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Paddlenorth

Page 15

by Jennifer Kingsley


  After needless discussion, in which Tim said nothing and I took deep breaths, we stayed. The calm, sunny days felt like years ago.

  Alie and I cooked that evening, and my irritation simmered. I wondered what the highlights of this trip were for Alie, but I didn’t ask. Lately she seemed keen on as much sleep as possible, and I could think of better places to go on a relaxing holiday. Our cooking styles didn’t match either. We were like dance partners out of step, always treading on each other’s toes.

  At least Jen and I were getting on okay, or so I thought.

  I decided it was just one of those days — which I have more often in the city — when it’s best to go to bed and try again tomorrow.

  THE OCEAN GAVE itself away by turning our surroundings from silt back into rock. We burst from the river on Day 41, and the landscape snapped from shallow soil to scoured stone. Salt clung to the air and to the shafts of our paddles. The water took on a new blue, despite the overcast sky. A north wind blew, but not too strongly, so we tucked behind an island and headed out into the thick of it. The rock around us, while flat and scrubbed, appeared as if through a prism: white, pink, gray, green. We reached the little island by lunchtime, and got out to take a look and have some food.

  The eastern side, where we landed, formed a low peninsula that we could easily crest to look north toward our goal. The island sloped up on the west side to form a smooth dome, striated by glaciers and too inhospitable to let much plant growth develop. By the time we finished our bannock, the wind had strengthened. Time to camp.

  Drew, Tim, and I started with a wrestling match. We tackled each other to the ground and laughed amidst a flurry of fake side slams and piledrivers. It lasted until Drew’s wicked elbow drop accidentally connected with my face and sent a gush of blood from my nose. I sat down in a patch of lichen and staunched the flow with a handful of wet moss. Tim took a photo for posterity and to show everyone back home how tough the trip really was. Then we set up the tents and climbed into them. We slept for three hours, until it was time for supper.

  “It will be hard to make the distance out here,” Levi observed over dinner.

  “A small wind for this place is too much for us,” Tim said.

  We sat around the stove and contemplated our new position. Jen picked at a seam of micalike rock. The polished stone all around us was shot through with lines of different color and consistency. Too bad none of us knew anything about geology.

  “Good thing it’s a nice island,” I said.

  Drew headed down to the water to do the dishes. He had used pure water from the barrel for tea but brackish water from the ocean to boil the pasta. We sat in the mixing zone where fresh water from the river floated on the surface, but it wasn’t pure enough to drink anymore.

  I woke the next morning to Drew’s voice outside the tent I shared with Levi. He called out in a high, whiny falsetto, “Housekeeping!” Levi and I burst out laughing. “You want fresh water?” he continued. Amazing that I could be so irritated by someone and then like him so much in the same twenty-four hours.

  The wind hadn’t died at all overnight. We weren’t going anywhere.

  After a pancake breakfast, I took off on my own to explore the island. It was shaped like a turtle. Its rocky head jutted east into the waves and took ten minutes to walk across. The sandy neck housed our kitchen and food cache, and we traversed it hourly to gauge the wind. Our tents were tucked into the turtle’s right shoulder, from which its shell rose smoothly. I climbed to the top of the island and looked east, where the massive sandy plain of the Back River delta looked two-dimensional, like an aerial photograph. Some of that sand, molded by a labyrinth of waterways, had traveled as far as we had. Silt from the banks of the Baillie mixed with soil knocked loose by Back’s boat in 1834. By the time the Inuit moved into the watershed, that delta had already been building for centuries. Below me, lumps of granite rose from the ocean like the backs of whales in white, pink, and black. The weather and glaciers had beaten the surrounding cliffs and peninsulas into animal skins; they looked like zebra stripes and shadows on a cheetah’s flank.

  I took a few hours to explore all the way around the island. I hadn’t seen anyone but my companions in more than a month — except for our odd encounter with the Burned People — but I still needed my alone time. You can spend weeks in the solitude of the tundra without ever being alone, or you can arrive home to realize that you didn’t spend enough time with someone from your tiny group. For example, even in our society of six, I rarely kicked around camp with Jen; we paddled together, but usually only on days with wind or white water that required focus. We spent a lot of camp time in a group, so closer bonding with one person didn’t come easily.

  The island was perfect for a solo adventure because of its relative safety. I didn’t think about bears or getting lost. I picked a few samples of plants to look up in our field guide and found a small pond out of sight and out of the wind. I watched the cotton grass bob and wrote in my journal until I got sleepy. I would return to that pond many times over the coming days.

  Nothing had changed with the weather by the next day. Drew’s group journal entry joked about our predicament:

  Future note for ocean paddlers: if you don’t want to drink from puddles then don’t camp on an island. There are no lakes on small islands. Just lots of big rocks and small rocks and flat rocks and pink rocks. We even had to move some rocks in order to tie down the canoes! It’s windy out here folks!

  We had committed the ultimate rookie move by stranding ourselves mid-ocean with no source of fresh water. Tim and I hauled a barrel up to some of the rainwater ponds and filled it using a bailer. With a huge stretch of water between us and our final destination, the wind had us well and truly stuck. We made the most of our time as the hours became days. We slept a lot, played Boggle, looked for mountain sorrel to nibble on, and stood on the windward side of the island watching the impressive whitecaps. I read three books. Progress was out of the question. Jen and Tim reached new heights in camp cooking with the invention of bannogies (bannock pouches filled with instant potatoes and cheese) and a date-apple-chocolate-banana-walnut pie of sorts. One morning, we sat around long after breakfast discussing the true meaning of forgiveness. Then we got out the kite.

  A kite is the perfect toy for an Arctic trip. It is small and light and needs the very thing you don’t: wind. We flew our zippy two-handled kite high over the island and crashed it into the granite over and over again until it was too crippled to fly.

  Those days on the island gave us time to rest and maybe too much time to think. Tim’s grief caught up with him there. We hadn’t had supper yet; it might have been seven o’clock. The sun slanted toward the horizon, a destination it would reach in three or four hours, but the days were getting shorter by then. I approached Tim’s tent and met the sun’s glare at eye level. The bugs weren’t bad, but I still paused by the tent door to take off my jacket and untie my boots. I yanked the zipper, dropped to my knees inside, and stuffed my jacket in the corner while kicking off my boots and rolling all the way in — my hand already closing the mesh behind me. The sun pressed the yellow walls, thickening the air and releasing the damp from Tim’s sleeping bag.

  Tim lay on his right side with his chest to the wall; he was sobbing again. I don’t want to be near this anymore, I thought. The clarity of my inner voice surprised me. Tim gulped the heavy air. I almost walked out on him, hating him for the heaviness that had followed us all that way. I lay down beside him while he cried into his sleeping bag. The light in the tent was hazy, and I imagined the Dark Cloud of Tim, pushing down on us, reaching for me. I didn’t blink. I would wait the requisite few minutes to show that I cared and then get the hell out of there. The comforting made no difference anyway. When I sat up, I looked over at Tim’s face and saw that he looked very thin. His flesh had been sucked away by forty-four days of labor and hard grief. I squirmed out into the vestibule and pulled my boots back on. Sun glared at me from the rocks. Dr
y stems clung to my clothes — Tundra Velcro, we called it. I set off to rejoin the others.

  EVENTUALLY, THE SUBJECT of getting home crept into our discussions. We’d been on the island for four days. We couldn’t help but think about our departure, but had no idea how or when we would get home. Levi had started checking the wind at all hours of the night and puzzling over his barometer. Our original plan was to get picked up at Montreal Island (two-thirds of the way up the huge inlet we had just entered) by a boat from the community of Gjoa Haven — we had commercial airline flights back to Yellowknife later in the month — but perhaps there was a better pickup spot that we could reach back at the river mouth. The phone gave us so many tantalizing options for creating a new plan, getting information, controlling the situation. But the land cannot be controlled.

  We decided to wait. And cut down on our food consumption.

  CHAPTER 15

  HUNGER

  DURING THE DAYS on the island, I often thought about food. The longer the expedition and the hungrier you get, the more engrossing a topic it becomes. After a month and a half, I had pages of notes for a book on the subject. The slim volume would be about food preparation for wilderness expeditions. I brainstormed the chapters and listed diagrams I could draw of different stove setups and cooking fire techniques. I would compare modern and historical meal plans and relate the backstory of expedition food, including pemmican and limes to prevent scurvy and the trade routes that supplied early trips with cocoa. Recipes would share pages with photographs and personal stories. Titles would be pithy and ironic: Principles of Baking and the Poofiness Factor, 101 Things to Do with Bannock, Food Disasters: Cream of Wheat.

  Food provides a thin cushion against forbidding uncertainty. There is comfort in homemade granola and fresh-baked bread, and confidence in the kitchen breeds confidence on the river. I learned that the hard way on my first long trip with Tim, in 1999. When we packed for the trip, we measured out healthy portions of everything, but we didn’t use any guidelines. We eyeballed it. We made a rotating menu and simply added everything up. I remember counting out the salt: 1 tsp + ½ tsp + ½ tsp + 1½ tsp . . . Unnecessary hair-splitting arithmetic, but we didn’t know how else to do it. We found some recipes in old camping books and invented others. I came up with a particularly vile formula for curried rice and raisins. Out on the river, hunger settled in after the first week. Our snacks did not match our appetites, and they tested my honesty. From the bow, when it was my turn to split up the trail mix, I resisted scooping most of the M&Ms into my share: If I take more than half, he will never know.

  On the sixth day of our trip, while paddling across blustery Lake St. Joseph, a motorboat pulled up beside us. A gorgeous blond fishing guide with a ponytail and mirrored sunglasses shot us a smile. He had his dog in the boat with him. I suddenly felt shy about my bed head and dirty T-shirt. “You want a tow?” he said. The wind was almost too much for us. I threw him the bowline but forgot that three pairs of my underwear were tied to it so they could dry on the bow deck. The flimsy cotton panties flopped into the water, and I fumbled desperately to untie them while my face turned bright red.

  That night, the guide, Bruce, fed us moose steaks and leftover coleslaw from the fly-in fishing lodge where he worked. I thought he was only slightly less cool when he put on a cassette tape called Jazz Loon. The next day, he showed us around the place, took us fishing, and sent us away with some leftovers and an extra can of naphtha gas for our cook stove. Despite my vegetarian tendencies, memories of the moose meat only piqued my hunger over the next few days as we kept to our menu of Alfredo sauce from the Bulk Barn and couscous so dry we had to focus not to aspirate it.

  By Day 12, it was time for a treat. We deserved it, and I wanted to surprise Tim with something special. I pulled out our only stash of chocolate, a package we kept in the wannigan along with our cooking gear. A few chocolate turtles, some peppermint patties, yogurt-covered raisins, and one extra-large bar of Lindt milk chocolate with hazelnuts hid between pots and cutlery. I spread a sampling on our Frisbee along with a sprig of fresh wintergreen and brought it to the campfire.

  The chocolate tasted like pure energy, and it promised to return flesh to our bones. Flavor saturated my tongue. At least two minutes passed before I started burping. My gut began to lurch and vapors dried the back of my mouth, but I refused to look up. We each took another piece and ate in silence. Finally, with mounting digestive upset and corrosive breath, we met each other’s eyes and faced the truth. The chocolate had been contaminated by naphtha from a leaky fuel canister. Bruce’s gift was, in fact, a curse.

  “Could we eat it anyway?” But we knew the answer. We’d have to burn it all, the only free, extra calories for many miles.

  We dumped every morsel into the fire. Flames wrapped the glistening chocolate. Sugar and gas accelerated the blaze. I actually shed a few tears over the funeral pyre.

  We burped naphtha for two days after that.

  We were so far behind schedule that we skipped our re-supply and survived on half of our already inadequate rations. I remember pausing in the middle of a windy lake to choke back powdery soy nuts and chickpeas. Sometimes we stopped for guilty spoonfuls of peanut butter, hoping we would have enough to finish the trip. And that was before I got Giardia, aka “beaver fever.” That tenacious intestinal parasite got to my food before my body could absorb it and kept me running over the banks and into the bushes up to ten times a day.

  Tim eased his hunger by imagining, out loud, the most extravagant ice cream sundaes. “Three scoops, no, four scoops. Chocolate, chocolate chip, Rocky Road, caramel.”

  “Stop it. Seriously,” I grumbled. My hunger was best contained by silence or distractions. His word paintings of hamburgers, pastas, milkshakes, and sandwiches made everything worse.

  We survived that trip by catching walleye and buying a few groceries from the limited and expensive selection when we traveled through the Ojibway community of Eabametoong, also called Fort Hope. Outside the store, we ate a container of strawberry cream cheese in one sitting. When we ran into fishermen further along our route, we would hang around and casually mention our food issues until they tossed us a bag of dried fruit or some biscuits. At one fishing lodge, a couple of women who ran the kitchen invited us in for tea. They put out a plate of fresh-baked cookies, and we ate them all before the ladies even sat down. Later on, when we got really desperate, I orchestrated a stakeout. We had met some anglers who were flying out the next day, so we took a detour to casually camp across from their cabin.

  “This will never work,” Tim said, but I felt confident they would have castoffs. I piled our campfire high that night, to make sure they saw us, and waited into the dusk for them to come and drop off their leftover groceries. Tim finally went to bed, hungry but smug. “I told you,” he said. I had to admit defeat until I heard the drone of a motorboat early the next morning. I grabbed my clothes and darted out of the tent, trying to look casual.

  “Good morning!” I called to the man in the boat.

  “Our plane is on its way. Thought you could use some of this.” He unloaded a full box of food. Bingo!

  We lounged for the rest of the morning over Nutri-Grain bars, scrambled Egg Beaters, corn muffins with fresh butter, and instant vanilla coffee.

  By the time my dad picked us up on the Ogoki River in August, I was down to 122 pounds from my usual 140. We were skeletons with big grins.

  ON OUR NEXT long trip, in 2002, Levi was particularly worried about our food rations. He had found a book about a trip on the Dubawnt River, Death on the Barrens by George Grinnell, and he read it as a cautionary tale. It had frightened him.

  “We’ve got to bring enough,” he would say every time we met to discuss the trip. “We’re going to burn a lot of calories, more than you’d think. We need to plan for that.”

  He asked everyone in the group that summer to read it, and the book became part of our tripping lore, one more stream in the watershed of our experience. Grinnell’
s story is a memoir from his troubled youth, and it reads like a psychological thriller. It is hard to say how accurate his version is, but as young paddlers, we were affected by his words.

  It was the summer of 1955, and three canoes sat by the shore of Black Lake, Saskatchewan. Arthur Moffatt’s group of six men, including him, aged thirty-six, and five others, aged eighteen to twenty-two, had been trying to leave for a week. The food shipment hadn’t arrived, so they replaced three months’ worth of provisions with whatever they could find in the village of Stony Rapids. Then they forgot three paddles and had to go back to town for them. The weather kicked up, and the overloaded canoes took on water every time the group tried to embark.

  “There’s no hurry,” Moffatt said, “we’ve got all summer.”1 But they had no idea what they were in for. They would need every possible day if they were going to make it down the Dubawnt River to Baker Lake, 1,400 kilometers distant, before cold and hunger overtook them. The only other non-native explorers who had traveled in that area, to their knowledge, had been Samuel Hearne in 1772 and the Tyrrell brothers in 1893.

  Arthur Moffatt had experience on northern rivers like Ontario’s Albany, which he’d paddled alone at age seventeen and subsequently guided several trips on, but this Dubawnt odyssey was more ambitious. Privately, he wondered if his group was up to the challenge. His second-in-command, Frederick Pessl, called Skip, had traveled with him before. So had James Franck, the youngest paddler and the most practical (he was the only one who carried matches in a waterproof container, according to Grinnell). Bruce LeFavour, the second youngest at nineteen, had brought along his reluctant college roommate, Joe Lanouette. These two would be the bowmen, along with George Grinnell, whose book would later etch the journey into the minds of paddlers everywhere, for better or for worse.

 

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