Mississippi River, which he rarely got to paddle.
I looked at a grainy color photograph on the wall. It was an image of a covered one-man canoe rigged with a sail, beached on the sandy shoreline of a large lake surrounded by pine trees.
“I designed that boat,” Hal offered half-heartedly. He went on to explain that the guy it belonged to had passed through Saint Paul recently. He was paddling from Patagonia to Alaska in stages.
“He came to me and asked for a canoe he could sail on the big waters up North,” Hal continued. “The guy takes winters off, but apart from those breaks he has been paddling constantly for four or five years.”
This seemed like a real achievement to me, but Hal quickly discredited the effort. “He’s a rich man and his kids are out of the house. He isn’t married. No pets. No one to take care of but himself. What the hell else does he have to do?”
I thought about what I had to do. I took care of my three daughters and my son four days and three nights a week. I was constantly struggling with my ex-wife for custody of the kids. I had to figure out what I was going to do now that my three-year graduate program at the University of Minnesota was nearing completion. And I had to get a job in order to begin to repay my $30,000 student loan.
“Once I’m finished with it, this canoe will take you anywhere you want to go,” Hal said.
“Even Hudson Bay?” I replied.
Hal’s eyes softened. He invited me back to his office, set down a blue plastic barrel of the sort used in Minnesota to distribute salt on the roads, and ordered me to sit. He described how he had paddled many venerable waterways, including Great Slave Lake, the Yukon River, and the Border Route from Lake Superior to Lake of the Woods. The Sevareid route had always loomed above all others in his imagination, but he was getting too old to even think about it now. He offered me a grimy can of Diet Coke from the shelf above his computer.
“You’ll need a shotgun: double-barreled, 20-gauge minimum, pump action. Anything smaller will just piss off the bears,” he said. “The Canadians are insane about guns. They’ll make you fill out a pile of paperwork before they let you bring one into their country—and even then they’ll probably deny you entry.”
Hal interrupted himself, logging onto the Web site for the Canada Firearms Centre and printing out a one-page declaration form, along with two pages of instructions.
“And when that polar bear attacks,” Hal continued, as if it were inevitable, “you’re going to have to unload on him. Pump and unload, right in the skull.”
I couldn’t help but smile. I had never seen Hal emote, but the thought of fighting off a polar bear had him really worked up.
“I don’t care if that goddamn bear looks like a rug,” he went on. “You just reload and empty, again and again. You can’t be too careful. It’s your life or his.”
Hal calmed down slowly, then conceded that there “might not be bear issues,” but only if proper care was taken.
I described my strategy for keeping predators out of camp. “I always string my food pack out of reach, between two trees.”
“Suicide,” he cried out in response, shaking his bald skull and wagging a finger. “You can’t hang your food in the subarctic. The few trees on the tundra aren’t tall enough to hang food out of reach of a polar bear. You lose your food supply, you starve. You need to carry your food in one of these things.”
Hal pointed at the salt barrel I was seated on. Its thick plastic shell and metal locking ring would keep my food safe. He explained how a friend of his at the Department of Transportation had donated the barrels. Hal turned around and sold them to canoeists. He normally cleaned them up and charged $50 each, but he was offering to sell me two for that price, so long as I was willing to wash them myself.
When he was finished repairing Hawk’s canoe, Hal proclaimed nonchalantly, it would be more durable than it was before the accident. Just in case, however, and in light of the fact that there were plenty of treacherous rapids and nasty waterfalls up on the Hayes River—the leg of the Sevareid route running some 500 miles northwest from Lake Winnipeg—he offered to sell me a patch kit that could be deployed easily in the backcountry.
“It may not look pretty,” he explained, “but this stuff will firm up hard as nails over any puncture.” I promptly paid for the kit, and agreed to return for the salt barrels and Hawk’s canoe.
Ten days passed before Hal called to say that the canoe was “ready to paddle to the end of the Earth.” It was a time of intense negotiation. After battling my ex-wife for 50 percent custody, I was asking our kids to stay with their mother for at least a dozen weeks while I inched up the globe in a canoe, a notion that prompted considerable indignation. Our two youngest kids, 6-year-old Malcolm and 13-year-old Martha, protested with particular vehemence. Only Gemma, our second child, encouraged me to go.
I concocted a ridiculous itinerary in an effort to satisfy everyone. I would shove off from the confluence of the Minnesota and Mississippi Rivers on April 15, return to Saint Paul from southwestern Minnesota two weeks later for Gemma’s high school graduation, resume paddling for three weeks, and return home from the Canadian border for Martha’s 14th birthday. Then I would go back to the river for three weeks, return home from northern Manitoba for Malcolm’s 7th birthday, put in four more weeks on the river, and return home again on August 6, for Allison’s 18th birthday. Finally, I would return to northern Manitoba for the last weeks of the trip, which I hoped to finish before Malcolm’s first day of school, just after Labor Day.
When I described this plan to my old friend Kocher, hoping to find validation, he raised his eyebrows. “I don’t think you should leave from Minneapolis. José isn’t going to tolerate paddling upstream on the Minnesota River for three weeks. It will take you five days just to make Mankato, which is only an hour’s drive from here. What’s to stop him from calling one of his homies at that point and arranging for a pickup.”
I was irritated by this insight, but I also knew that Kocher was right. He and I had been on enough expeditions to understand the screaming agony long-distance canoeing produces in the mind and body, and the overwhelming impulse to quit. I had to get far enough away so that José wouldn’t have a lot of choices when he inevitably realized that paddling 35 to 40 miles a day was truly torturous.
Back at Midwest Canoe, Hal cleared paperwork from his desk and scribbled out my invoice. Then—after I had explained the situation with José, my insane itinerary, and my inability to come to terms with a starting point for the expedition—he set me straight. “You’re not Sevareid,” he spat. “You’re not some teenage kid with nothing else to do. Who are you anyway?”
When I told him I was a graduate student at the University of Minnesota, Hal unleashed a tirade on the state of modern literature. It was “self-indulgent,” he complained, and only reflected “the failure of our society to create original thinkers.” I was astonished that this grumpy man who built and repaired canoes was so passionate about literature.
Hal went on to explain that paddling the nearly 500-mile stretch from Lake Winnipeg to the sea on the Hayes River was “like climbing Mount Everest, except that far more people summit Everest every year than reach Hudson Bay on the Hayes. It’s the crown jewel of the canoeing world. The rest of Sevareid’s route, the 1500 miles leading to the Hayes, is really just a driveway to the north end of Lake Winnipeg.”
I confessed to Hal that I was unsure what the trip would accomplish if we didn’t start in Minneapolis and end
