Disappointment River

by Brian Castner

  But relief came at the end of that small river. The view opened, for they had attained the height of land, as they pressed through swampy headwaters. On the horizon were hills of rock that Roderic thought had “the appearance of having been over-run by fire.” Like his Scottish Highlands home, but stripped of the heather. They gained long Lake Nipissing, speckled with islands at its western exit, and then Rivière des Français, where they could toss aside their setting poles with relish. For the first time they were heading downstream.

  “There is hardly a foot of soil to be seen from one end of the French river to the other,” Roderic wrote. Nothing but pink granite and stunted trees; seventy miles with the current, they ran it in one day. Even the river mouth looked petrified, the water leaking through tiny rock channels before finally spilling into Georgian Bay. A gale came on, and Lalonde, the guide of Roderic’s brigade, ordered every canoe to shore. “In less than half an hour, our tents were down about our ears and our baggage in a moment deluged with rain,” Roderic said.

  It was here, at this bay—in the “dreary wilderness,” wrote Roderic—where the French River and Lake Huron meet, that the cousins’ paths finally overlapped. Roderic in a canoe, Alexander on his ship, but each making for the summer rendezvous of 1785 at the Grand Portage.

  — 7 —

  INTO THE PAYS D’EN HAUT, SPRING 2016

  I went searching for Alexander Mackenzie—in the great cities he had walked in their infancies, in museums and historical sites, on the water route of his earliest travels—and I did not find him until the French River. Fitting, that kinship should start on the edge of the rocky Canadian Shield, where the north begins and Alexander Mackenzie joined up with the upper country’s main voyageur trunk line for the first time.

  In New York City, I walked the twisting alleys of old lower Manhattan on an early spring day, the kind of day on which the Mackenzies landed on the Peace & Plenty. It was raining—drizzle as a minimum, followed by the occasional downpour—and unlike most locals I had failed to remember to bring an umbrella. New York has largely shed its brick colonial past in favor of glass banking towers. The Liberty Pole at the Common has been replaced by City Hall, the gun batteries by Battery Park, the fortifications by ticket booths selling Statue of Liberty cruises. The lone remaining icons are loomed over by the titan Wall Street firms; how does any sun even reach the grass of Bowling Green, whose fence once provided lead for patriot bullets? The curry-yellow Fraunces Tavern, target of an HMS Asia cannonball in 1775, was locked up tight, so in the rain I quickly pressed uptown along Broadway, which is exactly that. In Mackenzie’s day, it was the major route to the farms that fed the town. Now the Canyon of Heroes leads to Nolita and SoHo, and plates pressed in the sidewalks name the celebrities who have been feted there, presidents and kings and the ’62 Yankees and the Apollo astronauts. Old colonial Broadway ends at St. Paul’s, at Fulton Street. I ducked inside, to get out of the weather, and found myself in the middle of a choir’s a cappella concert. The church was half-full; we were all taking refuge from the storm. Along the walls of the plain square chapel were historical displays: mementos left by the firefighters who responded to the World Trade Center on 9/11; the pew where George Washington knelt in prayer before his inauguration in 1789. Mackenzie was in the far, far north by then.

  Nor did I find Mackenzie at Fort Niagara. That French castle is full of wood smoke and costumed actors, but despite the promises of the brochures I find the history at such places to be less alive than reanimated, cobbled together and zombielike. There is too much “re-” in reenactor. People tend to save wedding dresses, not jeans, so everyone dressed in “authentic” clothing looks like they are bound for a ball. And no matter how many times the kindly gentleman behind the restored wooden counter declared himself the bourgeois of the trading post, that didn’t make him so.

  Similarly, south of the fort, along the trade corridor of the Niagara River, few hints remain. There’s a popular ice cream stand at the lower end of the old portage path around Niagara Falls, and at the upper end the intakes for the largest hydroelectric plant in the northeastern United States. Continue upstream, you reach my home. I live on an island in the Niagara River: Grand Island, only fancied Isle de Grande in online advertisements. One warm spring day, my father and I took his canoe out to faux-play voyageur reenactors ourselves. We launched a mile from my house, paddled the old route down along the western side of the island. The view was pretty in the sparkling light, but the Canadian and American shores are coated with McMansions, and invasive species besides. Farther upstream, the river narrows at present-day Buffalo, the French’s Beau Fleuve. But at the city’s red-tiled water intake, one finds the strength of industry, not wooden ships or supple canoes. There is a tremendous converging current here, so strong that Erie Canal barges found the Niagara River impossible to use; a separate adjacent channel had to be dug instead. The Peace Bridge spans the area now, tall enough to allow cargo ships to pass underneath. At the base of each support pillar is a massive ironclad wedge that splits the waters into tumbling white boils, like the prow of a ship sailing ever on against the current.

  In these long-settled places, I was not surprised to find nothing of Mackenzie; I had visited these, and his other haunts, many times before. The St. Lawrence Seaway is managed for container ships bearing iron ore and grain. Detroit long ago paved over its colonial footprint. South of Montreal, there is still a church at St. Anne, but it is a new one, and the old portage path is covered by a train trestle and highway and a strip of fashionable restaurants; one bar, bearing Corona beer signs, is named Annie’s.

  No, when I pecked along Mackenzie’s route, looking for a telltale sign, I did not find him until the French River, north of Toronto, north of Detroit, off the industrialized footprint. The granite of the Canadian Shield bursts from the ground, and in response the trees shrank like toy props in a train set. I drove north and—as the river approached—backward in time. Our cities naturally absorb and repurpose and build on top of. The view from the French, though, is nearly unchanged.

  The tannin-stained water still flows. Spruce and cedar and birch line its shores. The voyageur paths are still open. I searched the riverbanks and identified all the runes of the pays d’en haut: lobstick and lichen and cairn.

  The rock is the same. The genuine article, not a reenactment.

  * * *

  ————

  The woman who rented me the canoe to paddle the French River said I had to avoid Recollet Falls.

  “Don’t go up to it. A man drowned there, two summers ago,” she said. “A boy was with him, his son, I think. Really sad.”

  An hour later, as I crouched in the illicit spray of the Recollet, I thought of that drowned man, and the dozens of voyageurs who must have preceded him. Recollet Falls is named for the order of French missionaries that helped Cadillac settle Detroit. They probably lost a priest here too. Maybe the first white casualty, thus the name.

  By the time Roderic Mackenzie came through, it had been known as Recollet Falls for over a hundred years. “Recolet, forty-five paces” is all Roderic says about it. But why not count each step, I thought. He and Alexander spent the best years of their lives on little carrying trails like these.

  “In several parts there are guts or channels, where the water flows with great velocity, which are not more than twice the breadth of a canoe,” Roderic wrote of the river generally. Recollet Falls is one of those places, extending the width of the French River. Rocky outcrops squeeze the water into a few tumbling cataracts that drop ten or fifteen feet. It doesn’t look like much on the map, but up close you can see the water churns back on itself in a frightening way. The river digs and digs, creating holes on the river bottom. Holes that keep whatever is placed within them, like the bodies of French priests and summer tourists.

  Early that day, I had set up camp at one of the few destinations for those tourists, a small RV park at the end of a dirt road. It fronted the water and was a place for fishing and
drinking, often at the same time, the locals using tiny skiffs with buzzy outboard motors. It was late spring, early in the season, and I was the only customer who wished to rent a canoe. The manager gave me an aluminum tub, the generic kind one would see prominently featured in a movie about summer camp. It was far too long, unwieldy to paddle alone, and when I sat in the back the nose lifted out of the water. Still, I wanted so much to get on the river, see the view the right way.

  Henry David Thoreau understood. “Everyone must believe in something,” he said. “I believe I’ll go canoeing.”

  So I paid the woman ten dollars, pulled on my life vest, promised not to go to Recollet Falls, and then made it my primary destination; I was always the kid who had to touch the stove after being warned it was hot.

  The French is a creature of the Canadian Shield, the ancient core of the continent exposed by relentless and patient geologic force. The river drains a segment of that mound of four-billion-year-old granite, and on a map the waterway looks fractured, as if the bowl holding Lake Nipissing cracked and is leaking down a seam in the rock.

  The view from the canoe is different, though. The water is dark, like iced tea, the result of rain slowly steeping through dried leaves and pine needles. And the channel itself is a broad thoroughfare, a straight-as-an-arrow boulevard lined with high stone walls. It was like a modern limited-access highway but nature-made for canoe travel. The analogy is apt. The voyageurs formed a people-powered expressway, moving products in U-Haul-sized increments.

  Alone in the canoe, using a double-bladed kayak paddle to keep the boat headed generally in the right direction, I carefully eased the nose out of the eddy into the current, shifting my weight. Everything was still. No waves, no wind, no birdcalls, no drifting clouds.

  Soon I reached a small rapid, a crease across the river, swift and jumbled just enough to force me to the bank. The voyageurs would have cruised through without noticing, but alone, with no other human in sight, I got out and carefully walked, the moving water up to my knees. Using the old voyageur trick, I used a rope to line the boat through the treacherous rock garden. The danger here was not that I would be swept away but that my canoe would be, and then I would…what? Swim back to the campground? With the sheer rock walls, there was no shore to walk.

  Once past the worst of the current, I hopped back in my canoe, paddling even as I sat down, to avoid drifting into the rapid. Soon, I could hear the Recollet, though I still couldn’t see it. Such places usually bark worse than they bite, and when I arrived at the base of the falls, I found plenty of space to maneuver my boat toward the north side, a boulder field leading to a small slick ridge of rock at the rapid’s base.

  I sat alone with the water. The roar was calming in a hydropower-white-noise-machine sort of way. I wondered if I sat on the same silicon, potassium, iron, magnesium atoms that the voyageurs did. I wondered if they found the cataract calming as well; no way to know for sure, not a single letter survives from those illiterate men.

  The Mackenzies were always practical, though, so then I tried to find the portage route. Forty-five paces, Roderic said. No way to lift the canoe up the sheer rock bank in the north. Did they go through the center, across one of the knobs of granite that formed islands between the rapids? And then beach their canoes on the same boulder field as I? These little wilderness paths reminded me of the escalator in the JFK Airport, between the main concourse and the AirTrain. When the world comes to New York City, they do not pass through any broad welcoming avenue. Rather, they negotiate a series of dingy choke points, subway turnstiles, and walkways. So too were these narrow portages, along the highway of their day.

  Solo with a heavy aluminum canoe, I decided against experimenting with possible upstream portage routes myself. I turned around and returned to camp, lining again around the swift wrinkled water. Ten years ago, when I was still in my twenties, I would have run the small rapid, alone or not. Since then, I’ve learned a little discretion.

  When I got back to the campground, someone had cranked up “Your Cheatin’ Heart,” put the stereo speakers out on the porch of the single-wide so everyone could hear. The original Hank Williams version, 1953, full reverb.

  Compared with New York City, music is the most ephemeral of human footprints. And yet, where I intended to go, to follow Alexander Mackenzie to his unfortunate end, I’d leave even that behind too.

  — 8 —

  TO GRAND PORTAGE AND THE ENGLISH RIVER, 1785

  The granite of Georgian Bay is a rosy gray, the barrier islands mounded like the backs of breaching whales. In the early summer heat, the black biting flies set up in clouds, and schools of their larva squirm in shallow pools in the rocky sand. When a person walks through the flies, the clouds attach themselves and follow until he submerses himself in the lake and swims away. “If I had not kept my face wrapped in cloth, I am almost sure they would have blinded me, so pestiferous and poisonous are the bites of these little demons,” wrote one French traveler. “They make one look like a leper, hideous to behold. I confess this is the worst martyrdom I suffered in this country: hunger, thirst, weariness and fever are nothing to it. These little beasts not only persecute you all day but at night they get into your eyes and mouth, crawl under your clothes, or stick their long stings through them, and make such a noise that it distracts your attention, and prevents you from saying your prayers.”

  The voyageur route skirted the upper rim of the lake, hopping from island to island. Before sailing to the rendezvous, though, most ships and many canoes made the “Detour” to “the Westernmost military position which we have in this country,” as Alexander Mackenzie wrote. Lakes Michigan, Huron, and Superior come together in a confusing jumble of straits, archipelagoes, rapids, and peninsulas. There is no Gibraltar, one strategic mass that controls all passes, and so the French and British built an iteration of forts and posts on various islands and shores. All bore variations on the same name, an attempt to latinize the Ojibwa name for the great turtle that slept in the bay: Michilimackinac, Mackinac, Mackinaw.

  In 1675, the Jesuit missionary Jacques Marquette left Fort Michilimackinac, paddling west and south. He was searching for a route to the Pacific, a northwest passage. Marquette paddled into a bay along Lake Michigan’s western shore, followed a small stream up a series of rapids and portages, and then discovered a great river flowing south. He was in the land of the Illinois; French explorers later called it the “most beautiful that is known between the mouth of the Saint Lawrence and that of the Mississippi.” The primary virtues cited for the majesty of this idyllic place? Good soil, and plenty to eat.

  Marquette followed the river into the humid deciduous lowlands, and when it finally became clear he was going in the wrong direction, fear of attack—by the Spanish or Indian tribes or both—forced him back. But he never made it home. Marquette died on the eastern shore of Lake Michigan and was abandoned there until the Illinois gathered his bones and returned them to Mackinac, where they were buried at the mission along the shore.

  By the time Alexander Mackenzie arrived, Marquette had been dead for over a century, his mission long since burned, his grave lost. These abandoned Jesuit outposts, when the voyageurs could find them, were treated with reverence, but Alexander himself had little use for the missionaries. They “should have been contented to improve the morals of their own countrymen,” he wrote.

  Fort Michilimackinac was a place of mixed loyalties: like Detroit, a British fort on newly American soil, surrounded by Indian encampments trading furs and seeking gifts. Mackenzie thought that the British behaved nobly, but not the Americans, who paid the Indians “very little attention, and tell them that they keep possession of their country by right of conquest.” The Americans promised only that they will be “friends with them while they deserve it.”

  But it was a good place for a logistics post. White birch and cedar, the essentials of canoe construction, grew everywhere. The brigades took on additional provisions, some for the remainder of their journey
on Lake Superior, some to deliver to Grand Portage. They traded their peas and pork lard for fish and maple sugar, a welcome, though temporary, dietary change. Roderic’s brigade was in a hurry and skipped Fort Michilimackinac, but Alexander’s ship couldn’t sail up the rapids at Sault Sainte Marie, so he stopped to transfer to a canoe. Up and around the peninsula, Alexander passed a village on the south side of the sault, a mix of Algonquin and white habitants, that appeared to him to spend “one half of the year starving, and the other half intoxicated.” It had dwindled with the region’s failing fur trade, and like Detroit, these lands were all trapped out.

  Alexander found that Lake Superior “justifies the name that has been given to it.” He thought it “the largest and most magnificent body of fresh water in the world” and the “grand reservoir of the River St. Laurence.” He marveled at the great varieties of berries and bear and moose and fish, and measured the distance from St. Marys to Grand Portage as 160 leagues along the coast.

  They followed the lake’s northern edge, often through fog, along cliffs taller than any they had yet seen—“a continued mountainous embankment of rock,” Alexander called it—nearly a thousand feet above the water. The granite was black and deep purple in the peaks, pale gray near the waterline, and there the Ojibwa painted the story of their people’s migration from the east. The stone canvas depicted tiny vermilion men in canoes, fleeing Mishipeshu, the master of the waters, half lynx and half serpent, clawed and horned, scaled and spiked tailed, with the call of a churning cataract. Mishipeshu lived in the deepest part of the deepest lake and raised storms, and only specific ceremonies would placate the beast. Failure to sacrifice generous offerings ensured a canoe-wrecking tempest.

  As they approached the western end of the lake, the land in the distance bore the profile of a giant asleep. Bulbous, lumpy mountains speckled the coast. The voyageurs cleaned up, shaved, donned new shirts. They were nearing the end.