Intrepid by Pacific Water Sports

Humanity is a whisper here. Here caribou breast the landscape in antler-bobbing streams. Here musk ox pound craters in the snow with their chins to reach winter grass. Wolverines and Arctic foxes scent through the mosses after small prey—lemmings, tern eggs, hares. Sandhill cranes court one another on low bedrock ridges with stick-figure decorum. Here a wolf plunges its face into the hot entrails of a caribou calf. Here winds comb the stiff-grassed tundra with restless, rough, currying fingers. Humanity is elsewhere, gone away, sloughed off to the coast like the draining rivers taking their load of sand. Starved out, decimated by smallpox, swindled by the fur trade, and seduced by religion, rifles, whiskey, sewing needles, sedentary comforts. That old story. That old story no one wants to hear and I don’t want to tell. A story that makes my bones heavy.
Only this faint stirring in the air remains: the whisper of ancients only a generation past. They were still here, clothed in skins, dancing in igloos, beating on drums, welcoming the first birds of spring, walking the ridges, and spearing caribou at river crossings, when I was a young boy learning to ride a tricycle in a Boston suburb and John Kennedy had a decade yet to live. I have met them. Grandmothers who clean hotel rooms in places like Rankin Inlet and Baker Lake but who, as young girls, pounded strips of caribou into dry meat and competed with the foxes for birds’ eggs. Old men who return to the land once or twice a year by powerboat or snowmobile to shoot caribou with .30/30 rifles but who, as young boys, paddled skin kayaks and carved snow blocks to build igloos.
And on the land, the swell of northern land, a crescendo of teeming emptiness, I have had the company of their whispers.
At a windbound camp on Kamilukuak Lake, when I stoop down to pick up a piece of weathered driftwood, I find that it has been worked, fashioned to some purpose—weapon, tool, piece of boat frame. My hands run over the surfaces painstakingly crafted by other hands, hands separated from mine by an unimaginable gulf of circumstance, yet focused on the same smoothed stick.
Or paddling across Angikuni Lake toward the outlet of the Kazan River, there on a low, broad ridge stand a series of inukshuk, the rock cairns built across the treeless terrain to signify trails, caribou crossings, campsites and graves. Their human-like profiles pluck at the corners of my vision. Again and again I turn to them, expecting to see one raise an arm in greeting, to see another break into a run.
Again, in the Thirty-Mile country, when we stop for lunch and there are half a dozen tent rings, rock circles that once weighed down the edges of caribou-skin shelters. I lie in the center of one, on ground that cushioned the sleep of an Inuit family, a man and a woman, children: people, I think, satiated with the land. I think that because scattered everywhere on the ground are old caribou bones settling into the sphagnum.
Or on a wave-washed rock beach along the shore of an unnamed lake, where a low pile of rocks, full of gaps and crevices, hunkers just above the high-water line. Inside, the gleam of bones. A human femur, rib slats, the top of a skull. Gray lichen feathers around the cranial sutures.
We were here, it all says. We lived here. In our way, we flourished in this immense scarcity. We made love on this ground, bore children in this tent. We stood, just here, looking across the same blue-seamed space, knowing that space. We wrestled dead willows to kindle our fires. We stooped over grizzly tracks in the sand. We lit moss wicks steeped in caribou tallow to flicker against the winter night. We listened to the singing ice in the fall and thought of the meat cached away in permafrost crannies. And always we awaited the caribou, watching and listening and scenting for them every day, and dreaming of them by night.
Once, when we stopped for a stretch and a break in the all-day paddling rhythm, a flat bench part way up a ridge draws us to it. We turn to take in the view. At our feet, sunken in the ground, are foreign pieces of wood. Foreign, because there is no wood anywhere for many miles. We haven’t seen a tree more than head high in a month. The driftwood we make our fires from is the thickness of our fingers. The only trees are wind-twisted, ground-hugging spruces, barely waist high. This is real lumber, six-foot lengths, one-by-four boards, and once we spot it, a litter of it snaps into focus all around.
At first the wood appears milled, finished with precision machinery. I pick up a lichen-encrusted board and see, close up, that it is actually rough-hewn, almost perfectly turned, but done by hand. On the inside surface is gouged a row of evenly spaced, angled divots. The cross pieces cut to match those divots have fallen almost exactly in place. They still fit neatly. In fact, laid out there on the ground, fallen apart yet in a recognizable shape, as if a carpenter had set out the pieces of a project, each in its approximate position, is the frame of a kayak.
These bits of wood may have been collected and passed on for generations. A well-turned cockpit coaming would have been an inheritance worth marrying for. There is not a screw or a nail anywhere. Whittled pegs still protrude through holes drilled out with a primitive bit. The curved boat ribs, the support pillars, the long sides, the keel, all are there among the moss campion and short, bristly grasses.
It is as if a carpenter had fashioned all the parts of a project, set them in place, and then never gotten back to it. Or—and this comes to me as I stand there in the summer warmth with black flies pinging against my forehead—it comes looming up out of the whispering past with the certainty of a true and real story—it is as if an Inuit man, a hunter of caribou, had paddled his skin-covered craft up against the same sloping shore where we beached.
It is a fall day in this story. The lake is black and choppy, the sky lowering, the wind like shafts of ice. Flecks of spray have frozen like candle wax where water splashed up on the deck, on the sleeves of his skin parka, on the leading edges of the wooden paddle blades. A young boy ducks out of a skin tent and runs to join the man onshore. Together they lift the boat and carry it up to the flat, protected elevation. They pause, with the kayak at their feet, and look across the dark water. A thin snow scuds across their view.
Winter comes. The long twilight, then true darkness. The lakes freeze like plates of iron. It is a starving season. The fall caribou hunt was a marginal success. Hunters waited at the time-honored crossings, hunkered behind rock blinds, but the deer never came. Only a few meat caches are full, and the wolverines pillage one of those. The oil lamps run dry. People sit in a dark stupor, in semi-hibernation, for days at a time. Sickness visits the camp; people wither and shrink. A young woman dies in childbirth. Elders walk out of the igloos in the night and don’t come back. Late in the season, still months from spring, the people abandon camp and straggle toward the wan hope of a distant fur-trading outpost.
Spring arrives. The ice rafts up under the lash of wind. The sun is buoyant, high in the sky. Birds fill the open water; gravid caribou push their way toward calving grounds. The kayak rests patiently on the island. Its decay is a slow, gnawing dissolution made up of freeze and thaw, chapping winds, chewing rodents, the insistent settlement of fungus and moss and lichen. The stretched skin goes first, that thin organic layer, drying to parchment; then the sinew thread in its small, tight, meticulous stitches. Rodents den up in the hull and raise young. A two-year-old herring gull perches for much of a summer at the tip of the bow. Bird droppings, fish bones and eggshells litter the ground. The sun desiccates the exposed wood. Every winter the snow drifts over the boat, forming a white burial mound. Water fingers into the cracks and then freezes, prying the boat open.
When the young boy who helped stow the kayak after its final outing is a father with children, a man who lives in a prefabricated plywood house in Chesterfield Inlet and whose bad dreams writhe with emaciated ghosts, the first board drops loose. The next winter a peg falls out. The hull surrenders its form to the erosion of time and gravity and chance. The wood, precious and rare, settles its small weight into the tundra, and moss rises up around it.
We place the pieces of boat frame back into the perfect molds on the ground. My hands tingle with this communion, paddler to paddler. I have been out long enough that the lift of waves under boat hull is a sensation branded into my nerve synapses. I have felt the same cords of river current bending past rocks, dropping over ledges, eddying along shore as this paddler did. I have hunched down against the same implacable winds roaring across a plain of water. I have paddled into the midst of grunting strings of caribou swimming at a blue narrows, felt the close thrill of their straining bodies. I stand, now, in this paddler’s footprints and look out across the blue expanse, the gray, distant hills, the patches of snow that linger, even in August. When we paddle away, I notice the feathery contrail of a remote jet in the cloudless sky.
Alan Kesselheim is a freelance writer in Bozeman, Montana. This essay is an adapted chapter from his fifth book, Threading the Currents, now available from Island Press of Washington, D.C.