On Top of The World

Hayes River, Canadian Northern Coast

continued …

There’s more, lots more, in that one picture that nobody will ever appreciate as much as those of us who’ve been there.We paddled downwind along the shore until we found our stream and an ideal campsite with driftwood for baking. A day later, right on schedule, a speck out on the ocean materialized into the schooner of a friend coming to pick us up. A perfect rendezvous!

The Hayes River on the map — a long way from the site of the photograph — got its name on May 9, 1879, when an American military exploring party, searching for traces of the long-lost Franklin Expedition, stumbled across the frozen valley and named it for their president. They also met natives living along the river, the Itkuhikhalingmiut, or “People of the Soapstone Lamps,” and described them later as among the world’s sorriest and most miserable people, starving and wretched in their dark, unheated igloos. Times and fortunes change. Knud Rasmussen, sledging through the same country about forty years later, found them the liveliest, cleanest, and healthiest Inuit he had met in decades. All of this — and more — is conjured by this all-butfeatureless topographic map. That innocuous little curve in the river is the one that my friend, Baird, and I came paddling confidently around — to find ourselves in a rapid so heavy that it wasn’t likely we’d complete it “on the sunny side of the boat,” as the old-timers say. Sure enough, we didn’t. We didn’t meet any people, either. The valley, except for wandering caribou,musk oxen, and wolves, is now utterly deserted, its people all moved to hamlets along the coast.

On long trips away from home, I don’t write in complete sentences. There’s too much going on that I don’t want to miss. Sentence fragments, nouns, and expletives will do to remind me of incidents, accidents, and other sources of amazement. A single photograph like the one on the wall evokes weeks of rapids, huge lake trout and char, friends huddled together out of the wind and rain, and great white wolves watching us warily as we pass through their territory. And the map — well, I’ll be seeing Baird again in a couple of weeks, in a Quebec fishing camp. After a day of fishing, some cheese and crackers, and a little whiskey, that rapid will no doubt emerge chimera-like from our memories. Each of us saw it from a different spot and perspective, and each remembers it differently. It was a wonderful experience because we both survived and got a wonderful story out of it. But he’s never gotten into a canoe with me again.

Lange lives in Etna, New Hampshire. The author of five books, he also writes a weekly column, “A Yankee Notebook,” for several New England newspapers and serves as commentator and host for Vermont Public Radio. In 1973, he founded the Geriatric Adventure Society, a group of outdoor enthusiasts whose members have skied the two-hundred-mile Alaska Marathon, climbed in Alaska, the Andes, and the Himalayas, in addition to paddling rivers north of the Arctic Circle. He and his wife, Ida, have three children and four grandchildren.

Lange also leads annual tours for Vermont Public Radio. This year’s destination is Scotland, including a visit to Dunvegan Castle, the home of the MacLeod Clan. See vpr.net for details.

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