The Back River, 2009
In the summer of 2009 six of us canoed down one of the most famous and challenging arctic rivers, The Back River. Over the course of 45 days we encountered frozen lakes, amazing whitewater, wolves, caribou, grizzly bears, and muskox. When we thought our adventure had come to an end, we found our selves stranded on the Arctic Ocean. Below you can look through photographs, watch an 18 minute documentary film, and read the account of the time we spent with the Inuit hunters on the ocean.
The crew of the Back River. From the left: Alex Trigg, Adam Trigg, Derek Kockler, Steve Keaveny, Winchell Delano.
And, for the river itself, here is a film that shows the ice, wildlife, whitewater - in short - all the wonders of northern Canada.
Back to the Arctic from Peter Marshall on Vimeo.
If you watched the film, you may be wondering what happened that caused us to be stranded, here is an odd story of confusion, cultural communications, and unexpected friendships. View as a separate file.
Marooned in the Arctic
By
Peter Marshall
Dramatis Personae
Jacob……………………….........The Natural Resources Officer in Gjoa Haven.
John ………………………..........The owner of the boat that came to pick us up, sent by Jacob
Angel…………………….….........John’s helper
Anthony………………….............Owner of the boat that brought us gas.
Pete Marshall……………….…....Canoeist and narrator
Steve Keaveny………....………..Canoeist
Derek Kockler………..…………..Canoeist
Winchell Delano……………........Canoeist
Al Trigg………..……………….....Canoeist
Adam Trig..………………...........Canoeist
Steve Delano......………………...Winchell’s Dad. Took care of logistics regarding ice break-up and boat pick up. Go-to man.
Derrick…………….......………....Hydro-technician with Water Survey Canada
Jamie…………………….......…..Hydro-technician with Water Survey Canada
Dramatis Personae
Jacob……………………….........The Natural Resources Officer in Gjoa Haven.
John ………………………..........The owner of the boat that came to pick us up, sent by Jacob
Angel…………………….….........John’s helper
Anthony………………….............Owner of the boat that brought us gas.
Pete Marshall……………….…....Canoeist and narrator
Steve Keaveny………....………..Canoeist
Derek Kockler………..…………..Canoeist
Winchell Delano……………........Canoeist
Al Trigg………..……………….....Canoeist
Adam Trig..………………...........Canoeist
Steve Delano......………………...Winchell’s Dad. Took care of logistics regarding ice break-up and boat pick up. Go-to man.
Derrick…………….......………....Hydro-technician with Water Survey Canada
Jamie…………………….......…..Hydro-technician with Water Survey Canada
Now we came to the empty shore.
-Dante, Purgatorio I.130
The ice on the ocean began to break up the last week of July. We had been staying in a small cabin some five miles from the mouth of the Back River for two days, waiting out the weekend in the hope that the wind would clear the ice out of the strait between Gjoa Haven and Chantry Inlet. The runoff from the thawing permafrost created a small, murky stream that ran beside the cabin and provided us with fresh water; the 10 kg bag of flour we found in the cabin kept us fed. On Monday morning, August 10th, Steve used the satellite phone to call Jacob, the Natural Resources officer in Gjoa Haven, for a status update on the sea ice. Jacob told Steve that the ice had cleared over the weekend. A man named John had his boat in the water and was waiting for the weather to calm so he could come pick us up.
Ice on Gary Lake, July 2009
The day passed and no boat came. As
we were ready to go to bed, Kockler came into the cabin: “We got a light in the
distance.” I went out into the dark night and saw a glowing beacon across the
bay. I struck a flare. We started packing up our gear. In a half hour Angel, an
excitable older man who couldn’t have been more than five feet tall, and John,
a young, tall, and quiet man, came ashore, eager to warm up in the cabin. Hot
water was boiled, drinks made, cigarettes passed around, and a meal shared. We
loaded the boat, a decked nineteen-footer with a deep hull and cargo cabin,
with our packs, tied the three canoes onto it, then began to wait for dawn to
break and the sea fog to clear.
While this was happening Winchell made a phone call to his dad to let him know we were leaving. His dad, Steve Delano, had been notifying our parents of our progress, coordinating the pick up, and cleaning up other bits of logistical details we threw at him. After Winchell was off the phone, he came into the cabin and looked at me with a long face and wide eyes. “Well,” he said, “it looks like I have to be in Kansas by Thursday for a meeting or else I lose my job.”
“I thought you had more than a week, until the 19th,” I said.
“It has something to do with budget cuts within the University. Basically my dad talked with my advisor and she said this was a University, not a departmental, matter and if I’m not at the meeting I loose my TAship and stipend.”
“So you have 48 hours to get to Kansas.”
“They booked me a ticket out of Gjoa Haven for 5:30 tomorrow, or I guess today, it’s now Tuesday, right? I’ll get to Kansas about an hour before the meeting begins.”
“That’s going to be close.”
“If I pull this off, it will be the most impressive feat of my life. Not even Keaveny could match it.”
John and Angel seemed rather confident that we would be able to make the ninety-mile boat ride in under 10 hours, putting us in Gjoa Haven by 1:00PM. “But those boats, your canoes you know? Those might have to be left before Gjoa Haven. The important thing is to get you safely to Gjoa Haven first, and then the next day we can get the boats. Is that okay?” Angel said.
“No, it isn’t.” Steve said. “We made it clear to Jacob that we needed to get six people and three canoes to Gjoa Haven.”
“We don’t have gas,” Angel replied. He told us that they had used twenty-five gallons to reach us and had between fifteen and twenty gallons to return with the six of us and all our gear.
Around the cabin were a number of abandoned 55-gallon drums. Angel walked around knocking on the barrels, to see if any had any spare gasoline. Al walked into the cabin and told me, “That little guy found six gallons of diesel, and he’s going to mix it with the other gas he has.”
“Can you do that?”
“No. It might even be kerosene. I tried telling him, but he says it’s fine. Mixing unknown fuels. This will not be good.” And sure enough, around 3:00AM, the engine appeared to be flooded, then they thought the spark plugs might need cleaning, and after more than an hour of drifting and fumbling, it was clear that mixing fuels had been a less than perfect idea.
While this was happening Winchell made a phone call to his dad to let him know we were leaving. His dad, Steve Delano, had been notifying our parents of our progress, coordinating the pick up, and cleaning up other bits of logistical details we threw at him. After Winchell was off the phone, he came into the cabin and looked at me with a long face and wide eyes. “Well,” he said, “it looks like I have to be in Kansas by Thursday for a meeting or else I lose my job.”
“I thought you had more than a week, until the 19th,” I said.
“It has something to do with budget cuts within the University. Basically my dad talked with my advisor and she said this was a University, not a departmental, matter and if I’m not at the meeting I loose my TAship and stipend.”
“So you have 48 hours to get to Kansas.”
“They booked me a ticket out of Gjoa Haven for 5:30 tomorrow, or I guess today, it’s now Tuesday, right? I’ll get to Kansas about an hour before the meeting begins.”
“That’s going to be close.”
“If I pull this off, it will be the most impressive feat of my life. Not even Keaveny could match it.”
John and Angel seemed rather confident that we would be able to make the ninety-mile boat ride in under 10 hours, putting us in Gjoa Haven by 1:00PM. “But those boats, your canoes you know? Those might have to be left before Gjoa Haven. The important thing is to get you safely to Gjoa Haven first, and then the next day we can get the boats. Is that okay?” Angel said.
“No, it isn’t.” Steve said. “We made it clear to Jacob that we needed to get six people and three canoes to Gjoa Haven.”
“We don’t have gas,” Angel replied. He told us that they had used twenty-five gallons to reach us and had between fifteen and twenty gallons to return with the six of us and all our gear.
Around the cabin were a number of abandoned 55-gallon drums. Angel walked around knocking on the barrels, to see if any had any spare gasoline. Al walked into the cabin and told me, “That little guy found six gallons of diesel, and he’s going to mix it with the other gas he has.”
“Can you do that?”
“No. It might even be kerosene. I tried telling him, but he says it’s fine. Mixing unknown fuels. This will not be good.” And sure enough, around 3:00AM, the engine appeared to be flooded, then they thought the spark plugs might need cleaning, and after more than an hour of drifting and fumbling, it was clear that mixing fuels had been a less than perfect idea.
 Boat pickup in Chantry Inlet |
We had drifted within yards of a rocky island where the six of us put up two tents and caught some sleep. John and Angel took apart the carburetor and filtered out the contaminated fuel. By the late afternoon the wind had picked up and the waters were rough. We boarded the boat, this time tying the canoes together with ropes and dragging them in single line behind the 125 horsepower wake.
The boat labored through waves. There was a cache of gas some 60 miles away, far beyond the reach of our meager fuel supply. The six of us sat silently, rocked by the violent waters, anxiously watching the canoes as the wake from the boat and the surge of the ocean threatened to upset them.
Inevitably one canoe came off. The motor slowed and tightly turned around to retrieve the stray boat, in the process another canoe capsized in the engine’s wake. Steve bent over to pull the canoe up to the boat. We scrambled to make room enough to lift the canoe onto the side of the boat and empty it of water. The ocean shook us. Every shift of weight rocked the precarious balance of the boat. Meanwhile we watched the other canoe drift further away from us. “This is some Deadliest Catch shit,” Steve said. In a few minutes we motored over to the stray canoe and secured it to the towline then continued until the gas barrel was nearly dry. We stopped on a gravel beach enclosed by the rocky shores of a disappeared river. John and Angel told us they had to filter the last of the contaminated fuel and make something to eat.
The six of us gathered in a small circle. Alex broke the dominating sentiment, “I’m not getting back on the boat. I was sure Steve was going to fall in when we were fishing the canoes out of the water. Fuck that, I’ll get picked up by a plane.” We grumbled about what to do. We somehow had to get to Gjoa Haven, and what was suppose to be a relaxed, though maybe cold, boat ride at the end of the trip, had quickly become one of the more frightening situations any of us had been in.
The boat labored through waves. There was a cache of gas some 60 miles away, far beyond the reach of our meager fuel supply. The six of us sat silently, rocked by the violent waters, anxiously watching the canoes as the wake from the boat and the surge of the ocean threatened to upset them.
Inevitably one canoe came off. The motor slowed and tightly turned around to retrieve the stray boat, in the process another canoe capsized in the engine’s wake. Steve bent over to pull the canoe up to the boat. We scrambled to make room enough to lift the canoe onto the side of the boat and empty it of water. The ocean shook us. Every shift of weight rocked the precarious balance of the boat. Meanwhile we watched the other canoe drift further away from us. “This is some Deadliest Catch shit,” Steve said. In a few minutes we motored over to the stray canoe and secured it to the towline then continued until the gas barrel was nearly dry. We stopped on a gravel beach enclosed by the rocky shores of a disappeared river. John and Angel told us they had to filter the last of the contaminated fuel and make something to eat.
The six of us gathered in a small circle. Alex broke the dominating sentiment, “I’m not getting back on the boat. I was sure Steve was going to fall in when we were fishing the canoes out of the water. Fuck that, I’ll get picked up by a plane.” We grumbled about what to do. We somehow had to get to Gjoa Haven, and what was suppose to be a relaxed, though maybe cold, boat ride at the end of the trip, had quickly become one of the more frightening situations any of us had been in.
“Al’s got a point,” I said, “I
never really felt myself to be in danger, or that I might die because, you
know, I have never died, but I was wishing I had a rosary back there. And I
don’t even believe in that stuff.” There was some uneasy laughter. Twenty-four
hours before we needed to get the six of us and all our gear to Gjoa Haven. We
even thought we could get there in time for Winchell to catch his flight. Now
we just needed to get there safely. Circumstances had changed, and with the
change we began discussing what to do with the canoes. Financially we would not
loose much if we left them behind. The cost to ship them with First Air cargo
would have been between $700 and $1,000 per canoe. The added cost of gas we’d
save on the drive from Yellowknife to Minnesota without the three wind sails
strapped on the top of two vehicles would save us enough money to buy at least
two new canoes. “I’m not bringing my canoe back,” I said. “I paddled the Back
River with it, I got the experience, I don’t need the artifact. We can buy
Winchell a new boat and pay Russ a thousand bucks or so.”
“He is not going to be happy,” Adam said. We had borrowed one of the canoes, a Daggar Venture, from a friend, Russ Opatz, who didn’t really want us to take his boat on the trip in the first place, and now we would have to tell him that it was abandoned in a beautiful rocky cove somewhere in Chantry Inlet on the Arctic Ocean.
“There’s always a chance we can get them back, like they said, maybe the next day, and we can ship it by barge,” Winchell said.
“No. If we leave the boats here, they are gone,” I said. “Just think of what would have to happen. Someone would have to come get them, which they failed to do the first time, then they would have to arrange with the cargo company to barge them to our addresses. How’s payment going to work out? Do we leave them money and just assume they’ll take care of this while we’re gone, or are we going to pay them once we get confirmation the canoes are on the barge? This isn’t a Fortune 500 company bending over to maintain a good relationship with clients. If we leave the canoes here, these canoes are gone.” It wasn’t the happiest, or maybe even the best, decision we ever made as a crew, but our safety, and the very possibility of getting out of Chantry Inlet, required that we abandon the three canoes. And so we gutted the canoes of their seats, yokes and thwarts, and beside a twenty-foot outcropping of steep rock the canoes were laid side by side at 67.464 N latitude and 95.375 W longitude, if anyone ever cares to find them.
Winchell and I approached John and Angel, who were cooking a pot of caribou stew. Winchell, still trying to figure out if it would be financially viable to pay for another boat to retrieve the three canoes, asked John how much he was going to charge for picking us up.
“I’m not sure. Let me eat first then I’ll figure it out,” he replied.
“How much would it be for someone to come get these boats?” Winchell asked.
“We come get them the next day, no cost to you,” Angel said.
“The thing is we all might have to leave Gjoa Haven the next day, so how would we be sure that the boats would get on the barge?”
“It’s no problem. We’ll be in Gjoa Haven tomorrow,” Angel said.
“Do we have enough gas to get there?” Winchell asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe not enough to get to Montreal Island.” Montreal Island was about thirty or forty miles away, near where the gas cache was stored.
“So, how will we have enough gas to get to Gjoa Haven?”
“I don’t know. Maybe someone will deliver the gas to us.”
“Do we have enough gas to get to the gas cache?” Winchell’s voice was somewhat confused, somewhat annoyed.
“Maybe,” Angel and John then exchanged words in Inuktitut. “You will get to Gjoa Haven on time for your plane. Talk to John, it’s his boat.” Without any clear answers we walked back to where the other guys were gathered around a small fire burning the driftwood collected on shore
“Did they say how much it would cost?” Kockler asked..
“Within five minutes Angel told me it wouldn’t cost anything then that it would cost money to pick up the boats,” Winchell said. “I don’t know how well he understands English.”
“I think there might be some basic cultural differences,” I added, “I think they understand time more in a matter of when one has to go hunt or can go hunt, rather than nicely divided squares and numbers on a calendar.”
“I don’t like what’s going on,” Al said. “I think they’re going to try to swindle us out of money.”
“We’re not in a place we can negotiate,” Winchell said. “We’ll deal with cost once we get into Gjoa Haven.” We ate a meal of rice, reconstituted hamburger and instant cheese. We were nearing the end of our food rations. The sun had fallen behind the horizon, and a fat sliver of the moon began to glow in the blackened blue of the coming night. Hoping to stay warm, I put on two pairs of polypro underwear, a farmer john wetsuit, a wool shirt, a fleece and raingear. John and Angel brought us the remaining caribou stew they had made.
From shore the water looked deceptively calm, but on the boat, outside of the protected cove where we had stopped, the cold air had stirred the water into a frenzied state. The nineteen-foot boat was rocked on both sided by waves; at times sheets of water crashed over us. All six of us had attended the same Catholic High-school, and we tried, between a great amount of profanity and laughter, to remember the words to Hail Mary, Our Father, and The Glory Be.
As the boat buzzed into the night the water calmed. The air was thick with a cold mist. We all began to grow increasingly chilled. We passed beside crags and cliffs that were barely visible in the brief blue night. A sliver of orange from the never setting sun swung across the horizon and began to blaze in the east. As dawn broke we were on King Island, out of gas, and numb with cold.
We set up the tents in the cold light of the sun. My fingers could hardly grasp the tent poles or unzip my jacket. I couldn’t remember the last time I felt so cold; once I was in my sleeping bag I couldn’t remember the last time I was so happy to be in a sleeping bag.
It was clear that the quick ride to Gjoa Haven had become Phase II of our trip: getting to Gjoa Haven. In the morning I walked over to the large canvass tent John and Angel were staying in. A static squelch buzzed in the background of the Inuktitut I heard transmitted over the radio. Winchell had been in the tent, sipping coffee and warming up by the stove for almost an hour. “Did you call anyone?” I asked him.
“No. They radioed out earlier this morning. Someone’s on their way with gas.”
“Nice.” I sat down. Angel offered and John poured me a cup of coffee. “Do you know who’s coming to get us?” I asked.
“Maybe Search and Rescue. Some other guys might come though.”
“So now we just wait, huh?” Another pot of coffee began to boil. Al joined us and the five of us spent most of the afternoon in the warm canvass tent while Kockler, Steve and Adam stayed in their sleeping bags. After talking about hunting for a while, Al and I went out with Angel to hunt caribou. Angel walked off over a hill while I waited for Al to get his things from his tent.
“Those guys told me I shouldn’t eat with John and Angel, or go hunting,” he said after we had walked a little ways.
“Who?”
“Adam and Kockler. They said it would just put us further in their debt, and they were just going to try to get more money out of us by acting like our friends.”
“Well, that sounds like a good excuse to lay in a nylon tent all day.” We caught up with Angel and almost immediately spotted a caribou. Angel urged Al to take his gun and shoot the animal, promising Al that he wouldn’t tell anyone if he did; it’d be a secret. Al declined, and after two misses, Angel managed to drop the caribou.
Under the hide, the caribou was tarnished with brownish white spots over the red meat and transparent membrane. Angel told us this meant the animal was no good, and eating it could make you very sick or even die. Angel peeled off the hide and left the skinned carcass on the mossy rocks. He told us that he felt bad doing it, but what else could he do? He would send the hide in for testing and let the birds eat the caribou.
On the way back we stopped, Angel rolled a cigarette and began repeating what he already told me that morning: “You’re lucky we came to get you. Other people, they’d blame you for running out of gas, they’d push you much harder and would be very upset at you not leaving the boats back there when I tell you.” Al and I didn’t respond. “John, he will charge you a lot, he will push you for a lot of money, not me. I only want something to remember you by. You know, I take some Americans hunting, in the land, years ago. It cost nine-thousand dollars and he give me five-hundred dollar tip.” Angel took a few more drags from his cigarette. “I only want something to remember you by, not much.”
Al was clearly holding back, while I was doing my best to ignore what Angel was saying. “We’ll work it out in Gjoa Haven,” I said.
“That John, he’s hard to work with. I tell him to bring more than fifty gallons, but he doesn’t listen. He gets angry. I just want five-hundred dollars. John will push you for a lot more, not me. I just want a little.”
“You get us to Gjoa Haven first, then we’ll talk,” Al said. We began walking back to camp. In a few minuets Angel stopped for another cigarette. Al and I went ahead without him.
“The thing is, Pete, Angel told Kockler and me that he got tired of sitting around on his couch and came out with John for the adventure. He told us he wasn’t getting paid for this.”
“I’m not too concerned about what he said. The price Jacob quoted us was five-hundred-dollars per boat plus the cost of gas. Then there’s the issue of three abandoned canoes. He’s not getting five-hundred for himself.”
“I don’t trust him.”
“Yeah I can’t quite figure this guy out. When he was trying to make John sound like trouble I kind of thought, this guys a swindler.”
“You know why I didn’t shoot that caribou?” Al asked.
“No. I was surprised you didn’t.”
“He kept holding the gun out to me, saying, ‘you can take this shot, here shoot it, I wont tell, I promise. Shoot it. Here.’ I’m pretty sure once I shot it he would have said, ‘Now you have to pay me four-thousand-dollars or I’ll turn you in for poaching.’”
Winchell was out by the tents, “You guys shoot anything?” he called out.
“Yeah. But it was rotten. How was that meeting of yours you had today? It was at 12:30, right? Did you just get back from it or what?”
“Too soon, Pete. You’re picking at those wounds too soon.”
“Do you think you lost your job?”
“My dad’s been talking with the Department Chair, who really likes me, and I think I’ll be all right. This isn’t a, ‘I’m sick so I can’t make the meeting’ excuse. It’s more of the ‘I’m stranded on the Arctic Ocean’ variety.”
“I’ve used that one before. It works pretty well. You seem pretty relaxed about loosing your stipend, funding and health insurance,” I said.
“Well, there’s really not a lot I can do.”
No boat came that day. I spent the night reading a book on Shackleton’s voyage following the destruction of his ship, The Endurance. After a few hours of reading I went to sleep warm – inconvenienced, but warm.
In the morning, after receiving vague answers from John and Angel about how we were going to get gas delivered to us, Winchell called Jacob in Gjoa Haven to ask him what the status of our gas delivery was. He turned off the phone and chuckled, “Jacob said he didn’t know of anyone who was going to go pick us up and then said, ‘Well, who’s going to pay for this gas?’”
“So we don’t have a boat coming out here, we never really had a boat coming out here?” Steve asked.
“Not that Jacob knows of. I’m going to go talk to our guys over their tent.” In a few minuets I joined Winchell in the canvass tent. John was clearly annoyed and impatient, he appeared to be as frustrated and uncertain as we were. Angel told Winchell and I that if we left the canoes at the beginning, they could have made it to the cache and we would all be in Gjoa Haven.
“You should have brought more gas. We told Jacob that we needed six people and three canoes to be picked up and brought to Gjoa Haven,” I replied.
“Oh I’m not angry, I’m happy,” Angel’s teeth showed a yellow grimace, “who couldn’t be happy? See, I’m smiling.”
“What else are you going to do,” I said and took a gulp of coffee. The story for the day was that it was clearly too windy and rough for any boat to leave Gjoa Haven. Neither John nor Angel had talked to Jacob on the previous day as we had assumed, but they were going to talk to him that day after lunch. The boat they thought was going to come yesterday, or begin to try to come yesterday, was never more than wishful thinking.
Meanwhile, Steve was beginning to look for other ways we could get out. Almost two weeks before, while still on the Back River, we had broken into the Water Survey Cabin east of Mount Meadowbank. The morning after our stay, as we finished our hot breakfast, we heard the buzz of an airplane, looked out the door and saw a Twin Otter landing on the water. Instead of being scolded for trespassing, or yelled at in anyway, we were welcomed by the team of three Hydro-technicians, Derrick, Jamie and Steve, and two pilots, Paul and Brad. They told us we could stick around, offered us food that they had brought, and invited us to join them for some Kokanee beer and a endless fish fry in the cabin that evening.
We did.
Steve had wrote down their phone numbers as we planed to meet up with them when we got into Yellowknife. Derrick offered us use of his cabin and Jamie promised even better fish done on his grill. As we were leaving, Jamie mentioned that he’d be back at the cabin in two weeks, so if we got lazy and didn’t move, he’d see us then.
The plan we hatched was that if Jamie was returning to the cabin, it might be possible for us to pay for the extra aviation fuel it would cost for them to come pick us up. Of course such a simple plan would have the confusing sinews of government burocracy to get through, but it was worth a try. Steve called Jamie, who told him that he would make some calls and look into some things, but Steve should call back at 4:00 and talk to Derrick, who was his supervisor.
While Steve waited to call Derrick, I went to find John who had left camp in hopes of shooting a caribou. I climbed up on a talus ridge and saw John bellow, in the distance, waving his coat over his head. I walked towards him. He had shot, and was in the process of skinning a caribou. On the animal I saw the same brown spots Angel told me meant poisonous meat.
“Oh no. This caribou must have bad meat too?” I said.
“No. It’s good.”
“What about the spots right here? These look like the same spots that the caribou Angel shot yesterday had.”
“I thought Angel said they were white.”
“No, they were brown. Just like this.”
“Really? What a fucking waste. That guy must be colorblind. That pisses me off.” I watched John dress the caribou. He spilled the organs, sliced then emptied the stomach of several liters of undigested greens, then filled the stomach with blood and tied it off. He cut through the vertebrate and stuffed the hindquarters in the empty cavity. “Do you want to eat something?”
“Indeed I do. But you won’t be offended if I have to spit it out?”
“Oh no, of course not.”
“What should I try?”
“Anything, it’s all good.”
“I heard from some Inuit hunters a few years back that the best tasting thing is a slice of liver dipped in the stomach greens.”
“Yeah. It’s the best, man.”
“Maybe I’ll try some of the lung first.” John cut off a piece of some still warm lung and handed it to me. An odd texture and smoky flavor hit my mouth. “That’s not too bad. I guess I’ll try some liver next.” I took a black piece of liver and dunked it, like a chip, into the stomach greens. The mixture smelled like a hayloft. I took one bite, chewed, gagged and almost puked. John laughed as I tried spitting out every last taste.
“Not too bad, eh?”
“The lung was all right, but I don’t know about the liver and greens.”
“Do you want some of this? It’s the kidney.” John offered me a slice from the kidney he was eating. “Oh, I feel a lot better now. I haven’t ate all day.”
“I better not, I don’t think my body’s used to raw organ food. I might get sick.” John sliced and ate the two kidneys like a cheese log with no crackers. After eating he cut the tongue and the eyeballs from the head, wrapped everything up in the hide, tied a rope around the furry bundle and slung it over his shoulders. I grabbed the four legs and stomach. We began to walk through the cold wind, over the broken rocks and muddy tundra, towards camp.
After I dropped the legs and the stomach off by John’s tent, I told him I was going to go check on the other guys, then come back to eat some of the caribou.
“Gentlemen,” I announced myself.
“Pete, come play some Hearts.” Adam said from inside the tent.
“Okay. I just ate some raw organ meat.” I took my boots off and crawled in next to Steve, Al and Adam. They asked me how my meal tasted. “Oh, I almost puked it right back up. How’s life in here?”
“Winchell and Kockler went for a hike around the island. We’ve just been in here, hungry and warm,” Adam said.
“But you found the other deck of cards?” I asked.
“Right here.” He began to shuffle.
“Our boys with the Water Survey are making things happen.” Steve smiled.
“What did Derrick say when you called him?” I asked.
“They made some phone calls up to Gjoa Haven, they talked to Jacob, you know, the big boys from Yellowknife taking charge. We got gas on the way.” Steve chuckled as he looked at his cards.
“Who would have thought breaking and entering would have proved so beneficial?” I said.
“Jacob talked to Angel over the radio, I guess some guy named Anthony is going to pick us up. We got our boys in Yellowknife busting heads for us,” Steve smiled.
“He won’t be here for – 3 more days,” Al said.
“Derrick’s going to look into a few more things, so I’m going to call him back in the morning. 10 o’clock.” After an hour of playing Hearts I was hungry. Everyone had been living off meager rations, a candy bar or piece of bay bread (basically a homemade granola bar) a bowl of hot cereal, and perhaps a handful of nuts. Inactivity doesn’t require much food for energy, but for most of the day, most of the guys were hungry.
“Does anyone want to go over and eat caribou?” I asked. No one did. I went over to John and Angel’s tent. A pot of caribou was boiling, the marrow from the bones thickening the salt water into a rich broth.
“Are any of the other guys going to come eat? We have plenty.” John asked.
“No, it’s just me.”
“Are they mad or what?”
“They’re a little impatient, mostly just lazy.”
“I feel really bad about this. It’s shitty, you know,” John said.
“It’s one more chapter to the adventure,” I said. We talked about the boat Anthony would be coming in, paused to hear the incoming calls coming over the radio in a mysterious language. The two would laugh with a distant voice, making entirely incomprehensible conversation as I ate pieces of boiled caribou and drank cups of broth.
“Thank you very much for coming over and eating with us. We really appreciate it,” John said.
“Oh no, this is great. I’m the one who appreciates you feeding me.”
“I still feel bad about getting you guy stuck here,” John said. Angel immediately chimed in, speaking in excited, almost angry Inuktitut. John responded in his quiet manner. I understood nothing. I picked up another chunk of caribou, took the knife and sliced off the piece in my mouth.
“Do you know if Anthony will take a few of our bags, maybe let a couple of us ride with him back to Gjoa Haven? That might help us with gas mileage.” I asked. Angel said something in Inuktitut.
“Maybe not,” John said, perhaps translating what Angel may not have wanted translated, “he thinks not. Because you are not Inuit.”
On the third morning Winchell called his dad to check in and see if there was any updates about his job at the University. “Well, my dad gave me an earful this morning,” Winchell began after he put the phone away. “He just talked to Jacob, and Jacob told him that he didn’t know we were out of gas. My dad is pissed, basically he said, ‘Jacob, do you know who you’re talking to? Yesterday you told me that you were really upset that those two guys left without enough gas, and that you were still looking for someone to bring them gas.’ But he was so pissed he just handed the phone to my mom.”
“So Jacob’s a bit of a shady character,” Steve added.
“Anything else?” I asked.
“I guess Jacob also said that he couldn’t send anyone because he didn’t have our coordinates, even though my dad gave them to him. Dad’s a little upset. Otherwise, we’re still waiting here. My mom wants me to call back tonight. She said that they’re done dealing with Jacob.”
“Well,” I said, “once the moms start getting worried, there’s going to be a lot of frantic phone calls made to this area. All levels of government, throughout Canada are going to be infiltrated.”
Steve called our friends back at the Water Survey. “Jamie’s coming out here for three days on Tuesday,” Steve began to explain after he had made the call. “Derrick basically said, ‘we’re not going to let you guys get stranded out there.’ So if we’re still out here on Monday, in two days, we’ll give them a call.” And so alternative exit strategies began to materialize.
The next day the sky was empty, the wind dead, and the ocean silent. The perfect conditions were a mockery as we waited for a boat and worried the weather would turn once help was available. All we could do was wait. Everyone was out of the tents, out wandering around the island, enjoying the balmy temperatures that must have reached the mid-fifties. Angel yelled at Winchell, telling him it was our fault we were marooned, and that we could be paddling the boat some 14 miles across the inlet to the cache if we weren’t all scattered around the island. We had paddled the boat about 300 yards on that first morning when the motor wouldn’t start. The boat barely moved with eight paddles urging it forward, there was no way we could, or would, paddle it across the 9 miles of open water then another 5 miles.
By mid-day, not only had we received word that Anthony had left Gjoa Haven, but that Winchell’s parents had contacted the RCMP in Gjoa Haven, something Jacob evidently did not want them to do, and if we were not off the island by 11:00 that evening, the Search and Rescue boat would be at our island by 6:00 the next morning.
Weather was rough forty miles away in Gjoa Haven, and just as we had broken camp, we received word that Anthony had to turn back because the water in the straits was too rough. Two hours later Anthony had radioed in that the water had calmed outside of Gjoa Haven and he was on his way.
The weather held, the boat arrived, and Winchell’s parents did not have to call the RCMP to send Search and Rescue out for us. The other boat brought gas, fry biscuits, cigarettes, and gasoline. Anthony, his wife and their friend John, were very generous and invited Winchell and Al to ride with them back to Gjoa Haven, the whole time feeding them rolls stuffed with cheese and offering them an endless supply of cigarettes.
Winds of up to 60 km per hour were predicted for the next day, and every sputter of the motor, involuntary slow down, or speculation as to whether we had enough gas just made me shudder. In about three hours we pulled into the harbor Roald Amundson had spent two years in while navigating the Northwest Passage; the 100 hours we spent from the time we were picked up to the time we stepped onto the beach and into the footsteps of one of my heroes, seemed a blink.
We slept in our tents on the harbor shore. The next day we had a meeting at 1:00 to settle with John, Angel, and Anthony. Winchell talked with the RCMP before the meeting just to make sure we were under no legal duress to pay them more than what we thought was reasonable. Steve, Winchell and I went to meet all of them at the Hotel restaurant. Winchell purchased three packs of cigarettes and handed them out to everyone. John said he wanted $200 per person, a price that included both the gas he used to come get us and all the gas Anthony brought and used. Angel wanted $500. We told John that we would pay him the $1200, but from that he would have to pay Angel and pay Anthony the $250 he was asking for. We were firm that we were being more than fair. Angel was most vocal in his demands for money, but we told him that he would have to talk to John about being paid. We had lost $3000 worth of equipment and despite Angel’s insistence that the boats would be picked up and shipped to any address we left him, we maintained that we had no confidence that that would happen. Angel was clearly upset that we wouldn’t pay him what he was asking. We talked for about twenty minutes. As we were leaving, the owner of the hotel, who had overheard our negotiations, took Steve aside. Winchell left and went to buy gas tickets for John and Anthony at the Co-op, then paid the remaining balance to John, which ended up to be something under $600 Canadian. When I saw Steve again, Steve told me that the hotel owner had a shack full of canoes people left in town. “I’m facebook friends with him now. If our canoes show up, he’ll let us know. Otherwise I talked with his buddy who’s the RCMP officer here. This guy told me that a Search and Rescue boat would have been sent out right away if we notified them the moment we had run out of gas. And it wouldn’t have cost anything. Also there’s this guy in town, Paul, who has a 20 ft. boat equipped with a canoe rack he built and a four-stroke engine. The guy has a boat designed to pick up canoe parties. I’m wondering why Jacob sent these two guys who never picked up a canoe party and not this Paul guy.”
John gave Anthony $250 and paid Angel $250, which left less than $100 for himself. Angel was angry at only getting half the amount he wanted and stormed off to report us to the RCMP. Before we left on the plane Anthony, both Johns, and the six of us took a picture outside of the town hall building. Within the hour we were waiting in the airport lobby. With bear-spray and knives we boarded the plane. From the window I could see the shards of pack-ice gathered along the shores of the Arctic, and as we neared Yellowknife the spiraled scars of the enormous diamond mines around Contwoyto Lake appeared.
Within an hour the six of us saw the first trees we had seen in seven weeks.
CODA:
The wonderful thing about traveling in these remote areas of the North is that despite the safety nets of satellite phones, indestructible canoes and the comforts of absurdly expensive long underwear and raincoats, such incidents can still happen. I am grateful that we had to negotiate such unpredictable events such as ice, weather, miscalculation/swindling (whatever it was) and human error. I go on these trips for a little adventure, to see what remains of the unpeopled world, and experience something of the freedom that surfaces without schedules, appointments, real-world obligations, and, as far north as we were, the division between night and day.
I have been canoeing in Canada for a little over 10 years now, and I am beginning to realize that there is far more to the experience of a river journey than beautiful eskers, herds of caribou, or thrilling whitewater. It is the events that were never asked for or actively pursued, events that don’t necessarily teach a moral or lesson (except that gas is a vital component to an outboard motor) but remain the gifts of experience we may never have received if everything had gone as smoothly as our preparations and hopes assured. Such bumps and troubles texture and enrich every experience.
“He is not going to be happy,” Adam said. We had borrowed one of the canoes, a Daggar Venture, from a friend, Russ Opatz, who didn’t really want us to take his boat on the trip in the first place, and now we would have to tell him that it was abandoned in a beautiful rocky cove somewhere in Chantry Inlet on the Arctic Ocean.
“There’s always a chance we can get them back, like they said, maybe the next day, and we can ship it by barge,” Winchell said.
“No. If we leave the boats here, they are gone,” I said. “Just think of what would have to happen. Someone would have to come get them, which they failed to do the first time, then they would have to arrange with the cargo company to barge them to our addresses. How’s payment going to work out? Do we leave them money and just assume they’ll take care of this while we’re gone, or are we going to pay them once we get confirmation the canoes are on the barge? This isn’t a Fortune 500 company bending over to maintain a good relationship with clients. If we leave the canoes here, these canoes are gone.” It wasn’t the happiest, or maybe even the best, decision we ever made as a crew, but our safety, and the very possibility of getting out of Chantry Inlet, required that we abandon the three canoes. And so we gutted the canoes of their seats, yokes and thwarts, and beside a twenty-foot outcropping of steep rock the canoes were laid side by side at 67.464 N latitude and 95.375 W longitude, if anyone ever cares to find them.
Winchell and I approached John and Angel, who were cooking a pot of caribou stew. Winchell, still trying to figure out if it would be financially viable to pay for another boat to retrieve the three canoes, asked John how much he was going to charge for picking us up.
“I’m not sure. Let me eat first then I’ll figure it out,” he replied.
“How much would it be for someone to come get these boats?” Winchell asked.
“We come get them the next day, no cost to you,” Angel said.
“The thing is we all might have to leave Gjoa Haven the next day, so how would we be sure that the boats would get on the barge?”
“It’s no problem. We’ll be in Gjoa Haven tomorrow,” Angel said.
“Do we have enough gas to get there?” Winchell asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe not enough to get to Montreal Island.” Montreal Island was about thirty or forty miles away, near where the gas cache was stored.
“So, how will we have enough gas to get to Gjoa Haven?”
“I don’t know. Maybe someone will deliver the gas to us.”
“Do we have enough gas to get to the gas cache?” Winchell’s voice was somewhat confused, somewhat annoyed.
“Maybe,” Angel and John then exchanged words in Inuktitut. “You will get to Gjoa Haven on time for your plane. Talk to John, it’s his boat.” Without any clear answers we walked back to where the other guys were gathered around a small fire burning the driftwood collected on shore
“Did they say how much it would cost?” Kockler asked..
“Within five minutes Angel told me it wouldn’t cost anything then that it would cost money to pick up the boats,” Winchell said. “I don’t know how well he understands English.”
“I think there might be some basic cultural differences,” I added, “I think they understand time more in a matter of when one has to go hunt or can go hunt, rather than nicely divided squares and numbers on a calendar.”
“I don’t like what’s going on,” Al said. “I think they’re going to try to swindle us out of money.”
“We’re not in a place we can negotiate,” Winchell said. “We’ll deal with cost once we get into Gjoa Haven.” We ate a meal of rice, reconstituted hamburger and instant cheese. We were nearing the end of our food rations. The sun had fallen behind the horizon, and a fat sliver of the moon began to glow in the blackened blue of the coming night. Hoping to stay warm, I put on two pairs of polypro underwear, a farmer john wetsuit, a wool shirt, a fleece and raingear. John and Angel brought us the remaining caribou stew they had made.
From shore the water looked deceptively calm, but on the boat, outside of the protected cove where we had stopped, the cold air had stirred the water into a frenzied state. The nineteen-foot boat was rocked on both sided by waves; at times sheets of water crashed over us. All six of us had attended the same Catholic High-school, and we tried, between a great amount of profanity and laughter, to remember the words to Hail Mary, Our Father, and The Glory Be.
As the boat buzzed into the night the water calmed. The air was thick with a cold mist. We all began to grow increasingly chilled. We passed beside crags and cliffs that were barely visible in the brief blue night. A sliver of orange from the never setting sun swung across the horizon and began to blaze in the east. As dawn broke we were on King Island, out of gas, and numb with cold.
We set up the tents in the cold light of the sun. My fingers could hardly grasp the tent poles or unzip my jacket. I couldn’t remember the last time I felt so cold; once I was in my sleeping bag I couldn’t remember the last time I was so happy to be in a sleeping bag.
It was clear that the quick ride to Gjoa Haven had become Phase II of our trip: getting to Gjoa Haven. In the morning I walked over to the large canvass tent John and Angel were staying in. A static squelch buzzed in the background of the Inuktitut I heard transmitted over the radio. Winchell had been in the tent, sipping coffee and warming up by the stove for almost an hour. “Did you call anyone?” I asked him.
“No. They radioed out earlier this morning. Someone’s on their way with gas.”
“Nice.” I sat down. Angel offered and John poured me a cup of coffee. “Do you know who’s coming to get us?” I asked.
“Maybe Search and Rescue. Some other guys might come though.”
“So now we just wait, huh?” Another pot of coffee began to boil. Al joined us and the five of us spent most of the afternoon in the warm canvass tent while Kockler, Steve and Adam stayed in their sleeping bags. After talking about hunting for a while, Al and I went out with Angel to hunt caribou. Angel walked off over a hill while I waited for Al to get his things from his tent.
“Those guys told me I shouldn’t eat with John and Angel, or go hunting,” he said after we had walked a little ways.
“Who?”
“Adam and Kockler. They said it would just put us further in their debt, and they were just going to try to get more money out of us by acting like our friends.”
“Well, that sounds like a good excuse to lay in a nylon tent all day.” We caught up with Angel and almost immediately spotted a caribou. Angel urged Al to take his gun and shoot the animal, promising Al that he wouldn’t tell anyone if he did; it’d be a secret. Al declined, and after two misses, Angel managed to drop the caribou.
Under the hide, the caribou was tarnished with brownish white spots over the red meat and transparent membrane. Angel told us this meant the animal was no good, and eating it could make you very sick or even die. Angel peeled off the hide and left the skinned carcass on the mossy rocks. He told us that he felt bad doing it, but what else could he do? He would send the hide in for testing and let the birds eat the caribou.
On the way back we stopped, Angel rolled a cigarette and began repeating what he already told me that morning: “You’re lucky we came to get you. Other people, they’d blame you for running out of gas, they’d push you much harder and would be very upset at you not leaving the boats back there when I tell you.” Al and I didn’t respond. “John, he will charge you a lot, he will push you for a lot of money, not me. I only want something to remember you by. You know, I take some Americans hunting, in the land, years ago. It cost nine-thousand dollars and he give me five-hundred dollar tip.” Angel took a few more drags from his cigarette. “I only want something to remember you by, not much.”
Al was clearly holding back, while I was doing my best to ignore what Angel was saying. “We’ll work it out in Gjoa Haven,” I said.
“That John, he’s hard to work with. I tell him to bring more than fifty gallons, but he doesn’t listen. He gets angry. I just want five-hundred dollars. John will push you for a lot more, not me. I just want a little.”
“You get us to Gjoa Haven first, then we’ll talk,” Al said. We began walking back to camp. In a few minuets Angel stopped for another cigarette. Al and I went ahead without him.
“The thing is, Pete, Angel told Kockler and me that he got tired of sitting around on his couch and came out with John for the adventure. He told us he wasn’t getting paid for this.”
“I’m not too concerned about what he said. The price Jacob quoted us was five-hundred-dollars per boat plus the cost of gas. Then there’s the issue of three abandoned canoes. He’s not getting five-hundred for himself.”
“I don’t trust him.”
“Yeah I can’t quite figure this guy out. When he was trying to make John sound like trouble I kind of thought, this guys a swindler.”
“You know why I didn’t shoot that caribou?” Al asked.
“No. I was surprised you didn’t.”
“He kept holding the gun out to me, saying, ‘you can take this shot, here shoot it, I wont tell, I promise. Shoot it. Here.’ I’m pretty sure once I shot it he would have said, ‘Now you have to pay me four-thousand-dollars or I’ll turn you in for poaching.’”
Winchell was out by the tents, “You guys shoot anything?” he called out.
“Yeah. But it was rotten. How was that meeting of yours you had today? It was at 12:30, right? Did you just get back from it or what?”
“Too soon, Pete. You’re picking at those wounds too soon.”
“Do you think you lost your job?”
“My dad’s been talking with the Department Chair, who really likes me, and I think I’ll be all right. This isn’t a, ‘I’m sick so I can’t make the meeting’ excuse. It’s more of the ‘I’m stranded on the Arctic Ocean’ variety.”
“I’ve used that one before. It works pretty well. You seem pretty relaxed about loosing your stipend, funding and health insurance,” I said.
“Well, there’s really not a lot I can do.”
No boat came that day. I spent the night reading a book on Shackleton’s voyage following the destruction of his ship, The Endurance. After a few hours of reading I went to sleep warm – inconvenienced, but warm.
In the morning, after receiving vague answers from John and Angel about how we were going to get gas delivered to us, Winchell called Jacob in Gjoa Haven to ask him what the status of our gas delivery was. He turned off the phone and chuckled, “Jacob said he didn’t know of anyone who was going to go pick us up and then said, ‘Well, who’s going to pay for this gas?’”
“So we don’t have a boat coming out here, we never really had a boat coming out here?” Steve asked.
“Not that Jacob knows of. I’m going to go talk to our guys over their tent.” In a few minuets I joined Winchell in the canvass tent. John was clearly annoyed and impatient, he appeared to be as frustrated and uncertain as we were. Angel told Winchell and I that if we left the canoes at the beginning, they could have made it to the cache and we would all be in Gjoa Haven.
“You should have brought more gas. We told Jacob that we needed six people and three canoes to be picked up and brought to Gjoa Haven,” I replied.
“Oh I’m not angry, I’m happy,” Angel’s teeth showed a yellow grimace, “who couldn’t be happy? See, I’m smiling.”
“What else are you going to do,” I said and took a gulp of coffee. The story for the day was that it was clearly too windy and rough for any boat to leave Gjoa Haven. Neither John nor Angel had talked to Jacob on the previous day as we had assumed, but they were going to talk to him that day after lunch. The boat they thought was going to come yesterday, or begin to try to come yesterday, was never more than wishful thinking.
Meanwhile, Steve was beginning to look for other ways we could get out. Almost two weeks before, while still on the Back River, we had broken into the Water Survey Cabin east of Mount Meadowbank. The morning after our stay, as we finished our hot breakfast, we heard the buzz of an airplane, looked out the door and saw a Twin Otter landing on the water. Instead of being scolded for trespassing, or yelled at in anyway, we were welcomed by the team of three Hydro-technicians, Derrick, Jamie and Steve, and two pilots, Paul and Brad. They told us we could stick around, offered us food that they had brought, and invited us to join them for some Kokanee beer and a endless fish fry in the cabin that evening.
We did.
Steve had wrote down their phone numbers as we planed to meet up with them when we got into Yellowknife. Derrick offered us use of his cabin and Jamie promised even better fish done on his grill. As we were leaving, Jamie mentioned that he’d be back at the cabin in two weeks, so if we got lazy and didn’t move, he’d see us then.
The plan we hatched was that if Jamie was returning to the cabin, it might be possible for us to pay for the extra aviation fuel it would cost for them to come pick us up. Of course such a simple plan would have the confusing sinews of government burocracy to get through, but it was worth a try. Steve called Jamie, who told him that he would make some calls and look into some things, but Steve should call back at 4:00 and talk to Derrick, who was his supervisor.
While Steve waited to call Derrick, I went to find John who had left camp in hopes of shooting a caribou. I climbed up on a talus ridge and saw John bellow, in the distance, waving his coat over his head. I walked towards him. He had shot, and was in the process of skinning a caribou. On the animal I saw the same brown spots Angel told me meant poisonous meat.
“Oh no. This caribou must have bad meat too?” I said.
“No. It’s good.”
“What about the spots right here? These look like the same spots that the caribou Angel shot yesterday had.”
“I thought Angel said they were white.”
“No, they were brown. Just like this.”
“Really? What a fucking waste. That guy must be colorblind. That pisses me off.” I watched John dress the caribou. He spilled the organs, sliced then emptied the stomach of several liters of undigested greens, then filled the stomach with blood and tied it off. He cut through the vertebrate and stuffed the hindquarters in the empty cavity. “Do you want to eat something?”
“Indeed I do. But you won’t be offended if I have to spit it out?”
“Oh no, of course not.”
“What should I try?”
“Anything, it’s all good.”
“I heard from some Inuit hunters a few years back that the best tasting thing is a slice of liver dipped in the stomach greens.”
“Yeah. It’s the best, man.”
“Maybe I’ll try some of the lung first.” John cut off a piece of some still warm lung and handed it to me. An odd texture and smoky flavor hit my mouth. “That’s not too bad. I guess I’ll try some liver next.” I took a black piece of liver and dunked it, like a chip, into the stomach greens. The mixture smelled like a hayloft. I took one bite, chewed, gagged and almost puked. John laughed as I tried spitting out every last taste.
“Not too bad, eh?”
“The lung was all right, but I don’t know about the liver and greens.”
“Do you want some of this? It’s the kidney.” John offered me a slice from the kidney he was eating. “Oh, I feel a lot better now. I haven’t ate all day.”
“I better not, I don’t think my body’s used to raw organ food. I might get sick.” John sliced and ate the two kidneys like a cheese log with no crackers. After eating he cut the tongue and the eyeballs from the head, wrapped everything up in the hide, tied a rope around the furry bundle and slung it over his shoulders. I grabbed the four legs and stomach. We began to walk through the cold wind, over the broken rocks and muddy tundra, towards camp.
After I dropped the legs and the stomach off by John’s tent, I told him I was going to go check on the other guys, then come back to eat some of the caribou.
“Gentlemen,” I announced myself.
“Pete, come play some Hearts.” Adam said from inside the tent.
“Okay. I just ate some raw organ meat.” I took my boots off and crawled in next to Steve, Al and Adam. They asked me how my meal tasted. “Oh, I almost puked it right back up. How’s life in here?”
“Winchell and Kockler went for a hike around the island. We’ve just been in here, hungry and warm,” Adam said.
“But you found the other deck of cards?” I asked.
“Right here.” He began to shuffle.
“Our boys with the Water Survey are making things happen.” Steve smiled.
“What did Derrick say when you called him?” I asked.
“They made some phone calls up to Gjoa Haven, they talked to Jacob, you know, the big boys from Yellowknife taking charge. We got gas on the way.” Steve chuckled as he looked at his cards.
“Who would have thought breaking and entering would have proved so beneficial?” I said.
“Jacob talked to Angel over the radio, I guess some guy named Anthony is going to pick us up. We got our boys in Yellowknife busting heads for us,” Steve smiled.
“He won’t be here for – 3 more days,” Al said.
“Derrick’s going to look into a few more things, so I’m going to call him back in the morning. 10 o’clock.” After an hour of playing Hearts I was hungry. Everyone had been living off meager rations, a candy bar or piece of bay bread (basically a homemade granola bar) a bowl of hot cereal, and perhaps a handful of nuts. Inactivity doesn’t require much food for energy, but for most of the day, most of the guys were hungry.
“Does anyone want to go over and eat caribou?” I asked. No one did. I went over to John and Angel’s tent. A pot of caribou was boiling, the marrow from the bones thickening the salt water into a rich broth.
“Are any of the other guys going to come eat? We have plenty.” John asked.
“No, it’s just me.”
“Are they mad or what?”
“They’re a little impatient, mostly just lazy.”
“I feel really bad about this. It’s shitty, you know,” John said.
“It’s one more chapter to the adventure,” I said. We talked about the boat Anthony would be coming in, paused to hear the incoming calls coming over the radio in a mysterious language. The two would laugh with a distant voice, making entirely incomprehensible conversation as I ate pieces of boiled caribou and drank cups of broth.
“Thank you very much for coming over and eating with us. We really appreciate it,” John said.
“Oh no, this is great. I’m the one who appreciates you feeding me.”
“I still feel bad about getting you guy stuck here,” John said. Angel immediately chimed in, speaking in excited, almost angry Inuktitut. John responded in his quiet manner. I understood nothing. I picked up another chunk of caribou, took the knife and sliced off the piece in my mouth.
“Do you know if Anthony will take a few of our bags, maybe let a couple of us ride with him back to Gjoa Haven? That might help us with gas mileage.” I asked. Angel said something in Inuktitut.
“Maybe not,” John said, perhaps translating what Angel may not have wanted translated, “he thinks not. Because you are not Inuit.”
On the third morning Winchell called his dad to check in and see if there was any updates about his job at the University. “Well, my dad gave me an earful this morning,” Winchell began after he put the phone away. “He just talked to Jacob, and Jacob told him that he didn’t know we were out of gas. My dad is pissed, basically he said, ‘Jacob, do you know who you’re talking to? Yesterday you told me that you were really upset that those two guys left without enough gas, and that you were still looking for someone to bring them gas.’ But he was so pissed he just handed the phone to my mom.”
“So Jacob’s a bit of a shady character,” Steve added.
“Anything else?” I asked.
“I guess Jacob also said that he couldn’t send anyone because he didn’t have our coordinates, even though my dad gave them to him. Dad’s a little upset. Otherwise, we’re still waiting here. My mom wants me to call back tonight. She said that they’re done dealing with Jacob.”
“Well,” I said, “once the moms start getting worried, there’s going to be a lot of frantic phone calls made to this area. All levels of government, throughout Canada are going to be infiltrated.”
Steve called our friends back at the Water Survey. “Jamie’s coming out here for three days on Tuesday,” Steve began to explain after he had made the call. “Derrick basically said, ‘we’re not going to let you guys get stranded out there.’ So if we’re still out here on Monday, in two days, we’ll give them a call.” And so alternative exit strategies began to materialize.
The next day the sky was empty, the wind dead, and the ocean silent. The perfect conditions were a mockery as we waited for a boat and worried the weather would turn once help was available. All we could do was wait. Everyone was out of the tents, out wandering around the island, enjoying the balmy temperatures that must have reached the mid-fifties. Angel yelled at Winchell, telling him it was our fault we were marooned, and that we could be paddling the boat some 14 miles across the inlet to the cache if we weren’t all scattered around the island. We had paddled the boat about 300 yards on that first morning when the motor wouldn’t start. The boat barely moved with eight paddles urging it forward, there was no way we could, or would, paddle it across the 9 miles of open water then another 5 miles.
By mid-day, not only had we received word that Anthony had left Gjoa Haven, but that Winchell’s parents had contacted the RCMP in Gjoa Haven, something Jacob evidently did not want them to do, and if we were not off the island by 11:00 that evening, the Search and Rescue boat would be at our island by 6:00 the next morning.
Weather was rough forty miles away in Gjoa Haven, and just as we had broken camp, we received word that Anthony had to turn back because the water in the straits was too rough. Two hours later Anthony had radioed in that the water had calmed outside of Gjoa Haven and he was on his way.
The weather held, the boat arrived, and Winchell’s parents did not have to call the RCMP to send Search and Rescue out for us. The other boat brought gas, fry biscuits, cigarettes, and gasoline. Anthony, his wife and their friend John, were very generous and invited Winchell and Al to ride with them back to Gjoa Haven, the whole time feeding them rolls stuffed with cheese and offering them an endless supply of cigarettes.
Winds of up to 60 km per hour were predicted for the next day, and every sputter of the motor, involuntary slow down, or speculation as to whether we had enough gas just made me shudder. In about three hours we pulled into the harbor Roald Amundson had spent two years in while navigating the Northwest Passage; the 100 hours we spent from the time we were picked up to the time we stepped onto the beach and into the footsteps of one of my heroes, seemed a blink.
We slept in our tents on the harbor shore. The next day we had a meeting at 1:00 to settle with John, Angel, and Anthony. Winchell talked with the RCMP before the meeting just to make sure we were under no legal duress to pay them more than what we thought was reasonable. Steve, Winchell and I went to meet all of them at the Hotel restaurant. Winchell purchased three packs of cigarettes and handed them out to everyone. John said he wanted $200 per person, a price that included both the gas he used to come get us and all the gas Anthony brought and used. Angel wanted $500. We told John that we would pay him the $1200, but from that he would have to pay Angel and pay Anthony the $250 he was asking for. We were firm that we were being more than fair. Angel was most vocal in his demands for money, but we told him that he would have to talk to John about being paid. We had lost $3000 worth of equipment and despite Angel’s insistence that the boats would be picked up and shipped to any address we left him, we maintained that we had no confidence that that would happen. Angel was clearly upset that we wouldn’t pay him what he was asking. We talked for about twenty minutes. As we were leaving, the owner of the hotel, who had overheard our negotiations, took Steve aside. Winchell left and went to buy gas tickets for John and Anthony at the Co-op, then paid the remaining balance to John, which ended up to be something under $600 Canadian. When I saw Steve again, Steve told me that the hotel owner had a shack full of canoes people left in town. “I’m facebook friends with him now. If our canoes show up, he’ll let us know. Otherwise I talked with his buddy who’s the RCMP officer here. This guy told me that a Search and Rescue boat would have been sent out right away if we notified them the moment we had run out of gas. And it wouldn’t have cost anything. Also there’s this guy in town, Paul, who has a 20 ft. boat equipped with a canoe rack he built and a four-stroke engine. The guy has a boat designed to pick up canoe parties. I’m wondering why Jacob sent these two guys who never picked up a canoe party and not this Paul guy.”
John gave Anthony $250 and paid Angel $250, which left less than $100 for himself. Angel was angry at only getting half the amount he wanted and stormed off to report us to the RCMP. Before we left on the plane Anthony, both Johns, and the six of us took a picture outside of the town hall building. Within the hour we were waiting in the airport lobby. With bear-spray and knives we boarded the plane. From the window I could see the shards of pack-ice gathered along the shores of the Arctic, and as we neared Yellowknife the spiraled scars of the enormous diamond mines around Contwoyto Lake appeared.
Within an hour the six of us saw the first trees we had seen in seven weeks.
CODA:
The wonderful thing about traveling in these remote areas of the North is that despite the safety nets of satellite phones, indestructible canoes and the comforts of absurdly expensive long underwear and raincoats, such incidents can still happen. I am grateful that we had to negotiate such unpredictable events such as ice, weather, miscalculation/swindling (whatever it was) and human error. I go on these trips for a little adventure, to see what remains of the unpeopled world, and experience something of the freedom that surfaces without schedules, appointments, real-world obligations, and, as far north as we were, the division between night and day.
I have been canoeing in Canada for a little over 10 years now, and I am beginning to realize that there is far more to the experience of a river journey than beautiful eskers, herds of caribou, or thrilling whitewater. It is the events that were never asked for or actively pursued, events that don’t necessarily teach a moral or lesson (except that gas is a vital component to an outboard motor) but remain the gifts of experience we may never have received if everything had gone as smoothly as our preparations and hopes assured. Such bumps and troubles texture and enrich every experience.
