We tree-planted to raise money for our trip, then came home to measure flour, rice, salt, and oats into bags. We bought a boat and convinced my mum to drive us three long days to the start point. The remoteness of the trip sank in when Dr. Rick, Tim’s dad, walked us through the deluxe first-aid kit he had put together. The waterproof bag contained large dressings, splints, several varieties of antibiotics, a suture kit, and syringes for administering Demerol. I freaked when I saw the hypodermic needles.
“I don’t know how to give an injection!”
“If things get that bad,” Rick replied, “a needle will be the least of your worries. Just stick it in the thigh somewhere.”
During the first week of the trip, my hands swelled and then toughened like dry paper. My shoulders, wrists, ankles, and back tightened and strained, then relaxed into the pull of my paddle. Heavy loads got lighter as we penetrated farther into the maze of conifer-dappled sunlight, afternoon thunderstorms, and the lichen’s dry heat. Our route plan kept us paddling and portaging for most of the daylight hours, and we were still falling behind. Our metabolisms soared. It didn’t take us long to realize that we hadn’t brought enough food.
It rained for twenty-five days out of forty on that trip. I got beaver fever, our camera broke, Tim’s foot got infected after he stepped in a nest of leeches, and we were hungry every day. It was the best summer ever.
We looked forward to the year ahead. Back in civilization, however, we lost our stride. We started getting on each other’s nerves and couldn’t agree on the simplest things. It wasn’t the wilderness that broke us, as many people had predicted; it was coming home. We promised to stay friends, and, by a combination of love and stubbornness, we did. I wouldn’t give up on my friend who could find joy while huddled under a tarp in a thunderstorm, eating cold barley stew from a Ziploc bag.
Three summers after Ontario, we planned our first canoe trip in the Arctic, and three years after that we set our sights on the Back. In between, we moved between the Rockies and the coast, working on conservation projects or taking jobs as wildlife guides, and we often ended up in the same town. By the time we hit the Back River, we had spent over 150 days camping together.
Tim turned thirty in 2005. A few wrinkles around his bright blue eyes creased his freckled face, and his short brown hair was getting sparse. Surgery after a ski accident left him with a plate in his arm and a scar like model train tracks to show for it. It pained him when he paddled or carried a canoe, but he rarely let on.
ON APRIL 24, 2005, Tim’s dad, Rick, and his mum, Kathy, drove from Barrie to London, Ontario, to visit family. Tim and I lived in Victoria, British Columbia, at the time. Out of the blue, Kathy suffered a second massive heart attack, eight years after her first. Kathy was alive but in a coma, and she wasn’t expected to survive. By the time I got the news a few hours later, Tim had already left for the east.
The prognosis was not good but not certain, and Kathy had beaten the odds once already, making a remarkable recovery from her first heart attack. Kathy was a true believer in the power of positive thinking, and Tim spent four days by his mother’s side in intensive care practicing everything he had learned from her. He held her hand, told stories, played guitar, and sang. He forbade the doctors or nurses to say anything negative within his mum’s earshot. Kathy lay still.
On the evening of April 27, Tim called my house in Victoria from the hospital. “We’re taking my mum off life support tonight.” His voice was quiet. “We don’t know how long she will last.”
I bought a ticket over the counter and boarded a plane at 11:00 p.m. As I hurtled through the air from the Pacific coast, my eyes dry and unwilling to close, Tim sat alone with his mum — her eyes opening only at the sound of his voice.
When I landed in Toronto and called the hospital in London, Kathy’s intensive-care nurse told me that Kathy was still alive. I sped down Highway 401 while Tim sat alone in his mum’s hospital room and held her hand. She took a lungful of air, one deep breath, and died.
I burst into the hospital’s sterile brightness two hours later. Tim walked alone in a blaze of white linoleum; he had just left her room after saying goodbye. He looked up in the final steps, reached his arms around my neck, and breathed, “My mummy’s gone. My mummy’s gone.” I held tightly to his shoulders and cried silently, my mouth open against his shirt.
By afternoon on the same day, Tim and his dad were ready to go home to Barrie. Tim asked if I would come and stay with them. Rick hadn’t been home since he and Kathy had left on vacation the week before. At the house, the evening air was thick with the smell of annuals and mown grass. The keys jingled on their way to the lock, and as Rick pushed the door open he instinctively blocked it with his shin to keep the cats from escaping. The unique Kathy-and-Rick’s-house smell poured out. I wondered if the smell would change.
With Rick’s permission, I cleaned out the leftovers from the fridge — Kathy’s cooking packaged in Tupperware. The space that she had occupied surrounded me as I fussed in her kitchen. I kept myself busy: cleaning dishes, doing laundry, wiping dust. I walked to the basement laundry room and folded Kathy’s small T-shirts that hung from the rack.
Three days later, Tim and I drove to the funeral service together in Kathy’s car. It was a sunny spring day, and a small crowd in blouses and shirtsleeves stood outside the church. A knot of young men opened up as we approached; Tim’s buddies from the ski academy squeezed his shoulders and hugged him.
Sun slanted through the stained glass and fell on the wooden pews. A balcony, nearing capacity thirty minutes before the service, hung above us. The first three rows on the main floor were reserved for family, and the rest were filling up quickly.
Kathy and Rick had lost their daughter, Debbie, to cancer in 1984. Afterwards, Kathy became a dedicated volunteer at the local hospice. Rick, a family physician, became the regional expert in palliative care. The church was full of their community; many were veteran grievers.
I walked downstairs and pretended to look at the art in the church basement — cross-stitch of a log cabin, watercolor of a sunset at the lake, child and kitten on a piece of tin.
Rick came by in the dim light. All week, he had been making arrangements, phone calls, visits, and rearrangements. He never stopped.
“Hi, Jenn,” he said. “Did you find some people to sit with?”
I didn’t say anything — that settled it. I wouldn’t be sitting with the family.
“My dad just didn’t know what people would think,” Tim said later.
When upstairs got quiet, I slipped into a pew with two of my girlfriends from university. The family, along with Tim’s closest friends from his skiing days, filed into the front rows, and the service began.
My friend put her arms around me, and I started to cry. Until then, I had only cried at night, after Tim and Rick went to bed. Those tears held a swirl of emotion. I cried for Tim and Rick, but I also, for the first time, allowed room for my own private sorrow. I had lost my friend Kathy — not Tim’s mum or Rick’s wife, but the woman I knew and loved. Her tiny smile, the silly voice she used to make us laugh, her unshakeable belief in healing energy. That was the sorrow that would be displaced in the months to come.
The rest of my tears came from a bruised sense of belonging. I had wanted to be included in the family circle, and I shocked myself with the pettiness of that; it embarrassed me.
MOSQUITOES WHINED OUTSIDE the tent when I woke up the morning after our giant spaghetti dinner. I reached behind my head to undo the valve of my Therm-a-Rest, and then I remembered: rest day. No need to go anywhere. My mind turned to the idea of a proper bath.
I climbed from the tent to a scene that made my heart soar. Our camp huddled at a confluence of space and time. The wide, sandy banks of the Back River led downstream to our future, and the Baillie stretched back into our past. The third channel, which flowed from the Back’s headwaters, marked a journey we would never know.
I followed a thin trail of smoke t
o a large rock behind which Levi and Drew had built the ultimate camp kitchen, complete with a flat rock and a cooking fire. Drew’s twigs and driftwood treasures were paying off. Each day, he had loaded and unloaded the bundle wrapped in webbing. That morning, he coaxed a flame from the sticks, and Levi sat cross-legged frying pancakes.
A few feet away, Drew had done a masterful job of setting up our bug tent, and we were going to need it. He had used paddles, rocks, and guy lines to erect a tarp with long swathes of bug netting sewn around the edges of it. The tarp would keep off the worst of the wind and rain, but with the mesh down it became a bug-free haven we couldn’t do without. Jen sat inside with her mug of coffee.
A typical camp setup. CREDIT: LEVI WALDRON
I pulled some Campsuds biodegradable soap from the wannigan and headed down to the water, pulling my sweater over my head as I went. It must have been at least 12 or 15 degrees Celsius already. A welcome break from the cold that chapped my hands. I considered doing some laundry, which meant balancing a tricky equation. I would need a weather window when I didn’t need the clothes and we’d be away from the water long enough for them to dry. I decided to limit my efforts to my underwear.
Reluctance to enter the water isn’t an option with tundra mosquitoes hounding your flesh. It’s best to have a good routine for bathing; the ideal is one smooth motion. Strip off your top and use it to swat mosquitoes as best you can while you yank off your bra, socks, pants, and underwear as quickly as possible. Throw your top to the beach, grab your underwear for laundering, take a deep breath, and go under. Never mind that the cold takes your breath away and blurs your vision. The bugs will stay off long enough to get the important spots — if you’re quick.
I scrubbed my skin to suds with a dime-sized dab of soap, swished my undies around in the water, and scrabbled at my hair with dirty fingernails. Those actions completed my arrival in the tundra. The water pulled away the final remnants of the city and left my whole body burning with cold.
Back on shore, clammy and bug-bitten, I was hungry. Tim arrived with a prize from the barrel: a liter of maple butter straight from our friend’s sugar bush back home. We slathered it over the pancakes and lay back against the rocks.
After breakfast, Levi, Alie, and Drew — the Swim Team — streaked to the river for some kung fu kicks and a dip. Jen started on cleanup. Tim and I took to the hills.
Sandy banks, left standing as the river cut deeper into the land, opened like gates, showing us the expanse of the Back — two city blocks across. Cushions of moss campion sprang from the sandy slopes in isolated clumps. Pinpoint buds in bright pink emerged among their greening leaves. High banks had dried, and the deep green of heather and Labrador tea rose over last week’s brown. Sun. No more stranded ice.
The riverbank stood higher than a house. Smooth stones, glued together by sand, sloped down to the water on our right and drew a clean line against the sky on our left. The rising bank gave room for my thoughts to shift and breathe. When we finally crested the hill, we discovered a high plain — green, blue, and beige — that stretched to infinity. Bright water sliced across the canvas. A perfect breeze kept the bugs away.
We didn’t have to speak to know that we would head upstream, away from the path of our canoes, but I thought we would talk about Tim’s sadness from the previous night. I thought about asking that question: Do you want to talk about it? But it felt better just to walk.
Below us, two rivers cleaved the landscape. Their valleys were young and showed us erosion, spring flood, the river’s tumble, and plants colonizing new soil. Above those excavations, the land lay still. Ribbons of eskers traced the glaciers’ escape. When I looked down, I realized we were standing in the middle of a stone circle. A tent ring. Groups of nomadic Inuit would have lived along the banks of the river for thousands of years. Stones that held down the edges of summer tents made from caribou hide remain — often at beautiful, breezy lookout points. It’s only in the last century that these families began moving toward settlements; the rings could have been hundreds of years old.
Farther upstream we lay down among the tiny mountain avens that were starting to bloom and took pictures of each other; my smile almost fills the frame. Later, I spotted a smudge of movement in the distance.
“Tim,” I said, and he followed my gaze until he found it too.
That was the privilege of traveling with a friend who shared so much of my experience: a glance at the ground or wave to the horizon and Tim always knew what I had seen. We both smiled as the smudge resolved into a mother grizzly and cub.
On the way home we saw Drew and Jen, told them about the bears, and directed them to the tent rings. Farther along, Levi sat alone on a steep bank. We followed his gaze to a wolf cruising along the opposite bank. Our eleventh sighting in nine days: Kathy.
OUR THREE CANOES dug into shore the next morning. The current pulled the sterns downstream; red spray decks stretched tightly over each and concealed our gear. Our camp had returned to a patch of tundra.
We clustered around Jen at the water’s edge.
“I want to make an offering to the river,” she said.
Jen held out a long piece of dried caribou with a white border of sinew. She bit a chunk from the meat and passed it around the circle. Levi passed. I was normally a vegetarian but wanted to participate. I took the leathery strip and tried to picture what part of the animal that ribbon had been cut from. It felt stiff in my hand but still alive — as if, were I to pour water on it, it would turn back into living flesh. I pushed my teeth into the muscle fibers, tore a piece off, and handed the meat to Drew. As I chewed, the sinew shrank to an elastic band and the taste of blood lined my mouth. Maybe that is the tundra’s true flavor.
Jen tossed the remaining caribou into the current.
“For safe passage,” she said, as the river pulled it under.
FIVE
NAMESAKE
PACKING THOSE STRANDS of meat had been a trial. On our preparation day in Yellowknife, Jen had bounced in and announced, “I got the caribou.”
The caribou? Then I remembered: she had ordered local caribou jerky. Jen, with her big grin and spiky blonde pigtails, held out a large canvas shopping bag that bulged with spikes of meat and sinew.
“Wow,” I said, “it’s bigger than I thought. We’ll need more Ziplocs to pack it.” I had been expecting a package of caribou pepperoni. How would we wrestle a shredded hindquarter into our overstuffed bags?
“We aren’t supposed to put it in plastic; it needs to be exposed to the air so it doesn’t go bad.”
I looked up in disbelief. We had spent the day weatherproofing and bearproofing more than 300 kilograms (700 pounds to be exact) of vegetarian food, and our only meat was supposed to air-dry.
“It cost 120 bucks.”
“It has to go in the packs,” I said. “It’ll get wet otherwise. And attract animals. Don’t you think?” I tried to be diplomatic.
Jen and I had met in university, where I marveled at her super-active social life. She was also an expert at goal setting. As soon as Jen uttered, “I’d like to do this,” it was as good as done: get a job in Toronto, buy a house (renovate it!), spend time in the North, take a big canoe trip. A partner and kids would come later. What she lacked in experience she made up for in efficiency; she acted fast. I could hardly keep up. No sooner did she finish her house than she moved out of it. No sooner did she start online dating, after the trip, than she fell in love and started a family. Why couldn’t I make life move like that?
We found the rest of our plastic bags and bent as much of the meat into them as we could. I wondered about the white fibers that ran off the ends like nylon floss. We unpacked two of the barrels to bury some jerky and found corners in the other packs where we stuffed the rest of it.
TEN DAYS LATER we had barely touched the caribou, but we were starting to make a dent in the rest of our food, and our camp routines were coming together. We had solidified our cooking teams: Alie and me, Jen and Ti
m, and Levi and Drew. Once every three days, each pair took responsibility for all of the cooking and cleaning for one twenty-four-hour period, and then we got two days off to set up camp and hang out. Cooking in pairs was a habit for Tim, Levi, and me — a system we had grown to love. It meant lots of work when it was your day — organizing, prepping, and cooking three meals and snacks for six people, plus washing dishes — but we loved the free time it gave us on other days. Cooking pairs offset our paddling partnerships, except for Drew and Levi, who were double-paired because of our early switch.
Kitchen duty also meant locating all of the food for the next day. Our meticulously organized barrels should have made our next meal easy to find, but a bucket full of Ziploc bags is a slippery place. Everything got mixed up in a hurry.
We had packed 4,000 calories per person per day, which added up to about a kilogram of dry goods per person each day. Multiply by six people and fifty days, plus emergency rations, and we needed to pack and carry 320 kilograms (about 700 pounds) of food. None of us had a lot of money, so by drying our own food and looking for deals, we had assembled our rations for about six dollars per person per day. Drew built a dehydrator out of a cardboard box, a light bulb, and a small fan. He started experimenting and created tofu jerky (innovative, but not recommended). Tim, Levi, and I used our own dehydrators to dry soups, stews, burrito filling, salsa, and pizza toppings. Tim made vegetable leathers from yams and carrots. Jen and Alie packed dry goods. Someone hid jujubes in the pasta for an extra treat. I collected instructions for no-bake cookies, and Levi perfected our bannock recipe.
By June we had pulled together a large daily menu with a ten-day buffer. We brought fishing gear but wouldn’t rely on it. Our barrels, wannigans, and canoe packs carried, among other things:
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