was wrong.
After dabbing the electronic guts with the corner of a bandanna, José reached into his pack and produced an “all-purpose hood utility kit”—a pack of Kool Menthols. He was trying to quit smoking, but he had brought them along in case of emergency. He promptly lit up two cigarettes and dragged them down while holding the components close to his lips, saturating them in a stream of smoke.
“This is how you do it, bro. The smoke dries that shit out.”
Less than an hour later, José swaggered around the campground, gesturing wildly with his hands and vocalizing at maximum volume, seemingly oblivious to the frightened families looking on.
Later that evening, after José had been passed out in the tent for several hours, Kocher and I sat in the back of his van, conversing in hushed tones. On the eve of his planned departure, I was trying in vain to think of an angle that would convince him to continue paddling with us.
Kocher could hear the turmoil raging in my brain. To avoid being confronted with it, he inventoried the food he had accumulated for us, some of which had been stored in the van for the past few days. “A half pound of gouda cheese,” he reported in a monotone. “Three dozen garlicflavored crostinis; two sacks of salted and shelled pistachios; three half-pound pouches of teriyaki beef jerky; one large sack of organic dried fruit; two packages of Fig Newmans.”
This went on until the eastern skies glowed faintly amber, and culminated in one final exhausted exchange.
“Are you sure you’re not coming?”
“I wish I could, brother.”
By the time the sun rose over the prairie on the Minnesota side of the river I had organized everything into two piles. Gear that was already damaged (camera) or deemed superfluous (screen tent) was stacked to my left. Gear deemed vital (GPS unit, water purifiers, maps, clothing, food) was stacked to my right.
I passed out in the back seat of the van for a couple hours, then awoke to the sound of Kocher slamming open the van’s side door, nearly scalping me. He yanked the Duluth packs past my face and onto the grass. “Time to get up,” he commanded. “I gotta get home to the dogs, and I got a ton of work around the house before I go back to work.” I could tell Kocher was feeling bad about leaving us, and perhaps a bit envious.
I managed to slow him down somewhat. We ate breakfast in Fargo, then drove to a sporting goods store to score a new rain jacket for me.
Upon returning to the campground, Kocher remained in the van. He refused to snap photos and declined to help carry gear to the river’s edge. He didn’t even wave farewell after we loaded the canoe. He simply drove off before we paddled away.
The canoe was strikingly lighter without Kocher, but it would take some time for us to get used to the new balance. José rode high in the bow, and had to reach to get his paddle in the water.
It took two hours to paddle five miles into a warm wet headwind. When we reached Fargo North Dam, we portaged around the low-head, stepping precariously across a field of white retaining stones that slipped like basketballs beneath our boots. José carried a pack and the paddles. I carried the canoe overhead, the yoke burrowing into my shoulders.
Some 200 yards downstream, I set the canoe down at the end of a frothing churn. And as I did so, I said hello to a Native man fishing with his two little boys, their bobbers swirling in the fizz.
When José heard the guy was Anishinaabe from the nearby White Earth Reservation, he shifted into high gear, eager to demonstrate what Lakota people can do. Leaping from rock to rock, José bounded past the dam, hefted the food barrel and equipment pack onto his shoulders, and started back on trembling knees. Watching him trip and twist under the burden, it was easy to imagine José popping a fibula. But he eventually disgorged his load in a heap beside the canoe, sniffed at the fisherman and his boys, and shrugged his shoulders dismissively.
The little boys, with matching buzz cuts, begged for a canoe ride. We told them it wasn’t safe to paddle in the rapids without a life jacket. The man asked lots of questions, then said that what we were doing sounded “pretty cool.”
Finally, we shoved off.
“They got Indians!” José whispered back over his shoulder. “I thought it was going to be all rednecks up here.” I could hear the pride in his voice, and knew he thought he had impressed them.
“Hey,” yelled the older boy from shore, “where are you going?”
José turned back to him and smiled. “Hudson Bay, my nigga!”
In Canoeing with the Cree, Eric Sevareid sums up the 160 river miles between Fargo and Grand Forks, North Dakota, in one blasé paragraph: “The journey down the Red River from Fargo had been almost uneventful, a long, monotonous process of steady paddling, with no current to aid us, around unending bends, under a hot sun, beside muddy banks.”
Some things don’t change. We had agreed to a daily goal of 40 river miles, but 15 miles out of Fargo, José was hungry and refusing to paddle unless he had a hot meal.
It was impossible to cook lunch, I explained. There were no dry landings, the stove was buried somewhere in the depths of our packs, and we would have to use precious drinking water. We also had plenty of food that required no preparation: trail mix, jerky, dried fruit, chocolate, cheese, and crackers.
“It ain’t real food unless it’s cooked,” he replied. “I can’t live on birdseed.”
I was increasingly frustrated by José’s rickety stroke, and eventually I agreed to search for a relatively hospitable bank. Ankle-deep in inky goop, I fired up the single-burner camp stove and let José have at it. He boiled oriental-flavored ramen and fried squares of summer sausage, then combined them to make soup. I swatted flies off my back, and watched the conveyor flow past without us.
After filling his belly with a hot meal, José paddled hard until sundown, by which point we had logged just 25 miles since setting out that morning. We had had enough for the day, but our map showed no campsites or landings nearby. I anxiously searched the shore for a bivouac in the dying light, but this part of the river wound through a vast grassy wetland. I couldn’t find a circle of earth that would support a tent.
As the last solar strands were extinguished by the closing sky, the darkness became absolute. We pulled on our headlamps and scanned the shores, the beams lighting steam phantoms rising from the surface. An unsettling quiet moved in with the mist, and although we discussed possibly paddling all night, we were both exhausted, a little spooked, and anxious for our sleeping bags.
Suddenly a shot rang out, so close we could feel it in our bones.
José fell forward and thrust his chin between his knees.
Another blast, this one closer. José stayed low and looked back at me. “What the fuck, dawg? Rednecks is shooting at us? This is some Deliverance shit.”
Just then I saw the ripple from a beaver’s tail shiver against the side of our boat.
“I ain’t getting raped out here,” José continued obliviously, “tell you that right now.”
Eventually a wet
