Arctic Solitaire. Paul Souders

to appreciate the moments as they passed. I took out my cameras and shot a few desultory frames to record the scene. Silty river, sky of blue, forest green. But for the most part I simply basked in the fleeting minutes when I might finally breathe in and out and slow the passage of time.

      From a distance, the spindly spruce forest and dense carpet of moss atop crumbling riverbanks looked almost inviting, like something out of a fairy tale, if you could ignore the swarms of biting and blood-sucking insects. Where fires had swept through, stands of dead, sun-bleached trees stood straight as toothpicks along the river. I counted a half-dozen bald eagles, along with scores of Bonaparte’s gulls and Arctic terns, diving for fish in the swirling rapids.

      Gradually the river grew wider. In the late afternoon, I rounded a bend and suddenly the steep banks and endless green forest gave way to . . . nothing. Off in the distance, I could just make out the featureless horizon, and beyond it, the Bay.

      I laughed out loud. It was all going to be okay, after all.

      And then, it wasn’t. The depth-sounder shallowed suddenly from ten feet to eight, and then five. I let myself be distracted by some rattle behind me and, as I turned around; the first sickening crunch of rock against boat. I scrambled to get my engines up without tearing off the propellers, but the current had me. C-Sick slammed into barely submerged rocks again and again, making a horrible grinding sound. When the music finally stopped, I was well and truly grounded.

      On the bright side, I was unlikely to either sink or drown in less than two feet of water. The bad news was that we were stuck at least fifty river miles from another living soul. My big Arctic expedition ground to a humiliating halt before I even reached salt water.

      If there was an instruction book for this sort of mess, I’d never seen it. Improvising, I started offloading sixty gallons’ worth of extra fuel cans into the Zodiac I trailed behind C-Sick. Then I chucked in the heaviest camera and food cases on top. After that, I hopped over the side into the river shallows and began shouldering C-Sick with all my strength. I managed to get her off the rocks and scrambled back on board before she had a chance to drift out of reach. I didn’t have time to celebrate, because she quickly grounded again. The next two hours devolved into a slow-motion nightmare: too many rocks and not nearly enough water. I tasted the rat-breath slick of desperation in my mouth as I struggled to float more than a hundred yards at a go before fetching back up on the rocks.

      At one point, having floated C-Sick free, I strung the boat along by a rope tied to her bow, leading her through knee-deep water like a reluctant dog. Up ahead, I could see a group of seals swimming upstream. I climbed aboard to grab a camera, only to realize that the seals were really just more rocks sticking out of the fast-flowing current. The sun dropped slowly behind thickly forested hills. It was hours later and nearly dark before I found enough deep water to restart the engines. I painstakingly picked my way into the lee of two small islands and finally dropped anchor with less than ten feet of river beneath me.

      My anchor was sixteen pounds of tensile steel shaped like a three-toed claw and designed to bury itself in the muddy river bottom. It was secured to fifty feet of galvanized steel chain that was, in turn, spliced on to 150 feet of 5/8” three-strand nylon rope, and finally attached to a reinforced U-bolt through C-Sick’s hull. After I bought it, I found a spec sheet that said the anchor chain and line, called a rode by the nautically inclined, should withstand 8,910 pounds before breaking. I wondered uneasily who was in charge of testing that. I hoped it wasn’t some college kid whose dad got him the job for the summer.

      In theory, you could lift C-Sick out of the water and hang her up to dry by that anchor. I did know it had once held through eighty-knot williwaws that came howling out of the Alaska Range, kicking up a wall of white spray before nearly capsizing C-Sick.

      At eleven p.m., the last light of day colored high cirrus clouds salmon and blue. This far north, the sky was still too bright for stars. I poured a dram of Irish whiskey to settle my frayed nerves and stepped outside to brave the mosquitoes out on the back deck. I raised a toast to absent friends, thanking them each by name as I pictured their faces, one by one.

      I poured the last thimble of my drink onto the river’s swirling surface, a small offering. I hoped it might reach the Bay and mollify its irascible gods. The whiskey was gone in an instant, swept toward the vast sea looming ahead.

      That night I woke repeatedly to check the anchor’s hold. In the three a.m. half-darkness, I looked up and smiled at the familiar sight of the Northern Cross as a pale band of aurora arched overhead.

      At dawn, C-Sick’s GPS display showed us anchored somewhere up in the forest, hundreds of yards away from the river, a discovery that further eroded my already shaky confidence. I lowered one of the two outboard engines into the water, reserving the other in case I tore up the prop, and began to slowly nose my way into deeper water along the Nelson River’s main channel. In the distance, I could make out the abandoned train trestles left nearly a century before at Port Nelson. Early shipping magnates dreamed of a shortcut rail and ocean link between the prairie wheat fields and British and European markets. They pushed a railroad north across hundreds of miles of boggy forest, all the way to the Bay’s shores, then built a shipping terminal there. Boosters loudly and unironically proclaimed in The Hudson Bay Road that the Bay would soon be “the Mediterranean of the North.” During the port’s brief time in operation, three ships sank in four short years, and the business collapsed with the start of the First World War. A hundred winters of river ice had shattered the bridges’ timbers, and the rusted tracks now hung twisted and looked ready to topple into the water below. One of those shipwrecks was still there, hulking and rusted, lying half-submerged just offshore. I find there is nothing quite like a grand spectacle of ruin and costly failure to shine the harsh light of perspective on my own fragile dreams.

      I tempted fate with a playful slalom run through the old trestles, taking snapshots and wondering when the whole thing might crumble down on my head. Then, I headed out into the Nelson River’s wide delta. I timed my departure out into Hudson Bay to take advantage of the ten-foot outgoing tide, hoping to ride its current away from the braided shallows and into deeper salt water. What I didn’t anticipate was an opposing east wind blowing in off the Bay. One minute I was traveling at nine knots over calm seas; the next instant, I was slamming into steep, standing waves. Cresting a three-foot roller, C-Sick pitched over hard and I heard a dismaying crash from overhead. I had started this trip with a large cargo rack bolted on top of C-Sick’s cabin. It was a last-minute addition, to store lightweight but bulky supplies like toilet paper, my bear fence, and some empty fuel cans. Now it was upside down and floating away across the Bay.

      I considered letting the damn thing go, but this would be a long trip without toilet paper. With a torrent of swearing and one-false-move-andyou’re-in-the-water grappling, I wrestled the cargo box onboard, soaking myself as gallons of seawater poured out of it. I had long imagined the moment when I would finally reach Hudson Bay: it would mark a huge milestone and should have been a moment of celebration. As it was, I was too busy squeezing seawater from my eighteen-pack of toilet paper to much notice. By the time I bolted the cargo box back in place and lashed it down with a couple heavy cargo straps, I was breathless and furious and soaked to the skin.

      Hudson Bay covers nearly half a million square miles, and is connected by a narrow, tide-swept strait eastward to the Atlantic. There is an even more tortured and ice-blocked path to the west, via Fury and Terror Strait through the Northwest Passage and on to the Arctic and Pacific Oceans. The Bay’s waters begin to freeze in early November, and do not thaw again until the long hours of daylight return in June and July. The last remnants of ice sometimes linger late into the summer months. These patterns change with the vagaries of each year’s weather, but more than a century’s worth of statistics show that a rapidly warming climate has left more open water for longer periods through the summer.

      Environment Canada posts ice charts each day on its website, and I had been obsessively watching the winter ice’s melt for weeks. As I prepared for my departure, I grew worried, then dismayed. All the ice along the Bay’s west coast, between the Nelson River delta and Churchill, had melted weeks earlier than usual. The satellite maps now showed only a few icy remnants