Layman also argued that some people (“dumb paddlers”) should “learn to bowl”3 instead of canoeing, and he put the girls from Camp Widjiwagan in that category. Using bad secondhand information, he suggested the girls could have self-rescued with their remaining canoes and avoided the cost of calling for help. Layman’s inaccurate reporting “does everyone a disservice,”4 as Tim was quick to point out in a letter to the editor; however, Layman did raise an important issue. Because satellite technology makes it easier to call for help, it may entice people into situations they are not ready for or tempt them to call for help they don’t really need. But evaluating who is in what category is next to impossible. There are no clean lines between inexperience, accident, and emergency. And the question of who should pay for which rescues — the government, as an extension of emergency services, or the “client,” if it’s not a proper emergency — is just as complicated. Some people, like Layman, boast about their own safety record as if success were simply a matter of preparedness — but accidents do happen, even to experienced trippers. We can reduce our risk, but there are no guarantees. There never will be.
In 2007, Alie published a story in a Canadian magazine; in it, she mentioned the girls’ ordeal. Two of the campers responded to the article online. “The Author of the Diary You Discovered” thanked us for returning her journal — no one had told her that it had come from us — and she invited us to contact her. The message ended with “I’d love to hear more!” The second response, from Terri, was less friendly. She simply said she would like to discuss the “actual” experience.5 What had the “actual” experience become by then?
In early 2010, I called the RCMP in Baker Lake and made a formal request about the events of 2005, but I didn’t get any information. I talked to Jack Kruger, but he barely remembered the incident, since it hadn’t occurred in his district. I used the names I could decipher from The Man Who Mapped the Arctic to track the girls down on Facebook and then email. After reading their replies to Alie’s article, I didn’t think talking to them would be a problem — but I got only one positive response, and right away something changed. She was going to call me but then emailed to say she didn’t want to talk anymore. There were aspects of the trip she was not willing to speak about. “Please don’t use my name,” she wrote. No one would answer my messages after that.
Was there a flurry of emails as they consulted each other? What could be so hard to speak about after five years? I imagined a lingering terror or profound embarrassment. I wondered how such an intense event affected their relationships with each other. Amidst weeks of isolation, experiences on the land become heavy with meaning. What takes only moments to happen can linger for a lifetime. I imagined bug-bitten girls, some dripping wet, waiting for the helicopter’s whir. And then a message came in. One of them was willing to talk.
I pressed the phone to my ear and held my breath as she recounted the story I had waited so long to hear. “It was the end of a tiring day,” she began.
The set of rapids loomed, and they didn’t want to shoot it: too cold, too tired. The group began to ferry to shore — one canoe at a time until they reached the island where we later found their things. The leader (just one) and the last two girls (one sitting in the middle as we had suspected) attempted their forward ferry. They faced upstream, digging their blades into the waves as their boat slipped backward. The leader shouted encouragement as the river overcame them. I know that moment well, the certainty in your gut that you have lost the arm wrestle. They spun to face their opponent, to try and beat it at its game. But the fear, instability, fatigue, and lack of position were too much. The boat tipped. “They went all the way down.”
The remaining four ran to the end of the island, but their friends had disappeared. They scanned the water, waiting. The minutes stretched out. Did they hold hands? Pray?
“Finally, we saw little black figures walking.” Three young women, soaking wet and stripped of all of their gear, climbed back into view on the far side of the river.
Now a gulf, too frightening to cross, severed them from each other. They doubted their strength to overcome it. One boat, three bags, and the satellite phone were gone. The survivors paced up and down on the other side, shouting over the river-roar. The girls yelled to each other until the dry ones headed for the highest point. They had one remaining piece of communications equipment, a satellite beacon, and it was time to follow the instructions: Remove cover. Push button. They paced and kept watch. They took turns lying down and jogging for warmth. After six hours, the helicopter.
Reunited at an apartment in Baker Lake, they swapped tales of the near-tragedy. Who cried, who called out for her mother. But, at least for the woman I spoke with, relief that they were safe vied with heavy disappointment that they hadn’t finished the trip as planned.
At Camp Widjiwagan, the voyageur groups from previous years show slides of their Arctic trips; it’s part of the tradition to get new voyageurs ready: “You feel impressed,” she said. Of the North: “I loved being in that landscape.” But after the accident, the girls wanted to reassure themselves of their skills, their love for the place — before they grew afraid of it.
I am torn between an understanding of this woman’s story and a suspicion of it. Perhaps they were too tired and cold to run that rapid, but did they know it was too difficult to run under any circumstance? If they were experienced enough to run that river, why didn’t they equip themselves with spray decks, which I considered essential for safety on the Back? She was seventeen, “only seventeen,” one might say, but she quickly reminded me that “seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds are pretty able-bodied. They can do a lot. And you can’t guarantee safety.” She sounded confident about her training and the structure of her camp, but wondered if that trip would be better for people who are more mature. On the other hand, “It’s one of the most meaningful things I’ve ever done. My resilience and independence come from that trip in particular.” The young woman’s name was Jenny; she reminded me of myself, and I can’t reconcile her confidence with the mess of unprotected boats and craft supplies we found.
I have also taken trips I was less than one hundred percent prepared for; that’s how I learned. The next time I plan something big, I won’t be one hundred percent prepared for that either. And many people have discouraged me from doing the things I love most, but their fear — not only of the wilderness but also that I won’t ever have a “normal” life — is a reflection of my own, and I’ve learned not to give it too much weight.
After a few days in Baker Lake, the young women gathered some new gear and flew back to the tundra. They couldn’t go to the Back again, but they flew west of Baker Lake and then paddled back, to “bring it home,” as the staff at Widjiwagan put it.
Jenny said it wasn’t the same, but it was something.
WE STOWED OUR shopping spree finds in our packs and continued downstream. By then, the final obstacle in this series of rapids we’d been hung up in for four days was within striking distance: Sinclair Falls. The approach emphasized how far we’d come since the Baillie River, almost a month ago. The falls dropped in a series of ledges followed by gigantic waves. Even the cleanest lines — the paths through the rapids one could attempt with open boats — were three times too big for our canoes. The only routes we could consider snuck around the fringes.
Levi stands by one of many rapids. CREDIT: TIM IRVIN
With the girls’ ordeal behind us and the temperature rising, our mood lightened. We found a small route on river right, a “hammy hamster” we called it, where we could line up the boats and crash into rocks without any consequences. Tossing consequences aside for a few hours was good medicine. When Tim and Alie’s boat got stuck, Levi, Jen, and I stood up on a ledge and mooned them. Then Levi pointed Jen and me through a “clear” channel, only to laugh his head off when we smashed into a rock and stopped dead.
By evening, we’d made the bottom of the falls and set up camp. Alie and I cooked a feast of squash
soup with dumplings, gado gado (pasta and peanut sauce), and a no-bake cheesecake with a bannock crust, courtesy of Widjiwagan. We didn’t even talk about the girls that night. We just sat around eating their food and wearing their clothes.
CHAPTER 11
RELEASE
THE BOAT GEORGE Back used to get down and back up the Thlew-ee-choh was literally his lifeboat. Thirty feet long and double-pointed, it was equipped with oars, poles, and a simple rig for sailing. It also had ample room for storage and carried over 1,500 kilograms (3,300 pounds) of cargo, plus ten men, a few dogs, and extra oars and rigging. Carpenters had built it from knotty wood harvested a short distance from Fort Reliance, and it was impressively sturdy, but not strong enough to be dragged along a portage. With steel runners fitted to the bottom, it could be skated over ice (with a great deal of exertion), but for dodging rapids, the boat had to be carried. No one told Back until the last minute about this hernia-inducing task; the entire crew together could barely manage it when the boat was dry, let alone soaked with river water. The men carried pitch and tar to help with repairs. If anything happened to that boat, they were finished.
On April 25, 1834, before the spring thaw had begun in earnest, there had been a knock on the door at Fort Reliance. A messenger bearing a letter burst into the room and announced, “He is returned, sir! . . . Captain Ross, sir — Captain Ross is returned.”1 The men in the Ross party had been missing for four years, and the primary purpose of Back’s expedition was to search for them. The previous fall, after surviving on stores left at the Arctic coast by explorer William Parry, Ross and his men had managed to flag down a whaling ship and hitch a ride to England. When they arrived home, in October, they sent a letter to Back with the news of their safe arrival, but the news took six months to reach him. Back’s expedition changed once he knew the Ross party was safe. The descent of the new river became purely exploratory; Back would attempt to reach the ocean and map a new section of coastline. He decided to cut his travel party from two boats to one, since he no longer needed room for the rescued men — and by diminishing the crew, he could speed his progress and stretch his severely depleted food supply.
He made the announcement in May, as the first patches of green began to show through the snow. Soon geese would fly overhead and willow catkins would emerge. On June 7, Captain Back, Dr. King, and their crew left Fort Reliance. Back had sent his trusty fixer, McLeod, ahead to cache meat for them, and he hired extra porters to carry the pemmican, flour, cocoa, rum, and macaroni they would need for three months.
“There is something exciting in the first start even upon an ordinary journey,” Back wrote. “The bustle of preparation — the act of departing, which seems like a decided step taken — the prospect of change, and consequent stretching out of the imagination — have at all times the effect of stirring the blood, and giving a quicker motion to the spirits.”2
The men’s first task was to climb out of the watershed to the height of land and find the headwaters of the Thlew-ee-choh again. In the relatively flat country of the eastern mainland Arctic, the maze of lakes and small streams makes it difficult to find a clear route from one drainage into another. Strangely, Back left his notes from the previous year behind, which didn’t make things any easier, and the ice-filled spring landscape confused him further. While his men spent the days hauling gear over the ice and enduring either snowstorms or buggy heat, Back spent the evenings climbing various hills to jog his memory. McLeod paralleled their track, some distance ahead, with his land-based party. His men hunted and cached meat for Back along the route and marked it with rock cairns and notes attached to tree branches. Although neither leader had much sense of the country he traveled in, this system worked somehow. Back found at least as many caches as he missed, sometimes indicated only by a tiny note flapping in the wind. Back reached the headwaters of the Thlew-ee-choh, via the north end of Aylmer Lake, on June 28, 1834.
From there, a journey into unknown regions began. The men left Dene territory and moved deeper into Inuit land, where the river had different names, including Haningayok and Ukkuhikhalik. They didn’t know what lay ahead or how much the men’s skill — especially that of the principal bowman, George Sinclair, and the steersman, James McKay — would be tested.
It’s the details in Back’s journal that surprised me most. The further I got into the minutiae of his daily travel, the more I recognized our own journey. Back’s team was surprised to find so much ice and had to devise ways to cross it; they even chopped a trail with axes. His men were vexed by the alternating heat and frequent cold storms; they had chosen an unusually cold season, as we had. The men traveled nights to avoid weather, and Back even boasted about traveling light: “Only a very limited wardrobe can be allowed.”3 Back saw caribou and marveled at the goose molt; he found so many dropped feathers that “carts might have been laden with them.”4 He wrote about the hummocks on the tundra — raised humps of grass a foot wide — that look dry and inviting to the hiker, but unless you tread on them dead center (a difficult calculation) they’ll twist your ankle and send you sprawling to the ground.
But we had maps, whereas Back was creating the first paper map of the area as he went. We had waterproof breathables (a “space-age fabric,” as Levi liked to say) and a more reliable and varied diet. Back’s convoluted description of hunger warrants a chuckle: “certain internal gnawings began to intimate the propriety of supplying the organs of digestion with some occupation which might keep them from quarrelling among themselves.”5
I could relate to Back as a stranger to the country and someone who could not survive without extensive provisions. Although he and I come from different times, we agree on at least one thing: that “squeamishness is little heeded in such traveling as this, and shirking is quite out of the question.”6
Back had traveled several hundred kilometers before he reached the junction with the Baillie, where our paths intersected. His descriptions of the water are lively to say the least, and he has been criticized for exaggerating its power. He devotes long paragraphs to Rock Rapids, for example, where our group found the abandoned camp. Back describes a river that “foamed, and boiled, and rushed with impetuous and deadly fury.”7 He writes about rocks 800 feet high, which I certainly never saw, but he does drive home the point that death awaits careless paddlers there.
Portaging those rapids was impossible with Back’s heavy boat, so his crew emptied the cargo and tracked the boat downstream with two ropes at either end, his men poling from on-board and rock hopping from out-board. “Repeatedly did the strength of the current hurl the boat within an inch of destruction,”8 but McKay and Sinclair kept their cool and impressed their boss. They were awarded a cup of grog to celebrate, and when they reached the falls the next day, Back named them after Sinclair.
WE HAD BARELY pulled away from Sinclair Falls when a flash of silver winked between the ripples up ahead. A strange object lolled at water level close to shore, and as we approached the silver turned to red. We all recognized it at the same time: Camp Widjiwagan Canoe #3. The final piece of the puzzle.
“This is getting weird,” said Drew.
Tim and I paddled Delilah that day, the red 16-foot Esquif Prospecteur made with Royalex that Jen had purchased for the trip. As we came alongside the lost boat, also red, we noticed that it too was a 16-footer, which is not unusual. We landed our boats and surrounded the overturned one. When we pulled up on the gunwales, the river tugged back until we tilted the canoe slightly, broke the seal, and flipped it over in a rush of water. Only then could we see the entire hull and its labels: Esquif Prospecteur made with Royalex. Somehow, in perfect condition. From where the girls fell out of it, the boat had traveled the most treacherous 12 kilometers of the river, ending with a drop over the falls. Waterlogged maps and cameras dangled from the thwarts. A Nalgene water bottle, with drinking water sealed in, slumped against the side of the hull along with two small “dry” bags, turgid with water, and floating cameras. A small black Pelica
n case boasted a bone-dry SLR, a sweet-looking Nikon camera. It took film, so we couldn’t cruise its memory card to peek into the past.
We started disassembling the boat immediately. Levi and Tim pulled out Leathermans to strip off the center thwart, in case we needed one, and the bow seat, to replace our broken one. We left the soggy cameras but took the Nikon to return to sender. After our salvage work was done, I snapped a picture of everyone grinning and leaning on each other and the boat, as if it were a hot rod, and it kind of was. The boat gave us pleasure. We surrounded it like bounty hunters; we couldn’t step away, and that’s when the impulse came.
“Let’s take it,” I blurted out.
Perhaps we could get a new boat out of all this craziness. It made no sense to add another canoe to our outfit, but to my delight, everyone agreed.
“Let’s call her Desiree,” said Jen, “Delilah’s evil twin.”
“Let’s ghost-ride her down Escape Rapids,” Tim replied.
“Maybe we could get her home somehow?”
The scavenger’s impulse burned in all of us. She was too good to leave behind. We could tow her, perhaps as far as the ocean, still hundreds of kilometers away.
I couldn’t resist the image of our boat towing its empty twin, the vessel of another journey, so I tied her to our stern with a simple bowline knot, and we took off: Delilah and Desiree.
Even in the brisk current, the other boats sped ahead. Desiree strained at her halter; she pulled back and then sped up beside us on a rebound from the stretched line. She swerved and pulled our stern off course. I dug my paddle in and snarled, my determination fixed. We had tied ourselves to those girls, and I wasn’t ready to let go.
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