by Jon Scieszka
Looking back, I have to admit: I asked for it. I wanted big river adventure, and it found me.
As a kid, I didn’t grow up canoeing, but once I put my hands on a paddle, my world changed. Canoes were a ticket to adventure, whether it was a two-hour expedition down a local creek or a week across the Canadian wilds. Canoes carry far more gear than backpacks—and are a heckuva lot easier on your shoulders. They open up new worlds of fishing and hunting and camping, and over the years I got pretty darn good at loading a boat with gear, guns, and fishing rods and making it down almost any river, almost anywhere. Good enough, in fact, that I started looking for rivers wild enough and remote enough that hardly anyone ever paddled them. The rivers didn’t have to thunder with crazy whitewater, but the rivers I searched for needed to be off the grid, way up in the woods, out where you might not see another human being for days. For a week.
That’s why I’ve had a few spectacular near misses and unexpected rough patches. That’s why I went overboard on a stretch of river so deep in Alaska, it took tundra planes to fly in our gear—and our canoes had to be portable, packable boats that literally fit inside a duffel bag. That’s how I nearly died, more than three thousand miles from home.
As the whirlpooling current sucked me under, I caught a submerged tree trunk square in the chest, a blow softened by my life jacket, and I clamped an arm around the slick trunk, tasting fear and chipped teeth.
I can’t say how long I was underwater. Twenty seconds, perhaps? Forty? Later, Scott would shake his head and say: “You were being trolled underwater like a deep-diving fishing plug. I cannot believe you crawled out of that river.”
For long moments I thought I wouldn’t make it. I pulled myself along the sunken trunk as the current whipped me back and forth, my legs sucked straight downstream. But the trunk grew larger and larger. It slipped from the grip of my right armpit, and then I held fast to a single branch, groping for the next with my other hand. I don’t remember holding my breath. I don’t remember the frigid water. I just remember that the monster that was swallowing me had its grip on my shins, then I felt it clamped around my knees, and then my thighs.
For an odd few moments I heard a metallic ringing in my ears. Maybe I was hallucinating. It’s hard to say. But this scary scene played across my brain: It was the telephone at home, and it was ringing, and my wife, Julie, was walking through the house looking for it. Was it on the coffee table? Did the kids have it in the playroom? It was like this weird dream, and I suddenly knew that if Julie found the phone and said hello, the voice on the other end of the line would tell her I was dead. Drowned in Alaska.
In this funky dream-hallucination I was yelling, Don’t pick up the phone! Don’t pick up the phone!
And just then, as she was reaching for the phone, the toe of my right boot dragged on something hard, and I stood up in the river, and I could breathe.
Scott crashed through the brush, wild-eyed, as I crawled to the top of the riverbank, throwing up water. I waved him downstream, then clambered to my feet and started running. Somewhere below was Colby.
The big-handed hockey player had gone overboard farther out into the main current than I had, and had vanished beyond the strainers. Stumbling through brush, I heard Scott give a garbled cry of alarm, and my heart sank. Did he find Colby’s body? I burst into sunlight by the river. Scott was facedown on a mud bar, where he’d catapulted after tripping on a root. His paddling partner, Edwin Aguilar, battered his way out of a nearby thicket. A few feet away Colby stood chest-deep in the river, with stunned eyes and mouth open, marvelously alive. In his hand he gripped the bowline to the canoe, half-sunk and turned on its side, gear bags held fast with rope.
Our ragged little foursome huddled by the river, dumbstruck by our good luck. For a long time we simply shook our heads and tried not to meet the fear in one another’s eyes.
I’d lost a shotgun, two fly rods and reels, and a grab bag of gear, but everything else that went into the river had come out.
Edwin walked over quietly. He knew how close I’d come. “You okay?” he asked. “I mean, in your head?”
Just then the thing that felt cool and wet and slithery slid down my legs and off my body. I began to shiver, and no one said a word.
That was a pretty rough few minutes, I’ll admit.
But here’s what happened next—and this happens a lot. On so many river trips, the best fishing seems to come after the worst stretches of river.
A few miles downstream we ran into a big set of rapids, too heavy to chance running with loaded boats. Using ropes tied to each end of the canoes, we “lined” the craft through the angry water, then dragged the canoes to the head of a deep pool the color of smoke and emeralds. It was the first utterly green, seemingly bottomless pool we’d seen, and a half dozen very large salmon held motionless near the upstream ledge. While my river mates coiled ropes, I quietly slid a rod out of the canoe. The first cast landed a pink salmon. My second brought in a chum salmon. I hooted with guilty pleasure as the fish leaped into the sunlight. My pals grabbed their fly rods.
Within minutes total fishing chaos broke out on the riverbank. Scott, Colby, and I worked a triple hookup on salmon, our lines crossing. We fought sockeyes, kings, and wolf-fanged chum salmon with garish spawning teeth erupting through the gums. We landed cookie-gutter three-pound Arctic grayling and a solid twenty-six-inch rainbow trout. The fish ran up the frothy, white rapids at the head of the pool, leaping like silver and purple kites, at times so close that they splashed us with their tails.
“This is the outrageous, end-of-the-world fishing bomb!” Edwin shouted, standing on a cairn of stacked cobble as his rod curved steeply toward the pool.
For the first time I felt the pieces coming together. The pull of strong fish was medicine for ragged nerves and sore shoulders. Later that night eleven king salmon steaks slathered in chipotle sauce sizzled over the fire. Snow hung in the hollows of the high tundra hills above us.
“We deserved today,” Edwin said, lying back on a bed of rocks.
And how.
On the Kipchuk River we knew we were headed for water where anything could happen. We purposefully picked a stretch of river where there were hardly any records of canoeists on the stream. But not every river has to be that crazy-wild to have its share of adrenaline-pumping moments. Sometimes you’re right in the middle of an everyday paddle stroke and everything’s going just fine—until the river has other ideas.
Once, my buddy Peter DeJong and I cracked a wacky scheme. Walleyes are bug-eyed, copper-colored fish best known as being from big, deep, Canadian waters. When most people think of walleye fishing, they think of big lakes, big outboard motors, and trolling baits so deep, the fish they catch need eyeballs the size of gumdrops.
But Peter and I knew that not all walleyes hung out in white-capped lakes. We figured there were river walleyes far up in the Canadian north that rarely saw a hook, never heard a motor, and shared waters with pike, moose, and sandhill cranes. Peter is a big, burly, bearded Canadian, the kind of guy who wears wool plaid shirts when it’s 90 degrees outside. Together we hatched a big, burly river trip in the style of the old voyageurs, those wool-and-fringed-leather-wearing French fur trappers who paddled birchbark canoes a couple centuries ago. We’d run a few moderate whitewater rapids, cross empty lakes, hump our gear through bogs and woods, and fish our way through far northern Ontario. And we’d do it along one of the most historic fur-trading routes in all of Canada.
By now maybe you’ve figured out that this story is all about things that go wrong and ugly and upside down on a river, so here it comes. Our first big challenge on the Missinaibi River—other than finding fish—came during our second day. Greenhill Rapids is a three-quarter-mile-long rapid that rips and roars across an esker, a weird rock formation created thousands of years ago when a receding glacier piled up a bunch of massive rocks. There’s a dogleg turn in the middle of the rapids and canoe-swamping boulders all the way down. At low water it’s almo
st too low to run, at high water it’s crazy, and when the water is just right, you’d better be on top of your game. No surprise, then, that we played it safe, portaging our gear.
Portaging is a pretty fancy word for a pretty simple idea: We carried all our stuff around the rapids—humping every bag, pack, and rod for a mile across hill and bog. That left us with an empty boat to paddle through the rapids. As Peter and I pushed off, my tongue was as dry as toast.
We ran the big upper drops pretty clean, bashing through high rollers, then pulled in behind a midstream boulder to catch our breaths. From there on out, there were drops, rocks, and suckholes aplenty, but a kinda-sorta obvious route through the rough stuff. “A walk in the park,” Peter said nervously.
That’s when the wheels came off the bus. I gave the canoe a strong forward stroke to reenter the hard-charging river but screwed up my downstream lean. The canoe jerked violently to the right. As I was going over I got a glance at Peter, bracing the canoe from the bow, but he knew the goose was cooked. In half a second we were in the water, the boat between us like a giant battering ram, everything and everybody out of control.
For a couple of minutes it seemed like no big deal. We roller-coastered up and down tall waves for three hundred yards, but then bigger boulders and nasty ledge drops showed up. The canoe suddenly lurched to a stop, pinned against a rock the size of a pickup truck. The current washed me past the canoe just as I made a desperate grab for a gunwale. Upstream, Peter slipped over a ledge and bobbed to the surface. My “okay” sign let him know I wasn’t hurt, and he returned it with a humiliated grin. That’s when he slammed into an underwater boulder. He hit it hard, the kind of hard that makes you think of bones poking out of skin and rescue helicopters. His grin instantly turned into an O of pain. He slid over a hump of foaming water and came to an instant stop, his body downstream, right leg pointing upriver. I couldn’t believe it. With one foot trapped in the rocks on the river bottom, the Missinaibi poured over his shoulders.
Twenty yards downstream I could do nothing but watch as he struggled to right himself and keep his head above water. If his free leg slipped, the current would sweep him downstream and snap his leg like a pencil, if it wasn’t broken already. Peter strained against the river current, at times completely submerged, as he tried to twist his leg out of the snare.
Suddenly he wrenched himself free. He worked across the river carefully, grimacing, as I grabbed a rescue rope in case he stumbled again. He made it to the overturned canoe wild-eyed and panting, soaked and starting to chill. “I’m all right,” he said. For a full minute neither of us spoke another word. “Strange way to catch a walleye, eh?” he said. We laughed the nervous laugh of a couple of guys who knew they had dodged a bullet.
That trip ended up pretty swell, though. We caught tons of fish and grilled them over cedar-wood fires and camped on rocky cliffs where you could hardly hear yourself think for the thundering water below. We did end up trying to take a wilderness shortcut, and it’s no surprise that turned into a mess. Our shortcut required a mile-long portage through a lily-pad-choked bog. There’s nothing less fun than trying to slap mosquitoes while balancing a seventy-five-pound boat on your shoulders.
Come to think of it, though, the Missinaibi River was nothing compared to the Rocky Tangle. Holy catfish, that was a rough one. Some of my hairiest times in a canoe have occurred when the canoe was actually over my head. On my shoulders, to be exact.
The Rocky Tangle was our name for a monster portage route that took me and my pals almost two full days to complete. It wasn’t rapids that forced us to walk this time. The river literally disappeared into the ground beneath our feet.
We were on the Kanairiktok River in northern Labrador. This is one of those places you might not even know exists, a chunk of far eastern Canada that might be wilder than Alaska. Just getting there took some doing. First we logged thirteen hundred miles on a jet to Sept-Îles, Quebec, on the shores of the Saint Lawrence River. There we crowded onto a train slammed full of caribou hunters and Innu natives for a twelve-hour, dawn-to-dusk train ride to an old mining camp right on the Labrador line. On day three a rusty school-bus-turned-taxi loaded down with bloody caribou antlers delivered us to a floatplane base outside the village. And from there we took to the skies again for a 135-mile floatplane flight to a skinny lake so far up the Kanairiktok River that it wasn’t really a river yet. That’s where the real travel began: from lake to pond to lake to river, by canoe and hiking boot and waders.
We’d been on the waterway for several days when the river vanished. Seriously. It just gurgled away into the ground. Over a quarter of a mile the river got wider and wider; then it flowed into a gargantuan boulder field that was topped with shrubs and patches of tundra. Hopping from rock to rock, we could see the river under our feet—sometimes fifteen feet under our feet.
To get packs and canoes around the mess, we cut cross-country, through tundra and taiga, tied to the canoes like huskies pulling dogsleds. Fifty times an hour I’d lunge against a makeshift harness, jerry-rigged from climbing rope and knotted around my chest. The canoe screeched through black spruce trees and lichen-covered boulders. I’d take three steps on firm ground and then stumble into a gaping pit camouflaged with bearberry and alpine azalea, facedown in the Labrador taiga, run over by my own boat. Sucking in blackflies, scratched and bleeding and sweating from places that we didn’t know had pores, we dragged ourselves to our feet so we could drag the boat a few feet more.
That doesn’t sound very much like fun, huh?
But the payoff was huge. At the bottom of the Rocky Tangle, we paddled through a flat plain, the scenery an unbroken curtain of spruce and tamarack, blueberries, and Labrador tea. Soon the horizon rose up in high, rocky barrens. We crossed lakes in beastly winds, whitecaps slopping over the sides of the canoes, then ground out in bony streambeds, where the water dribbled through hundreds of yards of boulder and cobble. Sometimes we pulled the boats as much as we paddled them, but there wasn’t much point to fretting over what might be around the next bend. Nobody knew, and whatever it was, we’d have to make it through as best we could. We were a hundred miles from the nearest road.
One morning we were out of the tents as a rising sun sent plumes of steam boiling off the ice-slicked canoes. Holding plates of grits and bacon, we huddled over topographic maps. They were dog-eared and smeared with ink, but they had come to life, paddle stroke by paddle stroke. By now we knew what an inch of open blue water on the maps looks like in a headwind and how the squiggly contour lines came together to mark mossy rock cliffs crowding our route.
Figuring out the lake crossings took the most head-scratching. Turning the maps to line up with the compass, we figured out the far shoreline of the new morning’s puzzler. We could see it on the map: Somewhere along a distant smudge of green, our route poured through a twenty-yard-wide outlet and into a narrow gorge. Talk about a needle in a haystack. Miss it by just a few compass degrees, and we could plunge blindly into any number of look-alike box-canyon coves.
We took a reading and pushed off. Forty-five minutes later, we made landfall on a rocky shoreline. A solid wall of woods blocked our passage, with no outfall in sight. We pulled out the maps and compass, wondering where we’d gone wrong.
“Every lake up here looks like an ink blot,” I muttered. “We’re on a river and there are still eighty-six wrong ways to turn!” We split up to scout the shoreline in opposite directions. Five minutes later Bill Mulvey and David Falkowski whistled and waved paddles, signaling a find. A small, unmarked island had risen from the lake bottom during low water. Behind it lay a tiny outfall that carried the flow of the entire watershed. We could have lost half a day searching for such a small spigot. Our luck, so far, was holding.
By noon low clouds spit cold rain as we dropped out of the last set of rapids in the Kanairiktok’s headwaters. Rocky bluffs now pinched the waterway into a true, flowing river, its serpentine route snaking into the distance. The tough business of rout
e-finding was behind us.
That night we collapsed on the rocky shore of an unnamed lake and watched northern lights arc overhead like a lava lamp stretched across the sky. Mars was up, and Bill thought he heard wolves howling. Scott and David stuck their heads out of the tent door to catch the sound, but I crawled to my sleeping bag. I was beat—and we had four more days on the river.
Those are all big stories, some of them big-fish stories, from some of the wildest places left in North America. But the honest truth is you don’t have to half drown in places like Alaska and Canada to have crazy canoeing adventures. Here’s the deal: I’d bet that within an hour’s drive of just about every kid in America, there’s a creek or stream or small river that hardly ever sees a canoe. You can spot them on any road map: squiggly little blue lines that run through farm fields and woods. That’s what you look for—a few miles of stream between a couple of bridges. Pack fishing rods and bug spray. A big lunch. Better bring a saw or hatchet, just in case you have to hack your way through a blowdown or two.
There’s a stream just like this near my home. It uncoils like a wild grapevine through the hardwood bottoms of eastern North Carolina. My first trip down it was unforgettable. When my buddy Sam Toler and I pulled off the side of the road a hundred yards from the bridge, Sam ran down to the water and hooted up through the brambles: “Goo-ooo-oood-ness, the creek is low-low-low. I don’t know who I feel sorrier for—us or all those fish we’re getting ready to catch.”
We carried the canoe through a forty-yard stretch of brush, littered with a soggy sofa, busted glass, and a couple hundred pounds of old roofing shingles. At the water’s edge, cinder blocks, bottles, and Y-shaped fishing-rod sticks suggested we weren’t the first ones to drown a cricket in the creek. No big deal. “You know what’ll happen,” Sam said. “Soon as the bridge is out of sight we’ll be in another world.”
Ten paddle strokes later, and Sam was right: Tall river birch, gum, and swamp chestnut oaks stretched their branches out to form a canopy overhead. Cypress stumps and cypress knees lined the creek bank. The creek went from fifteen to fifty feet wide and back again—and again, and again. Snakes dripped from the trees with splashes while painted turtles and yellow-belly sliders plopped off. When we were just a football field away from the bridge, the only signs of human presence were jet trails in the sky overhead.