Paddlenorth

by Jennifer Kingsley

  The caribou sustained his position in the river for the time it took us to eat one cookie. Then the slip began. The caribou strained, and the river pulled with a smoothness that belied its power.

  “How is that possible?” Jen asked aloud for all of us. A canoe wouldn’t last a second trying to pull against that force. It had been minutes.

  By then, each kick slipped the buck an inch or two back until the froth nipped at his backside while his nostrils widened and his eyes panicked.

  “He’s going into the hole,” someone whispered.

  “It’s our fault.”

  We stood up together and ran toward the river, though I had no idea what we would do once we got there.

  I wondered if there would be blood, but that caribou’s last surge of power carried him out of the death trap and down the rapid’s dark throat. He maintained his line and rode the wave train, backward, like the pro he was. After riding three massive waves, he pulled enough reserves to cross the eddy line with a good angle. He hunched in the slacker water for a brief moment with his chest heaving. Then, without a backward look at us, he scrambled up the steep slope on jelly legs. We sat speechless until he disappeared over the rise.

  “WOO-HOO!” Drew yelled finally. “Way to go! Yeah!” He turned to us. “He’s fine!”

  THE CLOSER WE got to the river mouth, the more difficult it became to find a route with white water small enough for our boats. From a distance, the waves that rose to the maximum we could handle were barely visible against the monsters that dominated river center. The trick was to keep perspective. It would have been easy to bite off more than we could chew, and sometimes we wanted to. Those smooth vees and clean waves enticed us. If we could have had warmer water and a car in the parking lot, we might have tried them. Instead, we reminded each other of a critical paddling maxim Tim and I had learned years before: Never let desire overwhelm your better judgment.

  Those major rapids posed similar challenges for George Back. As another furious white-water hole dragged his boat into the abyss, one of the crew lost hope and began to pray. Steersman McKay, remembered for his skill and level-headedness yelled, “Is this a time for praying? Pull your starboard oar . . . Heaven helps those who help themselves,”1 and they managed to escape disaster at Escape Rapids, as Back so aptly named them.

  Nine white wolves greeted them at Wolf Rapids, and at Whirlpool Rapids they were borne along so swiftly “that it required our extremest efforts, the very tug of life, to keep the boat clear of the gigantic waves below: and we succeeded at last only to be tossed about in the Charybdis of its almost irresistible whirlpools.”2

  British naval officers were required to keep written accounts, which were often published, and the pages of their journals are riddled with niceties about sponsors and fellow officers. For example, Back named the large lake at the end of the river after Captain Sir John Franklin, a man he didn’t like. He said Franklin’s name would always be associated with that part of North America, and little did he know how right he was; Franklin died near the mouth of the Back thirteen years later, and the precise fate of his expedition has yet to be discovered.

  If I had read Back’s account before running the river, I doubt I would have put much stock in his descriptions of the white water, but I would have looked more carefully at the landmarks and tent rings, many of which were occupied by Inuit families during Back’s voyage. With so much talk about exploding population levels these days, we don’t spare much thought for landscapes that are emptier of people now than they were in the past.

  By July 29, 1834, after one final shoot of white water, Back entered the Arctic sea. “This then may be considered as the mouth of the Thlew-ee-choh, which, after a violent and tortuous course of five hundred and thirty geographical miles, running through an iron-ribbed country without a single tree on the whole line of its banks, expanding into fine large lakes with clear horizons, most embarrassing to the navigator, and broken into falls, cascades, and rapids, to the number of no less than eighty-three in the whole, pours its waters into the Polar Sea.”3

  Their adventure wasn’t over yet. They still had the coastline to map, and even when they reached their farthest point, they were only halfway home.

  With his 30-foot boat and ten men, Back traveled from the Baillie River to the river’s last rapid in fourteen days. It took us twenty-nine. If we had been on the river the same year — rather than 171 years apart — we would have met up close to the coast around the end of July.

  ON DAY 37, Franklin Lake met us with broadside waves that made paddling tedious and Jen seasick. Luckily, the weather held, though the barometer was beginning to drop. We went to bed in a state of suspense, but the next morning was still beautiful. As usual, we asked Levi to account for the conditions; he shrugged and said, “The weather is a many-variabled variable.”

  In the morning, we stopped after a portage, only our seventh of the entire trip. Tim headed off to try to catch some char — his final challenge as an Arctic angler. By that point, he was throwing most of the lake trout back. “Too easy,” he said. The rest of us stripped down for a swim. We took advantage of the heat and indulged in some naked time on the rocks. We took silly photographs in which we showed off our muscles. When we took to the water again, Jen decided she would be warm enough with just a PFD and a pair of pants.

  The map showed one more set of rapids before the beginning of the delta.

  As we approached it, several things vied for our attention. First, the river narrowed dramatically from over 2 kilometers wide to only 400 meters. Second, a group of gigantic inukshuks stood out against the sky. Third, the entire bay before the rapids was thick with a herd of caribou geometrically larger than any we had previously seen.

  We headed for the bay.

  The grunting reached our ears first, followed by the clacking of hooves on stone. What we had seen earlier in the trip was repeated and magnified. I estimated that there were ten thousand caribou. They shook the land with their soundtrack and pulverized it beneath their feet.

  The scene around us that afternoon summarized the expedition. In a landscape that swallowed giant herds and then revealed them like rabbits out of a hat, we also found monuments, mysterious to our untrained eyes, from the people who had come before us. The river cut between all of it and gave us a path to follow; others had followed it, and still more had attempted it, but water makes no trails and so lets you feel like the first visitor. The rapids ahead represented the physical challenge we had faced throughout our journey, and the unknown crouched around each corner. Through all of it, we had been six dots of color in three little boats — red, green, and blue — who had promised to go all the way together.

  Our campsite would be fairly close to where the caribou were roaming, so Alie suggested we go make camp, and those who wanted to come back to the caribou could. I couldn’t imagine preferring to leave. And there are never guarantees with wildlife, no matter how settled in they appear. Tim and I exchanged a look, but we carried on to scout the first rapid.

  We could see two sets, and we could tell from far away that the second was much too big to run. So the first set in this final rapid would be our last of the summer. We put all of our training to the test: scout, review, position, run, recover. The current carried us as if we were cycling on an open road and moving fast enough to risk a painful fall. We ran it like pros and then bounced out of the boats for big hugs and congratulations.

  We lugged the gear up to the campsite, and Tim and I headed back toward the caribou. Their hoofprints had turned the shoreline into braille, and they were gone. I was sorry to miss them but glad they had left us as mysteriously as they had come. In the half hour it had taken us to run the set and come back, they had funneled to who knows where.

  We climbed up to the inukshuks and tried to figure out how old they were. Huge blocks, bigger than a person could lift alone, balanced on each other to make figures taller than any of us. Large circles of lichen, which grows only a fraction of a ce
ntimeter each year, sealed the rocks together. George Back would have stood near these very inukshuks in 1834. When he arrived at the final rapids on the river, he met a group of Inuit who gathered in a semicircle around his boat after his men brought it ashore. What began as a fearful encounter soon became friendly after Back, by his account, used his limited Inuktitut to declare peace. The rendezvous shifted to hand shaking and gift giving — Back distributed fish hooks, buttons, and beads, and the Inuit gave the men tools and small objects they had made.

  The very last rapid was enormous, a perfect curler set between two gates of rock, 400 meters apart. A black trough of water flashed steeply into a series of standing waves nearly twice my height. We took portraits of each other there and ate supper on the spine of one gate, so close to the water we shouted to be heard. I had the strange impulse I’ve sometimes felt at the edge of a cliff; I had to concentrate to keep myself from leaping off.

  Our campsite perched above that rapid, another threshold we were about to cross. Things would be different on the other side. For one thing, salt would soon tinge the water. And although most of the journey was behind us, the most uncertain part still lay ahead. None of us had tackled the Arctic Ocean before, and thinking about it shifted the baseline. The river that had been so unknown now felt like familiar territory. We had risen to its expectations, but soon we would have a new master.

  We spent the evening playing rodeo with the waves. We started by throwing rocks; then someone fetched the Pelican case from the Dead Girls’ camera, tied a rope to it, and threw it into the maw. As the light faded — it faded toward midnight by then — we took turns holding each other by the belt and heaving our little surrogate into the water.

  “Ride the hole, baby! Ride the hole!” Tim yelled as the case took violent drownings, one after another.

  CHAPTER 14

  CONTACT

  THE NEXT MORNING, as we headed for the Arctic Ocean, we spotted four yellow tents, one beige tent, and three canoes off to our left. I heard the woman before I saw her.

  “Hi there!” she shouted across the river.

  We grew nervous. We had almost forgotten how to greet a stranger and weren’t sure that we wanted to; the solitude had become familiar. We contemplated not stopping at all, but the woman was insistent. Why is she being so loud?

  We changed course and headed in.

  “Where are you from?” she called.

  As we got closer to her waving arms, I could see they were both wrapped in gauze. One hand was enveloped in a bright white mitten.

  She chatted but did not refer to her condition. A second woman clambered down from the tents to reach us. This was George Drought’s party, the second woman said. Drought was a well-traveled Arctic paddler who had met Levi in Toronto and given him a series of annotated maps of the river. We had been following his arrows and triangles for weeks. That day, he lay in his tent with facial burns and possible lung damage. The woman who greeted us was his wife, Barbara. Her chattiness was a product of painkillers.

  George and some of his clients — he and Barbara guided trips in the summers — had been cooking oatmeal inside their massive beige “tundra tunnel” that morning. When Barbara came in she noticed right away that the stove didn’t sound right. It hissed below a large pot, the one they always used, but the windscreen wasn’t in the correct position and the fuel bottle sat too close to the flame. She walked over to the stove, and as she reached for the pot to remove it, a loud boom erupted as the bottle burst into flames. Fire engulfed the tent. It vaporized the roof and blasted George’s face with a fierce heat. The flames melted most of Barbara’s pants and shirt from her body — she immediately started picking the melted plastic from her skin. Her chest, legs, and arms, now exposed to the air, began to blister, but her left arm was much worse than the rest of her body. She headed to the water to cool her burns, while one of the clients, an emergency physician from British Columbia, treated George for shock and tended the wounds on his face. She worried that he had inhaled the heat into his lungs. One other man had minor burns on his hand, but everyone else in the group of eight was okay. The physician then bandaged Barbara’s arms — the left one was already swelling like a football — and gave her morphine tablets for the pain.

  We arrived an hour later.

  While we sat dazed and drifting, listening to the physician’s story and wondering what to make of the bandaged woman in front of us, the rest of the group waited for a Medevac. The helicopter would arrive shortly to take Barbara and George to the closest medical station, in the town of Baker Lake. The remaining members of the group were comfortable enough to complete the last three days of the trip on their own.

  After thirty-nine days on the tundra, these were the first people we had seen. If we had arrived two hours later, they would have been gone. We asked how we could help: Did they need food? Help carrying something out? Someone to stay for a while? A phone? But the only help they needed was hundreds of kilometers away and approaching fast. Another point for satellite technology. As I later read on the Widjiwagan website, “Camp is literally just a phone call away.” Technology makes us feel as if we aren’t so far away after all. It tethers us to the perceived safety of home, which alters the psychology of a trip, but it’s more than psychology; George and Barbara were about to be saved.

  There was nothing to do but keep going.

  We stopped for lunch an hour later. We yanked crackers and oily cheese from our lunch barrel as the helicopter flew over our heads.

  THE OCEAN REACHED our noses by midafternoon. The ripples on the water had subsided and created glass conditions, but the sea hung in the air all day. We camped 20 kilometers from the delta that would officially empty us into the ocean, but we had already started dipping our fingers over the side to taste for salt.

  We had been running tough rapids and traveling every day for almost two weeks. We were slightly ahead of schedule, which I wasn’t thrilled about. I would have preferred time to hike and explore than go full steam ahead for so long; however, I couldn’t deny that the ocean was a big unknown, and we were better to err on the side of caution with our schedule.

  The string of good paddling days had tired us out, and the next morning we slept an hour later than usual. I woke up feeling sluggish and impatient. We needed a break. I waited for breakfast and checked the map. The farther we got into the sandy delta, the less accurate the maps would be. We needed to stay in a main channel, but the ribbons of the river curved in all directions.

  After breakfast, Drew gathered us together. He was Leader of the Day that day, but we didn’t usually need to meet.

  “I’d like everyone with their paddling partners today,” he said. He explained that we were heading into bigger water with a bigger margin of uncertainty and that it would be best if we stuck to our most reliable teams. This was not an unreasonable idea, but something in the way Drew delivered the instructions set me off. He was Leader of the Day — a role designed to ease the group process — not Dictator of the Day. It was not his place to give us instructions.

  “Are you telling us who to paddle with?” I asked.

  “I guess I am. I think it’s best.”

  Drew’s plan was motivated by emotion rather than logic, or so I thought, and I didn’t want to obey him. Just like the day Tim and I crossed the river to find the girls’ camp and he tried to stop us.

  Anger constricted my chest, and although I tried to stay calm, I wasn’t very successful. I said that it was not his role to give orders and that his orders didn’t make sense. It was these small things that ignited maximum frustration in me when fatigue set in. “Fine,” I finished petulantly, and Jen and I loaded our boat.

  We had an upwind battle that day, and rain soaked our collars. We stopped twice, once to fill a barrel with water before the river got salty and once to visit a hunting cabin surrounded by wolf skeletons — which hardly cheered the mood. By completing the final rapid on the river, we had entered a zone that could be accessed by oceangoing
motorboats. People from the small community of Gjoa Haven — our final destination, still over 200 kilometers away — could visit by boat as well as snowmobile. The cabin contained fresh plywood and notes from winter travelers.

  By 4:00 p.m., we had called it quits. Drew made the final call on a campsite, which was a dismal choice among bad options. Flat, boggy, barely above water level, and covered in goose shit.

  “Goose Shit Island,” Jen called from the bank.

  We wandered around in the muck. No one felt committed to it, but paddling was not much better than sleeping in the silt and poo.

  Levi spoke up first.

  “It seems a shame to choose this site. It won’t be good for a day off or a weather day if we stay.”

  I could see Drew was thinking carefully about this. He tended to give Levi’s opinions extra weight.

  “We could pack up and paddle on,” Levi continued.

  Oh boy, I thought, here we go.

  Levi kick-started a discussion: why to stay, why to go. Drew was inclined to agree with Levi, even though he had made the call to stop — and for the second time that day, I was annoyed. Levi’s word had come to mean more than anyone else’s, and that upset me. Tim had asked Drew to stop calling our rotating leadership position the Levi of the Day, saying “we all have expertise to contribute.” Tim and Levi were equally strong paddlers, four of us had northern experience, and we all had good problem-solving skills. Levi didn’t need the extra authority, and he didn’t want it. Yet one sentence from him could change everything. That night, because of Levi’s hesitation, Drew might have asked us to pack all our soggy bags again and head off in search of a less terrible site. In a delta.