Arctic Solitaire. Paul Souders

driving to Spokane. It’s six hours, but by all means . . . ”

      As I turned the key to restart my truck and begin the long drive east, she looked at me with her clear blue eyes and said, “Try not to get yourself killed, okay?”

      From long practice, Janet and I had settled into a routine for handling these long absences. When loneliness stalked me, I would call her after dinner from whatever campsite or foreign hotel I’d washed up in, recount the day’s anecdotes and indignities in a long monologue, then try to wrap up the conversation quick to save on long distance charges. This time, Janet was having none of it. Once I launched C-Sick, I was to call each evening and provide my latitude and longitude. She, in turn, would give me the marine weather forecast. After that, we’d begin another of our uniquely frustrating satellite conversations, filled with satellite delays and overlaps and “You’re fading” and “Can you hear me now?”

      Two long, full days on the interstate took me as far as North Dakota. I hung a left and, after crossing into Canada, drove east on the Trans-Canada Highway, traveling parallel to a massive storm system tearing across the Saskatchewan prairie. The next morning, I drove past downed trees, power outages, and an aluminum canoe wrapped around a telephone pole.

      Tornadoes in Canada? Who knew?

      Lush farmland gave way to interminable spruce forest that stretched for mile after mile across northern Manitoba. Any time I stopped to pee by the roadside or stretch my sore back, a cloud of biting black flies swarmed in an angry circle. The grille of my truck was coated with a foul and sticky mat, and big, black ravens would descend to pick at their crushed remains.

      The pavement ended in the gritty, nickel-mining town of Thompson, nearly eight hundred miles from the US border. From there, I still had two hundred more miles of rattling gravel roads to reach Gillam. Forest fires had swept through the area in the past weeks, closing the road for days at a time. The air remained thick with smoke even after the previous day’s rain, but I managed to navigate the rough gravel, dodging bigger rocks and sluicing through mud. As I drove on, it occurred to me that I had almost no plans for what would happen once I arrived. How was I going to get C-Sick into the water? Clint, my only local contact, had left a garbled cellphone message of vague directions to some boat launch a few days earlier, then departed on vacation.

      Ten miles shy of town, I drove across the broad concrete rim of Kettle Dam. When I stopped in the middle and looked over the side nearly two hundred feet to the river below, I could see a winding dirt access road leading to an unexpectedly well-tended boat launch. Well, that seemed to solve at least one mystery. I drove down and backed the trailer into the surprisingly placid Nelson River, floated C-Sick, then took the boat out for a quick test run. Hell, this was gonna be easier than I thought. I dropped anchor and took my truck the remaining few miles to town to top off my fuel tanks.

      I drove first through the town’s well-tended neighborhoods before reaching Gillam’s grittier downtown. The old train station looked derelict and half-abandoned, with plywood nailed over broken windows. I found the local Co-op store where I could fill my gas cans. I said something to the attendant about my plans for heading downriver all the way to the Bay from the nearby boat launch. He gave me a puzzled look and said, “Yep, you can go a-ways for sure. Twenty miles down to Long Spruce Dam, I’d say. But after that, I dunno . . . ”

      So maybe that wasn’t the right boat launch after all.

      I slunk back to the ramp, hauled C-Sick out of the water, then drove another fifty miles downriver. I went past not one but two more dams, to the sprawling site of a third dam under construction at Conawapa. Work had only recently started, but bulldozers had already cut a rough path down to the river. The cut ended at an uneven rock shelf that served as a crude boat launch. I wandered around the rocks in my rubber boots, trying to pick out some workable path into the water.

      I couldn’t see the river bottom through all the silt, so I dug out an oar and started poking around, probing the shallows.

      The water level rose and fell according to the inscrutable whims of Manitoba Hydro, which could release millions of gallons of water from the dams and raise the river by several feet. Or not. It was impossible to tell. I could have stood there until Christmas and never known for sure if it was safe to go. Sunlight danced off the river and filtered through a forest that seemed to stretch green and lush across the continent.

      Finally, with a shrug, I began heaving a half ton’s worth of fuel cans, waterproof hard cases, and random boxes of food on board. Then, inch by inch, I backed C-Sick toward the river. My gut sank when the trailer dropped hard off the rock ledge, but when I looked back, I could see the water was just deep enough for my boat to float free.

      I let out enough anchor line to hold the boat in place, then parked my truck and trailer off in a corner, seemingly out of harm’s way. I hoped they wouldn’t finish building that dam before I got back in the fall.

      The only thing I could remember from Clint’s instructions was that the channel started on the far side of the river. I fired up both motors, then I stepped out onto the bow, hauled in the anchor chain, and headed out across the river and into swift, deep water.

      CHAPTER 7

      THE RIVER AND THE BAY

      The wilderness was vast and seemingly empty, but as I motored along I was nestled in a glowing cocoon of technological magic. Not one but two Garmin GPS chartplotters silently communed with the satellites overhead. My radar system could penetrate the thickest of fogs, though the day’s clear skies and sunshine made the prospect unlikely. My depth-sounder pinged sonar pulses off the rocks below, and I even carried something called, in bureaucratese, an Emergency Position Indicating Rescue Beacon, or, more jauntily, an EPIRB. Supposedly it would, at the panicked touch of a button, supply my coordinates and credit card information to the nearest helicopter rescue service.

      I may not have known what I was doing, but I could tell you exactly where I was doing it.

      Later in my travels, I would encounter a number of Inuit who would sagely tap the side of their heads and say, “My GPS is right up here.” To be sure, I admire anyone who can find their way through the wilderness unaided by modern technology. Then again, growing up in white-trash Pennsylvania, I could usually find my way home just by following the smell of chickenshit and the trail of broken beer bottles. But out here at the ass end of nowhere, I was always one blown fuse or dead battery away from becoming an Arctic version of Tom Hanks’ character in Cast Away, without the coconuts or the volleyball.

      C-Sick at anchor, Marble Island, Nunavut Territory

      Even with all this technology, the way forward seemed little more than guesswork. I quickly discovered my fancy electronic charts displayed nothing about the Nelson River this far inland, and I hadn’t thought to bring along a topographical map that might show the river’s contours. Aside from the twenty-foot-high banks, there wasn’t much in the way of topography, anyway—just hundreds of miles of flat, buggy forest that eventually gave way to flat, buggy tundra.

      I motored along blindly, using my depth-sounder to steer clear of submerged rocks and the irregular shelves of hard granite, invisible in the milky green water. Every time I passed over a shallow spot, I unconsciously held my breath and lifted my feet off the floor, as if that was going to help.

      When I reached the deeper main channel, a strong current swept C-Sick downriver. I was soon traveling at more than nine knots, nearly eleven miles per hour, with my engines hardly ticking above an idle. There was no turning back. I couldn’t fight my way back upriver against this current even if I wanted to. Like it or not, I was on this ride to the end, seventy-five miles to the Bay and whatever came after. I let go of that unhelpful thought and settled in as best I could, relaxing enough to enjoy the warm sun and a gentle breeze blowing upriver. It occurred to me that I should remember this feeling—the beginning-ness of it. Lost in the swirl of planning and motion and action, I had spent