a portable CD player, a grip of AA batteries, and discs by Mariah Carey and Young Jeezy.
Had I known that José was about to spend nearly all the money he had on entertainment, I would have blown a gasket. He’d told me he was planning to set aside two paychecks for the trip. But I would soon learn that he’d “loaned” most of that money to D and his grandmother, and left Saint Paul with about $50 in his pocket.
As we followed José back in the general direction of the registers, Kocher sensed my aggravation. “Don’t worry about it,” he whispered. “He’ll figure it out once he’s on the river.” And on one level, Kocher was right. José had always lived with nothing, and he was well adapted to it. Kocher had kindly packed rain gear and a fleece sweater for him in any case, and I had a sleeping bag and pad.
From Alexandria we drove to Fargo and met up with my old friends Greeny and Huck, who had followed us to North Dakota in order to help with logistics and see us off. We parked Kocher’s van in a ramp at a mall and piled into Huck’s 4Runner for the 60-mile drive south to the headwaters. We planned to return to the van in three days, after paddling 100 river miles, at which point Kocher would drive home.
Greeny and Huck had been in my life for decades. As kids we banded together closely, boys seeking relief for varying reasons from our families of origin. It was with Greeny and Huck that I took my first bike trip, 250 miles from Minneapolis to the Wisconsin Dells, when I was just 14 years old. When I was 18, we took our first extended road trip, from Minneapolis to Key West, and from there to Montreal. After our freshman year in college, we met under the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, and spent the summer tramping across Europe, Scandinavia, and the British Isles. In subsequent years we pursued riskier adventures: traveling up the Amazon River, mountain climbing in Alaska, and hiking across Bolivia and Peru. Now Greeny and Huck both had young families and demanding professional lives.
Around midnight that night outside Wahpeton, the sky opened. We struggled to see through the foggy windshield, but eventually we found a dirt road leading in the direction of the Red River. I’d considered the trip for weeks, but many loose ends remained. I needed a dry place to sort through the gear and camping supplies. I’d intended to make my final choices at the point of departure, and as a result, none of the gear had been placed in waterproof containers.
Risking ridicule, I suggested we spend the night in a hotel, so I could get my shit together in a dry place. Huck and Greeny stared at me, unamused. “You want to spend the whole summer outside,” they asked, “but you’re afraid of a little rain?” I quickly conceded, and we agreed to camp along the river.
The following morning, as rain continued to fall in sheets, we were awakened by the electric-motor hum of a maintenance vehicle. Driving it was a worker in green coveralls, who pretended not to notice that our tents were set up between a sand trap and the 13th green, in the middle of a golf course.
I stuffed everything I could into our packs with indiscriminate haste, and then we drove into Wahpeton and ate a greasy breakfast at Fryn’ Pan Family Restaurant, which was crowded that Sunday morning with starched churchgoers. They regarded us with glares of provincial intolerance as I worried about José. He looked nervous, exhausted, and uncharacteristically reserved. I tried to goad him out of his shell. “Hey bro, what’s wrong with these people? They’re acting like they’ve never seen an Indian before.”
He took the bait. “I see it all the time, dawg. They’re just worried papi gonna steal their wives.” A roar of laughter rose from our table and I saw José smile for the first time in two days.
It was still raining when we found Headwaters Park & Boat Landing in Breckenridge, the town opposite Wahpeton on the Minnesota side of the river. It is here that the Bois de Sioux and Otter Tail Rivers flow into a small reedy lagoon before gathering in a single stream a few canoe lengths wide, forming the Red River of the North.
Seeing this spot for the first time flashed me back to “Red River Mud,” the fifth chapter of Canoeing with the Cree. During their 21-day paddle up the Minnesota River, Sevareid and Port had met some farmers, killed a turtle for soup, and mucked around for a few frustrating days in the wetlands between the Minnesota and Bois de Sioux Rivers, before reaching this lagoon.
Kocher, José, and I posed for photographs with a four-sided granite pillar, which resembled the obelisks we would see later in towns along the Red River Valley, commemorating historic floods. This monument marked the start of the waterway, and an engraved map on it showed our route as far as Lake Winnipeg. After so many months of emotional uncertainty, the clarity was comforting.
We loaded our pregnant packs into the space between the thwarts, along with a food barrel, fishing poles, and a map tube as long as my arm. When Kocher stepped in, the canoe was precariously top-heavy.
José’s first attempt to step into the bow of the canoe was aborted after he lost both unlaced boots in the mud lining the lagoon. He hauled them out with a slurp, put them back on his feet, and entered the boat hauling an additional five pounds of muck. When I pushed off into the weak current and slid gingerly into the stern, Hawk’s canoe floated just a few inches above the murky waterline.
I thought of the opening line of Canoeing with the Cree: “We were off!”
But then we turned back not a hundred yards from the boat landing. José had left his glasses in the truck. Or so he thought, before discovering that they were in the pocket of his rain jacket.
Finally, we were off!
Thirty minutes into our voyage, I made a shoddy command decision. As we approached the whitewater created by a low-head dam, I mockingly paraphrased the campy training video I’d seen at a program in junior high. Kocher had attended the same program, and now he joined me in imitating the narrator:
The river’s most perilous obstruction, the low-head dam, is a wall-like structure just below the surface. As water flows over it and drops, a backwash is created, trapping anything that floats. Even small low-head dams can become brutal death traps when river levels are high.
In this case the river surely was high, and the low-head was producing a class II rapid, with standing waves the size of sports cars.
I knew enough to avoid it, but Kocher encouraged us to run the dam. “This is way smaller than anything you’ll see on the Hayes,” he said. “You need the practice.”
Due in equal parts to Kocher’s ill-conceived encouragement and to laziness, I decided to run the rapid rather than portage our overloaded canoe. Kocher grabbed the food barrel and a pack, and stood on land taking photos as we paddled back from the dam.
José twisted and winced. “We really gonna do this, dawg?”
I hadn’t run a rapid of any consequence since I was 16 years old, paddling the Ogoki River in northern Ontario. All I had for José was baseless bravado. “We’ll get through it,” I said, “just paddle.”
As we passed over the dam and swooshed down the rushing slide behind it, the canoe smashed into the first frothing line of standing waves. José was thrown onto one knee, and he grabbed the left gunwale with both hands. The canoe dipped left, the standing wave crashed over the rails, and river water filled the boat. José and I were pulled into the churning backwash along with our food and gear, then jettisoned unscathed from the lethal mayhem below the dam. As I popped to the surface, I found José clutching the partially submerged bow, his eyes wild with panic.
“Stay with the canoe, and keep your feet out in front of you,” I shouted. “You’re alright! Your life jacket will float you.”
We swam the canoe to shore and began corralling our tackle box, the GPS receiver, and whatever else we could find. As we were doing so, I looked upstream and saw Kocher in trouble.
He was standing in the current below the dam, up to his chest in roiling pandemonium, weighted down by the 80-pound Duluth pack strapped to his back. Demonstrating fearlessness and the superhuman strength I had come to expect from