I looked back at my partner and tried to laugh it off with a joke: “Pass me a towel and some shampoo?”
THE NEXT DAY, it was my turn.
I sat on a stone near our camp stove and sipped my tea — black chai with milk powder and honey. I watched the Baillie glide by and thought ahead to the day. The haystack incident had shaken me. Drew and I had talked about it, but not very well.
“That was kind of crazy.”
“Cold water.”
“Yeah.”
“More practice I guess, eh?”
The fact remained that I had overridden Drew’s call when I pulled us back into the waves. We hadn’t been on the same page. I felt the onus was on me to keep us safe.
A bright sky helped lift my nervousness. My sense of warm and cold was beginning to recalibrate, and the breeze felt balmy. It would speed the disappearance of the remaining ice. Warm. Still no bugs.
Drew and I climbed into our boat and onto a long series of moderate rapids. We bounced downstream and negotiated vees and small channels. The river grew every moment.
Pools of water with upstream flow, called eddies, form behind obstructions in the river, such as rocks or sandbars. When the current is strong enough, it creates lines of turbulence that separate the downstream current from the eddy. Those eddy lines were different by that fifth day; they swirled and bubbled with force. The river had crossed a threshold overnight.
We pulled over after lunch to scout another rapid. Drew and I picked our way across the bouldery shore to stand by the main funnel.
“What do you think?” Drew asked.
“If we come across the vee from left to right we can punch through that eddy line and take a rest down there,” I said, pointing to a pool of calm water. “Hey, Tim, Levi? Are you guys heading for that eddy?”
“That’s what I was thinking,” said Tim.
Levi nodded.
We would proceed in our regular order: Tim and Alie in front, Drew and me in the middle, Levi and Jen at the back.
Tim and Alie looked at us from their boat and touched their helmets, signaling “Okay.” We signaled back; they pushed away from shore and disappeared around the bend.
“Straight through the vee and eddy out on river right,” I said to Drew. “Ready?”
“Ready.”
We made our signal, and I pushed us away from the bank. Drew pulled us to midstream; I pried with my paddle to set our angle and aim for the vee. We pulled hard to gain speed, and black water passed beneath us. Noise rushed up from curling waves downstream, and shallow rocks threw sound and spray toward us. The vee itself was silent.
The current smoothed after we passed the rapid’s throat, and I looked to the eddy line. Maintain speed, set the angle, lean into it. Our bow hit the line, and Drew lifted his arms to plant his paddle in the opposing flow of the eddy; I swept from the back, and the world slowed. Our boat sat too upright, and my angle was wrong. We glanced off the line. We couldn’t pierce it.
The river didn’t hesitate.
It grabbed our downstream gunwale amidships and pulled down hard. I watched the side go under; I threw my weight to the right. Can I stop it? The boat keeled back toward center, then plunged under again. My ankles strained against my running shoes as the water hit my left arm, then my hip. Get your feet out. I leaned across the right gunwale, trying to keep my head dry. Our green hull flipped up beside me; I could touch it. My legs were still twisted under the stern seat — I yanked them hard into the water.
I fought fear to fill my lungs. It’s not that cold. I floated in the cocoon of my heat. Swim. Damp warmth stayed close to my skin until the river found my neck; then it rushed everywhere at once. Down my chest, my legs; up my sleeves, my belly. It burned like heat at first. Heat is what it wanted.
My head went under. The boat pulled away with the river.
I fought back to the surface and Drew appeared beside me.
“Swim!” I yelled.
We both set our angle toward shore, using the current to help us cross the eddy line — I was amazed that I remembered to do this — but the eddy wouldn’t yield. We were close to shore, but we couldn’t punch through the line. Ten strokes. My body gave its heat to the river so quickly. I flipped on my back. My arms barely cleared the water.
“Grab on, grab the stern!” I heard Tim and Alie screaming. They had paddled back to the eddy line to rescue us.
“Jenny, grab on!”
I wondered how long they had been there before I heard them.
I swung my arms, heavy with the river, up onto the stern deck, then floated my legs up. Drew did the same at the bow. Arms and legs out of the water, I won back some time. Tim and Alie paddled for shore, fighting the turbulence to get away, hindered by our drag on their boat. I pulled myself together: “You’re okay; you can do it,” I repeated aloud until the bow made shore and Tim reached down to drag me up the rocks.
Drew took off like a shot, running down the beach.
“What happened?” he said, over and over. He was furious.
I stumbled across the river-washed stones and started pulling my clothes off. Drew ran back and forth trying to get warm, then veered away from the river toward a cluster of muskox.
I yelled after him, my first words since the river, “Look out for the muskox! They charge, you know!”
My white skin reflected the sun as I stood naked on the shore. I felt like a skeleton. The water had flowed right through me, and now the wind.
I shook uncontrollably while Alie and Tim pulled spare clothes over my wet legs and across my back. I focused on getting dressed and watching the rocks at my feet. Alie pulled a down coat around me, and I crumpled onto a rock. She circled behind and wrapped me in her arms and legs until I stilled.
Jen ran up with some dried fruit and a thermos of tea. They had seen our dump and rushed their boat downstream to rescue ours.
“We got the boat and chased down one loose barrel. We only lost one paddle.” We had extras.
Tim went to check on Drew, who was still pacing the beach, refusing to change his clothes.
“I’m not cold,” he said, pale with shock.
TIM, JEN, LEVI, and Alie laid our clothes out on the rocks to dry. Thank God for the sun. We pitched our tents 100 meters away on the flat tundra and cooked by the river, but not too close. Everyone worked on supper except me. I sat dazed by the overturned canoe. What will happen now? The Baillie stays swift over long sections. We were lucky to be near the eddy. I could barely swim after one minute, so I would never have made it to shore from mid-channel.
Drew had suffered some shock, but his size and weight, combined with our short exposure, guarded him from hypothermia. I was 6 feet tall and weighed only 140 pounds, so mild hypothermia grabbed me easily. It had felt close to something more serious. Aside from the dangers, I brooded over my sense of failure. Everyone else had hit the line.
Drew walked toward me.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“It was my fault,” I replied. “Not enough angle.”
“I got really angry afterwards, but not at you. I wanted to make sure you knew that.”
We reviewed our mistakes: we hadn’t anticipated the change in current; we weren’t going fast enough. Underneath that, another truth: I was rusty, Drew inexperienced. The river would only get bigger from here.
We gathered by the stove for tundra pizza, a thick bannock crust spread with rehydrated tomato sauce, onions, red and green peppers, pineapple, and cheese (gluey, vegan “cheese” for Levi).
After dinner, Tim came and sat beside me. “Stop worrying. You can do this.”
We drew diagrams of the river in my journal and reviewed the basics of eddy turns: Power. Angle. Tilt.
AFTER A COLD and rainy breakfast the next day, we convened in our wet suits, looking like neoprene ninjas. An entire day in a rubber suit is dank and itchy, but nobody complained. The suits would increase our safety margin and help us regain confidence.
Levi and Tim took tur
ns reviewing river rescue, and we congratulated each other on what we’d pulled off the preceding afternoon. Drew and I had remembered our swift-water swimming technique, the lead boat had fetched us, and the sweep boat had gone after the gear. We had treated shock and mild hypothermia effectively. But we had still dumped, and I didn’t want to think about the consequences if the lead boat had gone down with no one in the eddy to help.
Next, we triple-checked the emergency communications gear we had stowed in accessible places only four days before. Our satellite phone lay cushioned in dark gray foam, inside a durable, waterproof case at the top of a pack. It looked like an oversized cordless phone, with the buttons protected by a plastic guard that flipped down. The antenna was as long as the phone and as thick as three pencils, and it folded out to point at the sky and improve reception. Although we could use the phone anytime to call home, we had agreed not to. We wanted to maintain a sense of isolation and separation from the rest of the world, plus we wanted to conserve the batteries in case of an emergency. The only phone we could get in Yellowknife was a Globalstar brand, which was not as reliable north of sixty — but we weren’t going to the North Pole, and if it was the northern rental phone of choice, we figured it would work fine.
The phone would handle emergency communication, and for emergency evacuation we packed a small satellite signal called a Personal Locator Beacon, or PLB. A $900 waterproof gadget (which is less expensive these days), the PLB was slightly larger than our phone and covered in hard plastic. It had been adapted from airplane and shipping technology for the wilderness recreation market. No signal would be sent unless we followed the simple instructions stenciled on the side of its yellow plastic shell: Remove cover. Push button. That one button would summon the closest search-and-rescue crews. Stern advisories on the registration papers warned that it was exclusively for life-threatening situations. “So not if you have a fight with your boyfriend?” my mum had joked before we left.
There is no perfect location for any of these things; you just have to maximize your chances of being close enough to one or the other device in an emergency. We decided to keep the phone with our gear and to strap the PLB around somebody’s waist. Levi’s level head and experience, plus his meticulous care of our gear and equipment, won him the honor of wearing our life-saving fanny pack.
The last point of business was paddling partners. It made sense for Drew and me to split up for a while and for him to paddle with Levi, the person he trusted most. That put Jen with me, the stern person who had botched a simple eddy turn the day before.
She was visibly nervous but flashed me a big smile. “We can do it,” she said.
Jen was our most novice paddler. I had often sterned, but only with another practiced paddler in my bow. It was time to step up, even though I wanted to hide under a rock. I tried to exude confidence.
On the water, Jen eased my worry almost immediately. She was confident and trusting. With each draw stroke (a lateral pull that turns the bow quickly), Jen reached out and pulled hard. When we needed to lean, she leaned. When I asked her to paddle forward, she didn’t worry about the rocks ahead. She brought the same attitude to the boat as she did to the trip: Don’t overthink; just do it.
Drew was still badly shaken. He was happy to be paddling with Levi, but he looked pale. He missed his wife. And his wooden torso would not lean away from the boat’s midline — a critical skill for a bow paddler.
“I feel totally responsible for him,” Levi told me later. “He’s here because of me.”
THREE
WILDING
WE SAW OUR first lone caribou on Day 6. It stood in water up to its ankles near shore. Its legs must have burned in the cold river. We had caught the caribou midcrossing, but it wouldn’t go back the way it came; two white wolves waited on the bank. The first sat back on its haunches halfway up the hill, while the other crouched at the top, outlined by the sky. All three animals stared at us. Nobody moved. Had we saved the caribou’s life, at least for the moment? We silently agreed to climb the bank on our side of the river, lie down on our bellies, and watch. The first wolf placed its head on its paws and stared at us. We stood out like Gore-Tex flags.
Ten minutes had passed when Levi looked over his shoulder.
“There’s a grizzly bear back there,” he said calmly.
“Let’s go back to the boats,” said Jen. “Right?”
The grizzly moved slowly between low bushes, 200 meters distant, pausing now and then to sniff. The wind kept our scent away.
“It’s not paying any attention to us,” said Tim.
Jen and Drew exchanged looks but didn’t move, and we stayed bracketed, like the caribou, between two wolves and a grizzly. I nested my elbows between the crowberry bushes and let my chin rest in my hands. I breathed in the cold aroma of the tundra.
WE HAD BEEN surrounded by wildlife from the moment we arrived on the Baillie River, but it took some time for that to sink in. Despite total immersion, it was scenery at first, like a movie, only colder. Going into the wild is like going to sleep; you get there in stages.
The immersion in ice water helped me sink myself into everything else. By the end of that first week, as the rest of my life fell away, scenes from our first few days asserted themselves in my memory. There had been pintails and red-throated loons the day we landed. Then Arctic terns, as light as tissue paper mobiles, dive-bombed us midriver. Those tiny ambassadors called to mind the other birds, including snow geese, eiders, plovers, sandpipers, gulls, and jaegers, who stream north every year to find country lush enough to feed and fledge their young. On the second day, we had seen muskox at lunch. The soft underfur that protects them all winter was beginning to loosen, and it hung from their backs like dreadlocks. After that, more wolves, a lake trout following my lure, more muskox, and a woolly bear caterpillar — amber and black and slow. Partway through a drawling sunset, while we set up the kitchen for supper, an Arctic fox took on two Canada geese, trying to steal eggs from their nest. The fox had already traded its white winter fur for the brown-with-a-white-tummy summer version — Arctic foxes are the only canids in the world that change color with the seasons. This fox would have been on the move during winter and may even have visited another continent — Arctic foxes sometimes travel 2,000 kilometers across land and sea ice in a single year. By spring, they are more likely to stay put and take advantage of super-abundant food sources. They’ll eat seaweed, mollusks, garbage, and insects if they have to, but they prefer lemmings and voles when they are plentiful. Eggs are another favorite. Foxes cruise the margins of breeding bird colonies or stake out individual nests, as we saw. In some places, the little thieves take an annual average of over a thousand eggs each. The match we witnessed between the geese and the fox was surprisingly even. The geese reared up on their legs and spread their wings wide. They stretched their necks, opened their mouths, and hissed and screamed while beating their wings in the fox’s face. The fox found itself boxed out repeatedly but kept bobbing and weaving like a featherweight. Fake left, stab right. Dart, spin, spring in for the egg.
During that first week, sporadic visits from mosquitoes and blackflies reminded us to tuck our pants into our socks and to keep our cuffs tight and our necks covered. It was still too cold for the legendary swarms that would crowd our wrists and eyes. Once the weather warmed, they would bite anything they could reach. Blackflies specialize in getting into your clothes; mosquitoes focus on what’s exposed. Almost every historical account of summer travel in the tundra by non-indigenous people has at least one sickening tale of the swarms that leave you bleeding or weeping or both. Last time I had been north, my neck was so swollen from the bites that I couldn’t look up at the sky. One day, I blew my nose and seven blackflies came out. Every cold day spared us from the torture we knew was coming.
I MAINTAINED A list of wildlife sightings, along with a bug index, in my journal. I wrote in it every evening. We also kept a group journal, and everyone took turns recording our collectiv
e experience — so some nights I wrote two versions of the same day.
I started keeping a journal when I was nine years old. The summer after my dad moved out, Mum decided that we would go on a road trip, and she bought me two diaries to take along — one large and one small, both covered in white fabric printed with wavy orange and blue vertical lines. I loved that they felt like clothing.
We piled our suitcase, bathing suits, and books into the back of our gray Oldsmobile Firenza and left Ottawa in search of La Gaspésie, the peninsula in Quebec that reaches for the Atlantic from the south shore of the St. Lawrence. It must have been one hell of a trip for my mother. It was her first holiday as a single parent while my dad was still settling in with the woman he had left her for. Maybe Mum was anxious — worried about money, scared about the future — but I don’t remember any of that, though I do recall writing down our expenses in the smaller of my two books. We stayed in small whitewashed motels by the sea that cost $25 a night. We stood on seaside cliffs and ate in family restaurants. Mum bought me a men’s XXL T-shirt that said “Gaspé” in black cursive, and I wore it everywhere with my bathing suit underneath. Every night Mum and I would sit on our beds, cross-legged, and write in our diaries.
That journey was hardly a wilderness trip, but my strongest memories are from the wildest places we visited. We hiked out to Percé Rock and almost got trapped by the rising tide. I felt the water drag at my ankles, and its power frightened me. We visited gannet colonies where thousands of birds with plumage like molded plastic stared the ocean down. We saw fishing boats and fishermen ready to take on the waves. I learned, from watching my mother, that visiting wild, foreign places — even if they aren’t that far from home — is like pushing the pause button. And when the shit hits the fan, the wilder the better.
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