Disappointment River by Brian Castner

Author:Brian Castner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2018-03-13T04:00:00+00:00

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For the first two hundred miles, from Great Slave Lake to Fort Simpson, the Mackenzie is green, and when the wind ripples the water, it looks like alligator skin.

But then the Liard River comes in from the west, flush with silt from the melting glaciers of British Columbia, and where the two great rivers meet, Doug had warned us of an eddy line large enough to dump our canoe. I had no desire to tumble as I did at the Slave, as the consequences would be far worse.

I took this seriously—checked that our gear was tied to the canoe’s thwarts and then checked again, squared our line through the eddy wall—but when David and I did cross to Fort Simpson, we saw no swirling boils or dangerous rip currents. Only a color change, from green to mud, chocolate smoothie in the blender. The meeting of the rivers was a bit of a disappointment, as had been Mills Lake before, though we counted ourselves fortunate to catch the Mackenzie on a tame day.

At the public boat launch at Fort Simpson, the shore was flat and inviting, but when we ran aground, our canoe did not grind to a halt as it would on gravel or sand. It squished. I got out and my feet sank into the dark Jell-O, almost up to my knees. Fort Simpson sits on an island of silt ten thousand years old, the slough formed when the clear main channel meets the laden mountain river. Mound and scrape, mound and scrape, the Mackenzie and Liard work like a painter preparing drywall.

David stayed with the canoe while I walked into town to look for coffee. Morning tea had so far kept away my caffeine-addict headaches, but so close to civilization my desire for black coffee went all the way to my groin. While searching for the convenience store, I was approached by a white guy with a long goatee. He said his name was Dean, and he offered to show me around town.

“Welcome to the last stop of civilization,” he said as we drove in his big-wheeled pickup truck. Fort Simpson is no metropolis—a gas station, hotel, liquor store, tourism office, grocery store—but it is the final commercial stop on the highway. From here, the dirt road trickles only a little farther to Wrigley, which Dean said “doesn’t count,” because it’s so small. Otherwise, for the next seven hundred miles to the north, the tiny local communities are accessible only by boat, plane, and winter ice roads. Dean said he used to live in a village like that. Originally from Alberta, he had worked as an educator in the far north for decades. His last assignment was in Nunavut, and he took the Fort Simpson job “to move south.” He was wearing a purple T-shirt with a spell-casting wizard on it because he was on his way to work; he was using medieval-themed board games to teach adults to read, making the shirt a sort of uniform.

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