Disappointment River

by Brian Castner

“Smart,” Senny said.

  I knew we made the right decision when I walked down to the shore to collect driftwood as kindling. The wind was so strong I had trouble walking. How would we paddle? A cold front swept the valley and fog stood up on the water, blown away in feathers moments later. I piled the driftwood by the woodstove and, opening the iron door, discovered a dead northern flicker. The large woodpecker was perfectly preserved in the dry ash, spots of red and yellow bright as life.

  When the hail started, I made a fire.

  I spent the day sitting at the kitchen table, solar panels spread to recharge our batteries, looking at the map, hoping we’d somehow magically transport to the end. The weather forecast on the inReach predicted twenty-knot winds until the wee hours the next morning, so Senny and I decided to pass the day in the warmth of the cabin and wake early, an alpine start, as the sun would be up anyway.

  Instead of being frustrated at the delay, I knew I should be grateful for Wilfred’s cabin. But I figured we had another four hundred miles to go, about a hundred hours of paddling. Ten hours a day for ten days, and I wanted to move. As Kylik—our Inuvialuit charter boat guide waiting for us at Inuvik—had said, you can get anywhere, it just takes time.

  The hail let up, and I went outside to split firewood, but the head on Wilfred’s ax was so loose on the shaft that I nearly sent it flying, and the wood was soaking wet anyway, so I gave up. I pissed, lay on a cot, made green tea on the woodstove. My fingers cracked and bled, as one’s do in winter in a dry house. My sons texted me on the inReach to say our favorite hockey team had made a big trade, but the homesickness was too much, so I put it away.

  “You know, sailors used to wait a month or two for the winds to shift around Cape Horn,” Senny said.

  “That’s not helping, Senny,” I said.

  But I should have been kinder; Senny was the perfect companion for a writer. Traveling with Senny was like traveling by myself. He was so quiet there was plenty of space for my own thoughts. “I’m bad at everything that involves communicating,” Senny explained. “Writing, poetry, painting, music. My wife says I’m bad at talking too.”

  We made dinner from the pantry shelf, meatball stew, with canned pears in heavy syrup for dessert. The cabin was warm, and I lay on top of my sleeping bag, in my underwear alone. Despite my brief gluttonous binge in Fort Good Hope, I looked thin, atrophied legs, wiry arms, reduced all over. Wasting away. Stress and exertion had taken their toll; in a flashback to boot camp, I had not had an erection in over a month. Before the trip, I thought I’d get in shape up here. “Better than P90X,” a buddy had texted me, referencing the strength-training routine. But as Senny noted, that’s like saying running should get you huge quads. But it doesn’t. Your insides shrink, and your skin hangs.

  I dozed. I knew I was asleep because I was dreaming, but I was dreaming of paddling. A rosary with an image of the Virgin hung from the nail over my bed. The fire went out, the cabin cooled. The wind howled through the eaves and played the chimney like a flute.

  Over the last thirty hours, we had gone a single mile.

  A little after midnight, I heard Senny packing gear. I got dressed, put my head outside, and saw the river was still. Our plan worked. We were on the water at two o’clock.

  It was eerie, perfectly calm under a dank ceiling, and we paddled river center to find the current. Occasionally, the wind gusted, but the water remained flat, and, desperate for progress, we pulled hard. Ten miles, fifteen, twenty.

  Then the banks of the Deh Cho rose and rose, so that we had entered a canyon many times deeper than the Ramparts, though still several miles wide. The wind came up from the northwest, and then the river turned northwest as well, and the current increased its pace, and with all the elements thus aligned, I should have known what was coming.

  A fierce blow in our faces, and the river bristled like one of Jonas’s fighting dogs.

  “Should we pretend this isn’t happening?” I called up to Senny. “Should we head in?” Was I too skittish?

  “We’re okay for now I think,” he said, and then a moment later the water leaped upward all around us, all at once, like an ambush of waves. On instinct, I turned the nose of the boat forty-five degrees, to make toward shore, but the waves beat our port side and started pushing us sideways. I knew immediately we were in terrible trouble.

  Five-foot seas, the frothing white crests high above my shoulders, far over the gunnels. I cinched my life vest tighter. Sometimes Senny paddled and hit air instead of water, and it looked like he was swatting at the waves to keep them at bay. I started to tack, plowing the nose of the canoe square into the swell and then jerking back to shore, a few paddle swipes in a direct line to safety, then turning the nose again so the surf didn’t catch us broadside. The boat would tip, throw us off balance until our hips righted us, and Senny looked like he was riding a bucking bronco at the saloon. We were still over a mile away from shore.

  “Maybe we should turn with the waves!” I yelled, and Senny agreed. I thought, I hoped, we could ride them in, as I had with Jeremy, turn a headwind into a tailwind. Ever so carefully, I turned us around. But paddling upstream, with the gale at our backs, we became stationary, completely motionless, suspended between the wind and the current and surfing a huge wave, like Leif and John at Molly’s Nipple on the Slave, except in an open boat and all alone.

  There was nothing to do but rudder back. “Hold on, I’ve got to turn us,” I yelled. Time stopped. We’re going too slow. There is no way we make it, I thought, over and over.

  And then a swell caught us hard across the flank. We rocked to starboard, tipped the gunwale precariously close to the water, and then the pendulum swung us back hard to the left, as the swell passed beneath us. But an even larger wave rose behind it, the biggest yet, and our momentum rocked us too far. The next wave hit, and we jerked violently to the right again, and my back seized, twisting to compensate. Our port side lifted and our right gunnel dipped down, down, down and I saw it dropping into the water. If the rim of the canoe dipped below the waterline, the current would flood the boat. We’d take in the whole sea in an instant and tumble, overturned. It was a point of no return that I had known, as a whitewater guide, many times.

  This is the end, I thought. No, I felt it, in my muscle memory. We’re done.

  The gunnel dropped and dropped and dropped and then just kissed the water and Senny and I kicked our hips and jerked the gunnel upward and that swell passed beneath us as well.

  Senny dug in, hard, willed us to land. An eternity, and then the bank was in reach. I turned the canoe and tried to crab along the shore, but the waves drove us in. The surf slammed us against the beach, lifted us, dropped us again. I felt like I was being kicked. I stuck my paddle in the gravel to steady us, but we were heaved again and tossed sideways. I rolled out, soaked, and then the waves threw the canoe on top of me and I held it there to keep myself from being kicked again.

  “Can you believe we didn’t capsize?” I said.

  “I was making plans to swim to shore,” Senny said.

  I looked out on the Deh Cho and saw a monstrous scoured trough, four miles wide, draining all the water in the world. Ever since Fort Simpson, the river had been a funnel, solid spruce on the top of the ridge, flood-stripped bare banks on the water’s edge. At this bend in the river, though, the canyon and the gale perfectly aligned, and we were caught, pinned to the back wall like bugs on a board.

  I checked the map. Our escape—the head of the wind tunnel, where the Deh Cho made a grand curve—lay more than twenty-five miles away.

  Senny and I were jittery with adrenaline. It was eight o’clock in the morning, and we had been paddling six hours, but there was nothing to do but set up the tent and, for the third day, try to wait out the wind.

  We walked the shore for an hour in either direction, looking for flat grass, but the thicket at the top of the ridge was so dense I couldn’t even step into the tree line. The whole area, muddy banks and exposed gravel bars, was
paraded with bear tracks, full-grown adults and cubs. One massive clawed print was four times the size of my boot sole.

  “Now I have to worry about Bigfoot too?” said Senny.

  The only space for the tent within two miles of the canoe was a small shelf behind one measly willow bush that did little to block the wind. It was mid-morning when we crawled into our bags, and despite the incessant howling we both immediately fell asleep.

  I was awoken by the tent’s fabric wall battering my head; in the comparative heat of the afternoon, the wind had somehow grown even stronger. I got up, unpacked the secondary emergency pop-up tent, and erected it upwind of our main tent. When that proved ineffective, I dragged driftwood logs from the beach up the hill and stacked them in a wall. Nothing worked.

  I was glad I’d bought the pricey Himalayan tent. It never stopped shuddering, the poles bowing and pulling each seam to the point I feared it would tear to tatters. So I sat with my back against the rounded wall, barring the door against the monster trying to beat his way in.

  There was nothing to do. I compulsively checked the inReach, noting the predicted gusts hour by hour, speed and direction. Always out of the north and northwest, between fifteen and twenty-five knots. It had to be higher along the water, in the Great Wind Tunnel, but how would the forecasting app know that? To launch, we’d need just a little window below fifteen knots, predicted to come early in the morning.

  We had another eighteen hours to wait.

  On a whim, for the first time I checked the current weather at our final destination, Garry Island at the far northern edge of the river delta. Twenty degrees, snow, twenty-five-knot winds. Do I have the gear for this? The stomach? “Today is the day I feel in the Arctic,” I wrote in my journal.

  There are places on earth that protect themselves, and nature still has the upper hand.

  I felt stir-crazy. The tent absorbed the perpetual sunshine and grew too hot. But outside, it was too windy and cold to pass the day. I couldn’t sleep. The sunlight never stopped. At first, north of 60 degrees latitude, I felt solar powered. But that had slid into mania, and now I just felt strung out.

  Sitting in the wind. The tent shook; the stitches strained. Time again, too much time to think about time. A land of timelessness. A land out of time. But also a land so vast and empty and lonesome it was time-consuming to cross, time made slower by the monotony. Sit and meditate an hour and achieve immortality. Time stops.

  “You can get anywhere if you have the time,” Kylik said, in this land where all Wilfred’s old-timers are dead.

  My mind ran in circles. And then I realized, I had finalized my list of the seven plagues of the Deh Cho. Heat. Cold. Wind. Tempest. Bugs. Timelessness. Emptiness.

  I just wanted to go home.

  For something to do, I made dinner. To raise our spirits—avoiding the spoiling bread and fruit—I cooked Seafood Delight, dehydrated fake crab, one of our favorites. We used the canoe as a windbreak, and Senny even tried to start a tiny fire behind a wall of stones, but neither the meal nor the fire provided comfort. Any warmth was blown away.

  “Hey, Senny,” I said. “No bugs.” He laughed. Good ole Senny.

  We crawled into our bags and hoped for a better tomorrow.

  * * *

  ————

  I woke early, five o’clock, and the tent was shaking. I got up, pissed, walked down to the canoe. There were still a few whitecaps in the center of the Deh Cho and angry gray clouds that threatened rain, but conditions had improved, just a bit, and I was done with the wind, done sitting, so I woke Senny and we launched.

  We hugged the river’s east bank, close to land but just far enough out to avoid the pounding surf, like two medieval sailors scared of the sea. It all felt precarious, that tightrope; don’t think too much about where you are and what you are doing.

  We paddled continuously, uphill, without stopping, for six hours. Progress was excruciating, one or two miles an hour at most. Senny’s sailboat tops out at five knots, and his example of satisfaction taught me patience. My shoulders and wrists and groin ached, and with each stroke the tendons in my hip popped over the bones.

  The Deh Cho threw every kind of wave at us. Sharp ones, driven by wind. Wide rollers reminiscent of the lake. Standing waves in current. Bubblers around the lips of boils. I wondered, do the Inuit have as many words for waves as they do for snow?

  We plotted a course between the sheer banks of two silty islands, hoping to rest in the wind shadow. But the gusts grew in strength in the channel, and we drifted backward as we regained our breath. Following the path of the mud, island-hopping along their shores, we had accidentally reached the center of the river again and had a choice to make.

  In a few miles, the great Thunder River, cleaving through the ridgeline to reach the Deh Cho, would meet our eastern shore. Through luck, good or bad, so far I had not met a bear the entire trip, seeing only their ever-expanding tracks. But everyone had warned us—Wilfred, Michelle’s guidebook, strangers at church in Fort Good Hope—that we were guaranteed to face grizzly at the Thunder River. They were thick in summer, eating fish, and so we needed to avoid that place at all costs.

  We would never have a better shot to cross the river than from these mud islands. Either we made an open crossing now, a mile and a half to the western side, across whitecaps that had nearly capsized us the day before, or we stuck to the eastern shore and, if a storm came, would brave the bears when forced to land.

  Senny and I talked it over. I thought of the Bigfoot grizzly print we had just found. I thought of the gunwale licking the river and how lucky we were to kick out of it.

  “We should cross,” Senny said, without indecision. And to my surprise, I realized I agreed. We knew how to deal with waves but had never fought off a bear. Counterintuitively, maybe, it was safer to cross.

  I guided the boat away from the mud islands and into the main river. Senny was silent, intent on the far shore, and paddling hard. In the near distance downriver, breaking the solid rock wall of the Deh Cho chasm, was the deep gash of the Thunder River. To flee one danger, we faced another that had nearly wrecked us. The wind-driven waves were fierce but only occasionally broke into whitecaps, and after an hour of concentrated paddling, the trance of the work overcoming nerves, suddenly our hull ground on land.

  I stepped from the canoe. There was no wind. I could see its effects on the river, hear it shake the spruce above, but where I stood, on that beach, all held still. The high western ridge shielded the worst of the northwest wind. Senny built a fire, and I broke out our best food, boiled a kettle of water, and made tea. We ate dried apricots and candy bars and drank a second mug, and steam rose from my boots as they dried before the flames. My toes were warm.

  I felt energized again, and our spirits lightened as the sun finally broke through. We would get back on the water soon, but now the waves felt bouncy, less threatening, and I saw the Deh Cho with new, confident eyes; we didn’t paddle any faster, but we did enjoy it more.

  We still had another two days of hard paddling to Tsiigehtchic, but we had accomplished something important in this test of wills. We had broken free. The Thunder River marked the end of the Great Wind Tunnel, fifty miles long, that had harried us for three days. Tiny progress is better than no progress. That was the lesson.

  I felt better than I had in a long time. I yelled into the wind.

  “Hey, Deh Cho, is that all you’ve got? Bring it on!”

  Senny responded immediately.

  “He’s fucking kidding! Don’t listen to him!”

  — 23 —

  SATISFY THE CURIOSITY, THO’ NOT THE INTENT, JULY 1789

  In the beginning, in the oldest of days, giant spirit animals walked the land, and they and the Gwichya Gwich’in people were equals. Each could speak, and could change into the form of the other, everyone and everything in balance. Raven tricked people, and Bear killed them, and Wolverine stole their food, but Caribou provided bounty for everyone, and Bluefish broke up the
lake ice each spring and will until the end of the world.

  Those days are called ts’ii deii days, and no one knows why.

  The Gwich’in people had always lived in that place, and they called themselves Gwichya because they made their home in the flats of the Nagwichoonjik river valley. And the great Atachuukaii traveled up and down the river, and fixed Raven and Crow, and chased away giants, and fought three beavers and stretched their skins on a rock far to the south. One winter, Atachuukaii even survived alone on the land, without shelter or supplies, and from then on he was also known as Man Without Fire. Some Gwich’in hunters made medicine to move very quickly, and they carried bows hewn from raw skin that only the strongest men would draw. And there was a place for everything, to fish and smoke and kill caribou, and time was circular, season by season by season. The muskrat ate its tail.

  In ts’ii deii days, there was a Gwichya Gwich’in man named Daii dhakhaii. He had a dream that he must visit a hill, and so he did. He climbed the hill until it became a cliff, and then he climbed the cliff and found a door, and he entered the door and had a vision. There were people living in the hill, and they gave him a pot made of hard gray metal. He had never seen such a pot before. And the people told him not to return the way he had come but to leave the hill by another door farther ahead. “If you continue, and go through the door ahead, your country is going to be like it is now, forever,” they said, “but if you turn back and return the way you came, someday this country will change.”

  Daii dhakhaii didn’t want anything to change, but he was also scared and didn’t know where this second door led, so he turned around down the hill and returned to his family and showed them the pot made of metal.

  And then, as the vision said, something different happened.

  At a Gwich’in camp in a big bend of the Nagwichoonjik, chips of wood floated into the eddy and got caught in the driftwood. The Gwichya Gwich’in had never seen wood chips like this. Not splinters, or scraps. Too large for a beaver, too precise for their own bone and stone axes. The Gwich’in realized that these chips were cut with something sharp and strong, like the metal of Daii dhakhaii’s pot. They must have come from aachin, strangers, from upriver.