The Mackenzie River rises full-grown from the Great Slave Lake, a wide silver path that travels over a thousand miles on its long, lonely journey to the Arctic Ocean. This river would be our path to the Arctic. Alexander Mackenzie, the first white man to travel the entire river, took only sixteen days to go from Great Slave Lake to the Mackenzie Delta. We would take twenty-five days, but then Mackenzie was on a business trip, and we were on vacation.
After lake travel the current pushing us on our way felt good. As we moved away from the lake, the temperature rapidly warmed and fifteen miles away became positively hot. Byron went off, shotgun in hand, to see if he could shoot a duck to celebrate our first night on the Mackenzie. Soon we heard a single shot ring over the water and come echoing back. Byron came strolling back into camp with his gun over his shoulder and two ducks hanging limply in his hand. “Not bad, huh,” he smiled smugly. “Two ducks with only one shot.”
“How are you going to cook them?” asked Doug.
“I think I’ll try wrapping them in tinfoil and laying them in the coals.” He didn’t let them cook long enough in the coals so cut them up and put them in a stew.
But somehow shooting and eating the ducks didn’t seem like a thing we should have done. It didn’t fit in. We came to watch birds, not shoot them. That was the first and last time we shot anything on the entire journey.
The next day we crossed Beaver Lake with a very strong crosswind. Although the lake was not very wide and the waves not too big, towards the end of the lake the current and wind combined to kick up a terrible chop. I found it hard to decide where to point the canoe, as the waves seemed to come from all angles. Right in the middle of the worst waves, as I struggled to keep my bow pointed into the waves, I saw a flock of little tiny baby ducks bobbing along merrily over 300 yards from the shore, paddling along calmly with their little feet, safe as could be in the same conditions that threatened to swamp my boat.
When I went by the Fort Providence ferry, one of the deckhands leaned over the rail and asked, “Where are you going?”
“Alaska,” I answered.
Obviously he didn’t believe me and retorted, “Oh, sure you are.”
Keeping a journal became discouraging. Too often I’d look back at my entries and want to tear them up. While planning the journey, I had considered not keeping a journal and leaving my camera at home to avoid any unnecessary intrusion into the present reality. I wanted to enjoy experiences now without thinking about how to best record them for the future. Rather than take pictures, I wanted to actually look at scenes and use the time I spent writing in my journal meditating on the ideas I would have been writing. While doing the trip that way would have merit, I didn’t think I had the mental discipline to handle it.
I felt the camera and journal helped me see and understand things. What is a camera but a tool to focus one’s vision on what one really wants to see? And what is a journal but writing to help focus thoughts on ideas one really wants to understand? So I bought my camera and journal, but now I seemed to just take snapshots without putting any effort into seeing, and my journal fell into a ho-hum record of insignificant events. So I put my camera away and refused to write in my journal, waiting until I really saw something before I reached for the camera and until I had something to say before writing in my journal.
As we neared Providence Rapids next morning, the current pulled irresistibly toward a narrowing of the river between the fifty feet high banks. I kept close to the shore but far enough away to be out of the eddy lines near the banks. The current rolled and rumbled through the rapids—a swirling current that swung our canoes back and forth, but we sped easily through the waves.
We had been told that Mills Lake could be very rough when the wind blew from the north across the eleven-mile expanse of open water. However, the lake spread calm and flat before us. After lunch I drifted along watching Doug and then Byron disappear down the river and amused myself by swatting bulldogs (a big fly similar to a horse fly) with my paddle. With a little practice I became quite adept at knocking them out of the air with a quick swat. Ambition finally came to me when I realized the wind and current had combined to keep me motionless. So I set off in pursuit of my partners, finding them camped on a grassy gravel bar between a river and a marsh. Surrounded by deep grass, the tent seemed afloat in a green sea. Mosquitoes rose in clouds out of the grass, and we were certainly glad that we had a mosquito proof shelter. I wished, though, that we had each brought a tent as the air in a tent gets somewhat less than fresh with three guys inside who could use baths and millions of menacing mosquitoes outside. But nobody complained.
Fortunately, in the big river we could paddle away from the shore and the mosquitoes, and a wind almost always blew. Several of the gravel bars gave a home to clouds of screeching gulls and terns. I stopped to see if I could find some nests and found the entire island dotted with them every ten or twelve feet. The gulls hovered about twenty feet overhead, squawking what I’m sure were gull obscenities while the braver ones took turns diving at me. In the interests of preserving the cleanliness of my clothes, I left for the safety of the open river.
We camped one night beside a sluggish stream dignified by the name Morrisey Creek. The mosquitoes made the most of the moist, calm air, and we were forced to wear headnets to protect from their onslaughts. The air didn’t seem to have enough space for all the mosquitoes swarming around us. We could then understand the old saying, “If there were any more mosquitoes in the North, they would have to be smaller.”
The lack of current on the upper Mackenzie discouraged us as we had expected an average current of about three miles an hour and so far it had been half that. I had hoped that with a strong, fast current we could make lots of miles and still have plenty of time for fishing, dreaming, drifting, and exploring side-streams and shorelines. Instead of drifting, we had to paddle hard to make just a few miles. And whenever the current sped up, the wind would blow harder in exact accordance with the second law of canoeing.
The day before we arrived at Fort Simpson, our third food drop, I tried to clean up a bit. It had seemed either too cold to bathe or the mosquitoes discouraged me, but I braved the cold water and washed some clothes for good measure. They dried rapidly on top of my packs. It was the middle of J une, and everywhere flowers bloomed in lush green grass. Summer had arrived suddenly in the Mackenzie basin.
We camped about forty miles from Fort Simpson and expected to arrive there sometime late in the evening. We were wrong; the current turned exceptionally strong, racing along the narrow valley, and we cruised into town in above five hours. The fort is located on an island at the confluence of the Liard and Mackenzie. Extremely muddy water from the Liard contrasted sharply with the comparatively clear waters of the Mackenzie. For nearly one hundred miles downstream, the difference was easily differentiated.
Doug had already gone to find the post office when I pulled up, so Byron said, “Why don’t you go into town, and I’ll stay here with the canoes. I’ve got to finish this letter.”
“All right. Which way did Doug go?”
Just then three Indians roared up in their pickup, and Doug jumped out of the back announcing, “These guys picked me up. Then they took me to the post office, and I got all our boxes and a tour of the whole town. What there is of it, that is.”
We thanked them for saving us a long trudge carrying three heavy boxes of food. One of them said, “Well, we saw you two days ago when we were out hunting and then again last night where you camped by Spence River. We figured you’d be in here today so we just kept an eye out for you.”
Doug asked, “What do y’all do for a living?”
“Well, we work for the government painting houses, but mostly we just run around in the truck burning up government gas,” they replied, “and pick up girls.”
We went down the beach and opened our boxes. Opening boxes always gave us a good feeling of security in having enough food to continue. We usually spread the food all over the beach to sort and then attempt to stuff all of it in our packs. Mine were all homemade. With shaky finances I simply sewed four top-opening nylon packs approximately 25x18x12 inches. Instead of shoulder straps, a leather-carrying handle helped me lug the packs from the canoe to a campsite. For portages I strapped the packs to my trusty Kelty pack frame. It provided a lot of flexibility; I could strap on more packs than I could possibly carry or just one or two.
Always it seemed impossible to fit all the food into the packs, but always we squeezed it in somehow, crammed the packs into the canoes, and set off down the river.