shedding any tears. But I couldn’t help but linger at the door as Malcolm and Martha pleaded with their eyes for me to stay.
Kocher had agreed to help us get underway, paddling along for the first few days. And so it was that I found myself loading three Duluth packs and a food barrel into his Volkswagen van, and securing Hawk’s canoe on top of the vehicle.
We stood on the sidewalk in front of my apartment, debating whether José would show. Two hours had passed since the departure time we’d agreed on, and José wasn’t answering his phone.
Another hour passed before he picked up.
“Oh, we’re leaving already? My man!” he said with faux surprise. “I’ll be over in a minute. Gotsta have music, dawg.”
I had warned him about taking electronic devices. They would be waterlogged at some point, I explained. And besides, I added, “You won’t need music. The wind and the water make their own.” Though I knew how lame it would sound to José, I meant this.
Another hour later, José rolled up in the passenger seat of a black Escalade. His new roommate, Homegirl J, was behind the wheel. He slid down to the street holding a shopping bag from Wal-Mart. He had on the white tank top and blue polyester shorts he would wear for the rest of the summer.
I had given José a list of essentials for the trip—wool socks, rain gear, hiking boots, a sweater, and a winter hat—items that would easily fill out a watermelon-sized sack. But there was just a little plastic bag hanging limply from his fist.
“You got enough gear in there to last you two months, bro?” I chided.
I opened the sack and found two pairs of boxer shorts still in their packaging, along with two tank tops, three pairs of white cotton socks, and a cotton sweatshirt. On a canoe trip to the subarctic, this was a just-add-water recipe for hypothermia. And it looked as if the kid still didn’t have glasses.
“I did get these though,” José said, grabbing the pair of oversized orange sunglasses that had been dangling from the neck of his T-shirt and sliding them onto his nose. “My stunner shades, bro. Gotsta have the stunner shades.”
José noticed my frustration. “Nah, I’m foolin’ with you, bro. We just need to pick up my new glasses at America’s Best.”
My spirits lifted. We could get whatever else he needed on our way to the Red River headwaters.
José’s brother emerged from the back seat of the Escalade and circled the scene. José hadn’t let him in on our plan. All D knew was that we were “going fishing in Canada for a few days.” That bit of knowledge, combined with the fact that he had recently watched Brokeback Mountain, had D thinking, as José would later put it, “that we were up to some real homo shit.”
D was a scary character, but I wasn’t scared. Nor was I fearful of any element of the trip. Not the deep wilderness navigation nor the murderous whitewater, not the risky lake crossings nor the polar bears, nor the possibility of medical emergencies and starvation. I wanted to be swallowed by the wide green landscape, to escape my suffocating sadness and despair.
Apart from singing along with rap lyrics, José didn’t say a word for a couple hours after we left Saint Paul. He lounged on the back bench of Kocher’s van, hidden behind two pairs of glasses—the new eyeglasses from America’s Best, covered by the stunner shades—moving and grooving to the thump of his headphones.
I wasn’t surprised to see José acting hard around Kocher. Nor was I surprised that meeting José for the first time caused Kocher to question my sanity. He turned slightly to me with each of José’s off-key eruptions, his expression at once amused and concerned.
I gazed out the window, taking in the yellow prairie of the western lakes region. I couldn’t help but think with some regret about missing out on the Minnesota River, which paralleled our course some 50 miles south, beyond the rolling horizon.
When searching for a meaningful starting point, I had placed a phone call to Kevin Jensvold, the chairman of the Upper Sioux Community, whose tiny reservation sits along the Minnesota River, some 250 miles upstream from Saint Paul. I asked if he’d be willing to meet with José before our departure from Upper Sioux. I knew how much it would mean to José to have a tribal chairman pat him on the back as he boarded a canoe for the first time. Recognition and acceptance from men in the Native community was particularly important to him.
Unfortunately, Jensvold informed me dismissively that he might be busy the day we planned to shove off. “If he needs encouragement, tell him I’ve heard stories of men who came through here before in canoes.”
I asked Jensvold if there was anyone on his rez, a spiritual leader perhaps, who might be willing to come out to the river and speak with José. Jensvold said he would look into it and promised to call back. He never did.
I turned to the back of the van and shouted to get José’s attention. I told him about the conversation I’d had with the Upper Sioux chairman and his apparent lack of interest in our undertaking. José said that kind of treatment was what he had come to expect from Native people, even members of his immediate family.
“That’s how it goes, bro. Indians hear my name and think I’m just another Mexican. They don’t give a shit.”
José had told me before about how his brothers and sisters, of a Lakota mother and fathers of diverse nationalities (Somali, Ethiopian, Puerto Rican, Yemeni), had all experienced similar disdain from the greater Native community, who often derided them as illegitimate Indians. At Heart of the Earth, the Native charter school in Minneapolis where José had gone to high school, he was constantly getting into fights—particularly with the Anishinaabe boys—over the question of his Indian-ness. They hated him for being light skinned and having a Hispanic name, and he hated them for being Anishinaabe. He had been burned in romantic and business relationships with Anishinaabe people, and he clung to the historic animosity that lingered in Minnesota.
We pulled off the interstate in Alexandria, intending to eat lunch and round out José’s paltry collection of gear at one of the discount stores along the strip. While searching for a restaurant we drove past the 30-foot statue of Big Ole, “the country’s biggest Viking,” outside the Runestone Museum. Home to the Kensington Runestone—a purportedly ancient tablet covered with writing said to be inscribed by pre-Columbian Viking explorers in 1362, and discovered by a local farmer in 1898—the site had since become a destination of sorts. The inscription on the stone reads as follows:
Eight Goths and 22 Norwegians on a journey of exploration from Vinland very far west. We had camp by 2 rocky islands one day’s journey north from this stone. We were out fishing one day. After we came home we found 10 men red with blood and dead. AVM [Ave Maria] save from evil.
If the tablet is authentic, the Nordic travelers who inscribed it almost certainly came down from Hudson Bay, making the Runestone the earliest evidence of paddlers from the north Atlantic reaching Minnesota. Scientists and archaeologists had questioned its legitimacy for more than a century, but there was no debate as far as José was concerned. He had once participated in a discussion of the Runestone in a history class at Heart of the Earth, and his mind was made up.
“That rune thing is fugazi,” he said, sneering at Big Ole’s winged helmet. “To claim Norwegians were here 700 years ago sounds like a wild allegation to me.” Instead, he speculated, the Runestone was inscribed by white men scheming to claim Minnesota from the Natives, an assertion that almost seemed to be confirmed by Big Ole. From behind a blond beard he gazed into the distance, as if beholding his conquest. The inscription on his shield read: “Alexandria, birthplace of America.” As we pulled away, José saluted him with middle fingers out the rear window.
From Big Ole and the Runestone Museum we headed to Target, where I quickly lost track of José. I searched the men’s clothing department, where I hoped he would be considering some warm clothes. Then Kocher and I searched for him in Health and Beauty, where we figured