Arctic Solitaire. Paul Souders

on my own, so I cast a wide net and dragged along anyone who could pay. A few even remained friends after the yelling was over. Others, well, there is no enemy quite like the one you make on a cold, cramped boat in the middle of nowhere, with no possible escape from each other. I will accept much of the blame. I know that I can be difficult.

      For all my faults, though, laziness is not among them. I had come to photograph polar bears, and photograph polar bears I did. I would stand on deck in the cold wind for hour after toe-numbing, finger-freezing hour, doggedly scanning the ice. I adopted my best steely-eyed, thousand-yard stare, feet apart, and scanned the ice through a pair of bulky and overpriced German binoculars. When I finally spotted my quarry, I notified the skipper with a curt flick of my chin to show our new course, and say simply, “Bear.”

      No wonder everyone hated me.

      Before I found myself set adrift on some lonely iceberg by mutinous shipmates, I needed to find another way. I turned to C-Sick. I imagined that if I could take her north, I might see polar bears on my own terms, living among them for weeks or months at time, with no one else around to complain about my personality quirks, poor hygiene, or wretched cooking. It would be just me, C-Sick, and the bears.

      CHAPTER 6

      DIRECTIONS NORTH

      Deserted highway, northern Manitoba

      After that first Zodiac trip to Churchill, I reasoned that if I had found the polar bear of my dreams just thirty miles from town in a dinky Zodiac, there was no limit to what I might see during a whole summer out in C-Sick.

      There was, of course, the small matter of getting two tons of boat across hundreds of miles of roadless wilderness to Hudson Bay. I could have saved myself a lot of trouble and simply loaded C-Sick onto a northbound freight train, retracing my previous summer’s steps. But that felt like cheating. So instead, I envisioned a grand journey that would begin at the end of my driveway and ultimately deliver me to the top of the world. I started planning with nothing more than my outdated Rand McNally road atlas. I’ve always found something seductive about maps. They offer all the promise of travel and adventure and discovery, yet foretell nothing of the discomfort, misery, and expense my travels always seem to entail.

      I traced the fat blue ribbons of American interstates to where they fed into an orange-colored line that marked the Trans-Canada Highway. From there, I could cross over the Rockies and traverse the rolling heartland prairie that spanned almost half the continent. After that, the path turned thin and red as it wound up into the northwoods of Manitoba, until finally dwindling to a tentative dotted track, like a string of breadcrumbs, that ended at a town I’d never heard of along a river I didn’t know existed.

      If I could get past that last pinprick of a town, Gillam, and find the spot where my map showed the Nelson River flowing winding and blue, it would be only seventy-five miles to the vastness of Hudson Bay. From there, I’d hang a left at the river’s mouth and head north. It was only a couple hundred miles to Churchill. Beyond that, I counted five little dots, tiny towns or villages scattered along the coastline between Churchill and the Arctic Circle, more than five hundred miles north as the crow flies.

      It sounded almost too easy.

      Digging deeper, I read that the Nelson River once ran free, deep, and clear almost four hundred miles from Lake Winnipeg north to the Bay. That was until 1957, when Manitoba Hydro saw fit to run the first of what has become six dams to generate cheap electricity for cities far to the south. Cree Indian tribes once lived all across this rich interior. They paddled birch bark canoes along the river’s fast-flowing waters to hunt and fish and trade. The arrival of French and British explorers, traders, missionaries, and settlers resulted in the familiar litany of colonial exploitation: Eden despoiled, fortunes made, and the local First Nations cultures displaced and dispossessed and forever changed.

      In truth, I wasn’t looking for a history lesson. All I wanted to know was if I could get my beloved, benighted C-Sick into the water, down the river, and out to sea. The internet was largely silent on the matter. Then I stumbled upon the Nelson Adventures website.

      The owner and operator, Clint Sawchuck, worked for Manitoba Hydro by day, and ran a jet boat river outfit for the rare tourist who happened upon Gillam and wanted to travel downriver out to the Bay or the ghost town at nearby York Factory. When we talked on the phone, Clint said; “Yeah, sure, it’s possible. If the river’s up, you can make it.” He said there was a rough boat launch not far from town, but there was only enough water to float a boat when the Hydro company opened the flood gates and raised the river level by several feet. He also mentioned that it was more than 150 miles from the mouth of the Nelson River up to Churchill. “The old trappers would make that trip in big twenty-four-foot freighter canoes, wait for good weather, then run like hell. There’s not a bit of cover for a big boat along that whole stretch of coast.”

      I put my fate in the hands of this affable stranger and set to work. I still had lots of questions. I found charts showing satellite views of the pack ice, lurid stretches of red that revealed thousands of square miles of impassable ice. I did some half-assed research on weather patterns and marine forecasts, but it all amounted to variations on the old song “Stormy Weather.” There was still a long list of things I didn’t know.

      But I did know this much: everything about Hudson Bay was big, and in comparison, C-Sick was very, very small. But she was all the boat I owned, and she hadn’t killed me yet. I figured she could carry sufficient fuel and enough food to get me from one remote village to the next. After years of Alaskan boating, I was no stranger to cowering at anchor, and reckoned I could take whatever bad weather the Bay threw at me. And if worst came to worst, I could always run C-Sick up on shore and start walking home.

      A trip like this could, and probably should, take years of preparation: a slow acquisition of the necessary skills and training and professional-grade equipment. Given enough time, anyone in their right mind would likely come to their senses and decide to stay home and catch up on the yard work instead. For me, it’s always made more sense to just go. Go before doubt creeps in, and then figure things out along the way. I wasn’t getting any younger and I imagined that, if nothing else, I could fail in truly spectacular and memorable fashion.

      There’s a lot of talk these days about ultralight travel: bring only what you can carry on your own back. I’m more of a “bring-everything-and-thekitchen-sink” kind of guy. In fact, better bring two sinks, because I’ll surely break one.

      First, I ordered maps. I bought a thick stack of nautical charts and topographical maps that detailed the coastline, from the Nelson River’s mouth and nearby Cape Tatnam all the way up to Fury and Hecla Strait, at the heart of the famed Northwest Passage some eight hundred miles north. Sure, past seventy degrees latitude the Arctic coast is perpetually locked in ice, swept by raging storms, and utterly suicidal for me to contemplate touring, but . . . I wanted to keep my options open.

      C-Sick had suffered mightily through my clumsy and collision-prone Alaskan navigations. The few times I took her out on the water near Seattle, she started reluctantly and spewed smoke, apparently sulking. Someone needed a spa day. The guys at my neighborhood boat shop were notably unimpressed with my maintenance skills. They catalogued years of neglect and mistreatment, from fouled plugs and corroded carbs to mangled gears and a leaking head gasket. They made me feel like an abusive husband. The final tab of $2,809.89 gutted my bank account and still covered only half their long list of critical repairs. I figured my chances of getting all the way to the Arctic Circle, let alone back again, were at best fifty-fifty. By my distorted logic, authorizing only half of the needed work seemed a fair trade. I would get to the other half if I ever made it home in one piece.

      The garage became ground zero for my planning. I searched the internet for every cheapskate deal and free shipping offer I could find, then began ordering mountains of food, like some paranoid hillbilly prepping for the end of days. I bought powdered eggs and canned ham, dried blueberries, salted nuts, an eighteen-pack of dehydrated