The Last Voyageurs

by Lorraine Boissoneault

  As the canoes made their way back to Washington Island, Ken started cracking jokes, trying to distract his crew from their shivering limbs and chattering teeth. His instincts kicked in as tension in the boat rose. Everyone needed a diversion from the miserable cold and the terrifying prospect of capsizing in the rough surf and freezing to death. As a trained actor, he knew he could provide that distraction, telling one joke after another.

  After a brief but nerve-wracking struggle, the convoy of canoes made it to land, only a mile or two south of the point where they’d launched less than an hour ago. The waterlogged canoe bottomed out early because it had sunk so low and had to be dragged up to shore by a number of men. Hess was assisted out of the boat and hobbled up to land. His cast was probably ruined, but at least he wasn’t at the bottom of the lake. Everyone who wasn’t drenched and frozen rushed off to cut wood for the fires. For the first time since they’d started their journey, the fire was lit with matches from an emergency pouch. It was too risky to waste any time on authenticity now. Ken, Hess, Fredenburg, and LeSieutre stripped out of their heavy wool and linen clothes, peeling off each layer with trembling, numb fingers. Their skin was angry crimson red up to their chests, but none of them looked as if he had any frostbite. Naked but for their underwear, the men wrapped up in warm, dry blankets and huddled close to the fire. Marc Lieberman dug around his pack looking for a small bottle. Though they’d been given plenty of bottles of alcohol, he knew the momentary warmth from liquor would do more harm than good. Instead, he found a bottle of maple syrup and passed it around for everyone to take a sip. The liquid was like an elixir. Normally used with their breakfast foods, maple syrup (and other sugary liquids) could be a useful preventative against severe hypothermia. The sugars were a quick, easily digestible source of fuel that provided the body with a small boost of warmth. It wasn’t until the crew had caught their breath and prepared to talk about their harrowing trip back to shore that someone realized there were only five canoes on the beach. The only canoe without an adult paddler had never returned to land.

  Clif Wilson was having a good day. They were back out in their boats after a three-day hiatus, and he and his crew members had found their rhythm. Even the cold air and icy water couldn’t bring down his mood. His curly blond hair was tucked under a wool toque, his fingers were warm beneath the double layer of mittens, and his toes were dry, despite the couple of inches of water that sloshed in the bottom of the boat, because he was still wearing the rubber waders he used for launching and landing the canoe. For once his boat was leading the pack, something that happened rarely. Most of the time they were lagging behind and causing delays for everyone else. He hated feeling as if the men in his boat weren’t pulling their weight. As the avant, the man at the front of the canoe, Wilson watched for obstacles, set the paddling rhythm, and jumped in first upon landing. He felt no need to make apologies for his performance. It was the craziest position of the four. Always getting splashed by waves and keeping everyone else dry, always on the lookout for driftwood or dangerous rocks ahead. He felt he was living up to his duties. When there was a finger to point, he pointed it in another direction. He liked shouting at other people, telling them what to do and where they went wrong. He’d never gelled with the others in his canoe, and that only made their situation harder. Maybe that lack of camaraderie was why they never seemed to be in-sync on the water. But not today. Today their paddles cut such a steady path through the choppy water that they’d soon outpaced the other five canoes.

  “Inside or outside?” Wilson shouted back to Bill Watts as they approached Hog Island, a tiny, rocky islet off to the east of Washington Island. As the gouvernail, Watts steered the canoe and made all decisions regarding obstacles and where they would land. They’d spoken about Hog Island earlier in the day with the rest of the group before heading out to the water. Its rocky shore made landing impossible, and the island itself didn’t have much room for them—it was maybe one hundred yards across and covered in trees. At the morning debrief before they launched, Hobart told them they’d have to go inside the island or around it depending on the direction of the wind and waves. At this point, with no other boat ahead of them to advise any differently, it seemed like there would be more wind outside the island, but the waves might be smaller.

  “We’ll go outside,” Watts said, using his paddle to steer through the water as the other three teenagers continued stroking forward. There was no second-guessing his decision. Watts had been chosen for the position for a reason. He was responsible and had plenty of wilderness experience as an Eagle Scout.

  In less than five minutes, however, it became apparent that going around Hog Island had put the canoe at the mercy of strong waves. Whenever the weather was bad and the surf was strong, Wilson thought of the waves as having teeth—sharp teeth attached to powerful jaws that tugged at the boat and threatened to pull it under. Today the waves bit down on the canoe almost the instant they reached the far side of Hog Island, sending a flood of icy water into the boat.

  “The others aren’t following us,” Watts said after a glance behind them. “They’re heading back to shore. We need to turn around.”

  Just as the men maneuvered their paddles to turn the canoe around, a wave came pouring over the side on top of them. Jorge Garcia barely had time to pick up the bailer and start emptying the boat when a second wave doused them, pouring an even greater volume of water into the vessel. Before anyone could react or balk at how waterlogged their handmade breeches and woolen mittens were becoming, the boat flipped over.

  Silence.

  The first thing Wilson noticed after being fully submerged was the silence. The whistling wind was gone. No more sounds of water smacking the fiberglass hulls of the canoe, none of the soft vibrations of the paddles pulling through water. Along with the silence was the intense cold. The cold was so strong it was almost a sense of its own, like taste or smell. It burned and ached and would’ve made him gasp out in shock if he hadn’t been trained to stifle the torso response that causes the body to increase oxygen intake when confronted with an abrupt drop in temperature. Not inhaling kept him from drowning, but his training had also taught him that they had only ten to fifteen minutes to get out of the water before their bodies started shutting down from hypothermia. If anyone passed out, he could say good-bye to any chance of survival. Randy Foster and Bill Watts were both muscular and stockier than Wilson and Garcia, but none of them could rely very long on extra body fat to keep them warm. Hundreds of miles of paddling and a rudimentary diet had taken care of most of their excess weight.

  Time moved in strange bursts underwater, and in the instant after he moved past the miserable pain of the cold, Wilson realized he was still wearing his waders and they were filling with water, dragging him down to the bottom. He surfaced into the world of noise and oxygen and shouted to the others that he was sinking with the weight of the waders. Watts and Garcia came over to brace him as he kicked them off, his movements hindered by his bulky, heavy clothing and the numbness spreading across his body. After a brief struggle, he broke free of the rubber boots. All four checked with one another one more time to make sure they were all still there. They were shivering in the icy water, but so far everyone had managed to avoid drowning.

  We’re going to die, Wilson thought. He felt no panic, just resignation. Maybe his emotions were numbed by the cold like the rest of his body. We’re going to die, but we’re not dead yet. That was something, at least. His next thought was for the powdered hot cocoa packets he’d stashed away in his canvas sack, a contraband item. Although chocolate beverages were already popular in France by the time La Salle was tramping through the New World in the 1670s, his voyageurs wouldn’t have had access to such luxuries while in the wild; and pretty much anything that the voyageurs couldn’t have, the reenactors couldn’t have. Lewis’s rules. Not that they were always followed. And Wilson had really been looking forward to a clandestine mug of hot cocoa now that the weather was getting colder. So mu
ch for that. Ironically, he could’ve used it more than ever now that the first stages of hypothermia were setting in. As long as they were still conscious and able to swallow, hypothermia victims were supposed to be given warm, sugary drinks to help their bodies compensate for all the energy lost in staying warm.

  “We need to cut all the gear away from the canoe,” Watts instructed over the sound of the waves. Only a few minutes had passed, but with each minute they stayed in the water, their body temperatures would drop lower. Each teenager reached under the boat with the small knives they carried to cut away the gear that had been strapped down, releasing cast-iron cooking pots and food supplies and clothes, all the belongings they’d managed to keep with them until this point. Next, everyone linked hands over the boat, two on each side, and tried to keep their heads above the waves that kept breaking over them.

  “Hey, if we wait till we’re in between the waves, I can touch bottom without going under,” Watts said. “Let’s try to walk toward land. We’ll use to boat to help us.”

  They waddled slowly through the waves, waiting for each trough so that they could bounce back up with the buoyant canoe. Every time a wave crashed over their heads, each person shouted out that he was still all right, still moving forward. The repeated dunking made them even colder, the heat leaching from their skulls. The body’s initial response to submersion in freezing water is a constriction of surface blood vessels and an increased blood pressure and heart rate. The pulse, blood pressure, and respiration all decrease. After ten minutes or so, muscle function is limited and the body’s core temperature drops. This is followed by gradual loss of mental abilities and, eventually, if the temperature falls low enough, unconsciousness.

  By some stroke of luck, the young men had capsized only two hundred yards from shore. Had they been much farther from land, someone would’ve likely become unconscious from hypothermia before they reached solid ground. As it was, they struggled to keep moving. After a few agonizingly long minutes, they were submerged only up to their chests, then their waists. While they walked, they argued about what to do with the canoe, whether they should try to pull it in with them or let it go. The canoes were more than just the group’s mode of transportation—they were works of art, constructed over the course of hundreds of hours using historical carpentry techniques. They were beautiful vessels, sleek and fast, and they’d carried the team all the way from Montreal. Releasing the canoe felt like betraying it, leaving it to the whim of the waves, but pulling it up could be dangerous since the shoreline was rocky and the surf was so rough. Plus, they weren’t in any condition to lug the heavy vessel up safely. Even walking through the cold water required enormous exertion.

  Eventually they decided to let the boat go after cutting away a waterproof bag that had been stowed in the bow. Garcia was slurring his words as they reached shore, barely able to move. He seemed to pull his limbs through the remaining inches of water with heavy, clumsy movements, and he acted confused, as if he were unable to comprehend what had happened. Watts was already trying to take the blame for the accident, the horror of the capsizing clear on his face. For once, Wilson had no desire to berate or lay blame on anyone’s head. He quickly tried to reassure Watts that it wasn’t his fault, that everything had turned out all right. Wilson and Foster, who were shivering but seemed less affected by hypothermia than the other two, half-carried Garcia up to the dry part of the shore, then helped to strip Watts and Garcia down to their underwear. Inside the waterproof bag were two sleeping bags and an emergency fire-starter kit with matches, which were never used on a daily basis. Flint would’ve been more useful after the capsizing, since the matches and tinder were soaked. At least the sleeping bags were dry. Wilson and Foster wrapped Watts and Garcia in the first one, their skin icy to the touch. Next, they stripped down to bare skin and wrapped themselves in the second sleeping bag, huddling closely together, shaking and numb.

  After a few minutes of warming up, Foster volunteered to head to the opposite side of the tiny island to look for the rest of the crew. He was 195 pounds and mostly muscle and hadn’t felt the effects of hypothermia nearly as severely as the others. Still shivering, he hurried through the trees and over the rocks to the other end of Hog Island. He peered out at the water and the distant shore of Washington Island. Nothing but white caps and steel gray water. All the other boats were gone. They’re all dead, he thought in shock. We had a hard time; we swamped. What about them? The capsizing hadn’t taken that long, so the boats couldn’t have gone very far, but he saw no trace of them. He ran back to the others to get warm again and tell them what he’d seen.

  Their canoe gone, unable to build a fire for themselves, the four could do nothing but pray the others hadn’t capsized as well and that help was on the way in one form or another. But even in the uncertainty of what would happen next, even through the painful cold that bit into his limbs, into his bones, Wilson noticed a momentary burst of ecstasy at having survived a capsizing and a swim through thirty-nine-degree water. He was eighteen, he had traveled a thousand miles in a canoe that he helped build, and he could now say he’d bested drowning and, as long as someone came and built a fire for them within the next couple of hours, he’d beaten hypothermia, too. This, he thought, is what it’s like to be a god.

  On Washington Island, confusion reigned. When they’d first landed, Lewis had walked to the nearest available phone to call Thor, their host, who was waiting with the liaison team at the site on the southern part of the island where the crew had planned to land. Now, faced with the second crisis of the morning, Lewis felt the beginnings of real panic. He asked the liaison team to reach out to the Coast Guard to see if there were any boats patrolling the area that could be sent to search for the four teenagers. When the word came back that the Coast Guard had already pulled all their boats out of the water for the winter and couldn’t launch them again, Lewis and the crew’s photographer, Bart Dean, went looking for someone who owned a boat and could give them a ride. They eventually found a skipper who offered his twenty-five-foot cabin cruiser as a search-and-rescue vessel.

  From shore the lake looked deceptively calm. White caps were clearly visible, but otherwise the violence of the wind seemed to have abated. This illusion was quickly washed away as the cabin cruiser carrying Lewis and Dean left shore and began bouncing up and down on ten-foot waves. The boat’s depth finder acted as if it were malfunctioning, giving a reading of ninety feet one minute, then five feet the next. The owner of the boat was pale with fear. He admitted he’d never been out in such rough water. There was no pattern to the chop, making the waves impossible to navigate.

  “The bottom is real rocky here,” the boat owner told Lewis and Dean when they asked about the depth finder. All three men were holding on for dear life, being tossed around the boat with each pounding wave. “Some of the rocks are the size of houses, they’re so huge.”

  Almost as soon as the words left his mouth, a trough between two waves cut an opening in the lake to reveal an enormous rock that resembled the jagged pyramid tip of the Chrysler building in New York City. The skipper managed to keep the powerboat from crashing down on the boulder, but he was severely shaken.

  “We’re going in,” he said over Lewis and Dean’s protests. “There’s no way we’ll make Hog Island—we’ll be lucky just to get back to shore alive.”

  The skipper turned the boat around, waves crashing over the stern and nearly swamping the small watercraft. As Lewis and Dean peered back at Hog Island, knuckles white from the force of their grip on the boat’s rails, they noticed a helicopter flying along the coast. Using the powerboat’s radio, Lewis hailed the Coast Guard, asking if they had decided to send it out to rescue the missing men. The Coast Guard officer responded in the negative, saying it was a Green Bay TV station, and they’d just reported seeing a smashed canoe drifting south of Hog Island. Lewis felt his heart sink. He asked the Coast Guard to radio the helicopter’s pilot and request that they make a pass over Hog Island. Moments later
the officer was back on the radio. The helicopter pilot had reported that the island appeared deserted.

  Oh my God, Lewis thought in despair. They’ve drowned. Four of my boys have drowned, and this is my fault.

  Almost as soon as they’d realized a canoe was missing, John Fialko and the young men in his boat (Sid Bardwell, Steve Marr, and Doug Sohn) had hurried to their canoe to start the search. The missing canoe was the other half of their module, after all. Fialko was the only adult crew member between the two boats, and he felt a certain amount of responsibility for the teens. The paddlers on the two boats were supposed to look out for one another, so it only made sense that they be the first ones back on the water.

  Hog Island, the spit of land the canoes had been closest to when they got separated, was a little less than a mile from the eastern shore of Washington Island, and it was the last place anyone had seen the teenagers. It seemed like the logical place to start looking. It wasn’t long before Fialko’s canoe was approaching the island, battling wind and waves, the surf crashing on the shallow shoals to the north. Every man scanned the island, trying to find some sign that the missing teenagers had landed there. But despite its size—probably no more than one hundred yards in any direction—the island was covered in a thick, dead jungle, the stubby trees packed so densely together that it was impossible to tell what might be hiding at the interior. Fialko directed the canoe to the southern tip of Hog Island in search of a protected cove, something that might keep them out of the waves and allow them to land. But there was nowhere safe, and they’d seen nothing of the men. Just as the boat was about to turn back, they caught sight of a canoe banging against the rocks and the crew huddled in sleeping bags on shore.