Beyond the Trees Page 3

  With that, I rolled up the flag and stashed it in my backpack, bid farewell to my friends and family, packed up my gear, and headed to the airport to catch a flight to the Yukon.

  × 2 ×

  LAND OF THE MIDNIGHT SUN

  I arrived in the Yukon on May 13, 2017, but it’d be Mother Nature that would dictate exactly when and where I’d begin my journey. If it was going to be an early spring, I’d launch my journey from the tiny northern community of Old Crow (population about three hundred) on the banks of the Porcupine River, which drains out to the Bering Sea. If it proved to be a late spring and the rivers were still swollen with shifting ice floes, I’d have to begin southeast of there to avoid the ice, in an even smaller community, Eagle Plains (population about nine). In either case, I’d still need the Peel and Mackenzie Rivers to be ice-free by the time I reached them on foot through the Richardson Mountains. Otherwise I’d be stuck waiting for ice to melt.

  You might be thinking that if the rivers were still frozen, why not just walk across them? The trouble is, they were in the ice breakup phase, when they’re no longer frozen solid enough to safely cross and not yet open enough to traverse by boat. During this period, which can last weeks, large chunks of ice drift swiftly downstream like gigantic jigsaw puzzle pieces—posing hazards to any watercraft. The result is a kind of purgatory in which travel of all kinds is difficult and the crossing of rivers well-nigh impossible. Even today, with modern transportation, this fact remains largely unaltered in the western Arctic. No bridges have ever succeeded in spanning the northern reaches of the great rivers of Canada’s far northwest, the Mackenzie, Peel, and Porcupine. In the long dark winter months snowmobiles ply these frozen arteries of the North; in the summer months, motorboats and canoes. But during the spring breakup these rivers become impassable barriers.

  In recent years, with warmer average temperatures, the Yukon’s ice breakup seems to be getting earlier and earlier. Partly it was this realization, that the ice-free season in the North was becoming longer and longer, that had led me to think a trans-Arctic canoe journey might be theoretically possible—something that in the past would have been dubious at best. But as luck would have it, by the standards of recent decades, the spring of 2017 did not prove to be an early one. It looked like it’d be an unusually late breakup, which would necessitate starting my journey from Eagle Plains. But with the rivers still clogged with ice, I had time on my hands, so rather than hang around in Whitehorse watching weather reports, I decided to take in the sights of Old Crow.

  Old Crow sits tucked away in the northwest corner of the map of Canada, a remote fly-in community of some three hundred people, mostly members of the Gwich’in First Nation. Despite its geographic remoteness, it’s connected to Whitehorse by daily commercial flights. I waited there, biding my time while the ice broke up, in an isolated cabin in the woods east of town. The cabin was the home of Betty, a Giwch’in elder in her mid-seventies, who largely shunned town-life in favour of the isolation of her cabin and the company of her two sled dogs, Winston and Vicki. I hadn’t known her beforehand, nor had she known me—chance brought us together.

  When I’d arrived at the airport, northern hospitality soon made me feel welcome. I was given a ride into town, invited to a barbecue, and offered a place to store my things. Later that day I accompanied a local fellow up the slopes of barren Crow Mountain, a low hill that overlooks the town. He brought his rifle in case we encountered any caribou, but despite some fresh tracks in the melting snows, we saw none. After a few days in town watching the ice drift by, I became restless and decided to see if I could scout conditions farther out. I ended up wandering along the riverbanks for a ways. I’d been hiking through dense thickets of black spruce, fording streams, and scrambling down high bluffs when I unexpectedly came upon a little cabin set deep in the woods, near the banks of the still ice-choked Porcupine River. Two sled dogs were tethered outside and wreaths of smoke were rising upward from a chimney.

  I heard the cabin door slowly unlock from the inside, then an elderly woman cautiously peeked out. She had a rifle clenched in her hands.

  “Hello,” I said. “Sorry to bother you. I was just passing by.”

  “Oh,” the old woman said in a surprised tone. She opened the door wider. “I thought you were a bear.”

  “No,” I replied, “I’m not.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Waiting for ice to melt.”

  Betty invited me in for tea, and before I knew it I’d spent the whole week as her guest, sleeping in her woodshed. At seventy-three years old she still hunted caribou and red squirrels, though age had reduced her mobility. She didn’t tend to venture far from home, and during the ice melt was cut off from human contact altogether. I’d only reached her cabin by traversing the ice-clogged Crow River on an inflatable pack raft beneath a bend where the ice had jammed enough to allow for a spot of open water. In fact, Betty informed me, I was the only visitor she’d ever had who’d arrived in that manner. Most people came by motorboat or snowmobile, but none during ice breakup.

  For the most part, Betty now chose to live alone. Though to my surprise, she did have an old flip-style cell phone that, amazingly, had reception at her isolated cabin. Her battery had died, and she hadn’t any means to recharge it, except on her visits to town. Luckily I had a battery charger, which I offered to her.

  We discovered that we had a fair number of overlapping interests, from a love of wilderness and solitude to an enjoyment of old Reader’s Digest issues (of which she had a collection). While I chopped wood and gathered blocks of ice for her water supply, Betty offered me soup and lemonade and told me stories. Among other things, she recounted her family history, some of the great fishing successes she’d had with her net, her experiences hunting bears and caribou, and feeding whisky-jacks from her hand. Betty also shared some of her wisdom for my upcoming journey. She suggested that for nourishment I try eating the inner bark of willow shoots—in springtime, she said, it was full of nutritious sap—as well as spruce gum, which she collected from the trees around her cabin. Betty also advised that crossing rivers on small pack rafts between ice jams was liable to shorten my life expectancy.

  For hours each day outside her cabin I listened to the stream of ice floes, bumping and crashing into each other, making sounds like glass shattering. It was mesmerizing to see them drift swiftly downriver, the sun glinting off thousands of pieces, some large enough to hold stranded, doomed caribou. This went on for days, night and day, so that it seemed extraordinary that so much ice could exist at all—but it was ice coming from hundreds of kilometres of river, all of it breaking up and now drifting in seemingly endless procession downstream like a kind of ice parade. Betty said it was the latest ice breakup she could remember since the 1980s.

  Some days I took Betty’s dogs, Vicki and Winston, for walks in the encircling subarctic forests, where we met with arctic hares and grouse. Winston seemed to take a particular liking to me. This may have been a result of feeding him half my lunches.

  I was surprised by how gravely Betty took the threat of bears. She never went anywhere without a whistle around her neck, and usually her rifle. Her dogs, she said, were to help keep bears away and sound the alarm if any approached. I had the vague idea, sleeping as I did in a small tent for months out of the year in bear territory, that such worries were perhaps overstated. But several times in the night bears did come into the camp. I could hear them outside the woodshed, sniffing around for caribou meat. When the dogs caught wind of them, they’d bark furiously.

  One day, when we were sitting by the river watching ice floes drift by, I asked Betty if she’d ever had a problem with grizzlies breaking into her storage shed to steal food.

  “Oh, they broke into my house,” she replied.

  “Into your house?” I said.

  “They broke the door right in half,” she explained.

  Betty motioned me to follow her behind the shed, where the discarded door now lay
. I was expecting to see some flimsy, rickety old thing. Instead Betty pointed to the mangled remains of a heavy, steel-plated wooden door.

  “He just took one paw”—Betty gestured with her arm to imitate a bear swipe—“He folded it right in half.” The door was bent over double, the metal plating twisted and curled up like car wreckage. The wood inside the steel plates had been partially ripped out, the grizzly’s claw marks plainly etched into it.

  Fortunately, Betty hadn’t been home at the time. The grizzly ended up gutting the cabin’s interior. After that Betty had an electric fence, powered by a car battery, installed around her door and windows, which she turned on each night. Staring down at the ruined door, I reflected that I’d been sleeping in a small shed whose only door was a sheet of tarp. Nevertheless, on my journey I wouldn’t be carrying a gun. Travelling as light as possible was an absolute necessity, and anyway, I figured, it must have been the smell of caribou meat that had attracted the bears to the cabin. Betty did give me some dried caribou meat as a gift, but this I ate (with Winston’s help) before setting off.

  After a week together watching ice floes drift by from atop the high banks of the Porcupine River, it was clear that I’d have to begin my journey from Eagle Plains. Betty wished me well, and asked me to stay in touch once I’d finished my journey.

  * * *

  I returned to Dawson on the next outbound flight. From that ghost-haunted place, rich in lore, I could await Chuck’s arrival. He was driving north from Whitehorse with my canoe and the watertight plastic barrels I’d tightly packed with rations. Accompanying Chuck was his friend Mark and some filmmakers who intended to record the start of my journey with a drone along the Dempster Highway.

  The Dempster Highway winds like a great ribbon across the northern Yukon, snaking between the awe-inspiring mountains of the Tombstone and Ogilvie ranges as it heads northward beyond the Arctic Circle. It is the only road, as far as roads go, to penetrate the immensity of the Yukon’s north, and Canada’s only road access to the Arctic Circle. On either side of it, for hundreds of miles, you’ll find no other roads, cities, towns, or even mines—only a vast mountainous terrain extending to the horizons. The highway, really only a narrow gravel road, stretches some 740 kilometres from Dawson to Inuvik in the Northwest Territories, partly following a historic dogsled route once used to carry mail between these isolated settlements. Construction began on it in the 1950s, but was soon abandoned. In the 1970s work resumed when it was thought the road might serve as a supply route for oil exploration in the Beaufort Sea. The oil never materialized, but the highway was officially opened in 1978 and named for Sergeant Jack Dempster of the Royal North-West Mounted Police, who’d led dogsled patrols from Dawson to Fort McPherson in the early 1900s.

  Our drive along the Dempster took us first through subarctic forest north of Dawson, where the dark spruce woods crowded close to the gravel roadway, hiding their secrets from prying eyes who only drive the road and don’t venture beyond it. In places where the road gained elevation, vistas opened up, revealing spruces extending in seemingly endless expanse, covering millions of acres. As we continued north the spruces thinned, aspens appeared in great clusters along the shoulders, and the forests gradually disappeared into meadowlands and windswept, jagged mountains, their upper slopes covered in snow.

  Our progress north was slowed by a sudden thick snowfall as we passed through the Tombstone Mountains. But by early evening, the sun still high in the sky at these latitudes, our little two-vehicle convoy arrived at the outpost of Eagle Plains. It’s the only inhabited place between Dawson and Fort McPherson, if a fluctuating population of six to nine people may be said to qualify as an inhabited place. Opened in 1978, Eagle Plains was established as a private venture to service and maintain the Dempster Highway, providing fuel, lodging, supplies, a restaurant, a bar, and a garage, as well as living quarters for its residents. The entire settlement is contained within a single sprawling compound set on a plateau overlooking vast spruce forests stretching away to distant mountains.

  A lone transport truck sat parked beside the gas station. Perched nearby were three ravens, looking slightly ominous as they stared at us. Our intention was to refuel, have a last meal, and then head north to the Arctic Circle a short distance away. We parked outside the hotel, and then the seven of us headed into the lobby: Chuck, his friend Mark, the four filmmakers—Francis, Marty, Patrick, and Barclay—and me. Over the front entrance was a faded, painted sign with the words Eagle Plains Hotel: An Oasis in the Wilderness.

  Eagle Plains seemed like a place lost in time—the decor, carpets, paint, signs, furniture, towel dispensers, bathrooms, and even bedding apparently hadn’t been updated since it was first opened in 1978. Beside a vintage Pepsi-Cola vending machine were a wall-mounted payphone (there’s no cell reception anywhere nearby) and a large painted map showing the Dempster’s route. According to the map, we were now 409 kilometres from Dawson and 181 kilometres southwest of Fort McPherson, the two nearest inhabited places along the road.

  Well, I thought, taking it all in, this would be a great setting for a horror movie.

  The lobby was a grand-looking space, complete with dirty old carpets, a worn leather couch and easy chair, and a side room adorned like a fur-trading post that functioned as a kind of canteen and office. I didn’t often stay in motels, but when I did, this was the sort of place I preferred.

  The crew headed into the cafeteria, where a third of Eagle Plains’ population worked. After looking over the menu, they decided on the chili. Meanwhile I’d wandered off down an empty, dimly lit corridor, attracted by the faded black-and-white photographs thickly plastered along the walls. The first one I came to showed a corpse with a half-frozen grimace on its gruesome face. It was the death photo of the infamous Mad Trapper, alias Albert Johnson, who’d trapped along the Rat River in the 1930s. Johnson, alone in the wilderness, had gone insane, murdering at least several people. A manhunt by the Mounties tracked him to the mountains north of here, culminating in a gun battle that ended with Johnson’s death.

  “This is a cheerful place,” said Chuck from behind me. “Who’s that?” He pointed to a faded, grainy image of a well-dressed man seated in a chair.

  “Hubert Daryl,” I replied. “A solo explorer who disappeared in the wilderness east of here in 1910, never to be heard from again.”

  “Hmm…” Chuck took a closer look. “Maybe one day they’ll have a picture of you in here, with the caption ‘Adam Shoalts, disappeared in the wilderness east of here, in 2017, never to be heard from again.’ ” Chuck laughed. I laughed too. It was obviously absurd to think they’d ever update the decor.

  The crew had finished the chili, which they pronounced excellent and encouraged me to try. I instead sampled an oatmeal raisin cookie, for sale alongside a few other baked goods, and wandered from the cafeteria into the empty bar and lounge. It was a wondrous place: decked to the rafters with all manner of mounted Yukon animals and other curiosities.

  Although Eagle Plains had a certain bewitching charm, we didn’t intend to spend the night there. I’d been in the Yukon for two weeks already and was eager to begin my journey.

  On the drive north I’d become better acquainted with my companions. It turned out that Chuck and Mark had met each other years earlier, when their sons were in Boy Scouts together and they’d organized the group camping trips. In his youth Mark had spent some time as a fisherman off the U.S. east coast. He’d told some fascinating stories of the sea, like when his fishing trawler had been hit by a rogue wave, or the time they’d pulled up a dead body in one of their nets, or the strange, unknown creatures of the depths they’d occasionally haul in.

  After refuelling the vehicles and checking that the ratchet straps still held my canoe securely, we left Eagle Plains and continued north for another thirty-seven kilometres to the Arctic Circle—the true start of my journey. The Arctic Circle is an imaginary line that corresponds to latitude 66°33’47"N and runs around the top of the world. No
rth of this line, the sun never sets for at least one day in summer and never rises for at least one day in winter. The farther north you go, the more days there are of either continuous daylight or darkness.

  Ecologically, though, the Arctic doesn’t fit into such a precise category. Permafrost, for example—the frost beneath the ground that never melts—doesn’t correspond very closely to the Arctic Circle. As one nears Hudson Bay, it extends far to the south, all the way down to fifty-five degrees north latitude, where there’s still tundra, along with polar bears and other species characteristic of the arctic environment. In other places, the treeline extends considerably beyond the Arctic Circle. In western North America, a lack of permafrost means black spruce, tamarack, and aspen can grow hundreds of kilometres north of the Circle. In short, among geographers, “Arctic” doesn’t denote any single agreed-upon definition beyond a vaguely cold, northern region—but then geographers are fond of arguing.

  Beside the gravel road was a conspicuously large wooden sign proclaiming the traveller’s arrival at the Arctic Circle. But the sign seemed insignificant, even absurd, compared with the awe-inspiring, almost magical landscape visible beyond it. Across a wide meadow rose the Richardson Mountains, an otherworldly range of high, dune-like peaks. Their unique, dreamlike appearance is partially owing to their escape from glaciation during the last ice age. While the rest of Canada was buried under a mile of ice that gouged out the continent’s modern landscapes, here, at the northwest end of the world, the glaciers never reached—leaving the Richardson Mountains unscarred.