Paddlenorth

by Jennifer Kingsley

  — 21 kilos of gorp (acronym for Good Old Raisins and Peanuts, but ours had lots of other ingredients too)

  — 96 homemade granola bars

  — 9 kilos of peanut butter, 6 of honey, 2 of jam, 1½ of almond butter

  — 7 liters of oil, 4 of margarine, 1 of Nutella

  — 150 cups of wheat flour, 40 of sugar, 20 of rice

  — 15 kilos of pasta

  — tahini, maple syrup, popcorn, quinoa, bulgur, soy sauce, vinegar, spice kit, chilies

  — 18 packages of home-dried hummus and bean dip, 6 bags of dried pizza sauce

  — 20 kilos of cheese

  Some items, like balsamic vinegar and extra chocolate, seemed extravagant, but we knew that good food makes for strong memories and helps everyone get along. Some people are happy with a sack of rice and a fishing rod or a barrel full of freeze-dried tofu teriyaki and trail mix, but I am not one of them. Only jaw-dropping wildlife sightings and the adrenaline rush of perfectly navigating a rapid come close to the pleasure of sinking your teeth into fresh-baked cinnamon buns so far from the nearest town.

  We did our best to pack the food logically in our barrels and packs. We spread cheese, honey, flour, fuel, and other items that would need replenishing throughout the stash. We filled four blue plastic barrels, then started on the packs. We lined each one with a homemade nylon sack, then with two heavyweight clear garbage bags to keep the smells in and the water out. I hoped that our advance sorting would keep us from opening more than two bags at mealtimes. As the packs grew in girth, we named each of them. The Orb of Joy looked disturbingly spherical. Blueberry Pie was the heaviest. With any luck, we would not join the long list of people who had starved or nearly starved in the Arctic — which included the river’s namesake.

  AS LIEUTENANT JOHN Franklin’s midshipman between 1819 and 1822, George Back spent some desperate and hungry months in Canada. It was Franklin’s first overland expedition for the British Navy, and Back was twenty-two years old when it started. By then, Back was accustomed to maggoty biscuits and stagnant water. He had been in the navy half his life.

  Back was born in England in 1796, when prospects were poor for many children, even those of the middle class. Girls worked long days in cotton mills or clothing factories, and boys pulled carts down the damp shafts of coal mines. There was no law limiting children’s hours of work until 1833. Life at sea — where children would receive clothing, hot meals, a place to sleep, and some semblance of education and medical care — didn’t seem so bad. For these reasons, and because of Back’s childhood passion for seafaring, his parents sent him off on his first ship in 1808, during the Napoleonic wars. They would not see him again for five years.

  After only seven months with the navy, Back and some of his shipmates were captured by French troops off the north coast of Spain and sent to France, where Back lived in a Napoleonic prison until 1814. It was more like house arrest than a modern jail. Officers set up a school where Back learned mathematics, navigation, and theories of seamanship, as well as French and drawing — skills indispensable to an Arctic explorer. The incarcerated men received money from England for books, and they set up masts in town to practice rigging. Besides hunting, swimming, playing cricket, and riding ponies, many prisoners drank heavily, gambled, took mistresses or “women of pleasure” (over whom they sometimes killed each other), and held kangaroo courts, where the accused were beaten or humiliated. Back described it as “Excess, no matter in what.”1 He was through most of his teenage years by the time he returned to England to see his family again.

  After Napoleon’s defeat, the British navy was cut from 150,000 men to 20,000. Only forty-six of the seven hundred commanders had active jobs. John Barrow, the Admiralty’s second secretary, resolved to improve prospects for “the boys” by sending them to explore the Canadian North. Barrow planned to find a viable commercial route to the Orient via the elusive Northwest Passage, and he would create maps and celebrities in the process.

  Once the machine got started, exploration became a new route to fame. Parliament offered rewards for successful journeys. Returning commanders wrote books, sat for portraits, and worked the lecture circuit. The best way to get really famous was to disappear, as Franklin — by then Sir John Franklin — would inadvertently prove.

  Back was lucky to be appointed to Franklin’s first overland expedition. He was lucky to have a job and lucky to survive it. The expedition goes down as one of the navy’s most disastrous. The officers had no experience in overland travel; they could not hunt and knew nothing about rivers, canoes, the Arctic winter, or local politics. Some of Franklin’s first mistakes were related to food. On a tip from fellow Englishman John Pritchard, Franklin started from England with 350 kilograms (about 770 pounds) of salted pig for the men’s rations, but it was already rotting and useless by the time they got to York Factory, on the shore of Hudson Bay. They replaced the pig with more traditional pemmican, a mix of powdered meat (usually bison), fat, and sometimes berries. It was a start, but there wasn’t enough and they didn’t have a good backup plan. More than two years into their journey, in the fall of 1821, John Franklin and his men ran out of food near the Arctic coast on what is now called the Hood River. They were far away from help.

  Day by day, the men trudged south. They had a couple of minor hunting victories such as a small caribou (split twenty ways) and a couple of ptarmigan. Mostly, they ate curly black lichen, called tripe-de-roche, which gave them diarrhea. When they found a rotten caribou spine, they shared the marrow between them. The temperature dropped and the terrain grew more difficult. Men started to fall behind, and then they started to die. Franklin eventually sent some of the stronger men ahead (including Back), while the weaker ones did their best to carry on — but they didn’t all make it to the shared camp, and some were never seen again. One of the men who disappeared was allegedly murdered, and another, Officer Hood, was found with a bullet through his head. After Hood’s death, the survivors singed the hair off his buffalo robe and ate it. A couple of days later, Dr. Richardson, the expedition’s surgeon and naturalist, exacted retribution by shooting Hood’s accused murderer.

  Only nine of Franklin’s original team of twenty returned to England with him; from the Admiralty’s point of view, however, the men had succeeded in running the Coppermine River to the ocean and mapping the coast heading east. The journey took three years, during which Franklin traveled almost 9,000 kilometers. He returned to England a hero and received a promotion.

  Back accompanied Franklin on his second overland expedition as well, but their relationship was rocky. Franklin complained about Back in private letters, though neither man’s official journals describe any discord. The men had learned from the disasters of their first expedition together, and their journey along the Mackenzie River was more comfortable, but their relations deteriorated even further. Their interpersonal problems were likely a main reason Back did not go on Franklin’s final and fatal mission to find the Northwest Passage in 1845.

  IN FEBRUARY 1833, at age thirty-six, George Back left England on his third expedition to the Canadian Arctic. This time, the short, stocky explorer was in command. His objective was to reach the Arctic coast by a river called the Thlew-ee-choh, or Great Fish, which no one had ever run. Back’s orders were to find it, descend it, and then search the coastline for a missing British expedition. Captain John Ross, along with his nephew James and twenty-two men, had not been heard from in four years. Back’s second objective, failing a rescue, was to fill in a blank on the British map by heading west toward Point Turnagain — the last place Franklin and Back had reached from the mouth of the Coppermine in 1821.

  Back hired several men in England, including Richard King, a naturalist and surgeon, who would be his second in command. He picked up the rest of his crew, including Alexander McLeod, the expedition assistant, en route from New York to Great Slave Lake. He reached Great Slave in August and directed McLeod to find a wintering site and begin building Fort Reliance. Me
anwhile, Back pressed on in search of the source of the mysterious Thlew-ee-choh. Although summer was nearing its end, the weather remained unusually warm — and that’s where the problems began.

  On August 22, McLeod and four men arrived at the bay where they would spend the winter. They began work atop a bank of gravel and sand; an abundance of mosses and shrubs surrounded the building site. Back said it was “more like a park than part of an American forest.”2 The men lost no time cutting suitable lumber for the walls and finding clay for the mortar. They erected three buildings out of squared logs, clay-mud, and wooden shingles. Each room had a fireplace with a granite chimney. Fort Reliance was taking shape.

  Meanwhile, to the east, Back, along with his Dene guide, Maufelly, and a small party of men, continued toward the headwaters of the Thlew-ee-choh. The warm weather subjected everyone to late-season torment by biting flies, which made their faces bleed. According to Back, “There is certainly no form of wretchedness . . . at once so great and so humiliating, as the torture inflicted by these puny blood-suckers.”3

  By August 29, Back’s team was drinking grog out on the tundra and celebrating their “discovery” of the headwaters. Planning to return in the spring to begin their descent toward the Arctic Coast, they turned back and headed toward Great Slave Lake.

  The warm weather sped their return, but when hungry hunters started arriving, they realized that the warm spell was also changing the migration patterns of the caribou. The herds hadn’t moved south to the tree line at the usual time; nor were they following their usual routes. Back wrote: “To this unusual mildness of the season may be ascribed the unparalleled sufferings of the Indians, who, emaciated and worn out by fatigue, continued to pour in upon us from the barren lands, where, contrary to their habits, the deer [caribou] still remained; keeping at too great a distance to be followed.”4

  It was normal for forts and trading posts to become hubs for local hunters, but the scene at Fort Reliance that year was different. People needed help. Back had winter provisions, but he’d planned to trade for more food. This strategy was common, though it had proved disastrous for past expeditions; trading plans were sure to fail in the midst of a widespread famine.

  Elders, hunters, and families showed up hoping for scraps of pemmican. Instead, they were lucky to receive “A handful of mouldy pounded meat, which had been originally reserved for our dogs.”5 Some nights, Dene families would stand at the elbows of Back’s men while they ate, watching each spoonful go into their mouths. Back sent his crew far afield to fish and hunt. He discharged a few paddlers and voyageurs to return south. And he reduced the portions of some of the native hunters so drastically that they were forced to leave in search of food.

  The relationship between Back, his crew, and the local people was complicated. Back criticized and mistrusted the Dene, but he also relied on them completely to find the river he sought. Although he did give out some of his food, especially to children, he couldn’t, or wouldn’t, feed everyone. Some Dene starved that winter, though Back’s men all survived. Back felt he needed to save his large supply of pemmican for the following summer’s river trip. Yet by Christmas he had already used half of it.

  Darkness pressed against the moose-skin windows on Christmas evening. The temperature outside neared –60 degrees Celsius; inside, it wasn’t much warmer. The fireplaces offered little comfort to the hungry explorers and starving families who waited for the holiday meal. For Back’s men, Christmas dinner was a reduced ration of pemmican. Some of the children got a spoonful or two. For the others, it was nothing but a mouthful of their own caribou-hide clothing. While Back and his men swapped memories of balmy England, some of the local people cried out in their suffering. King, the surgeon, attended to those he could, but had little aid to offer. George Back sat quietly at the table. He wrote that “Happiness on such occasions depends entirely on the mood and temper of the individuals.”6 He and King considered opening their special tin of food, given to them by a woman in New York, but decided to wait until McLeod returned from a hunting trip. Instead, they dined on a small dish of pemmican, swapping stories about roast beef, plum pudding, and friends back home. With Back’s determined cheer, which buoyed the others in his party, they managed to squeeze some Christmas joy from their grim situation.

  The brutal winter conditions continued. The men saw few animals outside the fort, and punishing cold seeped through the logs day and night. The men conducted science experiments by observing the freezing points of everything around them. When Back splashed water on his face, droplets froze in his hair before he could wipe himself dry. Wounds opened on his hands when his skin cracked, and he tried to heal them with grease. He tried to work on his paintings by the fire, but his brush froze stiff.

  Relief would not arrive until February 9, when Alexander McLeod returned with a hunting party and toboggans loaded with meat. Between his efforts and the sporadic success of other hunters, a trickle of food kept Fort Reliance going until spring.

  I SOMETIMES FELT embarrassed about the goodies we packed and the relatively elaborate recipes we enjoyed when I talked to some of the other guides and trippers I knew back home. Making your own tortillas, for example, might be going a little overboard. But we traveled the river from a position of privilege. We had lives that could accommodate two months away, and we had a bit of extra money to go beyond the demands of the day-to-day. I figured some extra chocolate chips and apricot jam — instead of a sack of beans — could only help, as long as our backs could take the weight.

  CHAPTER 6

  APPROACH

  DREW HAD ROLLED up his pants, but they were wet anyway. The weight of the blue food barrel on his back had him bent almost double, and he was reaching for the painter line buried somewhere in the bow. Levi didn’t bother to roll up his pants; he just stepped out into the shin-deep water, put his hands on his hips, and looked around. After a short exchange with Drew, Levi picked up a pack and they hauled the lines in unison.

  The new river, after the confluence, engulfed us in a maze of dunes and meandering braids. Silt and sand obscured the river bottom and made it anybody’s guess which channel would be deepest. Levi and Drew had guessed wrong. Once they hit bottom, the silty riverbed molded to their boat. The longer they sat, the deeper they sank. Nothing short of unloading themselves and half of their gear would free them, so they got out and searched for the deep channel on foot, dragging the sluggish canoe behind them. Drew found the channel by plunging in up to his thigh.

  A few muskox munched away on shore as Alie and I rigged up a sail from two paddles and a small green tarp. The blaze of sun and the dry wind cracked my nose and mouth, and I tugged on my hat. Luck kept us in the deep channel, and we soared ahead of the others. I gazed past Alie’s pigtails and her fleece-clad arms gripping the sail to watch the musk­ox in the distance. They had survived the winter by scraping through windblown snow to graze on vegetation so tough it would need several days to be digested. In summer, life is easier but much the same. Muskox stay in groups, leaning their shaggy faces into the wind. They watch for predators but don’t run. They protect themselves from the circling wolves by forming a line or an outward-facing circle with curved horns jutting forward. On the sandy plains around that part of the Back, as wind whipped a film of sand into the air, the animals looked more like water buffalo from India than creatures native to the Arctic. The two species are from the same family, which includes cattle, goats, sheep, and antelope — but only one, called Oomingmak (“the bearded one”) by the Inuit, has evolved to this life of extremes.

  The flat expanse of sand challenged me mentally. I felt bored, though I was embarrassed to admit that, even to myself. Will it be like this the whole time? There was so much space, but I felt squeezed. And the sand itself overwhelmed me. It got into everything: the hood of my sleeping bag, the zipper on my coat, the bannock, the oil, the rim of my water bottle, my hair. The sand made me hate the things I thought I loved about the Arctic: the endless views, the scale, th
e uncaring weather. I wanted sunny periods and a gentle breeze instead of wind that battered our faces and cold that swelled our hands to uselessness.

  After a long day in the dust bowl, I went to bed early. The tent offered sensory deprivation; its bland beige hid me from the searing light, bugs, wind, the others. I took off my socks to air out my itchy, swollen feet and opened my journal to the next blank page. A message in purple block letters in Dalton’s handwriting screamed at me: “I’M THINKING OF YOU!” My throat tightened. That diary was my own private, empty space. How could he have opened it, blank or not? I resented his over-familiarity with my things. We had not made any promises; yet here he was, in my face.

  Two weeks into the trip and I felt unsettled about how the experience was measuring up. I couldn’t help making comparisons to my first Arctic summer on the Coppermine and Hood Rivers. That trip lived in my mind as a joyful romp. We’d had some tough days, but we’d also had fun; I remembered laughing a lot that summer. I was twenty-five years old and in love. My boyfriend at that time was a broad-shouldered wilderness guide from Saskatchewan with a knack for tracking grizzly and polar bears.

  He had plenty of Arctic experience himself as an Arctic fox researcher, so when I told him about the canoe trip, he understood, and he sent me North with two things. The first was a package of tiny letters handwritten on photocopied topographical maps. Each one was folded down to 2 inches square, marked with the day I was supposed to open it and sealed with packing tape to make it waterproof. The letters hardly took any space; they asserted his presence yet allowed me my freedom. My pulse quickened each time I opened one. I cherished the letters; they were incredibly sweet, but despite their assertions, home became more and more distant as the days wore on.