three-foot waves all around.” In an attempt to cross over to the other side of the river and work their way up to the portage, both canoes capsized. Zelenak and Sirk made it back to shore, but for their friends in the other canoe, Ken Randlett, 39, and David Zenisek, 23, the flow of the current was too much.
The four Cleveland-area companions spent weekends and holidays together, usually canoeing, and to them, a trip down the Missinaibi River was to be a trip of a lifetime. Randlett, who planned to spend his fortieth birthday on the river, spent a year organizing the expedition; Zenisek was to be married shortly after their return. The last Zelenak and Sirk saw of their friends, the two of them were clinging to the canoe and heading for the falls. They were both wearing lifejackets so they figured they would be okay.
The trail is marked by purpose, not by signage.
A group of Canadian canoeists had congregated at the campsite overlooking the gorge, some distance along the sixteen-hundred-metre portage. They were in the process of portaging their gear and were now taking a few restful minutes absorbing the spectacular scene below them — the thunderous applause of a great river squeezed between ancient ramparts of granite. They had no idea of the tragedy unfolding above the falls at that moment. Walking casually along the brim of the canyon, the Canadians came in sight of the first chute, still dazzled by the immensity of the spillway and the gallery of water-worn rocks. They soon saw that something was definitely out of place; the prow of a canoe bobbed up and down in the surging pool between the first two chutes, a lifejacket ripped in half, a pack and a plastic cooler remained partly visible, caught in a boil of aerated water and river foam. Two of the Canadians had already gone back to the head of the portage where they soon met up with the remaining half of the Ohio party who still believed their friends had made it to shore safely, maybe mingling with the Canadians down at the campsite. The utter horror of the situation sank in when they discovered that their friends were unaccounted for, and that the mangled canoe and torn lifejacket had turned up at the bottom of the falls. They were all wearing lifejackets, Zelenak thought aloud.
A frenzied shore search resulted in little hope of finding anyone alive.
On June 21, 1993, the Rescue Co-ordination Centre in Trenton, Ontario, responded to an activated Emergency Locating Transmitter (E.L.T.) on the Missinaibi River, almost a thousand kilometres to the north. An Ontario Provincial Police Search and Rescue Team and helicopter were dispatched early the following day and made contact with a group of paddlers camped at Thunderhouse Falls. Four days later, the rescue team located one of the bodies in Bell’s Bay, twenty-four kilometres downstream from Thunderhouse. The second body was found the next day just below Conjuring House Rapids.
Twenty-five days later, provincial police and Natural Resources officials met in Hearst with local coroner, Bertrand Proulx. Proulx had recalled a similar drowning some years earlier at Thunderhouse but did not want to call an inquest because of the expense, according to the records of the meeting. The report adds, “… especially when he knows what the inquest’s recommendations would be, anyways.” There was no mention in any of the records to making any effort to correct the false information on the topographic map that had led the Ohio party astray.
At the time I was writing a canoeing guidebook to the Missinaibi River, initially because it was both a provincial waterway park and a Canadian Heritage River. The scope of the book changed when I heard about the recent drownings at Thunderhouse. I was on the river at the time, near the headwater, and heard about the tragedy in the riverside village of Mattice while picking up supplies. Two days later I was camped at Thunderhouse, trying to picture what had happened to the Ohio men. Beaching my canoe below the falls and canyon, I hiked up to the pool where the non-existent portage was marked on the map — the portage the Ohio men tried to reach. The pool near where I was standing (where the portage was supposed to be) was relatively calm, streaked with river foam and slowly recirculating; the rapid entering the pool was dramatic and tightly wound with a sharp decline toward the first falls. Even a good, strong paddler could not exit the rapids and get across the pond safely here, I thought. My eye caught a flash of sunlight from an object pushed up along the shore rocks. It was a waterproof, disposable camera, probably belonging to the Ohio men that dumped in the rapids. It was a strange feeling to be holding the record of the last hours of the two dead men in my hand.
A year earlier I was paddling the upper Missinaibi with a girlfriend and had pulled over at an open bedrock island in the middle of Albany Rapids for lunch. A Search and Rescue helicopter landed a quarter of a kilometre downstream and unloaded several men and a small boat. We thought this was just a training exercise. Packing up, we pushed on, paddling the rapid in front of the SAR group and exchanging casual waves. When we reached Mattice and dropped in to sign the river guestbook at Nancy’s restaurant, owner Doris Tanguay mentioned that someone had drowned upriver at Albany Rapids about a week ago and that the rescue squad was having difficulty getting the body out of the river. I realized we had paddled directly over a dead man that was wedged in rocks underwater and that the SAR members we had passed were still trying to extricate the body. The log book showed that over a hundred paddlers had passed through in the last four days, and they, too, had paddled over the body in the rapids.
After the two Thunderhouse drownings and the one at Albany Rapids, I was beginning to wonder if there was a trend or pattern to the deaths. I was also curious to see if there were any other deaths along the river in the past years. I was already suspecting inaccuracies with the topographic maps and well knew their faults and failures, but I wanted to find out if any other deaths had been the cause of errant maps. I had appealed to the Natural Resources regional office for funding for my research and was turned down, but I was determined to continue my investigations.
Requesting the appropriate access to information documents, I was finally approved and allowed to visit the Ontario Coroner’s Office in Toronto. I was given a cubicle and instructions how to use their filing system. I’d search back to 1977, or seventeen years of records, and isolate only those boating deaths that had occurred anywhere along the Missinaibi River Heritage route, from Lake Superior to Moosonee on James Bay — a total distance of about 650 kilometres. It was a daunting task, time consuming and unsettling. For the next three days I would leaf through over five hundred police and coroner reports, isolating all the deaths that had occurred along one Canadian river system. Thankfully, there were no photographs in the reports, except in the last file I examined. Leafing through a file dated June 1981, two crisp glossy photographs flipped out on to the table. My stomach lurched at what I saw. I took in a deep breath and stared at the pictures. I couldn’t take my eyes off them. There were two young men, obviously dead, stretched unceremoniously on stainless-steel gurneys — a morgue photo. Both still had their lifejackets on. The cold water of the Missinaibi had preserved their bodies, at least from bloating, but their skin was bleach white, eyes vacant and darkened by death. The whiteness of their skin accentuated cuts, contusions, and fractures; broken necks, crushed skulls, limbs twisted out of symmetry. One dead youth was wearing my brand of lifejacket with extrication knife attached. It was weird; when I first saw the picture it was like I was looking at myself, dead. Both young men were twenty-three years old, from Brooklyn, New York, and had belonged to a whitewater paddling club. They were experienced paddlers. There were four in the party; the survivors reported that their friends had been “sucked” into the rapids and couldn’t get out of the pull to the falls. They were headed for a non-existent portage, just as the Ohio men had done. It was the very last of the five hundred files. I quickly packed up my research material and left the building. I found a quiet park bench and sat down and wept, deep sobs, for the parents of these boys who were probably spared the pictures I had just seen. Then I got angry.
It was even hard writing about this incident fourteen years later without feeling emotionally charged. There had been thirty-five drownings in the time period I had researched, or an average of about two deaths per year. Eleven of those deaths occurred within the boundaries of the Missinaibi Provincial and Heritage Waterway Park; twelve of the drownings, about one-third of the total, were American tourists. Seventeen of the drownings could have been prevented. Five died at Thunderhouse Falls because the topographic map told them to portage at a spot