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 him, Kocher trudged to land, then continued over to where we were standing waist-deep against the steep rocky bank, emptied his hands of supplies, and fished us out of the river with an outstretched hand.
I was eager to empty the boat and get back in the water, but José was furious. “Why the fuck did you do that? You tipped us. You said we’d get through it.”
I ignored him, focused on emptying and then reloading the canoe. As we returned to the river, I noticed a bearded man in a black pickup parked across the channel near the dam. I had seen the same vehicle at the boat landing in Breckenridge. The driver was watching us, smiling cruelly.
I could see the rage in José’s eyes. As if things weren’t bad enough, now a redneck was laughing at him. Standing knee-deep in the water, he demanded to use my phone. He said he was going to call Homegirl J, so she could come pick him up. I dug the soaked phone out of a dripping pack and handed it to him. José burrowed into the duffer spot, pulled his headphones over his ears, and went unresponsive.
Kocher and I paddled a docile draw over the next mostly sunny 25 miles. Around every bend, as if the river hadn’t seen humans since Sevareid, deer bolted between the cottonwoods, and bald eagles, startled from their nests, took wing on fabulous spans, often swooping down to take a closer look at us. Canadian geese honked, warning us to keep our distance, and scurried to shore to shepherd goslings among the vegetation. Throughout this first extended leg of the voyage, José spit out C-Murder lyrics, moving only to slap with his paddle at the larger geese when they swam close to the boat.
I’d taken some difficult kids out on the water, but I’d never seen anyone show such disdain for Mother Earth. Kocher didn’t have to turn around to see my frustration. Per usual, though, his analysis was sage. “He’s creating his own little urban environment inside those headphones,” he explained. “It’s going to take time. You have to be patient.”
We stopped for the night at a city park in Abercrombie, North Dakota. There wasn’t much to the place beyond grass, an outhouse, a dock, and a lighted gazebo.
The rain returned, but we stayed dry under the gazebo while Kocher prepared a deluxe dinner from ziplocked ingredients. We had pita sandwiches stuffed with thick cuts of mozzarella, sweet heirloom tomatoes, spinach, arugula, fresh-squeezed lemon juice, and mint.
José fished from shore on his own, ignoring
