Moffatt’s crew of young men came from different walks of life, but they had one thing in common: when they went North, they followed their leader. But as the pre-departure days dragged on and the delays continued, the men grew restless. “If I were superstitious,” said Skip, “I would almost believe we were not meant to go down the Dubawnt.”2
Moffatt often thought of his family back home. Before he had kissed his wife and two daughters goodbye for the summer, he had doubled his life insurance policy.
It was 7:00 p.m. on July 2 when they finally pulled away from shore.
The first portage took a week. Caribou trails led off in all directions, and the Canadian Shield created rocky barricades as Moffatt’s men stumbled through a maze of small lakes and tangles of scrubby spruce. They struggled with heavy loads and battled an onslaught of blackflies and mosquitoes. Progress was painfully slow, and Moffatt, who had been feeling “sad, apprehensive and gloomy about the summer,”3 continued to worry. He recorded this in his journal, parts of which were later published in Sports Illustrated magazine. The physical work punished him. His neck strained from carrying his 39 kilograms (86 pounds) of movie-camera equipment on a tumpline around his forehead, and he pulled so hard on the strap that even when he lay down at the end of the day, his elbows wouldn’t straighten.
They weren’t far from Black Lake, just shy of the Northwest Territories border, when the hunger began. Pickings were slim and monotonous. They had a hundred bags of oatmeal for breakfasts, dry pilot biscuits with peanut butter, jam, and cheese for lunch, and, every day, a dinner called “glop”: two boxes of Catelli macaroni, two tins of tomato paste, two packages of dehydrated soup, two cans of Spork or Spam, and one gallon of water. Other simple stores like mashed potatoes, onions, and prunes provided the only variety.
Moffatt cooked most of the meals and distributed all of the rations, but after the first two weeks, the men grew hungry before, during, and after every meal. They circled the supper pot each night and tried to snag the largest pieces of meat with the ladle. Only tea and sugar were not controlled, so they’d drink cup after cup until Moffatt made new rules. After that, they wet their spoons to snag more sugar crystals. They stopped sharing their extra snacks and tobacco. Peter Franck began saving pieces of his biscuits in old jam containers. The oatmeal sat in canvas packs and grew moldy.
As July gave way to August, food supplies dwindled and tension grew. At the same time, a strange peace settled over the group. Grinnell was perhaps the most affected. He came from a wealthy but troubled family and had served in the military before joining the expedition. Possibly because of this, he considered himself physically superior to the other men and didn’t bring gloves or a warm sleeping bag. He followed Moffatt into the wilderness, he wrote, because he wanted to change himself, to “be born again, strong, courageous, heroic, self-sacrificing, obliging, witty, in general, the most loveable person in the world.”4 By August, Grinnell and most of the others had succumbed to a sort of delusion. They felt they were in paradise. As the food in their packs diminished, some became convinced they could sustain themselves with wild foods. Two of them had brought guns and started hunting caribou, while others fished or gathered berries. The wild feasts were like a holy communion for Grinnell, but the season of plenty in the North is painfully brief. Winter was already galloping toward them.
The days grew shorter, but instead of pressing his team onward, Moffatt took long walks in the morning, filmed, and stayed up late at night. It seems nothing — not hunger, lack of provisions, increasingly cold nights, or the caribou’s southward migration — could rouse him. According to Grinnell, only Peter Franck kept a grip on reality and urged the group to keep moving. Nobody would listen. For half of August, they voted to take “holidays” and went nowhere.
By August 29, three days before they’d planned to complete the trip, they had traveled barely half the distance. The caribou were long gone, the weather changed overnight, and the men were trapped on the land. Dreams of plenty were a thing of the past. The remaining caribou steaks were “full of grubs and cysts of one kind or another,” wrote Moffatt. He dreamed more often about home, but refused to take the blame for their food situation. Skip and the others had taken back some control over rations by then. Moffatt insisted that “if I had been able to cook all meals, there would be no problem.”5
By early September, Grinnell was entertaining thoughts of deserting the expedition and dying on the tundra in the arms of the “wonderful mother earth who gives birth to us all.” He wrote that “death in paradise seemed preferable to life in civilization.”6 But his wilderness ecstasy alternated with panic attacks. He feared for his life.
The men were still over 300 kilometers from Baker Lake when it started to snow. Moffatt began filling his diary with lists of supplies and meditations about his family. He’d passed through paradise and found something darker on the other side. On September 10 he wrote, “We’re all running scared.”7
Four days later, all three boats plunged over a waterfall the paddlers hadn’t bothered to scout. Two of the boats capsized. Only Franck and Grinnell stayed upright. Moffatt and his bowman had been in the water the longest, but the other two swimmers, Skip Pessl and Bruce LeFavour, were being swept downstream, so Grinnell and Franck rushed to them first. By the time the rescue was over, Grinnel had also fallen in the water, and Moffatt was severely hypothermic.
On shore, Grinnell unpacked a sleeping bag, removed his own sopping clothes, and climbed inside. Before falling unconscious, he remembers calling to Moffatt, “Get undressed and get in this sleeping bag with me.”8 But Moffatt was too cold to move and Grinnell too weak to help him. By the time Grinnell awoke, Franck had started a fire using his waterproof matches, put Moffatt in another sleeping bag, and attempted to resuscitate him. It was too late.
The survivors spent the night in each other’s sleeping bags, nearly frozen to death. The next morning, they laid Moffatt’s body under an overturned canoe and sprinted, half-starved, toward Baker Lake. They paddled big lakes and shot dangerous rapids, covering 300 kilometers in eight days. The day before they reached town, they ate their last meal — the remainder of a jar of curry powder, split five ways.
When the five young men stumbled into Baker Lake, an RCMP officer made a quick assessment: “So,” he said, “you lost your sense of reality.”9
LIKE ANY MEMOIR, Grinnell’s story has been criticized. Everyone has a different reason for committing a journey to paper, and no one has the same memory. Whatever the truth, Grinnell’s account helped solidify Moffatt’s posthumous reputation for incompetence, perhaps unfairly. Like most disasters, the outcome was the cumulative result of mistakes that can only be tallied in hindsight. But the story, aside from encouraging us to bring lots of nutritious food, made me think about the expectations we bring to the wilderness. Perhaps these men’s first mistake wasn’t a lack of material supplies. Maybe they fell victim to the trapline of stories and stereotypes we have created about the northern landscape: wilderness as healer, transformer, provider, paradise.
CHAPTER 16
STANDBY
THE TEMPERATURE HOVERED between 8 and 11 degrees Celsius during our days on the island, and the wind blew steadily. There was no question of going anywhere, so there was no point in getting impatient. We stayed huddled in our extra layers and amused ourselves in our little granite universe. Levi began checking the wind more and more often. He finally had to admit that he couldn’t control the weather with his barometer.
Early on the fifth day, the wind had died enough to quell the whitecaps early in the morning. We made a break for it: packed the tents, downed some gorp, loaded the boats — but the wind came up again. We reversed the process and set up camp once more.
We were tired from too much rest, so we played Sardines (like hide and seek) and Land (which involves throwing sticks). By lunchtime, Drew, Levi, and Tim were sitting next to each other and lobbing rocks at the lunch bucket. First one to get a stone to stay on the lid wins
. We were running out of things to do.
Drew suggested we use the Dead Girls’ phone to call our contact in Gjoa Haven, Charlie Cahill, and we agreed. It was Charlie’s job to organize a boat charter to pick us up from Montreal Island the following week. The agreed-upon date was fast approaching, and we were over 100 kilometers from the pickup point. The least we could do was give him a heads-up. Drew retreated to the tent to get away from the wind and start a conversation with the outside world.
Through the tent wall I heard the hellos and then Drew’s surprised question: “Ice?” he said. “Do you think it will blow out anytime soon?”
My breath caught in my throat.
Drew emerged moments later. “Gjoa Haven is completely iced-in,” he told us. “There aren’t any boats on the water.”
At first, I thought the ice was already forming in Gjoa Haven, that winter had begun. But during the first week in August, the villagers were still waiting for spring breakup. Too late for snowmobiles, too early for boats.
“So nobody can come and get us until the ice blows out?” Jen asked.
“He said that the ice is really late this year,” Drew replied. “It normally breaks up by August 4.” I laughed. It was August 8.
Drew explained that Gjoa Haven needed a strong north wind to clear its harbor, but it was the north wind that kept us stuck on the island. The village needed something stronger, but we couldn’t move until the wind dropped.
Charlie suggested we continue north when we could. As an afterthought, he mentioned that we should keep our eyes open for a family near Montreal Island. They were running out of food, and he was trying to get a helicopter out to them. Another group whose trip wasn’t going as planned — this time, because of ice and weather.
After that call, we had more information, and although nothing had really changed, it made us feel like we needed to do something. We would spend a long time yet discussing what could be done. It didn’t seem possible that the answer was nothing.
We skipped dessert that night. No more extras.
Levi awoke at four o’clock the next morning, and conditions looked promising, but within an hour, whitecaps crowned each wave. Alie and I did an inventory and discovered we had twelve days of food left. We decided to call Drew’s dad and start researching options for flying out. Given our ignorance about the behavior of sea ice, seeking outside advice seemed like a good plan.
We pulled out the girls’ phone. Its one battery still worked, but the battery symbol showed only one bar out of three. There was no spare, and the battery couldn’t be swapped for the fully charged one in our phone. I agreed that we should make the call and then regretted it. In case of an emergency, we would need every drop of power. Drew promised to keep the call short.
WE HAD APPOINTED Greg our safety coordinator back in the spring. At the time he was the vice president of IBM’s Global Services, a job with huge responsibility that called for a tech-savvy leader who could be reached at any hour. Greg is logical, reliable, and organized. He also loves canoeing and had done some short trips closer to home. We had promised not to call unless there was an emergency, so two weeks before, when he and his wife had received Drew’s first phone call late at night, he’d imagined the worst. Our second call, on August 9, wasn’t as shocking. Rather than feeling scared, he felt activated. We were iced-in and needed ground support. Greg was on the job.
He established a command room in the den of his house and dispatched Drew’s wife, Hilary, to buy several huge maps that covered Gjoa Haven, Montreal Island, and Chantrey Inlet. She laid them all out on the floor while Greg fired up two computers and got on the phone. I need to understand the situation, he thought. He started with the temperature, wind, and barometric pressure in Gjoa Haven. Then he contacted Charlie Cahill and anyone else in the village who might be able to help, including local RCMP and the wildlife officer. He also reached the air charter company in Yellowknife, ice analysts at Environment Canada, and, eventually, all of our parents.
MEANWHILE, OBLIVIOUS TO the flurry of activity we’d triggered back home, we headed to bed. The next morning at 2:30, the beginning of our seventh day on the island, Tim, Alie, and Drew stood on the shore looking north and assessing the conditions. The wind was still blowing — but less so. Perhaps it was dying, though it was hard to tell in the dark. They decided to wake us up.
“We’re going for it,” Tim said from outside our vestibule. He ruffled the nylon. “Let’s go, you’ve been sleeping for a week.”
After a quick handful of trail mix, we were off.
Orange began to fringe the horizon as we bobbed up and over each wave. The sea had subsided somewhat but not entirely. The sun rose from the water, above where I imagined the delta; it touched our cheeks, promising warmth. I fixed my eyes on the water horizon and set my arms in motion. We had spent six days on that island, and we needed to move. I hoped the wind wouldn’t force us back to camp again.
We hit a rhythm and didn’t falter. Every minute took us north, and with each passing stroke, the water flattened until we floated through a calm so complete it was hard to believe the transformation. From a relentless storm, stillness emerged.
We stopped for more food and the coffee ritual that Jen and Alie couldn’t do without. We ate lunch on the water and had a quick conference about shortcutting across a large unnamed bay. The weather seemed stable — though we’d been wrong before — but we needed to make progress. We decided to go for it. During the afternoon, the separation between sea and sky vanished; water appeared above us, air below. Silver and blue. Our rhythm dropped only once, when a ringed seal broke the surface. We swiveled around to each other, mouthing, “Wow!”
A week off had weakened us. My arms burned by midday, but we had to keep going. We paddled well into the evening, until we’d made half the distance to our endpoint, about 50 kilometers. We’d barely spoken since morning. A shallow pan of sedimentary rock settled for home that night, inches above high tide. Tim took his boots off and waded, heronlike, into a shallow pond in search of drinking water. Silt billowed at the slightest disturbance, and little water critters darted every which way. Tim walked forward at a smooth pace and dipped the bailer into every clear spot he could reach, but zooplankton still flicked around in the barrel when he brought it back to camp.
We slept for four hours with a mixture of peace and anxiety that the wind would return. I awoke with sore arms and a crinkly, sunburned nose. A slight headwind rippled across the water, and I prayed it wouldn’t build. We had at least another 50 kilometers to go, so we packed up and pulled away from shore at 4:00 a.m.
The headwind gave us pause before a second huge crossing, this time of Elliot Bay. As with the day before, we had planned to trace the shoreline for safety’s sake, since the wind could pick up anytime and leave us unprotected out there. But the crossing would save us at least 20 kilometers of zigzagging and island hopping, and we couldn’t resist. Levi checked the barometer one more time — “Steady” — and we agreed not to stop at all on the transect, not for seals or photos or because of fatigue.
Jen and I chatted to pass the time and somehow came around to communication styles and team dynamics. I think Jen surprised both of us when the conversation hit a nerve. Sometimes a person simply needs an opening, at the right time, to get something off her chest. It turned out that this woman — who had emerged as a cheerful force of optimism, who had become an incredible camp cook and solid bow paddler and had brought so many smiles to Tim’s face — well, she had some feedback for me, and she couldn’t contain it anymore. I wondered if the vast ocean and the canoe, where we didn’t have to look at each other, made it easier for her to open up, the way a long drive on an open road can.
“You take up all this space in the group,” she said. “You talk over people; you don’t give us room.”
I stayed quiet.
“You don’t listen. And I don’t feel like we make decisions together about how to paddle the rapids. I want to learn, but I’m not included.”
She paused.
“And you always get what you want but in a roundabout way. You’re subversive about it; you manipulate people.”
That last point hurt the most.
When she was finished, we let the rhythm of our paddles carry the conversation for a while. No way to take a break from each other and no way to stop traveling. The saddest part for me was the timing: Day 48. We could have done something about this. It had all built up for too long by then.
I resisted the urge to defend myself. She was right — a little angry just then, but not wrong. I had been impossibly stubborn at times. I had been pushy, though I hated that it had seemed manipulative to her. As for the white water, I hadn’t wanted Jen to see how it pushed the limits of my ability. If I was scared shitless, I didn’t want to pass that on to my partner. Sometimes, getting through safely took all of my focus.
The rest of my sadness was more private. It had been a challenging trip for all of us, and I had paid an extra price by feeling caught between Tim and everyone else. It was a lonely place to be, which Jen probably didn’t know. I watched Tim joke and play, and I was thankful to see his good mood increase bit by bit over the summer, but I also saw his ragged edges more than the others did. It confused me to be one step removed from someone else’s grief. I had loved Tim’s mum too, and I had been on the sidelines through the aftermath. In our eighth week of collective solitude, the six of us had been through so much, but that afternoon I realized what the costs might be. I had bulldozed Jen and the others sometimes. I had sacrificed some friendships. That is how I dealt with being a neighbor to grief.
The conversation ended well. Jen said her piece, and I absorbed some of it, shed a few tears, and let the rest sink into the water. One of the tundra’s lessons came in handy that afternoon: carry on, carry on.
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