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  PADDLENORTH

  ADVENTURE, RESILIENCE, AND RENEWAL IN THE ARCTIC WILD

  JENNIFER KINGSLEY

  Copyright © 2014 by Jennifer Kingsley

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a license from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For a copyright license, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

  Greystone Books Ltd.

  www.greystonebooks.com

  Cataloguing data available from Library and Archives Canada

  ISBN 978-1-77164-035-0 (cloth)

  ISBN 978-1-77164-036-7 (epub)

  Editing by Nancy Flight

  Copy editing by Jennifer Croll

  Cover photograph by Jennifer Kingsley

  Photographs by Drew Gulyas, Tim Irvin, Jennifer Kingsley, and Levi Waldron

  We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the British Columbia Arts Council, the Province of British Columbia through the Book Publishing Tax Credit, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.

  We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $157 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country.

  Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien. L’an dernier, le Conseil a investi 157 millions de dollars pour mettre de l’art dans la vie des Canadiennes et des Canadiens de tout le pays.

  Paddling one of the Back’s many lakes. CREDIT: TIM IRVIN

  for Tim

  For some of us, wilderness is a place — maybe a park. For others, it’s the essence of wild nature, and a park could never enclose it. Some call wilderness a cathedral; others call it a construction.

  Inside wilderness lives the elusive idea of wildness, a shape-shifter that crawls onto the crease of a leaf, sleeps between skyscrapers, spreads across a mountain range, or rests in a drop of seawater. We could call it the spirit of wilderness, but wilderness cannot contain it. Wildness overflows the boundaries of location, refusing to conform to a scale or definition.

  CONTENTS

  ONE To Begin, to Begin

  TWO First Mistakes

  THREE Wilding

  FOUR Sinking

  FIVE Namesake

  SIX Approach

  SEVEN Library

  EIGHT Storm

  NINE Search

  TEN Forward

  ELEVEN Release

  TWELVE Reprieve

  THIRTEEN Arrival

  FOURTEEN Contact

  FIFTEEN Hunger

  SIXTEEN Standby

  SEVENTEEN Overtime

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Endnotes

  Bibliography

  ONE

  TO BEGIN, TO BEGIN

  I CLIMBED THE thin steps of the Twin Otter floatplane carefully; it wouldn’t do to twist an ankle before take-off. I squeezed by our stack of canoes and slid into a cold metal seat. As we taxied out into the bay and accelerated, the plane’s vibrations became a steady roar. I reached for the company-issued earmuffs and prepared to be pushed back in my chair as we nosed upward. The plane dragged the heels of its pontoons along the water, and suddenly we were airborne.

  I was surrounded by camping gear, fifty days’ worth of food, and my five companions. Yellowknife disappeared within moments, along with the silver edge of Great Slave Lake. Ponds and small lakes stared blackly upward, and golden muskeg glowed between spruce trees. The horizon arced in the distance, and I wanted to believe that wilderness would not be broken again as we headed north. I stared at the ground, looking for animals, and my eyes were rewarded, not with moose or caribou, but with a paved road that gave way to gravel, and finally to the open pit of a diamond mine. The land was big enough to swallow hundreds of thousands of caribou, powerful rivers, and fresh scars of industry. I was used to studying the landscape from the black and white lines of topographical maps — most of which are too old to show the territories’ newer faces.

  Despite my nervousness and excitement, the howl of the airplane, and the cold that crept through its metal shell, I slumped against the wall and slept. Preparing for the trip had exhausted all of us. While I napped, we continued north, and the trees thinned out into isolated clumps and then disappeared altogether. I awoke to find Drew with his forehead pressed to the window, his eyes open wide in amazement. We had reached the tundra in springtime; no trees, but lots of ice. We were only the third group of paddlers to be dropped off by the air charter company so far that summer. All of the lakes, about half the surface of the land, flared white under the clouds. The ground resembled a muted painter’s palette of grays, browns, and yellows mixed between bright patches of snow. No recognizable landforms stood out, no movement. Pools of color stretched to the curve of the earth.

  Our planned landing was impossible; only a few sections of river were unfrozen. Tim wrestled with the map and pointed. The pilot nodded; the plane dipped left and spiraled down, its nose seeking water below. My view alternated from land to sky, land to sky, unsettling the lunch in my belly. The wings finally stabilized, but ice still zoomed under our feet. I felt the river before I saw it. We stuttered across its surface.

  The Baillie River wears a trough into the tundra’s rocky plain. This tributary would lead our group of six to the Back River, a massive 1,000-kilometer-long waterway that drains the central mainland of Nunavut, Canada’s largest and northernmost territory. The Back boasts over eighty sets of rapids, 10-foot standing waves, boiling chutes, and an enormous system of lakes. We planned to spend fifty days winding our way to the Arctic Ocean. And it would all start here. My feet froze in the water as I carried a pack to shore. The river was only about 25 meters across.

  The plane buzzed overhead and dipped its wings in farewell. I stood at the water’s edge in a thin yellow windbreaker I wouldn’t wear again for the rest of the trip, and scanned our heap of gear: three boats, three personal packs, four food packs, four food barrels (hip height, waterproof, and made from blue plastic), two wannigans (voyageur-style wooden boxes with removable lids and tumplines for carrying), and a mess of paddles, PFDs (personal flotation devices, aka life jackets), helmets, and day packs. Gusts of wind pulled at my hair and found the gap above my waistband. The painter’s palette had sprung into a relief of small rises, but without trees or familiar landmarks, scale was hard to figure out.

  We stood around feeling stunned by our new reality — we had been eating take-out noodles in Yellowknife three hours earlier — until Levi checked his thermometer and broke the silence. “It’s only one degree,” he said. “And how about that windchill?”

  We scattered after that.

  Alie sat down; Drew and Jen walked away from the water, picking up stones; Levi looked up at the sky; Tim walked the farthest. I stood by the river and cast my mind back three years to the first time I had set foot on the tundra. Is this what I remember? That summer lived in my memory as a sunny, buggy adventure filled with laughter and the good kind of challenge. It occurred to me that it might not be the same this time.

  Arrival on the Baillie River. Left to right: Levi Waldron, Tim Irvin, Jenny Kingsley, Drew Gulyas, Jen McKay, Alie Pick. CREDIT: TIM IRVIN

  We came back together eventually, and Tim showed me the handful of soft brown qiviut, the underfur from a muskox, that he had found on the ground. He tucked it into a pocket and set up the camera for a picture. The six of us stood close together with our arms entwined. We smiled with pale faces, short hair, new pants, and clean shoes. We stared straight at the lens, our feet planted squarely on the tundra — except my right foot and Alie’s left, which rolled out as if the
ground were too hot or cold to stand on. Levi had a dark bandana wrapped around his black hair, and his Leatherman Multi-Tool hung from his belt. Tim draped an arm around Levi’s shoulder and smiled broadly from under a baseball cap. Drew and I stood in the middle, freshly washed and confident, no hats. My dark hair barely curled behind my ears; his orange mop was cropped to a frizzy brush cut. Sunglasses held back Jen’s blonde hair — like she was having a day at the beach — and she wrapped her arm around Alie, whose red fleece looked fresh off the rack.

  The tundra filled in all around us. We stood on coarse, beige sand littered with fist- and skull-sized rocks. Each one was a different color — gray, black, purple, pink — and each was tattooed with splotches of lichen. Green and brown vegetation darkened the background, next to a small lake, and the horizon line cut behind us at waist level. Above it all, the clouds seemed to spread from a single point. They papered the sky white.

  THAT FIRST AFTERNOON was a blur of moving bags and searching for gear. We decided not to travel, or cook, until the next morning; the noodles would suffice until we slept.

  Tim and I shared a tent the first night, but he didn’t say much. I think he saved his energy for the group during those early days. He lay down with his back to me and started sleep-breathing within minutes. I had always envied his ability to fall asleep anywhere, anytime.

  I slid off my outer clothes and climbed into the pouf of my sleeping bag. It smelled moist. My clammy feet stuck to the nylon. I lay back and waited for my body heat to generate a warm shell. I had no idea what time it was. Our tents crouched on the sand, 2 degrees south of the Arctic Circle, four days after the summer solstice. The sun would dip below the horizon for about three hours.

  Silence filled the evening. The wind wasn’t strong enough to make noise or push the tents around. I strained to hear something outside, but I couldn’t. Not even the whine of a mosquito; it was still too cold for them. Tim’s breathing, the odd rustle of nylon from the vestibule, every movement of my sleeping bag, and the sound of my legs shifting against my Therm-a-Rest completed the soundtrack.

  I pulled out my journal and flipped through it in the beige light of the tent.

  The first sixty-one pages were already covered with calculations and lists dating back six months to January 2005. Everything from food weights to diagrams of eddy turns to expenses and endless food shopping lists. Some items were cryptic: ask about trip wire, write note about molasses. Others were small but important: go to dentist, ask group about toilet paper preferences.

  The lists became more scattered and more detailed as our departure day approached. Anything that I didn’t write down I risked forgetting: email about sunglasses, extra sugar and cinnamon. I knew it was silly to pack all these lists across the tundra, but I wanted one book that would tell my story from the beginning to the end.

  I wrote little about the details of that first day. I was more concerned about the feeling of being back on the tundra. Did I feel comfortable? Would I fit in with the group? What about Tim? I slept fitfully, haunted by a bird’s-eye view of the landscape, with the camera pulling back. Our camp got smaller and smaller until we faded away completely.

  THE NEXT MORNING I stretched outside the tent and appraised my surroundings. I had arrived in the world’s coldest biome. The Arctic tundra (there is also an alpine variety) is defined by relatively unappealing characteristics: year-round cold; lack of trees; permanently frozen ground, called permafrost, which leads to poorly drained soil; a short growing season; and low biodiversity. It’s hardly travel brochure material, and its other names, the Barrenlands or simply the Barrens, don’t inspire typical vacation dreams either. However, if you want to measure yourself against the Earth — to test your perspective on life and distance — there is nowhere better. Our planet is about 10 percent tundra, but relatively few of us will ever set foot on it. You can travel for weeks without finding another person, and what it lacks in diversity it makes up for in abundance. Millions of birds seek the Arctic tundra each spring; some, like the Arctic tern, fly all the way from South America to feed and breed. Legendary caribou migrations crisscross the tundra’s surface, and equally renowned swarms of biting flies fill the summer air. Animals that stay year-round — like muskox and gyrfalcons — push the limits of survival. It is one of the last places on Earth where apex predators like bears and wolves can live without much human interference. It is unlike anywhere else, and that is a wonder in itself, but in the three years since my last visit, I had forgotten about the tundra’s oppressive moods. The landscape is so open — yet when the wind rises, the temperature drops, and the sky fills with clouds, the atmosphere becomes heavy, and you feel trapped by all that freedom. Around our camp, Labrador tea, dwarf birch, and willow — still brown from the weight of winter — rolled away in every direction. The richness of warming earth reached my nose but was knocked away by the steel smell of ice.

  Morning brought our group’s first point of order.

  “Will today be the first day of the trip because it’s our first full day out here?” asked Jen.

  “I started the group journal last night with Day One,” said Drew.

  “Maybe today should be Day One and yesterday could be Day Zero because we didn’t paddle anywhere,” Alie offered.

  “Or yesterday could be Day One and today is Day Two,” said Levi.

  “Today is Day One,” Drew replied, “Day Two in New­found­land.”

  After bowls of granola with milk powder (coconut milk powder for Levi, who was vegan), we started to set up our partnerships. We decided not to establish fixed tent mates; if we rotated tent partners, we would get more one-on-one time with each other over the summer. We would have cooking partners to develop efficiency in the kitchen, but we could decide on those later. The most important thing to organize first was paddling partners. We needed to balance our skills to maximize safety. Choosing who would paddle with whom through the white water and big winds (we could switch up on the easier days) was like picking teams in gym class; it’s best if the teams are even, but everybody wants to be on a good team. We paired Levi, an experienced paddler and a good teacher, with Jen, our least experienced paddler. Tim, another white-water vet, paddled with Alie, an experienced tripper with less white-water experience. That left Drew, who spoke confidently about his white-water proficiency, and me, strong but out of practice. We planned to alternate between the bow and stern.

  It’s difficult to build a team of six people who can spend an entire summer far from home — especially when the team needs river skills, wilderness experience, a good balance of personalities, and, hopefully, a shared sense of humor. Our group was born the previous January when Tim and I pulled out a map of the Arctic. Tim was my closest friend, and over our ten-year friendship we had paddled at least a hundred days together. With the map spread out on the floor, we called Levi, our old canoe-tripping friend, who was finishing a PhD in wood science at the University of Toronto. He was an easy sell. Over the following weeks we combed our community for three more willing candidates. Drew had recently married, bought a house in Toronto, and left his job as the co-director of a summer camp for children with cancer. He wanted this once-in-a-lifetime adventure before returning to school for a master’s in education, and later becoming a father. Alie was a writer working on both a poetry collection and a master’s of philosophy in Newfoundland while awaiting the release of her first novel. She had completed two long canoe trips in the past and wanted a break before resuming life as an author. For Jen, this trip would be the perfect addition to a two-year leave of absence from the Ontario Ministry of the Environment, which she was spending in Yellowknife on a work transfer. It would also be a big change from her shorter outings on Ontario’s lakes.

  Before the expedition, we had various degrees of social interaction. Levi, Tim, and I were good friends already and had tested our compatibility on a previous Arctic trip. Jen and I had close friends in common but hadn’t made the leap to one-on-one friendship ourselves. Drew
and Alie were more like acquaintances to me (and to Tim), but I looked forward to knowing them better. As for the others, Drew and Jen were already buddies; they had known each other almost ten years. Both of them had paddled with Levi before. Alie was the bravest; she didn’t have a good friend in the group yet, but she seemed so comfortable I never thought about that until later in the summer.

  Before the trip we had all been socially connected, but soon we would become a society of our own.

  MY FINGERS SWELLED from the cold as Drew and I heaved a barrel, personal pack, canoe pack, and wannigan into our boat: 300 pounds in all. I secured our throw bag (a small sack filled with loosely packed rope that can be thrown to a distressed swimmer) behind the stern seat and tied painters (ropes for tying up or towing a boat) to the bow and stern. We unrolled the spray deck that would attach to the hull and cover everything. It would help to keep us warm and dry through the rapids and wind, but I could hardly feel its tough nylon as we tugged the deck into position. I blew on my hands and climbed into the stern.

  “Okay, let’s go,” I said.

  Drew jumped in, and we pushed away from shore with the butts of our paddles. The river picked us up and carried us around the first bend. From shore, the water had looked black, but now I could see pebbles at the bottom. My arms sank into the pace of the paddle. I watched Drew to follow his rhythm. I kept my lower arm straight and led with my wrist. Both of my shoulders swiveled with the recovery of the stroke, and I used my core muscles to propel us forward. After twenty minutes, I started to warm up. Blood returned to my hands; my joints felt smooth, if a little weak. The pain would come later. It was still a long time before lunch.

  It took a couple of hours to reach the ice. Giant blocks, 6 feet high and 20 across, littered the riverbanks by the hundreds, heaved up and broken by the spring thaw. The river flowed swiftly but remained narrow and shallow. We wound our way downstream, surrounded by towers of beached candle ice — each block a matrix of long vertical shards. On our first break, Jen and Drew ran over to the ice and gave it a swift kick. Icicles crashed toward them with the boom of a chandelier cut loose from a ballroom ceiling. Icy spikes encased their ankles. Alie and Levi climbed out of their boat to explore, and Tim and I followed. We kicked at the melting ice and chased each other between the towers with spears of glass while the tundra squelched beneath our boots. The sky remained overcast and settled on my shoulders.