The year I turned eleven, my mum took another big trip, this time to the Nahanni River in the Northwest Territories, and this time on her own.
My dad had been gone two years by then, and Mum had cancer again, though we didn’t know it yet. At least I didn’t. She had a funny lump in her groin, and sometimes she would let me push it in with my finger and watch it bounce back. It was hard and springy, about the size of a golf ball. She said it didn’t hurt.
Mum booked a two-week guided canoe trip on the Nahanni for that summer. She would get the thing looked at afterwards. It wouldn’t be good, so she might as well ride a wild river before solving the mystery. She had already survived a melanoma; she was forty-one years old.
Before Mum left, a friend gave her some good advice: “Bring lots of cigarettes.” The logic was that everyone else would use the trip to try to quit, but they would soon be bumming, so if she planned to smoke, she should bring extras. The lump would force her to quit soon enough.
In the pictures, my mother looks remarkably like me: tall, thin, a bit slouchy, and wide-smiling. She also had a mop of curls, though hers was a perm.
When she got home, Mum gushed about the trip; she couldn’t stop. I didn’t mind hearing the stories at first, but soon other things took over. The lump turned out to be a malignant tumor. There was surgery, hospital time, and a gruesome, foot-long scar. Every day, nurses arrived at our house and dragged sopping yellow gauze out of a hole in my mum’s leg while I watched.
As the scar healed and Mum successfully fought her nicotine cravings, she would go on and on about the trip. The big barrel and the ex-marine who liked to carry it. The neurotic couple in matching Gore-Tex. The handsome guide who cooked her supper. The guy with Crohn’s who insisted on his own tent. I rolled my eyes every time she brought it up. The stories were endless and repetitive and — God, Mum, enough! You told me that already.
I didn’t realize until years later, in a forehead-slapping moment, that this was her this-could-be-my-last-trip trip. There’s-a-goddamned-lump-in-my-leg-and-I-might-not-paddle-again trip.
After I successfully nagged her into shutting up about it, I wanted the stories back. “What was that guy’s name again?” “How did you dump your boat?”
TOWARD THE END of the first week, we gathered in our biggest tent, a four-season dome that we had started calling The Boss (everything gets named on a canoe trip), for another talk. We were still new to that landscape — and always would be — but even as we figured out our gear, our food, and our paddling partners, we needed to think about the ending. We had 1,080 kilometers to travel and fifty days in which to do it. A few too many slow days, combined with the weather wild card, and that goal could quickly become impossible. We spent the first few minutes smearing bugs against the ceiling while Levi laid out the maps. He tugged some from our small, semi-sodden map case, which looked like a glorified Ziploc bag but was never dry, and pulled another stack from the map tube, a simple, waterproof poster tube that held oracle-like status. It told us the future, and we needed it. Stuffed with 1:250,000-scale maps for the big picture and dozens of 1:50,000s for a closer look, the map tube was carefully strapped into the bow of the same boat every day. Each map had been photocopied to save money. Backup 1:250s lived in a second boat.
The maps crinkled as we spread them out and shoved them under our knees. As we ran our fingers over the land, we scanned for white-water symbols and eyeballed the big lakes coming up.
“We are here,” said Levi, placing his finger on a large-scale map. “We have fifty days to get here.” His finger skated across one map, onto the next, and up to an island on the Arctic coast. “We need some milestones.”
Levi’s calm, logical demeanor was a tremendous asset to our group. He was very open-minded, and somewhat absent-minded, but also fastidious about repairs, safety, and scouting. He told obscure jokes, had no appreciation for sarcasm, and made us laugh with his dance performances and funny songs. His whole look — trim frame, steady brown eyes, dark hair and matching beard — inspired trust.
Levi had grown up in British Columbia in a six-sided log house that his parents had built. They had been career tree planters who lived off the grid and home-schooled their kids. It worked fine until Levi went on strike in grade three; he refused to do any more work until they moved to town and put him in a real school. By the time I met him in 2002, he had both a bachelor’s and a master’s in physics and was working on his PhD. A few years after the Back River trip, he would be a post-doctoral fellow in biostatistics at Harvard University’s prestigious cancer research institute, working in a challenging new field he hadn’t formally studied. He was that smart, as well as quirky. We had become good friends on our first Arctic trip three years before, and I was thankful to travel with him again. There was no doubt that he would get along with everyone.
That night, he held down the maps and reviewed our plan. We had planned on 30 kilometers a day plus seven rest days and seven weather days, give or take. That gave us a total of fifty days, and we booked our flights out of Gjoa Haven, on King William Island, another five days after that, to be safe. My eyes moved back and forth over the maps. Even though I had studied them a hundred times back home, it all looked different now that the real landscape pressed against the door.
“What about the lakes?” I asked. The Back is famous for the Garry Lakes, a string of huge, shallow bodies of water that stretch for hundreds of kilometers. They were about a week away.
“We might have to paddle nights,” said Alie. “We did that on one of my other trips. It helped us keep the distance up when the weather got shitty.” The lakes were the biggest threat to our timeline. You could sit a long, long time waiting for the wind to die.
We chipped away at a plan for the next hour or so. With string and an old map roller to measure distance, we went over the route in detail:
— 206 kilometers to the confluence with the Back;
— 420 to the start of Pelly Lake, the beginning of the flat-water stretch;
— 610 to Rock Rapids, the most turbulent part of the river;
— 930 to the Hayes River junction, at the cusp of the
river’s mouth and its delta;
— 150 kilometers of ocean paddling to reach Montreal Island, our final pickup point;
— Total distance remaining: 1080 kilometers.
“There will be lots to explore along the way,” I said. “It would be nice to take some rest days because we want to, not just when we have to.”
“We need time to stop for wildlife too,” said Tim. “That’s one of the reasons we came up here.”
“I agree that’s important, but obviously we need to get to the end in time. If we take too much time early on, it worries me a little,” said Alie.
“We’ve set a big objective. We can’t get away from that,” said Jen.
“I’m excited about all of it,” said Drew, “but I want to meet the goal.”
“We all want to meet the goal,” I replied.
“Rapids take time too,” said Levi. “It will be hard to make 30 kilometers when there’s lots of white water.”
“And easy with a good current or a tailwind,” said Tim.
These are the struggles of every group trip — who is there to paddle hard and meet the goal, who is there to explore the landscape and take their time. Each one of us was a mix of both, to varying degrees. We had all committed to the same objective, but there would be more than one way to reach it.
That night, the tiny crack that had opened between us was barely noticeable, and we were very polite about it. Some pushed to get the distance under our belt and rest later, if we had time; some, mainly Tim and I, pushed for a slower pace to enjoy experiences as they came and deal with weather challenges if we had to. Pace is critical on a long trip, and finding a balance between enjoyment and achievement can be tricky.
“Look,” Jen said finally, “we’ve already cut the trip up into chunks.”
“So we can do one chunk at a t
ime,” Drew finished.
We could have rest time and fun time, as long as we made the end of the section by the agreed-upon day. It was the logical compromise. Depending on what lay ahead — what rapids, what weather — we might have to scrap the plan and make a new one anyway.
My biggest hope, and the reason I wanted extra time at the beginning of the trip, was for the caribou. I wanted to see a herd. In early spring, barren-ground caribou calve in the northern tundra — beyond the range of wolves, their biggest predators, who stay further south to den. After calving, the male, female, and young caribou aggregate in the tens of thousands for a long journey south to the tree line. They spend the midsummer walking skinny trails that have been pounded into the muskeg by previous generations. They graze and rest in between hours of travel, when they move in lines or loose groups. The trails lead them back to the subarctic forest, the northern limits of the taiga, where they will rut and mate and spread out to forage over the winter. The distance between their calving and wintering grounds can be as much as 1,000 kilometers. I had always hoped to meet them somewhere along the way.
During my first forty-six days on the tundra in 2002, we paddled the Hood River and sections of the Coppermine, farther to the west, and we saw one caribou. One. A single representative of a species that is hundreds of thousands strong. But you have to be in the right place at the right time to see them. We weren’t.
On the Back, I had another chance. I imagined it over and over. The way they might appear over a rise and fill the valley like floodwater breaking away from a riverbed. The maps, books, and websites had told us we were most likely to cross paths with the caribou during the first half of our trip. So the caribou were another reason to take our time early on. But caribou are smoke in the wind, hard to find and impossible to plan for. So maybe it would be better to carry on in case of big storms.
Whatever our pace, I resolved to search for those caribou. The day after our planning session, and on many days thereafter, I climbed a ridge to examine the view rock by rock, inch by inch. I searched up every tributary valley that we passed. I never returned to the tent after a midnight pee without making a 360-degree scan. I wanted the experience for myself, but also for Tim, who loves wilderness more than anyone I know. It would be a salve for his grief.
BY CANADA DAY, Day 7, the temperature had dropped below zero with a serious windchill. We were breaking in our new paddling teams and forming our six-person mini-culture by naming everything we had. Jen and I paddled her red boat, officially christened Delilah; Alie and Tim cruised in the blue 18-footer, Bluebell; Drew and Levi piloted the green 17-foot boat we called The Frou-Frou Barge in honor of Drew’s stick collection lashed to the deck amidships. It’s tough to have campfires in a land without trees, but if you are a diligent collector, like Drew, you can eke out the occasional cooking fire from willow branches and the odd piece of driftwood.
At lunchtime we jumped out of the boats where the shelter of the leeward bank let the brush grow thigh high, which meant it towered over everything else. We were so hungry we had to stop, so cold we had to keep moving. I ran back and forth, jumped, jumping-jacked, and jogged. Tim searched for the blessed thermoses of tea and couldn’t find them. This was the worst news yet. I seriously considered a 15-kilometer tundra bushwhack back to the previous campsite.
“I could be there in, like, an hour. Or two.”
As the threat of cold soup for the rest of the summer began to sink in, Tim — upside down under the spray deck — emerged with a flourish.
“Got ’em.”
Back on the water, we came upon several small groups of Canada geese, a frequent sight along the banks. Jen and Drew found this a little bit too much Toronto, but I loved to see these birds in their wild, migratory incarnation. At that time each year, the geese drop their flight feathers, grounding them for a few weeks while they grow new ones. The birds stick close to the water while they wait. If a predator approaches over land, a quick dash to the river is their only escape. Because we came toward them from the water, they would sprint away over land in a rustle of feathers. They looked like Victorian ladies with their skirts pulled up around their knees.
Later that afternoon, our second bear of the trip sauntered over the hill and saw us paddling below, not 100 meters away. He didn’t slow down to check us out but continued along the ridge with his cowboy swagger — hips swinging side to side. Like he was strolling the strip, looking for babes. A moment later, his eyes locked onto a solitary goose, a second before it saw him. The goose raced toward the river at full speed, but the bear was much faster. One moment he had been strolling; the next, ready to kill. The bear swooped over the goose, catching it above the shoulder in one smooth motion and then loping back to the top of the ridge. He snapped that goose left and right until it hung like a skein of wool.
The geese weren’t fast enough for the wolves either. We happened upon a wolf biting through one — feathers stuck to fur — and then chasing down another. A second wolf crouched in the background with a radio collar hanging darkly from its neck.
Ever since the second night, when Tim had spoken of his mum and the wolves sang, each sighting made me think of Kathy. Their chorus sounded like a memory but more real. Wolves appeared to us as Kathy had become: more than shadow, less than flesh.
THE MORNING AFTER we’d made our plan, my fingers burned with cold as I stuffed handfuls of wet nylon into the tent bag. Tim stood behind me, gazing across the tundra. I was about to kick his boot to wake him up but instead I followed his gaze. Two more wolves, or maybe some we had already seen, watched our every move.
After bulgur and cheese hash for breakfast, and with a clear goal in mind, we set out on our most ambitious day so far: 46 kilometers to the confluence with the Back River. We were tired from the first week of a life we weren’t used to, and if we reached our goal, we could take a day off. When our energy flagged, Drew pulled out his special fuel: a super-deluxe multilayered snack of sour keys, tofu jerky, sundried tomatoes, and dried apples with cinnamon.
Life on the Baillie had been a kind of tug-of-war for me. The excitement of beginning the journey and seeing so many animals vied with frustration at feeling so cold and worry about getting along as a group: I wasn’t laughing at the jokes; I felt like an outsider. I hoped that arriving at the Back would help smooth it all out.
The river was generous to us that day.
Jen turned to me: “It’s like a conveyor belt.”
Stroke by stroke we moved toward the river that would be our home for the rest of the summer. Tim was silent in the stern of his boat. I kept looking ahead, waiting for the sandy gates of the Back to show themselves.
FOUR
SINKING
SIX GIANT BOWLS of pasta steamed on the edge of our kitchen rock. I wondered if Levi and Drew had doubled the recipe by accident. With this meal, we would celebrate our arrival at the confluence of the Baillie and the Back.
“I’ll go get Tim,” I said, and walked toward the tents. “Supper!” I called, but he didn’t answer.
I scanned the tundra for him, then dropped to my knees and pulled the zipper to his tent.
“Tim?”
He lay on his right side with his chest to the wall. I dove in and closed the mesh to keep out the bugs.
“Tim?” I repeated softly, but he didn’t move. He was sobbing into his sleeping bag, dragging uneven breaths into his lungs. I sat for a while and listened; my mind wandered back to Ontario and the days we had spent together before Kathy’s funeral. He had cried a lot, but I’d never seen him like this.
“Oh dear,” I said quietly, sounding like my grandma.
I lay down behind my friend and put an arm over his, each of his breaths now jolting both of us. Gray fog seeped from Tim’s chest into mine. Does he even know I’m here?
Eventually, his breath slowed. I hoped he would be taken by a good dream. I sat up and looked at his face. It looked old. His body sank into the tundra, like a river cutting its own banks. I tumb
led back outside and returned to my cold supper.
“Tim isn’t having dinner tonight,” I said through my tears. “He’s sleeping.”
BEFORE THE TRIP, I hadn’t thought much about the effect Tim’s grief might have on the rest of us, but I feared that he would stay behind. I wanted to travel with my friend, and the tundra was the best place I could imagine to receive the stream of his sadness. It wouldn’t ricochet off the walls of the city or reflect back to him from the faces of others. Grief could pour out and sink into the moisture of the land. Be absorbed into the frozen soil. Disappear.
Tim and I met in our first-year botany lab at the University of Guelph. He had recently quit traveling North America and Europe as a downhill ski racer after a crash that broke his shoulder, both arms, and several fingers. I was fresh out of high school in Ottawa. The first time we hung out, we visited our professor and his electron microscope. We loved the same things: birds, canoes, and cruising campus with me on the handlebars of Tim’s gold-painted bicycle.
We knew each other for two years before we crossed the boundary between friendship and courtship. On our first date, in October, he took me fly-fishing. He lent me his waders and spent the afternoon up to his waist in the river wearing shorts and gumboots.
Once we started dating, Tim and I planned our first long canoe trip in Northern Ontario. We shared the dream of being in the woods long enough for a different rhythm to emerge — a rhythm of camping and paddling. Maybe then we would feel what it was like to live outside, instead of visiting.
We didn’t have any experience with long trips. Neither of us had been to summer camp, the usual Canadian training ground for such things, so we found an online trip report from a boy’s summer camp and resolved to follow it for forty days through northwestern Ontario. We would start 500 kilometers north of Thunder Bay and hop between lakes and rivers neither of us had ever heard of, such as Bamaji, Zionz, Otoskwin, Attawapiskat, Kagianagami, and Ogoki.
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