ear.
She shook her head, buried her face in his shoulder. They clung to each other and Chaos as more trees fell around and over them. The first tree that fell over them acted as a shield, flexing and quivering as each new blowdown piled on. With each close call, Pender swore loudly. It was a reflex he couldn’t control. Annette tried to choke back short, fearful yelps, with no more success.
It seemed impossible that they would survive the onslaught.
After twenty minutes of bombardment, the gale tapered off to merely powerful winds, maybe thirty miles per hour, Pender thought. The deluge ebbed to a heavy rain. The sound of trees cracking and falling stopped. Their tarp leaked where the wind shredded it and tree branches punctured it. Cold water seeped into their dark niche, making them wetter and more miserable. The air temperature was dropping, too, and between the cold and the wet, they began shivering even though they clung to each other.
“We’re getting hypothermic,” Annette said. “We have to get dry and get warm!”
“Okay.” Pender replied. “But it’s wet in here!”
“Right. We have to get a tent up, get the packs inside. Then us.”
“That’ll be a good trick in this wind.” Pender was dubious. They didn’t have to yell anymore, but the wind was still high enough to make pitching a tent a challenge.
“Don’t wimp out on me now!” she said. “You hold down the tarp while I get my tent.”
“I’ll do the tent,” he said.
Annette started to object, then nodded. Pender had told her about assembling his tent in the dark, as fast and sure as an Indy 500 pit crew. One more crazy thing about the guy, though this one was helpful.
Pender pulled his gear pack under the tarp and removed his tent bag from it. He yelled to her.
“I’m going up above,” he gestured. “Give me five minutes, then come on up. I’ll need help with the fly, then you get in and I’ll shuttle the packs.”
Annette stared at him in silence.
“This’ll work,” he said, locking eyes with her.
She nodded her agreement.
Pender slipped out from under the tarp and crawled through the tangle of trees and branches piled over them. He emerged into an apocalypse. Fallen trees littered the ground as far as he could see, vast forests destroyed as if felled by a giant scythe. Most of the ruined hulks of the trees pointed to the northeast.
He forced himself to focus on finding a place to pitch the tent. Clambering up the rock face, he found what had been a campsite near the top of the hill. All of the mature trees were flattened. Only a few saplings still stood. He found an open area among the carcasses just big enough for his tent. He spread it on the ground and tried to stake it down before it blew away. The site had very little soil. He could sink only two stakes to full depth and two others about halfway. The fifth and sixth he skipped. He assembled the two long tent poles and plugged them into grommets in the tent’s floor and roof, then erected the tent by snapping clips on the tent’s roof to the poles. The hard rain pelted the tent, threatening to soak it before they could erect the rain fly.
Annette came up the rock face,
trying to haul two packs with her. Pender scurried down to grab one of the packs, and they hustled back to the tent. He secured the upwind side of the fly while she kept it from ripping away in the wind. They secured the fly to the four stakes he had driven for the tent, not sufficient to get through the night, but maybe good enough for now, Pender thought.
Annette got inside and began arranging things. Pender retrieved the rest of their gear and threw it in the tent’s vestibule. Chaos followed him everywhere, his spirits higher now that the wind had died down.
They raced against time, the rain and the cold stalking them like a hungry predator. Pender dashed around the area collecting ten-pound rocks to anchor the tent and fly in the places he couldn’t secure stakes. He tied guy lines to the rocks from the tent and the fly to achieve structural integrity and to maintain air space between the rain fly and the walls and roof of the tent so the whole structure could breathe. Otherwise condensation would overpower the interior in a short time; it would be like a rain forest but colder, and they would be in danger again.
The cold and wet were overtaking Pender. His teeth chattered. His legs cramped badly when he crouched. Hypothermia was knocking on his door, but he had to finish his work or they would both die of hypothermia when their structure failed.
By the time he entered the tent, Annette had positioned Chaos against the far wall, their gear packs inside the door, their food packs in the vestibule. Their sleeping pads were laid out and inflated. The sleeping bags were stacked on one pad, towels and clothing on the other.
Pender tried to close the tent door behind him, but his fingers had stopped working. They were sickly white, his lips blue. Annette stopped him and began pulling off his wet clothes. She extracted his shirt and T-shirt and threw them on a pack in the vestibule, then closed the door herself. She told him to take off his pants and began drying his upper body with a towel. She had him dry his lower body while she pulled a fleece sweater over his head, then gave him fleece pants to put on. She opened his sleeping bag and told him to scoot his lower body in. She zipped it to his hips and then rubbed his arms and legs vigorously. She threw the other sleeping bag over him as she changed into dry clothes herself. She pushed the pads together, opened the top sleeping bag, and draped it over them both like a quilt.