had ever heard. “Why would you want to do what someone else has done? Totally unoriginal. Are you Eric Arnold Sevareid? For Christ’s sake, didn’t you say you were a writer? Take this Indian–Puerto Rican kid, this José, and make the journey your own. Canoeing with the Cree has already been written. Write your own story. Write Canoeing with José!”
Over the following days, I checked out nearly 20 topographical maps covering Sevareid’s entire route from an obscure campus library for geography majors. I took them home and pored over the charts, which were covered by blue veins of water and the green flesh of mother earth.
And then one afternoon, I dropped in to see José at Pawn Minnesota, as I had done almost every day since he agreed to come on the trip. Dressed in his freshly pressed uniform, a white shirt with narrow black tie, he bought and sold just about everything: hand tools, DVDs, video games, guitars, televisions, stereos, computers, MP3 players. My repeated visits provided opportunities to remind him about our impending departure, and to implore him to get a pair of glasses for the trip.
Nearly blind, José never noticed me until I was next in line at his counter.
“Good afternoon, sir,” José said professionally.
“Did you get the stuff yet?” I whispered confidentially. I had given him a list of items to acquire before the day planned for our departure.
Each time I asked he seemed surprised, and each time his reply was the same: “No, dawg, not yet. But I will.” It was unnerving to be putting so much energy into researching the route and acquiring gear, unsure if José was serious about going.
When I unrolled the maps for him later that night at my apartment, José seemed uninterested. He looked away and changed the subject. His older brother had been released from prison recently after having raped an adolescent cousin, and he and José had met two young women, wealthy members of one of Minnesota’s casino-rich Dakota tribes. They had moved in with these women, using them for their Escalades, condos, and booze. It was a cushy setup, and I feared José might never leave.
I pointed to the region north of Lake Winnipeg, where we would encounter treacherous white water and long stretches of wilderness. I also explained how we would have to be particularly mindful of polar bears.
“Oh, hell no, bro,” he cried, “I ain’t going into no polar bear territory. That ain’t even close to how I’m going out. You for reals?”
I assured him I was, and went to the computer to search polar bears. The first listing was a polar bear fact sheet. Up came a colorful page from Ranger Rick magazine, illustrated with endangered species from around the world: a mountain gorilla bared his teeth and pounded his chest, a komodo dragon swiped the air with its razor-sharp claw, and a massive polar bear stalked a field of snow and ice.
José leaped back from the screen and backed away to the far side of the living room, shouting, “Hell no. Hell no. I ain’t canoeing through no jungle with dragons and gorillas. Oh, fuck no. Are you insane, dawg? I ain’t going.”
I laughed aloud at the notion that these equatorial creatures would haunt our northern journey, then promised that there would be no gorillas or dragons, and that, in the unlikely event we were attacked by a polar bear, I would fill said predator with all the lead at my disposal. José seemed appeased for the most part, and we agreed again on the date of our departure, just a few days away.
Finally, the day before we were to set out, I left José in a van idling outside my ex-wife’s building in downtown Saint Paul and climbed the five flights to her apartment. The ink was still fresh on our divorce, and I dreaded every interaction with Jane. I was 20 and she 24 when we first met in a Native American studies class at the University of Minnesota. She was pretty and outgoing, I was lonely and increasingly estranged from my family. And I couldn’t help but fall in love with Jane’s two-year-old daughter, Allison. In that brief initial period of purity in our relationship, I committed to raising Allison, and it was this that had kept us together through a series of moves across Minnesota, Spain, South Dakota, Texas, and Alaska.
We had shared incredible intimacy in our marriage, but in recent years Jane and I had come to distrust each other. And now I resented her for hovering as I hugged the kids and said a silent prayer. Having long subdued my emotions in her presence, I said goodbye without shedding any tears. But I couldn’t help but linger at the door as Malcolm and Martha pleaded with their eyes for me to stay.
Kocher had agreed to help us get underway, paddling along for the first few days. And so it was that I found myself loading three Duluth packs and a food barrel into his Volkswagen van, and securing Hawk’s canoe on top of the vehicle.
We stood on the sidewalk in front of my apartment, debating whether José would show. Two hours had passed since the departure time we’d agreed on, and José wasn’t answering his phone.
Another hour passed before he picked up.
“Oh, we’re leaving already? My man!” he said with faux surprise. “I’ll be over in a minute. Gotsta have music, dawg.”
I had warned him about taking electronic devices. They would be waterlogged at some point, I explained. And besides, I added, “You won’t need music. The wind and the water make their own.” Though I knew how lame it would sound to José, I meant this.
Another hour later, José rolled up in the passenger seat of a black Escalade. His new roommate, Homegirl J, was behind the wheel. He slid down to the street holding a shopping bag from Wal-Mart. He had on the white tank top and blue polyester shorts he would wear for the rest of the summer.
I had given José a list of essentials for the trip—wool socks, rain gear, hiking boots, a sweater, and a winter hat—items that would easily fill out a watermelon-sized sack. But there was just a little plastic bag hanging limply from his fist.
“You got enough gear in there to last you two months, bro?” I chided.
I opened the sack and found two pairs of boxer shorts still in their packaging, along with two tank tops, three pairs of white cotton socks, and a cotton sweatshirt. On a canoe trip to the subarctic, this was a just-add-water recipe for hypothermia. And it looked as if the kid still didn’t have glasses.
“I did get these though,” José said, grabbing the pair of oversized orange sunglasses that had been dangling from the neck of his T-shirt and sliding them onto his nose. “My stunner shades, bro. Gotsta have the stunner shades.”
José noticed my frustration. “Nah, I’m foolin’ with you, bro. We just need to pick up my new glasses at America’s Best.”
My spirits lifted. We could get whatever else he needed on our way to the Red River headwaters.
José’s brother emerged from the back seat of the Escalade and circled the scene. José hadn’t let him in on our plan. All D knew was that we were “going fishing in Canada for a few days.” That bit of knowledge, combined with the fact that he had recently watched Brokeback Mountain, had D thinking, as José would later put it, “that we were up to some real homo shit.”
D was a scary character, but I wasn’t scared. Nor was I fearful of any element of the trip. Not the deep wilderness navigation nor the murderous whitewater, not the risky lake crossings nor the polar bears, nor the possibility of medical emergencies and starvation. I wanted to be swallowed by the wide green landscape, to escape my suffocating
