Oliver's Twist Page 21
Another opportunity for canoeing notoriety presented itself in 1992 when we made for Ellesmere Island and the Ruggles River. Ted Johnson had dreamed of this expedition for years, whereas Peter Stollery was game for anything; Eddie Goldenberg had probably never been so far away from Jean Chrétien; John Godfrey was supremely nonchalant, whatever the risks. We had invited two first-timers that year, perhaps hoping for fresh conversational material. Bill Fox filled the bill with his storytelling gifts, and Ross Howard, a Globe and Mail reporter and experienced outdoorsman, was stimulating company.
On Ellesmere, in a delightful reversal of roles for a television reporter, a dozen European tourists with video cameras captured our party’s departure as we set off in canoes across Lake Hazen. In our remote locale, this was news: We were the first to attempt a descent of the Ruggles, the most northerly river in the world and the sole outlet for Lake Hazen.
The early signs were not encouraging. Though located in a rare thermal oasis that usually gives it some two months of frost-free days annually, the lake that year was a solid mass of white candle ice at the height of summer. Harnessed like beasts of burden, we had to drag our loaded boats nine miles across the lake to the narrow band of open water along the far shore. Behind us, some fifty snow-capped mountain peaks formed a phalanx from one end of the horizon to the other. Halfway across, I began to sink through the thin ice and I threw myself into the canoe. Tim upbraided me for stepping on the tomatoes. Apparently the fresh vegetables held a higher priority than I did.
Our plan was to follow the Ruggles’ course to Chandler and Conybeare fiords and Lady Franklin Bay and the Arctic Ocean beyond, then paddle a few days north to Fort Conger, the long-abandoned jumping-off spot for several doomed nineteenth- and twentieth-century expeditions to the North Pole, only a few hundred miles beyond.
But the objective was beyond our reach. We were only a few days down the rapid-filled but relatively shallow river when ice walls began to appear on both banks, making it difficult if not impossible to go ashore if a canoe were upset. Farther along, large chunks of ice that had broken off from the walls floated by, prompting thoughts of the Titanic. We pressed on until a helicopter from the Federal Parks Department swooped down on us with a warning that the river ahead was treacherous, full of ice bridges and deep holes. They advised us that even if we made it past these hurdles, the ocean itself was solid pack ice. Moreover, heavy winds were forecast. Did we have ice screws with which to anchor our tents and equipment?
Not wanting to relive the grim fates of other adventurers from Sir John Franklin to Robert Edwin Peary, we gave up on further advance, hunkered down in our tents, and awaited the helicopter we had summoned by emergency radio. The winds were as advertised: During the day we had to sit in the corners of our shelters with our backs against the walls to hold them down. We slept that way as well, with the tent walls constantly hammering our heads.
During that long wait for the chopper, Bill Fox and I decided to go for a hike to ease the boredom. We climbed up a long traverse to the top of the river canyon and walked south for several hours. By then the cold was biting and we began the trek back to camp. We’d walked a long time until I told Bill I no longer recognized our trail. I had brought a map but no compass, and neither of us had a clue where we were. The map was of little help in this flat horizon, especially since we had become completely disoriented.
The issue was simple: Had we walked past our takeout point, or was it still ahead? We trudged on a few more kilometres and at intervals I fired distress gunshots but heard no reply. We found a high point from which we could gaze down on the river, but everything looked the same. Night was settling in and a decision had to be made: keep going or turn back. I elected to turn back and Bill accepted that decision, God bless him. I was just uncertain enough that had he disagreed strongly, I would have pushed us farther into the wilderness.
Finally Bill spied one of our companions standing at the top of the campsite’s ridge. Another few seconds and he might have disappeared back down to camp. I will always wonder if Bill and I could have missed the takeout path for a second time. The headline Lost in the Arctic came to mind. But who would have won top billing? Bill Fox, the high-profile former Mulroney staffer, or Craig Oliver, an obscure reporter?
Taking the whole party out was not a rescue mission, of course. If anything, we were oversupplied and knew our exact whereabouts. But it was a few days before the winds died down, allowing the chopper to land. By then the supply of rum was falling dangerously low. I dared not tell anyone, but the disappointment at failing to reach Fort Conger was worth that scene of departure at the outset, surrounded as we were by lights and cameras and exclamations of admiration. For a fleeting moment, I understood why Franklin and the others had done it.
Sometimes I felt that the greater risk to our lives was taken not on the rivers but on the chartered flights in and out. In the early days, we had to rope canoes to the struts of the aircrafts’ pontoons. We tied them carefully because the burden on one or both sides of the plane affected its aerodynamics. If a canoe came loose, the results might be fatal. Today the Department of Transport forbids that practice and canoes are nested into one another inside larger planes, usually Twin Otters.
For the inexperienced, charter flights into the Arctic wilderness are still white-knuckle flying. There are no prepared landing strips. The aircraft, some of them fitted with oversized tundra tires, find a flat spot in the landscape or a hard-packed sandbar on which to land. If pilots are uncertain whether or not the landing surface can bear the weight of the loaded aircraft, they put it down under full power, then circle back to judge how deep the wheel tracks are.
Trying to fly from Yellowknife to Banks Island one summer, our canoe group turned back three times when ice buildup on the wings exceeded the capacity of the heaters. As we were finally approaching the island, the pilot had to fly at ocean level to escape a low ceiling. Breaking out of the fog, the plane was headed directly for a beautiful blue iceberg, which the pilot avoided only by a quick reaction. That particular flyer was the one who had dropped a metal canister containing a message of protest onto the deck of the American supertanker Manhattan when that ship sailed through the Northwest Passage in 1969, challenging Canada’s claims to Arctic sovereignty.
On another occasion we flew through a narrow valley in the Brooks Range in Alaska with granite mountain peaks to either side of the wings. I became worried when heavy weather closed in, stealing visibility in front of us and behind. Should we try for more altitude? “Nope,” replied the pilot laconically. We would fly blind, supposedly reassured by the fact that the valley broke through the mountains straight ahead of us and it was simply a matter of maintaining the same compass course.
Venturing to some of the most remote places in the world frequently put us beyond the reach of ready help, at least until the invention of the satellite phone. Everyone was aware that a heart attack or a stroke that might easily be survived in a hospital would probably be fatal in the Barrens. On balance we regarded such risks as worth taking. More worrisome perhaps was what might happen to those back home when we were not there to help.
In 1998, we were dropped off in the east-central Barren Lands of Nunavut to paddle an isolated section of the Back River. We canoed for weeks with no sign of the outside world. The river lies below no major flight paths, nor did we pass any communities. From hilltops we could see the permanent pack ice shimmering in the sun, and eventually we reached Starvation Cove, a desolate island of shale and rock with nothing to sustain life. It was here that Inuit found the remains of the crew of the doomed Franklin Expedition. The desperate men had made their way south in a ship’s whaler and their skeletons were discovered huddled together beneath it.
The sounds of the Arctic night and day had become so familiar to us that everyone was startled one afternoon to hear the faint drone of an engine. As the distant speck grew into a Twin Otter, our resentment over the intrusion turned to anxiety when the aircraft flew pa
st us and then circled back. Now it was losing altitude as if to land, except that the small point where we were camped could never provide a safe landing spot. Apparently the pilot was looking for us; a flight to this speck on the map would cost thousands of dollars and was no joyride.
We were all apprehensive. Allan Rock, then minister of Health, put his hand on my shoulder. “Someone has died,” he said. “There could be no other reason.” The group stood in a circle, each with his private thoughts. A tragedy seemed about to befall one of us, but whom?
“If it is one of my kids, I will never forgive myself for not being there,” said a voice.
“If it’s for me,” replied another, “it has to be that serious because my wife and I agreed that if our parents died, she’d keep them on ice until I returned.”
A grisly discussion of death’s pecking order followed. Would a brother or sister mean cancellation of the trip, or just that of a spouse? Should all of us fly out or only the canoe member involved? Was a violent death more urgent than a death from natural causes?
The noisy Otter made a run out to sea and then turned toward us, flying just above the waves. As the plane roared overhead, a hatch opened in the belly and a steel canister dropped out, plummeting a few yards from our camp. We scrambled to retrieve the message, which was greeted with nearincredulity. The aircraft was on its way to fight fires in the south and happened to see us. It belonged to the charter company due to pick us up a week hence, and the pilot merely wanted us to know that a spit of hard sand about forty miles ahead would make an ideal pickup spot.
One paddler turned away and wept in relief. It took a moment for all of us to collect ourselves. The tension was broken with a laugh when we recalled what had happened many years before when our pickup plane arrived to retrieve us after three weeks on the Nahanni. The pilot was barely out of his cockpit before we asked for news of the outside world. What had transpired in our absence? “My God, you mean you don’t know?” he gasped, clearly astonished that lost souls such as ourselves could be unaware of the news he possessed.
“Elvis Presley is dead!” he announced. I appreciated once again that in the real world, news priorities differ.
Around the campfire one night on the Thelon River, Trudeau asked me why I had not yet taken my son on an Arctic trip, surely a tremendous adventure for a young man. Coming from anyone other than this dedicated father of three sons, I might have taken exception to the implication that my canoe partners were more important to me than my own child—a hurtful notion, though I doubt Trudeau intended it that way. But he was right, I thought. Perhaps it was time for what was then called a “bonding experience.”
It took two years to put together, but in 1981 I organized a shared family trip with former finance minister Don Macdonald, his daughter Althea, and his courageous wife, Ruth, who was fighting the cancer that eventually took her life a few years later. David Silcox joined the group with the teenaged son of a friend, Ian McPhail, who would be close in age to fourteen-year-old Murray. Denis Harvey, eager to escape his desk in Toronto, also threw in with us; it was the first trip we made together.
We had chosen the Coppermine River, a mecca for northern canoeists. This stunning Barren Lands river finds its source in the Great Slave Lake region and gathers steam as its heads northwest into Coronation Gulf on the Arctic Ocean. About nine miles south of its mouth lies the famous Bloody Falls, where in 1771 explorer Samuel Hearne recorded the ambush and murder of a group of Inuit by his Chipewyan guides.
Two years before our trip, a canoe team led by a friend of mine had found a body on a sandbar at the end of the Rocky Defile rapid on the Coppermine. My friend learned later that the victim had dumped in the rapids, but his companions could not find his body. They headed downstream to summon police, and in the meantime the body surfaced and was found by my friend’s party.
Conscious of the hazards, David Silcox and I planned to run the empty canoes of the inexperienced paddlers through the trickiest rapids, leaving the others to portage with their packs. We would be an odd crew, not knowing one another well and all travelling with private purposes of our own. Unlike the friendly though ever-competitive all-male outings, this trip proved to be a more relaxed venture, thanks largely to the presence of the two women. Watching three young people discover the magic of the Arctic and the midnight sun renewed my own sense of awe at an environment that I’d almost come to take for granted. If I missed the intense camaraderie of the club’s wilderness excursions, I found focus enough in my personal agenda.
This was a chance to restore some balance in my relationship with Murray, with whom I had not lived since leaving home when he was five years old. I had done my best to stay connected, taking him on European holidays, spending every Christmas with him, even when it meant sleeping on the couch in my former wife’s apartment, and phoning him every week. Now when I tried delicately to raise my fears of losing him, his reaction was the wry amusement one might reserve for a daft uncle. I was worried about a problem that did not exist, he told me to my surprise, and that was that.
An incident on that trip gave me the confidence that father and son did share a mutual understanding; indeed, it brought a sense of overall cohesion to our disparate party. I made a bad judgment about heading into a wide lake-sized section of the river one afternoon. In spite of a stiff wind, the river seemed calm enough to go for it. Halfway across, the wind shifted hard behind us and the river erupted into whitecapped rollers, threatening to broach anyone who lost control of the stern. Ninety percent of fatalities on canoe excursions occur not in rapids but during crossings of large bodies of flat water. We had no choice but for every man, woman, and teen to dig in hard for the far shore, and I so instructed the crews.
When we’d completed the passage, Don Macdonald was understandably upset with me for putting his family in such peril. I had to accept his criticism, but could not help but appreciate the effort that all had shown in pulling together. I found in Murray a determination and strength I had not known. He saw a father who could do more than simply babble on television.
Later we were winded for three days, unable to leave camp. Don constructed a sheltered fireplace on a narrow rock ledge ten feet above the river. He warned all of us not to step back too far, lest we lose our footing on the ledge. Not more than a few minutes later, there was a great splash when the six-foot-six giant forgot his own advice. That night Don, who had also served as defence minister, showed everyone how soldiers under fire roll over the ground on their elbows. Thousands of kilometres from anywhere, we tried it ourselves, rolling about with gleeful abandon on the tundra. Next morning, two bottles of Scotch were missing. Only the evidence of screw-tops around the fire convinced us adults that we had consumed all the Scotch. All in all, the voyage was one of the most memorable of my paddling career, and everyone who was there fondly and gratefully recalled its joys for years after.
Every trip holds memories, but at a campsite halfway across an unassailable set of rapids on the Hood River, I experienced one of those moments of understanding that come all too infrequently in a lifetime. I awoke in my tent at three in the morning, and in the half-light of the midnight sun I hiked a few hundred yards up a granite-strewn bluff high above the river. While I sat there in a silence so profound as to be almost indescribable, I could appreciate why the natives of the western plains regarded their landscape as an extension of the Great Spirit. To them the plateaus, mountains, prairies, and rivers were the embodiment of that spirit, and they held them sacred.
It came to me that there was a timelessness to this place, but also a terrible vulnerability. Warnings of environmental depredation suggest that the rivers may not run forever, nor the pack ice anchor us to the pole. If we fail to protect the Arctic, we are doomed; the North calls on us to acknowledge and preserve the interconnectedness between ourselves and the land that lies at the heart of our very existence.
Looking back toward our campsite, I saw in our little group a metaphor for the country. One miss
tep could have swept any of us away had we tried this adventure on our own; it had taken the skills of all to ensure the well-being of the whole. We are a nation of survivors, but we need each other to do it.
9
UNCIVIL WARS
Of all the prime ministers I covered, shadowed, or otherwise harassed for more than a half-century, Jean Chrétien was the most impressive when judged by the objective measure of victory at the polls. His record is unassailable, and although he was the ship’s captain when the sponsorship scandal broke in 2002, he was never implicated personally. His pressure on a government banker to rescue an investment in a golf course and hotel in his hometown are largely forgotten today. Since leaving office in 2003, Chrétien has grown in stature and reputation, just as Pierre Trudeau did. The difference is that Chrétien was regarded with immense affection in his heyday, whereas Trudeau commanded awe and respect.
Even former political rivals acknowledge Chrétien’s achievements. This was brought home to me at an Ottawa Senators hockey game shortly after Stephen Harper’s Conservatives came to power in 2006. Chrétien was in the stands that night, as were several newly appointed members of the Harper Cabinet. I was surprised to see these eager ministers arrange themselves in a respectful queue to shake Chrétien’s hand. Later, I chided Monte Solberg, who had just been named immigration minister, reminding him that he wasn’t supposed to pay homage to the man who had kept the Conservatives in Opposition for so long. It was not about personal homage, Solberg said. “We were admiring three consecutive majorities. After all, that’s how those of us in politics keep score, and he hit home runs.”
Chrétien’s detractors say he had it easy because the political forces against him were divided—Progressive Conservative vs. Reform/Alliance, Green Party vs. the NDP—or regionalized, as in the case of the Bloc Québécois. He was able to take his Liberals up the middle between a fractious right and a weak left and win every time. Those detractors are not crediting the fact that Chrétien kept his opponents off balance and successfully played to public suspicions of what the Conservatives in particular might do once in power, all the while calibrating his own policies to the public’s fickle mood.