The continued kindness of communities and strangers along the expedition’s route made what was starting to feel like a death march more bearable. As the men hiked through snowstorms, three people dragging each canoe sled at a sluggish pace, passersby stopped with coffee, hot chocolate, and encouragement. Local newspapers and TV stations tracked the men’s progress and gave updates about their performances. After a particularly hard day of walking at the end of December, the men were invited to a private dinner at Tabor Hill Vineyard and Winery. The owner, Leonard Olson, took them on a tour of the winery to see the gleaming stainless steel vats and casks, then gave them a supper of corn and crab chowder and wine. Olsen was so impressed by the expedition that he offered to reserve a white wine, name it for the expedition, and donate a portion of the profits to them. After much food and more wine, the crew chose the name “Decidons demains”—let’s decide tomorrow—to reflect the continued uncertainty and spirit of endurance that characterized their winter walk.
Apart from the difficulties posed by the weather and the ongoing frustrations with leadership and liaison-team miscommunication, fighting off modernity was the expedition’s main challenge. They were doing everything they could to remain true to their stated goal of authentically re-creating the voyageurs’ journey across North America, but the temptations of modern life were ubiquitous. Instead of camping outside every night, the men could have easily found rooms in a motel or taken advantage of the hospitality of locals and slept somewhere warm and dry. The option to quit or take a two-week break was tantalizing after a long day’s hike across snowy fields and highways, especially now that colds and flus were becoming a more regular problem. La Salle hadn’t had any other choice but to keep going when he was faced with bad weather. The modern voyageurs did have a choice, and they could see all the creature comforts they were missing.
Modern infrastructure worked against the men in other ways as well. When they were forced to walk on the road instead of through trails or over the frozen river (the latter was a hazardous undertaking since someone inevitably fell through the ice, sometimes up to his neck, and had to be fished out and warmed up before the expedition could continue), the rough, frozen concrete chewed up their moccasins and made their feet ache. It was like being on the portage through Toronto all over again, but this time there was no end in sight. And then there was the danger presented by modern vehicles. On January 3, one of the few days when the men were able to put their canoes in the water and inch slowly past the ice, a snowmobile came droning by. The driver was crossing a small bridge over the river when he got distracted by the sight of six canoes paddling through the ice floes and lost control of his vehicle. Snowmobile and driver went flying through the air, barely avoiding John Fialko’s canoe as they plunged into the water. Had the snowmobile traveled a few feet farther or Fialko’s canoe been paddling slightly slower, the men would’ve been crushed beneath the falling vehicle.
Fialko and his crew paddled over and got the snowmobiler out of the water while others went to call for help. The man had a concussion but was otherwise fine. None of the members of the expedition was hurt, though they were all a bit shaken. Funny as it was to see a snowmobile go flying over the river, it was also a warning: whatever clothes the crew wore or foods they ate, no matter how hard they tried to pretend otherwise, they were part of the 20th century and had to contend with its dangers.
Kankakee River, Indiana
January 11, 1977
After days of struggling to drag the canoe sleds through snow and paddling on rivers that were rapidly icing up, the decision was made to abandon the canoes for good. They’d be stored by the United Parcel Service, who offered to transport the canoes to wherever the expedition might need them. At this rate it might be weeks before the rivers were reliably water and not ice. Even parts of the Mississippi were frozen. The weather hadn’t been so consistently, severely cold since the winter of 1917–1918,11 and by all accounts, the winter of La Salle’s journey down the Mississippi had been quite mild. Nature certainly wasn’t cooperating to help them make a perfect re-creation of the original voyage. If the men left their moccasins or any article of clothing outside the shelter at night, it was sure to be frozen solid in the morning. Some nights the temperature was down to minus twenty-five degrees without factoring in windchill. On those nights, the air was so cold that their breath seemed to form a cloud that fell back down on them as they slept.
The first day of walking along the Kankakee was a brutal lumber through snow. The trees with their ice-coated branches were beautiful and the scene along the river held an undeniable serenity, but it didn’t stop morale from slipping. When would they be warm again? When would they be back in the canoes? Just the other day, one of their last days paddling, someone had tossed a bag of oranges into one of the boats for the voyageurs to feast on. But by the time they stopped to eat them, the oranges were frozen solid.
Tonight there was one source of respite from the cold and the monotony of walking. The Fort Tassinong Muzzleloaders, a group of men who shot black-powder rifles and spent weekends pretending to live like 18th-century homesteaders, had erected three tipis and campfires for the expedition. The sight of the shelters already constructed and the warm fires waiting for them was a welcome one. The muzzleloaders were thrilled to be spending time with the famous voyageurs on their trek across the frozen Midwest. Although the voyageurs had to leave for a nearby performance, they came back to their camp later in the evening to enjoy the company of the muzzleloaders and share stories of their trials. Yes, the winter was a hard one—harder than most—and the men often grew dejected by the constant cold and pain. But every so often there were these moments of levity that brightened the gray days and made them feel as if they could carry on despite it all.
Chapter Nine
THE MOST DANGEROUS
PRODUCT THE INTELLECT
HAS CONCOCTED
Illinois River
January 1682
Since first setting out from Montreal in 1679, La Salle had undertaken two unsuccessful missions to reach the Mississippi. There was no knowing if he’d have more luck this third time around. The Frenchman’s earlier expeditions into the wilderness had been nothing short of calamitous. Men deserted at every stop they made along the route, and the deserters often took food and valuable tools with them. La Salle wasn’t taking any risks this time around. He decided to keep all his men together rather than sending small groups ahead to scout the area as he had in the past.
The Frenchmen paddling in La Salle’s current and previous expeditions had a number of reasons for wanting to desert, not least of which was the likelihood of injury or death. But smaller grievances added up as well. The New World was filled with pests, beasts, and stranger creatures than those they knew in France. The mosquitoes alone were enough to drive a man mad. “I believe the Egyptian plague was not more cruel,” wrote Father du Poisson in the Jesuit Relations. “[At night] we are eaten and devoured, they enter our mouths, our nostrils, our ears. They cover our faces, hands, and bodies . . . However adroitly you squirm under the canvas, there will always be two or three that enter with you, and it only takes two or three to make you spend a bad night.”1 La Salle and his men were safe from the bloodsuckers in the frozen north, but the farther south they traveled, the more they’d have to deal with them, even in winter.
There were also wolves, bears, and venomous snakes to worry about, as well as stampeding buffalo. For the men who hadn’t been long in the territory, the buffalo must have made a striking impression. When they traveled in large herds, the drumming of their hooves resonated for miles. Years after La Salle and his men passed through the area, French writer Chateaubriand described the buffalo as having “the mane of a lion, the hump of a camel, the hide and hindquarters of a rhinoceros or a hippopotamus, and the horns and legs of a bull.”2 As befit their formidable appearance, buffalo had to be treated with caution. Even though they were herbivores, they had no qualms about trampling a man to death if
he got in their way.
Apart from the weird and wild monsters the men encountered along their travels, they faced a number of other physical hardships. They could wander into inhabited territory and be killed by hostile Native Americans. The voyageurs could die of starvation, disease, or by drowning. It wasn’t uncommon for men to be ejected from their canoes in rapids, and most of the voyageurs never learned how to swim. Many of their paddling songs memorialized those who had been killed in the wilderness. The canoes occasionally paddled past crosses erected on shore in memory of the dead.3 If they managed to survive everything else, there was always exposure to the harsh climate. Winters were frigid and the only shelter the voyageurs could expect at night was the protection offered by their overturned canoes. Little surprise, then, that men in their twenties were considered old, and anyone who reached 40 was downright ancient, as well as incredibly lucky.
Fortunately for La Salle and his men, everything seemed to be working in their favor during this third expedition. They arrived at the Illinois River by mid-January. They hadn’t encountered any warring tribes, and La Salle’s plan to keep all of his men together was proving its worth—no one had deserted since a small number of men had departed this expedition several months earlier in the trip. Everything was falling into place so smoothly after years of misfortune that La Salle might have dared to hope his expedition would arrive at the mouth of the Mississippi by springtime.
Indiana Highway 2
January 12, 1977
The day began with a clear, azure sky, beautiful and deceptive. Bright sunlight glimmered on the frozen river and the snow-laden branches of trees, but the temperature was somewhere around fifteen below zero, with a windchill of minus forty. The men had spent a cozy night in the three tipis erected by the muzzleloaders, but that comfort was over now. There was walking to do. After eating breakfast and taking a few turns shooting the muzzleloaders’ muskets (one of their members, Wild Bill Voyles, was a gunsmith), the voyageurs bid their comrades in historical reenactment farewell and set off.
The crew had been following the river system ever since they arrived at the St. Joseph River in Michigan, but a tortuous bend in the Kankakee River had them considering alternate routes this morning. The expedition was falling further and further behind its schedule. Every night after a bone-aching day of walking, a bus would pull into their camp to take the men to whichever town they were supposed to be performing in. They’d muster up whatever energy they had left, put on a show, eat a warm dinner, then head back to camp for another night of trying to sleep in temperatures that seemed to approximate the last Ice Age. It was an exhausting pace and any shortcuts were godsends. Hobart had compared their route down the Kankakee to nearby county roads and found they’d only have to travel eighteen miles along a road for what would amount to a fifty-mile walk on the meandering river. The decision was a no-brainer. Plus, it would save anyone else from plunging through weak spots on the ice. Almost everyone had gone up to their knees when they hit a weak patch of ice; Sam Hess had gone in up to his head just a few days ago. Luckily, he’d been attached by rope to someone else, or who knew how long it would’ve taken to fish him out, and if he would’ve survived the retrieval.
The men plodded down the road, packs balanced with the help of tumplines, their slow procession spreading out over a distance of a quarter mile or more. Some walked faster than others. Rich Gross was often one of the last ones into camp because he despised walking. He’d signed up for the expedition because he loved canoeing and being on the water. But somehow he found himself covering hundreds of miles on foot. It made his back and hips and legs ache, and he was desperate to be back in the boats. Some people walked alone, backs bent, eyes on the ground. Others formed clusters to talk or silently commiserate. One such group included Keith Gorse, Bob Kulick, Marc Lieberman, and Clif Wilson. They called themselves the Frank Lloyd Wright Supper Club.
Walking all day with nothing to see but leafless trees, barren fields, and endless stretches of snow didn’t require much brainpower. The muscles screamed, the joints ached, the skin chafed, but the mind was bored. It wandered in and out of bizarre worlds, settling on minutiae for amusement and looking for fellows to share in the experience. So began the Supper Club. The seed was planted in Michigan during the first hundred miles of walking, when the group passed a ramshackle building with a sign announcing it to be the Frank Lloyd Wright Inn. The thing was so incongruous it set off a flood of firing synapses that still hadn’t stopped producing ridiculous fodder for entertainment. As the four teenagers walked, they came up with rules for and stories about their club. They debated which celebrities would be allowed entry, what each member’s role would be, and what sort of initiation rituals they’d have (one included eating a twelve-course dinner in a phone booth). It was silly, but it distracted them from noticing the pain of putting one foot in front of the other. They tried to walk together as often as possible to keep the game going.
Breaks were the other anodyne for the weary walkers. Lunch was especially welcome. Today they had soup and hot cocoa from Stillwagon’s wife, Rowena, and sandwiches from a conciliatory liaison team. The women had been threatening to quit after months of nothing but complaints and insults from the crew. Marlena had actually taken several weeks off in December and returned home, leaving Jan and her teenage helpers to muddle through on their own. All four were back at work now. However angry they might get about being taken for granted, they, too, wanted to see the expedition succeed. If only they could make it out of this endless winter. It put everyone in a temper.
Besides stopping for food, the men also came together for Argo breaks. Argo was the brand of cornstarch they carried, six big, yellow containers of it. The men weren’t mixing the powder into food to make their soups thicker—it was used on the inner thighs to treat the rashes everyone had developed. The clothes they wore were made of wool and scratchy canvas, and all the walking they’d been doing caused the fabric to irritate the skin. Just another discomfort to deal with in addition to all the other winter ailments. The cornstarch soothed the burning rashes and led to ongoing jokes about “pulling down your pants and Argo-ing up.”
When the men stopped for an Argo break shortly after lunch, Wilson was one of the last to get a box of cornstarch, and his friends were already heading back out to the road. He hesitated for a moment—run and catch up to them, or stay behind to apply some of the powder? He chose the latter. They wouldn’t get too far ahead in five minutes. He’d have plenty of time to catch up.
After putting the Argo away and slipping back into his pack, Wilson took off down the road. He’d have to walk quickly to reach his friends, who were at the front of the line behind Hobart and Cox. The crystalline sky from the morning had long since disappeared behind a swath of gray clouds. Snow was blowing in streams across the road. The men had just come to the end of County Road 900 and turned south on State Road 2. They were a few miles south of the small town of Hebron, Indiana, and had an entire afternoon of walking before they could stop for the night. But they were making better time than they would have on the river. Traffic was sparse on the little two-lane roads they’d been following. Every once in a while a car would come rumbling by, spraying snow in the voyageurs’ faces. They kept to the edge of the road to stay out of the way, but otherwise paid little attention to the cars. The struggle to keep moving was all consuming.
Bob Kulick was walking up near the front of the line with the other members of the Supper Club. Unlike the others, Kulick had his head up. He liked to brace his tumpline across his chest rather than on his forehead. It allowed him to look around at everything instead of just staring at the legs of whoever was directly in front of him. Today, this stance meant he was the first to see the semi truck. It was pulling into the left lane on the other side of the road from the walkers so that it could pass a white Chevrolet pickup whose driver had slowed to stare at the otherworldly members of the expedition. But the semi driver hadn’t seen an oncoming car and was now trying
to slide back into the right lane, the lane the men were walking alongside against the direction of the traffic.
He’s never going to make it, Kulick thought.
“Get down! Everybody get down!” Kulick shouted to Lieberman and Gorse, trying to push them toward the ditch on the side of the road.
Behind them in line, Sid Bardwell felt a blast of air and heard a sharp beep, then the squealing of brakes, then the loud, distinctive crunch of metal on metal. Rich Gross saw the semi’s trailer fly past him as it rammed into the Chevrolet.
Steve Marr looked up in time to see the rear tire of the pickup truck skidding toward him and tried to swivel out of the way, but his left leg moved a second too slowly.
Clif Wilson turned and caught only a glimpse of the Chevy’s chrome jet hood ornament, exactly like the one that had been on his mom’s station wagon when he was a kid. Then he was flying through the air.
Gary Braun and Jorge Garcia saw nothing but the dirty grille of the pickup truck, then muffled blackness and cold snow.
In moments of crisis, the mind seems to slow time to the point where the person experiencing the warp feels as if he can reach out and avert disaster the millisecond before it happens. This cruel illusion has nothing to do with a heightened ability to perceive the world. The brain is not operating at a higher rate like a camera with accelerated shutter speed. Instead, it’s an effect of the amygdala becoming more active and laying down extra-dense memories. Adults feel as if time passes more quickly with old age than it did in childhood for much the same reason; their brains are not actively forming such vivid memories because none of the experiences are as new. A brain in emergency sees everything with a child’s eyes again. Remember this moment, the brain is instructing itself. It might later help you survive. As the flood of information registers in the mind, the body must choose to give in to fear or use adrenaline as fuel for a fight.
The Last Voyageurs Page 20