by Adam Shoalts
Canada’s public broadcaster, the CBC, asked if it could send a team from its flagship news show, The National, with me to the river. I had to explain that the idea was impractical. A number of newspapers splashed pictures of me on their front pages, including the Toronto Star, which captioned its photo of me with the line “Canada’s Indiana Jones.” It seemed as if I was suddenly the world’s most famous explorer—if only for fifteen minutes.
The Globe and Mail asked if one of its reporters could accompany me on the expedition. I spoke to the eager journalist on the phone.
“Have you done much canoeing?” I asked.
“Never,” he replied.
“You’ve never been canoeing?” I asked in disbelief.
“No, but I’m keen to come with you.”
I tried to let him down gently. “Maybe another time.”
The enormous quantity of media requests made it impossible for me to keep up with them all, even with the help of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society’s media liaison. Inevitably, like all of today’s instantaneous and hastily produced news coverage, stories began to appear that were full of errors and distortions. Some of the less diligent news outlets blissfully glossed over the nuances of my work on the Again River—ignoring, for example, the difference between an unexplored river and an uncharted one. Exploring means journeying to a place to make a detailed investigation of it, while uncharted means unmapped, which the Again River was not, as it had been charted on the basis of black-and-white aerial photos. Some journalists also ignored the difference between “first on record”—I was the first person on record to canoe the Again in its entirety—and “first ever.” This struck me as careless, since journalists surely understand the difference between “the coldest winter ever” and “the coldest winter on record” or the difference between “the biggest northern pike ever” and “the biggest northern pike on record.”
The continual media interviews—which, understandably, the Geographical Society insisted that I do—ate into my preparatory time for the expedition. I was asked to delay my start date by several days in order to do more interviews, but I stubbornly refused. I was eager to escape from the limelight and seek solitude in the wilderness. With only an hour of sleep, I appeared bright and early on CTV’s morning news show, Canada AM, then promptly left the studio to drive due north to Cochrane to begin my expedition.
“YOU’RE A CELEBRITY!” exclaimed Terry O’Neil, as he greeted me outside the train station in Cochrane. “I was having my morning cup of coffee, watching Canada AM, and the next thing I know, I see you on the TV. I said to my wife, ‘I know that guy!’”
I laughed.
“You know, I was going to call up the Cochrane Times Post, our local paper, to let them know you were in town,” said Terry, smiling broadly, “but I figured you might not like that, so I didn’t.”
“Thanks. I’ve had about all I can handle of news coverage.”
“I figured as much,” said Terry. Then, looking grave, he added in a sombre voice, “but I have bad news.”
“What’s that?” I asked, concerned.
“Adam, it’s been a very rainy summer. The water’s going to be high.”
“That will make canoeing the shallow parts easier,” I replied.
“But what about the big rapids?” asked Terry.
I shrugged and tried to reassure Terry that I would be perfectly fine. Inwardly I was a little alarmed, but I thought it best not to let him notice it.
Terry shook his head as he got into my car. Rather encouragingly, as we drove out of town and headed into the wilderness, he told me once more about the canoeist who had drowned on the Kattawagami River in 2006. I would soon find out whether my canoe and I were up to the challenge of paddling the Again in high water.
[ 14 ]
END OF A JOURNEY
We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.
—T.S. Eliot, “Little Gidding,” 1942
THE LIFE OF AN EXPLORER is often lonely. Soldiers and sailors have their bonds of brotherhood—but explorers tend to be lone wolves, solitary sorts not given to intimacy. The more time they spend beyond the reach of civilization—in a place where life depends on cunning, and where they alone are the sole authority—the more difficult it becomes to adjust back to a normal life. Some of the world’s greatest explorers—men who had endured adversity and dangers beyond counting—later found themselves forlorn, wracked by self-doubt and overcome by despair. Meriwether Lewis, lionized for his crossing of North America, was later consumed by inner demons. Spurned in love, lonely and drinking heavily, despite the fame and accolades bestowed on him, Lewis fell irretrievably into despondency. One night, unable to cope any longer, he shot himself in the head. The bullet only grazed his skull. Grabbing another flintlock pistol, Lewis shot himself through the chest. Still, he did not die. Fully conscious, but out of ammunition, in desperation he reached for a razor. In the words of a horrified witness who burst upon the scene, Lewis was found “busily engaged in cutting himself from head to foot.” Choking with blood, Lewis gasped, “I am no coward; but I am so strong, [it is] so hard to die.” Only after agonizing pain that lasted for hours did Lewis—one of history’s most fearless explorers—finally succumb to his self-inflicted wounds.
John Hanning Speke, after discovering the source of the world’s longest river in 1858, a riddle that had been puzzled over since the days of the pharaohs—became ensnared in bitter controversies over his discoveries back in England. His fellow explorer Sir Richard Burton disputed the Nile’s source, and the acrimonious debate resulted in angry polemics in journals and newspapers. Speke had braved every imaginable danger in the wilds of Africa, but he found the hounding of the civilized world insufferable. On the afternoon of September 15, 1864, shortly before he was to appear at a session of the Royal Geographical Society to debate Burton, he fatally shot himself while hunting in the English countryside.
Some explorers simply vanished in the wild, never to be seen again, their fate a mystery, such as Percy Fawcett in the Amazon in 1925 and Hubert Darrell, a forgotten hero of the Arctic and solo explorer without equal, who disappeared in northern Canada in 1910 while on a lone journey into unexplored territory. Others lived into old age only to discover that their singular experiences had rendered them unsociable and incapable of developing deeper bonds with other people. They lived out their days filled with loneliness. But not for anything, I think, would any of them have traded their wilderness explorations for a more settled existence—like Faust, they could not repent, for they had seen and done things no one else had.
RAIN FELL ALMOST ceaselessly during the first seven days of my journey, further swelling already high water levels, which were at least a metre and a half higher than they had been the previous year. This meant that the waterfalls would be correspondingly shorter, as the water beneath each fall would have risen since I had last seen them. As Terry had warned, it also meant that the whitewater would be faster and more powerful. While the waterfalls posed little danger as long as I remembered their locations, the river’s countless rapids were unavoidable. Any one of these rapids was capable of swamping my shallow canoe—which I depended on to snake between dense forest on portages, not to handle whitewater. Even if I ran one hundred rapids flawlessly, an error on the hundred and first could prove fatal.
I got my first taste of high water levels while paddling down the winding course of the Kattagawami River on day one. Some of its rapids were transformed into frothing cataracts—one of which nearly hurled my canoe and me straight into a massive boulder that towered out of the river. I just barely managed to steer the canoe clear of the boulder as we plunged through the raging torrent. After that, I decided to make camp early for the day to rest. As it was, I was exhausted from a week spent with little sleep—and sleep deprivation and wilderness canoeing aren’t usually a winning combination.
The next day, rejuv
enated from a night spent on a bed of lichens and moss, I paddled hard, arriving at a large, reed-covered lake. The weather had turned cold, with temperatures barely above freezing. While I was crossing the lake in a stiff headwind, a drizzle of rain turned into a steady downpour, chilling me to the bone. I managed to escape hypothermia by spending the night holed up in my tent on a sheltered island far from shore. Despite the weather, I was as happy as could be—I was back in the wilderness doing what I loved best. In the forest on the island I felt like I was in a dream world—the cathedral of ancient trees blotted out the sky, sheltering me from the rain, while thick carpets of bright green moss covered the ground.
The portages were as demanding as they had been the year before: the forest was sodden from steady rain and the ground was even swampier. But at least I could follow my old trails and didn’t have to blaze any new ones. One day, in the middle of the longest portage to the Again’s headwaters, I had fallen into a sort of mental fog, staggering onward in rain through swamp forest, when suddenly a deafening crash reverberated from out of the depths of the woods. Instinctively I froze. A tree must have toppled over—something I had witnessed several times in my life—but after days of silence, any loud sound was arresting. The tree might have fallen of its own accord, or it might have been knocked over by a black bear searching for insect larvae. I waited in silence to see if a bear would appear. When none emerged, I gingerly carried on with the portage to the Again’s headwaters, glancing over my shoulder every so often.
On that moonless night, I pitched my tent on a dry patch near the shoreline. More than just bears could be lurking in the darkness: wolves, wolverines, and supposedly wendigos haunted these unexplored regions. Anything out there could be silently watching me as I lay scribbling notes by the glow of my flashlight. Occasionally I heard a branch snap, the wind howl, or some unidentifiable noise rise from out of the darkness. But I slept easy—to be in the woods was to be home.
Strangely, my most dramatic wildlife encounter of the expedition took place in broad daylight. One morning I crawled out of my tent, still half-asleep, into some rare sunshine. I had camped in a burnt-out area. Short jack pines, the first trees to grow after a fire, and alder bushes were the only greenery on the charred landscape. I shuffled behind the tent into some chest-high alders to find some firewood. When I struck a branch with my hatchet I heard a sudden noise behind me—spinning around I caught sight of the fleeing backside of an enormous wolf. In a flash, it disappeared into the alder bushes. The wolf had been no more than three metres away from me. Previously in the wild, I had only caught a glimpse of wolves from a distance. I was puzzled to see one so close. But wolves, like all dogs, are innately curious, and this one, I suppose, couldn’t resist investigating what strange manner of creature lived in the nylon tent.
THE HIGH WATER made the rapid-choked course of the Again River more hazardous, but this time I didn’t have to worry about getting swept over any hidden waterfalls. I knew their approximate locations, and I could remember the look of the river above each fall. Several canoeists have been killed by unsuspected waterfalls in the James Bay watershed, and I didn’t intend to join them. According to legend, a war party of Iroquois braves plunged to their deaths in their birchbark canoes over an unfamiliar waterfall on the Abitibi River, at a place still called Iroquois Falls. More recently, in 1993, two American canoeists had drowned when they were trapped in a furious current and swept over a waterfall on the Missinaibi River. Their deaths were attributed in part to inaccurate maps of the river, which is, nevertheless, one of the best-known rivers flowing into James Bay.
Despite the higher water levels, the river was still shallow and rocky in places, especially along its upper course, which forced me to occasionally wade and pull the canoe behind me. In these stretches, the bottom of my canoe frequently scraped over sharp rocks. Each time my canoe ground over another rock, I wondered if it would be the last straw—but somehow Avalon managed to hold up. In a traditional birchbark or canvas canoe, the endless sharp rocks would have made navigating the river nearly impossible—part of the reason why the Again remained unexplored for so long.
As I navigated farther along the river, it grew larger and deeper. The whitewater rapids were of considerable size with serrated rocks and boulders dispersed throughout them like the obstacles in a pinball machine, all of which I had to snake around in my canoe. I spent all day doing so, navigating one rapid after another; but something about the grey skies, drizzle of rain, ceaseless rustle of running water, and cold air lulled me into a haze. Alone with my thoughts, my mind would drift, a risky prospect when every bit of river has hidden rocks. I find staying mentally focused to be one of the most underappreciated challenges of solo wilderness travel.
In the midst of one otherwise ordinary rapid, while I wasn’t concentrating on the river, my canoe suddenly smashed into a barely visible boulder, spun sideways, flooded, and bent round like a boomerang from the power of the water. When it began to fill with water, I leapt onto the boulder, while my gear was swept downriver. The force of the cascading water pinned the inundated canoe on the granite rock so that it looked as if the canoe would snap in two. There was nothing to do but attempt to free the crushed canoe from the rock and repair it onshore. I carefully stepped off the boulder into the cold, swirling water, which rose to my waist, and worked to free the canoe. It took all my strength to pull the flooded canoe off the rock and wade to the alder-covered banks to fix it. Fortunately, the repair work was easier than I thought it would be—I popped the crushed hull back into shape and it sustained little permanent damage. After retrieving my plastic barrel, paddles, and waterlogged backpack, which lucky for me were blocked from travelling far by rocks, I resumed paddling with a greater effort to avoid slipping into any further reveries.
A few days after my canoe was nearly broken in two by the boulder, I encountered more difficulty in whitewater. I had been navigating rapids along the Again all day—portaging around the largest ones, but more often than not running them. I was soaking wet from the waves, which frequently lapped over the canoe’s shallow sides and forced me to halt regularly, unpack the canoe, and empty the accumulated water before continuing. But I knew I was nearing the beautiful stretch of river that ran between the rocky hills and canyons, and I was eager to arrive there soon by paddling as many rapids as possible. Though I had only been there once, the stark beauty of the place was engraved in my memory.
After a sharp bend in the river, another rapid roared ahead—foaming water was crashing noisily over a rock ledge. The drop was not much more than a foot, so I decided to risk paddling it rather than unpack everything and perform yet another portage. But when I plunged over the ledge in my canoe, the waves lapped right over the bow, flooding the vessel. For a few seconds, it seemed as if the flotation I had lashed inside the canoe would prevent the inundated craft from sinking, but the weight of the water proved too much—as if in slow motion, the canoe sank with me in it.
My lifejacket kept me afloat as I found myself swimming in rapids, gasping in the cold. I grabbed on to the flooded canoe with my right hand, while with my left I struggled to get a hold of my watertight barrel, backpack, and paddles. With my hands full trying to hold on to all my vital gear, I watched helplessly as my brown fedora—an identical replacement for the one I had lost in the waterfall the year before—disappeared into the swirling water. Kicking with my feet, I managed to swim over to a boulder in the river, beach my canoe on that, and then make several trips to shore to secure my gear. Besides my hat, I lost my fishing rod, bug spray, a few other small items, and a bag of dried apples—nothing I couldn’t survive without.
THE MASTERCRAFT TORPEDO LEVEL mounted with the .22 calibre rifle scope worked like a charm for measuring the waterfalls—despite the hordes of blackflies that devoured my face and hands as I set up the instrument. My face was smeared with blood from their incessant bites. Sometimes, if I inhaled, I would cough from having swallowed a cloud of insects. Even in the rain th
e mosquitoes still swarmed me. Meriwether Lewis had written of the torments caused by swarms of mosquitoes:
The musquetoes continue to infest us in such manner that we can scarcely exist; for my own part I am confined by them to my bier at least 3/4 of the time. My dog even howls with the torture he experiences from them.
The early explorers in the Lowlands had learned from their aboriginal counterparts to cake themselves in foul-smelling bear grease to protect against blackflies and mosquitoes. I preferred a long-sleeved shirt, a mesh bug net, and if things were really awful, insect repellant, which was however never very effective.
The highest waterfall I surveyed measured just over six metres, or around twenty feet, which meant that at the time of my first expedition, it was probably not quite eight metres, or nearly twenty-five feet. The waterfalls on the Again River number between five and nine, depending on how one classifies “a waterfall” (no universally agreed criteria exist). The number varies based on whether one counts “split falls” around rocks or islands as one or two waterfalls, whether upper and lower drops should be counted separately, whether “step falls” (a sort of cascade) should be counted as a waterfall, and whether an exceptionally fierce, steep rapid with a considerable drop should be considered a waterfall or just a big rapid. My preference is for a conservative scale, according to which the Again River has five waterfalls. Waterfalls can be classified into over a dozen different categories, including curtain falls, plunges, cascades, fans, horsetails, slides, ledges, and punchbowls. The waterfall I went over was a ledge waterfall, where water descends over a vertical drop while maintaining partial contact with the bedrock. The horseshoe-shaped waterfall at the start of the longest canyon on the river was a plunge fall, where water descends vertically without contact with the bedrock. Two of the waterfalls, including the highest, were violent cascades, and the smallest was a “slide waterfall,” where water glides over bedrock while maintaining continuous contact. I photographed, measured, and recorded the longitude and latitude of each one—something no one had done before.
