A growing shadow of silver helped steer our attention to other matters. The sea ice Charlie had warned us about was on the horizon. Two hours later, our boats crept between the ice floes.
Jen turned to face me. “Our first sea ice! It looks different than on the lakes.”
It wasn’t like the freshwater ice we had seen earlier. Each floe stood a foot out of the water and sank about three feet below. Many chunks had snow layers on top. Each section of ice defined itself clearly, without any of the mush we saw on the lakes, and when the pieces hit each other, they thudded. None of the tinkling we had heard upstream.
We stopped on the Adelaide Peninsula, which Levi immediately termed a “bulbous isthmus.” The wind had dropped again, and we were further shielded by the ice, so the protected water north of the peninsula formed a heavenly stone-skipping pond. And the beach was covered with perfect stones.
I would have loved to lie in the sunny curve of the protected bay, but time was no longer on our side. We pushed through the ice for the rest of the afternoon, the day’s odometer clicked past 50 kilometers, and our final destination, just north of a small stream and across from Montreal Island, came into view. There was no sign of the family Charlie had mentioned.
“Land ho!” Drew called. “We are almost there; we can do this!”
Final days. From left to right: Jen, Drew, Levi, Tim, Alie. CREDIT: JENNIFER KINGSLEY
As if conjured up by Drew’s optimism, the wind awoke. Within ten minutes, we could hardly make headway. It took all of our strength to gain the small beach of our final destination. By the time we secured the boats, the conditions had grown too dangerous to paddle. Wind chopped the waves and pinned us in place.
We had done it.
“We’re here!”
“We made it!”
We jumped and hugged each other. Jen and I held each other’s arms and smiled. “Thank you,” I said. We shared a tent that night. Perhaps it wasn’t too late to make amends.
We had traded the ice-choked headwaters of the Baillie River for this icy bay. When I went through the motions of setting up camp, nothing felt more natural. I knew how many tugs it would take to free the nylon from my pack, and I flicked the tent poles out in a perfect arc to snap all the pieces together. I had achieved a sense of home; yet as soon as we landed at our final campsite (or so we thought), our objective changed again. It happened in an instant. For almost two months we had put our all into getting to that patch of ground. Now it was time to think about leaving altogether. Part of me was ready — past ready — but the rest of me felt rooted and unwilling to go.
Jenny on Day 52. CREDIT: DREW GULYAS
GREG HAD BEEN busy in Toronto. By the time we settled in near Montreal Island, he had two ice forecasters assigned to his case and was getting updates twice per day. He had begun reading digital ice maps and interpreting satellite images. He had chosen an aircraft to charter and was on a first-name basis with the owner of the air charter company. His inbox and phone hummed with messages from our families. Their responses ran the gamut. Tim’s dad sent an email far and wide to friends and family about our exciting situation: “Ah, the balance between adventure and danger!!” he said, and recommended that everyone buy a copy of Alie’s upcoming book. On the other end, at least one parent called Greg, nearly demanding that he send the plane and offering a blank check to cover the costs. That person’s opinion was clear: “Let’s get this done.”
Fortunately, Greg was not easily swayed from his mission, which he and Levi had thoroughly discussed before our departure. Greg had clear instructions from us about locations, dates, and contingencies. Any changes to our final exit plan would be ours to make, not his, unless circumstances dictated otherwise.
SOMETIME DURING OUR forty-eight-hour marathon, Levi had discovered how to send and receive text messages, which used less battery, and communication with Greg became part of our routine. Drew let slip that his dad had stopped going to his job at IBM so that he could work out the logistics of our exit. We started to get daily updates like “Gjoa Harbour 90% coverage, ice 4 ft. thick.”
In contrast to Greg’s hectic life in the command room, we had nothing to do but wait. I started yet another book — we had all read most of each other’s by then — and explored the stream by our camp. Drew and I headed up the stream together to find some good drinking water. We chatted a bit about the trip, and I was amazed to realize that in fifty days, Drew and I hadn’t talked one-on-one or paddled together very many times. I admired Drew for his courage and spirit, and I wanted to know him better. The river had changed all of us; we’d grown stronger and somehow shinier, but it showed more on him. I watched him stride over the slippery rocks with a barrel on his back and realized he had found his footing.
Near a riffle upstream, we discovered a fox den. Hard-packed earth, full of holes, mounded up above the permafrost. There wasn’t any activity, so I walked a few steps to the top of it and found a goose foot lying in the dirt. I picked it up and worked its rubbery joints with my fingers until Drew joined me. If we stood very, very still, we could hear the pups’ tiny yips and moans underground.
The next morning, as I leaned against the wannigan with a cup of tea in my hand, wolves slipped between the tents where everyone else was sleeping. They seemed to take everything in: me and the boats, the ice and the shadows, but if they made a sound as they blew through camp, I couldn’t hear it.
I wandered over the rocks and stopped to stretch my arms above my head. The air on my belly felt good. I climbed a small rise and looked north to check the progress of the ice. It had moved in overnight. When everyone else got up, I shared the news: “If that ice gets much closer, we could get too boxed in here, even for a plane.” It made sense to move to the island itself; we hoped one of its many bays would stay open.
Greg was poised to fly us out, which would cost more than $8,000. If he didn’t hear from us again, he would default to sending the plane a few days later, but we still had to make a decision for ourselves about how and when we wanted to end it. We could hold him off, wait it out, stick to the plan. Or we could get out while the clear weather lasted.
We packed our gear and crossed a kilometer or so of open water to set up camp behind two small islands. Upon our arrival, we received another message from Greg: “Move 1.5 km south into shelter of two small islands.” Exactly where we were already.
Later that day, another directive from the phone: “Do not attempt to swim to the mainland.”
“Do not attempt to swim to the mainland?” Tim repeated when he read the message. “Does he really think we would do something so ridiculous? We just paddled the most badass river in Nunavut. We’re not idiots.”
“That’s my dad for ya,” said Drew with a smile.“Captain Obvious.”
I could see the disconnect between Greg’s information and ours. He had satellite images and weather reports, and we had our senses and our wits. He wanted to send us helpful information, but his information was our environment. Our brief and broken conversations were attempts to bridge the gaps between his imagination and our experience, but the gulf was too wide. Yes, we were pinned in by sea ice and unsure how to get home, but we were warm, dry, fed, and not about to make a break for it by swimming. I cringed to think what some of the other parents and partners might be thinking. A text message on dying batteries, no matter how well crafted, wasn’t going to calm anybody. Without the phone, we wouldn’t have had to make a choice about how to leave. Our phone and PLB were supposed to be safety measures. They provided security, both practically and psychologically, but I had never contemplated their true power. They could threaten the very experience we were looking for.
Once a desire to get home took hold of some of us, it became increasingly difficult to wait. Drew wanted to be home with his wife, and Alie was also ready to head south. Even Tim was tired — not so much of the place, but of the trip and the group. Jen and I were supposed to be bridesmaids at a mutual friend’s wedding in Toronto a few days later,
but I still had mixed feelings about the decision to leave. My commitment to the original plan stayed strong. I felt like I was cheating on the river to think about leaving it. Levi was the only person who wanted, 100 percent, to wait out the ice and leave by boat. While some held a clear position on what to do, most of us, at least some of the time, felt unclear. It wasn’t so much that the group was divided, but that each of us was divided by our conflicting desires. It was a test of stamina to let the land decide our fate when we could take a semblance of control with one phone call. With that final decision, to fly or not to fly, we tested the bounds of consensus-based decision making. We considered every angle. The expense of the plane and the worries about food and ice were just the beginning. What about the poetry of our voyage, the commitment to see Gjoa Haven, and the execution of the boat exit? What about the fossil fuel emissions, the environmental ethics?
When we ended yet another discussion in stalemate, on Day 51, I grabbed the soap and headed to the beach. I stripped my clothes off into a stinky heap and marched into ice water that stabbed my ankles and thighs. Waves splashed the thin skin of my belly and squeezed my lungs and xylophone ribs. I would not let the ocean force me out. I would wash my hair, even as the water cinched a band of steel across my forehead. I tried to relax my neck and stop thinking about home.
CHAPTER 17
OVERTIME
ON JEN’S BIRTHDAY — August 15, Day 52 — we all took a walk together. With the end in sight, we clung to each other, despite our indecision. Every meal, hike, or sleep could be the last, depending on the ice. We passed a small group of caribou — there were at least twenty-five on the island with us — and I wondered what would happen to them over the coming winter. It was too late to be that far north. We climbed over granite boulders and across dry moss to the ridge looking north. The tundra’s spice rose briefly to our noses before the wind snatched it away. A shiny mat on the water extended north to the horizon and, to our dismay, curled around the south of the island as well.
George Back had also been stuck in the ice upon reaching Chantrey Inlet and Montreal Island. He stood at the same vantage points we did and marveled at the shards of ice that piled up on the beach below. Back monitored the ice constantly, hoping for openings that would allow him to follow his intended course, but the risk of a gale forcing ice against his boat and crushing it was too great. “We had therefore nothing for it,” he wrote, “but to yield to necessity, and wait submissively until nature should remove the barrier which she had placed.”1 When conditions allowed, he crawled north toward the Arctic coast despite constant fog and shifting ice; he badly wanted to fulfill his mission of mapping what was then a blank on the British map. He held out as long as possible, but finally the late date and poor conditions forced him to turn around on August 15. “I shall not attempt to describe what were my feelings at finding my endeavours baffled in every quarter,” he wrote. “Every resource was exhausted, and it was vain to expect that any efforts, however strenuous, could avail against the close-wedged ice, and the constant fogs which enveloped every thing in impenetrable obscurity . . . even in the ordinary pursuits of men, with all the appliances of civilized life to boot, the execution is rarely equal to the conception.”2 Back assembled his men, planted the British flag, gave three cheers, and headed home.
We continued down to the shoreline, where the ice pounded the beach. Overhead, a hawk circled and screeched. The bird came low and called repeatedly into the fierce wind. About 100 meters farther on, we found her nest, where two big fledglings perched on the edge with their faces to the wind. They were rough-legged hawks, who spend the breeding season in the Arctic, and their speckled plumage blended into the rocks and sand. If they didn’t fly yet, they would have to learn soon.
While we wandered the island, Greg was trying to put the final details in place for our exit plan, but he couldn’t reach us. A day had passed, and his requests for a reply went unanswered. He was flying blind and didn’t know if our battery had died or if something else had gone wrong. “That’s when things felt like they were unraveling,” he later told me. He sent messages about the ice, the boat, and the plane, but we never received them. The messages got jammed up somehow and Greg had to work with the company’s IT support to clear the system and start again. By that point, he had sent six updates to our families showcasing the maps from his new friends at Environment Canada. He was amazed at what a man could get for his tax dollars.
On the island, we tried to stay in the moment, not knowing when the end would come or how. We still had a chance to call off the plane, but we’d have to do it soon. In celebration of Jen’s birthday, Alie and I made a double-decker marble cake with strawberry filling and lemon icing, complete with birthday candles. We filled her tent with balloons and then piled inside to play games and drink rum. We presented her with a cardboard Bingo game we had brought for the occasion, in case we were still out on the trip for the big day. It only had a four-by-four grid, so we called it Ingo.
The next morning was our last chance to call Greg and stick to the original plan of waiting a few more days for a boat. We had been discussing the decision for three days, and by then I hated the sound of my own voice, the hollowness of my logic, the repetition of my ideas. Tim hung back a little, and I envied him his disconnect. We volleyed statements back and forth:
“If we don’t get out now, we might not get out at all.”
“I’m not ready to call it.”
During those talks, we were no longer on the tundra. We imagined ourselves home. What if we couldn’t be bridesmaids at our friend’s wedding in Toronto? I had a custom-made pale green dress waiting for me at home. While I sat on a rock in the long underwear I had been wearing for fifty days straight, I could hardly imagine getting into it, but I didn’t want it to go to waste.
What we had gained that summer, a feeling of being fully present — at least in moments — was evaporating. After almost two months of simplifying our thoughts and learning from the land, the “real world” began pounding at the tent flap, demanding to be let inside. The weather had turned bitterly cold, but even the wind’s tug on my hands and legs couldn’t keep me in the moment.
Three hours into another examination of our goals and feelings and the pros and cons of our exit options, Levi put his foot down.
“I want to stay,” he said. “We have enough food, especially if I am by myself, and I don’t want to go home by plane. You guys can go, but I’m staying.”
I looked over at our gentle friend, appalled by this new attitude. Surely it was too dangerous. He could starve or freeze. But my arguments rang hollow. I knew he would be perfectly safe and happy, but I couldn’t let him go. I wanted us to finish together; I had never imagined it any other way.
The others seemed more ready to accept Levi’s plan, despite my amazement. Perhaps we could avoid a group decision after all. The idea of splitting up, of splintering, became possible for the first time, and it tantalized us.
“Is that what you really want?” Drew asked.
During all of this, Tim sat in the circle, just close enough that we couldn’t say he wasn’t there. He would sit in, then lean back on his elbows, listless. He hated these talks and didn’t want to share his feelings. Silence would be the fastest way out of there. I loved and hated him for it.
“Do it,” said Tim, finally. “Why not?”
“Wait,” I said. “If Levi really wants to stay, we shouldn’t just leave him here.” I looked over at my friend. “I don’t want you to be here by yourself. Maybe we should all stay.”
Alie, Drew, and Jen sat next to each other in the circle. Their dark faces, skinny and smudged, remained mysterious to me. After fifty days, they sometimes felt like strangers.
We broke apart soon after that, knowing that if we didn’t phone Greg he would likely send a plane for us in a couple of days. It remained to be seen if Levi would get on it. The bow paddlers — Alie, Jen, and Drew — left camp for a hike along the shore. Tim hung back. Levi
walked back to our tent, grabbed his book, and took off across the island, away from camp. I followed him, stopping to get my own book on the way. I caught up with him as he jumped across some lichen-covered rocks, and I fell in step beside him.
“I want us all to end this trip the way we want to end it,” I said, “but I don’t want to leave you here.” The notion of leaving him at all was unthinkable. Levi had become as much a part of my landscape as the river.
Levi put his arm around my shoulders and we continued to a sheltered spot behind some high rocks and lay down. We’d found a perfect cocoon; the sun ricocheted between the rocks, which nulled the wind, and it was too cold for mosquitoes. We lay side by side on the stones and opened our books. Come what may.
After an hour or so, a figure bolted across the muskeg, headed away from us at a full run. It was Tim.
“What is he doing?” I said.
He had his hat off, jacket open.
“Tim!” Levi yelled after him. “What are you doing?” Levi and I both laughed, and Levi said, “Does he have to go to the bathroom?”
Tim heard the calls, turned around, and ran straight toward us.
He kept repeating something, but it took a while to make it out.
“A boat. A boat. The boat,” he said.
He arrived at our rock panting like a dog. Levi and I stood up to meet him. Tim threw his arms around us both, then leaned back and said, “The boat is here. It’s time to go.”
“No way,” I said.
The three of us ran, arm in arm, to the top of the hill, where we looked down to our campsite and saw an aluminum boat pulled up on shore. Two strangers stood beside it — one big, one small.
Tim started ahead, but I tugged him back. “Wait a sec.”
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