Brian Castner - Disappointment River: Finding and Losing the Northwest Passage

The river was liquid glass, a cloud mirror that rolled beneath my canoe and made me dizzy, as if I might stumble and fall down into the heavens, and in the horizon the silvery sky and water fused as one.

We had been paddling for two days, and the river was so wide that the far bank appeared to be little more than a slight film of green. Reeds filled our shore, black ducks and seagulls and a steady succession of bald eagles feeding on both. Behind us, tumbling lake storms, and ahead, just a rumor of current.

This river. The many nations of Dene, the indigenous peoples in the upper and middle basin, know it as the Deh Cho. The Gwichya Gwichin, of the lower interior bush, as the Nagwichoonjik. The Inuvialuit, the western Inuit at the rivers end in the Arctic, as the Kuukpak. All the names are a variation on the same themethe Big Riverand for good reason. It is the second longest in North America. The island that plugs the rivers upper mouth is larger than five Manhattans. Everything about the Deh Cho is enormous.

And yet I intended to canoe every drop of it, all eleven hundred miles. I am a fairly serious river guide, but never before had I undertaken a self-supported trip of this magnitude, and the scale of the journey weighed heavily. We paddled an eighteen-and-a-half-foot Sea Clipper canoe, wide and steady as the days, designed to track through whitecaps and swallow hundreds of pounds of gear. I had spent half a year researching, purchasing, testing, sorting, packing, and repacking that gear: an Everest-rated tent, solar panels and satellite link, a handcrafted curved splitting ax from Maine, ninety freeze-dried dinners from Quebec, plus apples, mandarins, bagels, peanut butter, chocolate, oatmeal, tea, chunk honey, and fifteen pounds of pemmican. All that and more, stuffed in waterproof barrels or lashed to the boat so a rogue wave couldnt end our trip.

That morning, as we broke our first camp on the sandy shore of Great Slave Lake , I felt smothered. By the scale of the job ahead of us, the labor required, the intense summer heat, the size of the river. It had taken two days of travel just to reach the starting line, weeks and weeks yet to go to find the end.

All day, the shore ground by reluctantly. Grueling progress in the hazy shimmer. But then, unexpectedly and with great relief, a breeze stirred behind ushow did a breeze come out of the east?and the watery mirror shattered as wavelets formed about us.

I unfolded the small sail we had brought for just such an unlikely development, clipped it to a metal bar at the nose of the boat, and when a gust caught us I felt it tug hard against my line and we surged forward, surfing on and over the rising waves, making real headway for the first time.