Alone Against the North (6 page)

Beside the construction camp, what greeted my eyes was a deeply unsettling sight: where once had been verdant forests was now a barren moonscape, devastated by strip-mining. It was a bleak, apocalyptic-looking place destroyed by machines and riddled with dark chasms that led deep into the earth. It filled me with dismay that society could permit the wanton destruction of wilderness—earth's true gem—in the pursuit of shiny stones. But my opinions reflect a life spent seeking untouched, hidden-away places.

The workers were gathered in the common room of a temporary building erected on the site, watching television. I met most of them as well as the man in charge. Only a few dozen people were at the mine because it wasn't yet fully operational. I was a little concerned, irrationally so, that one of the workers would recognize me as the explorer who penned articles arguing against mining in the Hudson Bay Lowlands. Yet they seemed to regard me as just some sort of eccentric who liked canoeing rivers no one had heard of. I chatted with them and asked if any of them knew of the Again River. None of them had ever heard of it.

My escort in, the aboriginal trapper, with whom I talked the most, had likewise never heard of the river. A thoroughly modern trapper, he was eager to fetch his laptop and have me show him the river on Google Earth. I did so, pointing out to him the blurry
little black ribbon that snaked through emerald green forest on the low-resolution images. He nodded and affirmed he knew nothing of that river. As we talked, I learned that he was originally from Moosonee, a Cree community on the mouth of the large Moose River, near James Bay, and the northern terminus of the government-owned Polar Bear Express railroad. He had grown up fishing, hunting, and trapping there, before drifting south to Cochrane. He didn't much care for Moosonee anymore and told me he wouldn't move back.

Since he had proved helpful, and I had both enjoyed our conversation and was grateful that Wes and I had not been killed on the ride he generously provided—I decided to pay him as best as I could for the ride. I had little money, but offered him my old canoe, telling him it needed repairs but was his if he wanted it. He happily accepted my offer.

It was getting on near midnight, and all the workers and the trapper soon disappeared off to bed for the night. I had been given a room of my own to sleep in while I waited for Wes to return, as well as a dry pair of wool socks to replace my soaking wet ones. It wasn't until 3:00 a.m. that Wes finally arrived. I met him outside the makeshift buildings erected on the site.

“What took you so long?” I asked, half asleep.

“I drove slow. It's pitch dark and there's moose and bears crossing the road. I was terrified I'd hit one.”

We decided not to stay at the mine—though we had been offered the room for the night—and instead drove back to where we had stowed our canoe and gear beside the creek. We spent the night there; then departed in the late morning for our drive home, so that Wes could make it to his sister's wedding. Before
we left, we hauled the canoe out beside the road, leaving it there for the trapper to pick up.

“Well, we didn't get to explore your river,” remarked Wes as he drove us south.

“No, but that's all right,” I said a little ruefully, “the river will still be there next summer.”

[ 2 ]

PLANS AND PREPARATIONS

Geographers … crowd into the edges of their maps parts of the world which
they do not know about, adding notes in the margin to the effect that beyond this lies nothing but sandy deserts full of wild beasts, and unapproachable bogs.

—Plutarch,
Plutarch's Lives, first
century
AD

M
UCH OF THE HISTORY
of exploration is the story of failures. Christopher Columbus, after all, wasn't looking for North America when he made landfall in the Bahamas in 1492. He was attempting to sail around the world to Asia—more precisely, the East Indies—hence the Italian mariner's mistaken belief that the people he met with were “Indians.” Sir Alexander Mackenzie, perhaps the greatest of North America's land explorers, had the misfortune to journey over two thousand kilometres in the wrong direction in his attempt to reach the Pacific Ocean. The eccentric genius Sir Richard Burton, among the most celebrated of African explorers, failed in his famous quest to find the source of the Nile. And then there was Sir Ernest Shackleton, widely considered a gifted leader and polar explorer par excellence, who never succeeded on any of his expeditions in reaching his objective. I took solace in these facts over my failure to explore the Again River two summers in a row. While I had not reached the Again,
I had a consolation prize in that I had still explored a nameless river (a tributary of the Kattawagami, a map of which I created) and together with Wes blazed kilometres of new trails into unexplored territory. More importantly, my resolve to explore the Again remained undiminished.

It would be necessary to wait until the Hudson Bay Lowlands' long winter ended and the ice melted before another attempt could be made to canoe the Again River. I felt certain that the summer of 2010 would be when I'd finally explore it—in fact, restless as always, I was growing impatient to free myself of the mental hold the Again was exercising over me and move on to other challenges. While the desire to reach the Again remained, haunting me like some sort of spectre, I hurled myself into other undertakings. I ventured to Lake Superior to search for ancient pictographs on that majestic body of water's rocky shores and to explore its many mysterious caves. I wandered off into remote parts of the Rockies, crossing paths with black bears and elk. On the wide open grasslands of the prairies, I slept under the stars and collected mule deer antlers. And in Manitoba, I paddled azure lakes while fishing for pickerel. In fact, I roamed all around Canada's wilderness from the rocky inlets of the Atlantic to the temperate rainforests of the Pacific. My life devolved into a restless search for one adventure after another—a desire “to escape from the commonplace of existence,” as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle put it.

When the summer arrived, I was impatient to attempt the Again once more. However, a wrench was thrown in my plans when Wes informed me that two weeks was all the time that he could afford for exploration. Financially, Wes found himself in difficult straits (I was no better off), and the practical man that
he was, he was attempting to save money in order to buy a house with his girlfriend. For Wes to take an unpaid leave from his construction job to go exploring wasn't economical. Until that time, I had mainly financed our expeditions the same way most explorers had paid for their work since the Victorian era—through writing and public lectures. While these speaking engagements and articles allowed me to eke out a living as an explorer and had made me something of a local celebrity in our small town, it wasn't going to buy any house.

But things got even more complicated when in July, Wes gloomily informed me that a week was now all he could offer me.

“But a week isn't enough time to explore the Again River,” I scoffed.

“That's all I can afford to take off,” Wes explained.

“Yes, but just think, if we make this sacrifice now and succeed, it will pay off in the long run.”

“We need sponsors,” replied Wes, unimpressed.

“We'll get sponsors by doing expeditions and making a name for ourselves.”

“We need them now, though.”

“We have only a few weeks, it's not enough time to get any.”

“Then find a way to explore it in a week.”

Disheartening as this revelation was, I wasn't going to abandon my quest to explore the Again that easily. As much as I disliked the thought and dreaded the increased financial cost to myself, I entertained the possibility of chartering a helicopter or floatplane to fly us as close to the river as possible, which might, under the best of circumstances, permit us to complete the expedition in eight or nine days.

However, this approach wasn't without considerable drawbacks: inevitably it would entail exploring less territory, which would diminish our accomplishment. It felt as if half the point of the expedition—exploring the area fully from the ground—would be unfulfilled by doing things in this manner. Still, if this was the only way Wes could join me, I'd consider it. Since a helicopter was beyond my financial resources, I made inquiries with bush pilots about taking us, our gear, and our canoe to one of the lakes in the upper part of the Again River's watershed. The response wasn't encouraging.

The chief bush pilot in Cochrane, who made his living flying hunters and fishermen to remote wilderness lakes, had never heard of the Again River and wasn't familiar with any of the lakes in its watershed. By now, I was familiar with this response. The bush pilot was uncomfortable flying to a lake he didn't know—it might after all prove too shallow or rocky to land on—and suggested that we fly to one of the lakes he did know and content ourselves with paddling some other river. As far as our purposes were concerned, he proved unhelpful—he wouldn't fly us where we wanted to go, so that option was quickly dropped. There was no way then—given Wes' time constraints—to explore the Again that summer. Since I had come to regard the Again as the special shared ambition of Wes and me, it didn't seem right to explore it without him. With much regret, I resigned myself to waiting another year to explore it.

Wes and I had to content ourselves with some minor adventures and exploring of a different sort—such as searches on the wooded hillsides of our rural countryside for giant puffballs, an oversized mushroom that resembles a volleyball (or as I like to
say, a dinosaur egg), which we collected and ate. But the failure to explore the Again left me restless and more eager than ever to hurl myself into new challenges. Perhaps I was compensating for failure, but, regardless, I needed more adventures, more quests—to live a more satisfying existence. That autumn, I worked on my survival skills in the northern woods. I also made arrangements to spend the winter in Ottawa writing articles and doing research for
Canadian Geographic
magazine and the spring in the Amazon rainforest on a scientific expedition. These new challenges, which broadened my horizons, actually helped dissipate my interest in the Again. I half told myself to forget about that obscure river and to turn my attention elsewhere. The Amazon had long exercised a spell over me—rare is the explorer who isn't interested in exploring its exotic, otherworldly jungles, where species unknown to science remain to be discovered and Stone Age tribes still live. I also longed to explore the Arctic and the northern reaches of the Hudson Bay Lowlands, the home of earth's largest land carnivore,
Ursus maritimus
, the polar bear. The Again, in contrast, was in the southern part of the Lowlands, outside the range of the great white bear. I was eager to undertake bigger expeditions farther afield and convinced myself that the cursed Again had become a sort of millstone that was weighing me down. I told myself that one day I would undoubtedly explore it, but that it could wait for the time being.

That winter, Wes and I were snowshoeing and tracking wolves north of Lake Huron when he suggested that we canoe the Florida Everglades. Such an adventure sounded like a suitable warm-up for the Amazon jungle, so I started making plans for an Everglades canoe trip as soon as we returned from the
wilds. But just days before we were to depart, Wes abruptly cancelled. He had decided instead on a trip with his girlfriend to a resort in the Caribbean. I was disappointed—considering the time that I had invested in making arrangements for the Everglades—and began to wonder whether his thirst for adventure was drying up. It certainly seemed like he was becoming domesticated. I shuddered with horror at the thought of such a thing ever happening to me.

ON MY FIRST DAY
at
Canadian Geographic
's head office in Ottawa, I attended an editorial meeting. On the wall opposite from where I sat was a glorious collection of old charters for the magazine's publisher: the venerable Royal Canadian Geographical Society. The Society, modelled on Britain's Royal Geographical Society, was founded in 1929 by the explorer Charles Camsell and other like-minded individuals. Besides publishing
Canadian Geographic
, the Society sponsors expeditions, produces the
Atlas of Canada
and other maps, promotes geographical education, and bestows awards and honours on explorers and geographers. I had held the institution in holy reverence ever since my grandparents had given me a subscription to
Canadian Geographic
as a child for my birthday. I dreamed of carrying the Society's blue flag, emblazoned with its crest—a white, eight-point compass overlaid with a red maple leaf—on an expedition of my own one day.

Beside the old charters hung an antique Asian-looking sword with a golden hilt and decorative scabbard. With this curious artifact directly in my line of sight, it wasn't long before I lost the thread of the editorial discussion and started
pondering the sword. Beneath the sword, a plaque mounted on the wall read: