The Last Voyageurs

by Lorraine Boissoneault

  Despite the thousand little hardships of daily life on the expedition—getting wet, sore, tired, cold, and hungry enough to devour a horse, hooves and all—Hess couldn’t be happier. He nearly hadn’t been part of the expedition. The teachers had cut him from the original group during the interview process. But Hess hadn’t wanted to pass up the opportunity to help create tools for the trip, even if he couldn’t participate on the trip itself. His parents had always said he was an old soul. He did things like set trap lines for mink and muskrats in the suburbs, and his summers were filled with camping trips. Learning to craft 17th-century objects would be instructive in and of itself, even without getting the chance to regularly use them. In John Fialko’s shop, Hess helped carve knives and tomahawks and pound out steel for the hinges that would be used on wooden chests. Taking note of his diligence, the teachers decided on Hess as an alternate. When someone dropped out a few months into the training, Hess was asked to join the expedition as a regular crew member. He didn’t know why the other student had dropped out, and he didn’t care. Their loss; his gain. He signed away his social life and took the name Gabriel Barbier without a second thought.

  The morning came to a close as everyone swallowed their breakfast and cleaned their wooden bowls and spoons. It was time to be off. They had a full day coming up, including a trip through two locks, the Snell and the Eisenhower.

  The St. Lawrence Seaway, with its myriad locks and channels used by massive shipping freights, had not been built with man-powered canoes in mind. The project was quite the opposite; officials in Canada and the United States had hoped the bi-national engineering marvel would usher in greater economic and technological prosperity. It had also been a significant source of political consternation, with the debate about the project’s feasibility spanning fifty years in the American Congress.6 But eventually, American lawmakers conceded that the project was worth the cost, and construction began. Between 1954 and 1959, engineers and construction workers carved out buried earth, built locks and dams, and created a navigable waterway between Montreal and Lake Ontario that raised ships 225 feet and helped them avoid rapids and shoals. The cost of construction was $470 million Canadian, with the Canadian government paying more than 70 percent of the total bill.

  Robert Moses, renowned for his work in New York City urban planning, headed the American side of the project. Once completed, the seaway was heavily promoted by the Eisenhower administration. Some called it the eighth wonder of the world for its incomprehensible scope and the speed at which it was completed. If La Salle had somehow managed to travel forward in time and retraced his trajectory on the St. Lawrence, the river would have been unrecognizable. It might also have been impossible to navigate. Locks and dams are not necessarily helpful to canoes.

  The paddlers in the six canoes of La Salle: Expedition II were quickly discovering the challenges posed by modern engineering when traveling in vessels from an earlier era. After paddling only several hundred yards out of camp, they came across dangerous rapids around a bridge. Foaming water seethed up around the trestles and created miniature whirlpools that tugged on the boats as they went by, destabilizing their trajectory through the water. Ron Hobart’s boat fought through the rapids just as John DiFulvio’s boat, carrying Kulick and Reid Lewis, shot forward. They barely avoided a collision. DiFulvio’s boat wound up under a tree on shore and rolled dangerously, taking on a foot of water.

  In his boat, Hess focused on digging deep with each paddle stroke. Running through rapids was terrifying and exhilarating. He paddled as hard as he could, fighting forward, the canoe barely moving, and when it seemed like he was getting sucked backward or about to spin out of control, adrenaline spiked through his system and he pushed harder than he thought possible to break free of the current’s grip. But he never knew whether he’d be strong enough before he made the attempt. Battling currents on the St. Lawrence sometimes felt like a Herculean task. The river made no concessions for novices. If anyone capsized in the rapids, he’d be swept away and potentially drowned in minutes, regardless of whether he had a life preserver on or not, and plenty of the men didn’t bother with the life preservers. Hess never regretted joining the expedition, but moments like this made him question his sanity.

  The rapids made for an exciting, if wet, morning. By the time the group reached Snell Lock on the southern side of the river, they’d missed the morning window and would have to wait for the lock to open again. The sun hid behind a dense layer of clouds, and the light wind was growing stronger. Stillwagon yelled at those who were shivering to put on something dry if they wanted to avoid hypothermia. As they changed into dry shirts, a man who’d been piloting a sailboat upriver and was also waiting for the lock offered them hot coffee he’d prepared belowdecks. A warm drink with the kick of caffeine was a godsend. Paddling was tiring work. Just as soon as everyone had glugged down the black liquid, the locks opened and they were ushered into the giant concrete maw.

  The taupe stone walls of the lock loomed over the men as they paddled their canoes forward. Built for mammoth freights, the lock made the 20-foot canoes look like toys in a bathtub. The La Salle: Expedition II was the first group to ever travel the locks in non-motorized boats, and it hadn’t been easy to secure permission for the passage. They were followed in by a work boat that would keep an eye on them. After everyone was in, the lower gate folded shut and water began pouring in through the filling valve deep below the surface. The water burbled up, pushing them higher and higher against the wall. The weather seemed to be cooperating more today than it had three days ago, when they had passed through the Beauharnois Lock. It had poured buckets that day, and after only a few minutes it had become apparent that the canvas ponchos designed to keep them dry only served to soak up moisture. Today was gray, but the clouds hadn’t turned into a storm.

  When the water in Snell Lock was nearly level with the top of the upper gate, the gate opened and the six canoe crews began paddling again. After a quick jaunt two miles upstream the men found Cathy Palmer, Sharon Baumgartner, Jan Lewis, and Marlena Scavuzzo waiting for them outside the Eisenhower Lock with ham-and-cheese sandwiches, jerky, and crackers. They devoured every last morsel while the lock was filled and emptied for the boats ahead of them. As they waited their turn, a crowd gathered along the observation deck, a feature that didn’t exist alongside the other locks. A few dozen soon grew to more than a hundred curious onlookers eager to see a 20th-century system put to use by a crew of 17th-century voyageurs.

  The gate to the lock opened and crew members who had dozed off during the wait were woken up and ushered back into the boats. Even after the group passed through a couple of locks, the massive walls of the Eisenhower Lock were formidable. To be lifted almost 40 feet on a river without paddling a single stroke was surreal, like riding an elevator in a wooden boat. Relaxing, even though they had to hold on to one another’s canoes to make sure the hulls didn’t scratch one another. Off to the side of the lock the onlookers standing on the observation deck and leaning over the railing peered into the belly of the concrete drum. They watched as the canoes inched their way up the wall, buoyed by river water. It was a queer juxtaposition of modern and historic technology.

  As the canoes rose higher and higher, coming level with the upper part of the river, a breeze ruffled the hats and shirts of those in the canoes. The water stopped rising, the lock gates opened, and a violent windstorm turned the river into a churning mass of waves.

  “Did we get dropped off at the Atlantic Ocean?” someone joked.

  The waves tossed the boats around as the men paddled. The wind howled in their ears. Soon everyone was drenched. Water sloshed around their feet in the boats, turning their leather moccasins into soggy socks. Occasionally one of the milieu men would stop to bail water out of the boat if it got too high. The river rose and dropped by a matter of feet as the locks closed and opened behind them. Bit by bit the paddlers fought the current and the wind and the waves. Back and arm muscles burned and strained
against the water.

  “You want the goddamn pants, take ’em!” Terry Cox shouted into the wind. He was a bowman with a temper, and in the wettest seat of the canoe he would occasionally lose it when his pants got soaked yet again.

  It was a struggle to get to Massena, New York, but waiting for the sopping voyageurs at the end of the river were a number of 4-H kids with a dinner of spaghetti and cake—real food!—and hot showers. God, did showers feel good when most days the best they could expect was a dousing on the river. With full stomachs and clean hair and dry clothes, the sore muscles and blisters didn’t bother them so much. And sleep had never felt more satisfying, even if Hess, the group prankster, had scattered sand or ants in their sleeping bags.

  Ogdensburg, New York

  August 19, 1976

  Twenty-one men sprawled across the lush grass beneath a warm sun, limp and indolent as they enjoyed an afternoon nap. Bob Kulick and Keith Gorse were alone in resisting the soporific ambience of the manicured park. Each of the two men wrote in his journal, Kulick with his authentic-looking fountain pen and characteristic attention to detail.

  “I said we pulled into a place that looked like a park—well, it is a state hospital,” Kulick wrote. “I guess it is an appropriate place for this group to spend time.”

  It was early afternoon and the paddlers had made such good time in the morning that they had only two and a half miles to go and three hours before they were expected in Ogdensburg, giving them more than enough time to eat a long lunch and grab forty winks. It just figured that the place they’d chosen for a rest was the grounds of the St. Lawrence Psychiatric Center, treating the mentally insane since 1890.

  Whether or not anyone on the crew met the clinical criteria for some form of mental abnormality was almost a moot point. They’d all willingly signed on for the expedition, despite knowing it would involve a great deal of physical agony and the emotional discomfort of close quarters and constant observation. They were spending every waking and sleeping hour together—a group of two dozen, mostly teenage, mostly alpha-male-type guys—and curious onlookers usually watched them from early morning to late at night. It was like living in a testosterone-filled fish bowl. Eight days in, the strain was starting to show.

  For some, homesickness struck hard and unexpectedly. Stillwagon, the stentorian biology teacher who’d initially balked at the fact that these teenagers would be addressing him by his first name instead of “Mr. Stillwagon,” missed his family and his home so much he wasn’t sure he’d survive. As he paddled along the river, occasionally providing a rudder stroke to keep the canoe on course, he was hit by nostalgia so intense it was almost physical pain. One minute he was watching the water glisten below an Arcadian shoreline, the next he was dreaming of his mother-in-law’s fudge and toast. He didn’t even like toast that much! It made no sense. He’d been away from home plenty of times before, on canoe trips that lasted several weeks, but somehow this was different. His wife, Rowena, was back home in Indiana with their four kids, and he missed them all. The only thing to do was keep to the routine: wake up each morning, paddle all day, perform for the community they were visiting at night, write a letter to Rowena. At least they weren’t being 100 percent accurate to the past. In the 18th century, physicians thought homesickness was a physical malady and treated it with purges, bloodletting, and leeches. One Russian general resorted to burying alive his soldiers suffering from homesickness.7 He reported that after they’d been buried, left underground for a bit, then dug back up, the homesickness had usually subsided.

  The second mental obstacle was more insidious and less likely to dissipate with time. It boiled down to clashing personalities—an inevitable result of putting twenty-three men in a pressure-cooker situation, no matter how many psychological team-building sessions they’d attended in advance. Some days, you just didn’t want to deal with someone else’s bullshit or the fact that one of your socks got lost in the wash. Shouting matches erupted quick and hot as flash fires and subsided just as rapidly. By morning any lingering antagonism was usually forgotten. But some people had the kind of temperaments that seemed to invite simmering, relentless resentment. One such person on the crew was Clif Wilson.

  Wilson played the role of a royal, Jacques Bourdon, Sieur d’Autray. He got to wear a fancy jacket and felt hat for their performances. But he carried some of those aristocratic tendencies with him off the stage. He did his work, but he also yelled at everyone else even if they were doing theirs. He was mouthy, emotional, and bossy. He regularly got into vehement arguments with Cox, who could poke a mean finger in Wilson’s chest while shouting. Wilson didn’t perceive the world in shades of gray; everything was black and white, including his dislike of Randy Foster, who sat directly behind him in their canoe. There wasn’t anything logical in the antipathy Wilson felt for Foster, and yet the sentiment stretched back to the years they’d spent training for the expedition. Somehow, despite the animosity between them, the two had been placed in the same canoe, the only canoe without an adult paddler. And that smoldering dislike had no outlet since they spent hours every day in the same small boat.

  One of the few ways for Wilson to cope with his dilemma in the canoe was to vent to his friends when they got off the water. The clique called itself the Radical Five and was comprised of Lieberman, Kulick, DiFulvio, Gorse, and Wilson. Sometimes Hess joined their group as well. They were all good friends and would’ve spent most of their time together anyway, so forming the quasi-fraternity was a logical step. It meant they could share secrets and discuss the people they disliked with the knowledge that most bad-mouthing was done in the heat of the moment and would be kept among themselves. But lately Wilson’s disagreements with Foster had become more severe, to the point where Wilson was considering leaving the expedition.

  “You know what a bummer it is to be talking about quitting on the first week out?” he told Kulick and DiFulvio. Kulick figured that if it really came down to it, the adults probably wouldn’t let Wilson quit. It wasn’t like they were prisoners in the Gulag who’d never see home again, but they’d made a commitment to the expedition and Kulick thought the adults would hold them to it.

  Even though paddling all day gave people plenty of time to dwell on their homesickness or stew in anger and frustration, the evenings were full enough to keep everyone busy until bedtime. Today was no different. After leaving the picturesque grounds of the mental institution and paddling the rest of the way to Ogdensburg, the group was treated to another 4-H meal of corn, beans, potatoes, and spaghetti. 4-H clubs (developed by the National Institute of Food and Agriculture and focusing on the development of head, heart, hands, and health) could always be relied on to provide the crew with good, filling food without any of the frills or pretensions that city councils sometimes included with their meals. Not that anyone would turn up their noses at any kind of food served on any kind of dishware. The generosity of communities along the route was the best antidote to daily aggravations and disagreements among the crew members. It was a continual pleasant surprise to see how receptive strangers were of their expedition.

  Ogdensburg was particularly welcoming. The townspeople invited the whole crew for a tour of their Frederic Remington Art Museum after visiting hours. The paintings and sketches were beautifully detailed, almost like pictures taken from an era before photography. Sculptures captured bucking broncos, trapped forever on their hind legs, while paintings and sketches depicted life on the Western frontier: cowboys seated around the fire and Indians riding into battle wearing feathered headdresses. In many ways, cowboys were 19th-century versions of voyageurs. They traveled into dangerous lands, trying to colonize, “civilize,” and domesticate the wilderness. They were also invaders, like the voyageurs had been, and they co-opted the modes of transportation natives used—horses and canoes.

  Pretending to be a voyageur naturally gave everyone on the crew a more visceral appreciation for the ways of the past and the challenges its inhabitants faced. If they could’ve ju
mped into those paintings and sat around the fire with the cowboys, would they have had anything in common? Would they’ve sung songs with a guitar late into the night, maybe taught the cowboys some John Denver or Gordon Lightfoot tunes? That was the thing about acting like time travelers from the past: history felt so close at hand. But the past was still—and would always be—untouchable.

  Alexandria Bay, New York

  August 23, 1976

  The boat appeared around a bend in the river like a ghost from another era, its white hull glowing against the shadowy green of the pine trees on shore. La Duchesse, a 106-foot houseboat owned by Andrew McNally of Rand McNally & Co. (a publisher of maps, atlases, textbooks, and globes), was the crew’s first rest point on this sixteen-mile day, and it took them five miles off course of their destination.

  “Here we go with this song-and-dance routine,” Cox muttered as the six sleek canoes whisked across the open river and landed at the sheltered dock where La Duchesse made berth. He felt no qualms about voicing his opinion, and he wasn’t looking forward to the schmoozing they were going to do today. Cox was like Wilson in that way: straightforward, emotional, maybe a little mouthy. But call a spade a spade. As he saw it, McNally had only invited them for a visit so that he could show them off to his rich friends, like they were a bunch of monkeys in suits.

  Not all of the crew shared Cox’s cynical outlook on the visit to La Duchesse. They spent all day on the water in boats then slept underneath them at night, so they appreciated a well-crafted vessel. And the teenagers didn’t know much about the ongoing fund-raising efforts. Lewis hadn’t told them how far below the red they still were. Even now he often stayed up late into the night filling out applications for more grants. His departure in the evenings and lack of participation in certain group events and chores was starting to cause some friction. McNally’s generosity could be important in that respect. He was on the American Revolution Bicentennial Administration and had already secured $17,000 for La Salle: Expedition II. That’s what Lewis told Kulick, at least, and that’s why Lewis said they needed to keep “cultivating” McNally.