Joan had a thing with Sonic when you two were split up, and a couple nights ago you still loved her enough to marry her,” I said. “If you really loved her then, you would still love her now.”
José took this in silently. He wondered aloud if Joan might agree to give up “that little hasapa,” Lakota slang for a black baby. Then he asked to use my phone to call her.
Joan answered.
José said he loved her and needed to talk. He said he could forgive her, and wanted to try again. His apparent transformation from juvenile thug to mature young man was convincing. I drove off from Sibley Manor believing him, a state of delusion that would last until he appeared at my door a few nights later, out of breath and trembling.
He explained quickly that he had just sprinted across Interstate 94 from Frogtown, after “blasting that Sonic motherfucker with a sawed-off.” I would later learn that he had waited for Sonic outside Joan’s mother’s house, where she and the baby were staying. When Sonic appeared, José shot out the rear window of his Oldsmobile 98.
I pulled José into my apartment, looked up and down the street, and bolted the door.
The nights following this drama with José were stormy, with violent winds that lulled me to sleep the way unsettled weather always has. I didn’t hear much from him after the night he went after Sonic and crashed at my place, and I prayed that no news was good news.
In the meantime, I had decided that I was going to Hudson Bay, and José had agreed to join me. Planning for the expedition was still in the early stages when, on a morning that smelled like lightning and damp earth, I received a call from my friend Greeny, whom I had known since nursery school. He reported that a massive branch had fallen and smashed through my canoe, which was resting on sawhorses behind his house in Minneapolis.
I exhaled in a vaguely accusatory way. “Now what the hell am I going to paddle to Hudson Bay?”
I sped across the Lake Street bridge to his house on the other side of the Mississippi. The canoe, a 17-foot Royalex hull with ash seats, thwarts, and gunwales, had been with me since my sister Hawk gave it to me more than a decade earlier, when she moved to Colorado.
Growing up, Hawk was my idol. As a boy I shared a bedroom with my younger brother, Adam, but I preferred to sleep in Hawk’s room, on the floor beside her bed.
When I was 11 and Hawk was 13, she registered for a two-week session at a YMCA canoeing camp on West Bearskin Lake, along the Minnesota-Ontario border. I tagged along.
In subsequent years we camped with groups of kids our own age, but that first summer we went into the woods together. Sitting on a piney point on West Bearskin Lake, Hawk taught me how to smoke cigarettes and weed. She shared secrets that boys my age weren’t supposed to know, and showed me menstrual blood as it traveled down her leg following a midnight swim. Out on trail in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, she was always much tougher than me. She paddled harder and complained less about grueling portages, hunger, mosquitoes, and wet sleeping bags. I had always looked up to her, and the canoe she gave me had special meaning.
Greeny and I used handsaws to extricate the mangled boat from the leafy fist that had impaled it through the stern. When we yanked the offending branches from the hull, the gashes, two jagged wounds the size of apples, appeared to be terminal. Nearly certain that Hawk’s canoe would never float again, we gently loaded it onto my car.
I drove along River Road to downtown Saint Paul, and parked next to an unmarked loading dock behind an old brick warehouse. I climbed up a crumbling concrete lip and pounded on the garage door. Behind it I heard the proprietor of this underground repair shop bark impatiently, “Coming!”
Old Hal maintained no particular schedule, so I was thankful to find him at work. He opened the door and glared at me as if he were looking into the sun. The previous summer he had replaced the rotted gunwales on Hawk’s canoe, so I knew this was just his gruff way.
I wandered around the shop while Hal examined the canoe. There were three wood-strip canoes on the floor in various stages of completion. These were Hal’s projects, and they would eventually join the curvaceous masterpieces hanging on ropes from the ceiling. I couldn’t help but wonder if Hal was grouchy because his love of canoes and skill in building and repairing them had led to his imprisonment in a dusty warehouse just two blocks off the Mississippi River, which he rarely got to paddle.
I looked at a grainy color photograph on the wall. It was an image of a covered one-man canoe rigged with a sail, beached on the sandy shoreline of a large lake surrounded by pine trees.
“I designed that boat,” Hal offered half-heartedly. He went on to explain that the guy it belonged to had passed through Saint Paul recently. He was paddling from Patagonia to Alaska in stages.
“He came to me and asked for a canoe he could sail on the big waters up North,” Hal continued. “The guy takes winters off, but apart from those breaks he has been paddling constantly for four or five years.”
This seemed like a real achievement to me, but Hal quickly discredited the effort. “He’s a rich man and his kids are out of the house. He isn’t married. No pets. No one to take care of but himself. What the hell else does he have to do?”
I thought about what I had to do. I took care of my three daughters and my son four days and three nights a week. I was constantly struggling with my ex-wife for custody of the kids. I had to figure out what I was going to do now that my three-year graduate program at the University of Minnesota was nearing completion. And I had to get a job in order to begin to repay my $30,000 student loan.
“Once I’m finished with it, this canoe will take you anywhere you want to go,” Hal said.
“Even Hudson Bay?” I replied.
Hal’s eyes softened. He invited me back to his office, set down a blue plastic barrel of the sort used in Minnesota to distribute salt on the roads, and ordered me to sit. He described how he had paddled many venerable waterways, including Great Slave Lake, the Yukon River, and the Border Route from Lake Superior to Lake of the Woods. The Sevareid route had always loomed above all others in his imagination, but he was getting too old to even think about it now. He offered me a grimy can of Diet Coke from the shelf above his computer.
“You’ll need a shotgun: double-barreled, 20-gauge minimum, pump action. Anything smaller will just piss off the bears,” he said. “The Canadians are insane about guns. They’ll make you fill out a pile of paperwork before they let you bring one into their country—and even then they’ll probably deny you entry.”
Hal interrupted himself, logging onto the Web site for the Canada Firearms Centre and printing out a one-page declaration form, along with two pages of instructions.
“And when that polar bear attacks,” Hal continued, as if it were inevitable, “you’re going to have to unload on him. Pump and unload, right in the skull.”
I couldn’t help but smile. I had never seen Hal emote, but the thought of fighting off a polar bear had him really worked up.
“I don’t care if that goddamn bear looks like a rug,” he went on. “You just reload and empty, again and again. You can’t be too careful. It’s your life or his.”
Hal calmed down slowly, then conceded that there “might not be bear issues,” but only if proper care was taken.
I described my strategy for keeping predators out of camp. “I always string my food pack out of reach, between two trees.”
“Suicide,” he cried out in response, shaking his bald skull and wagging a finger. “You can’t hang your food in the subarctic. The few trees on the tundra aren’t tall enough to hang food out of reach of a polar bear. You lose your food supply, you starve. You need to carry your food in one of these things.”
Hal pointed at the salt barrel I was seated on. Its thick plastic shell