with one less canoe? What was I going to tell the group? I slipped the canoe into the water and was about to shove off, heading downstream, when something caught my eye upstream. It was my canoe, and it was moving of its own volition, up against the current, rounding a bend out of sight into the canyon. I had the feeling that someone was watching me. I looked around but nobody was there.
I paddled hard against the current, trying to keep to the backwater eddy and the sheerline that ran along the inside of the canyon bend. I caught up to my canoe just before the conjuring rock, grabbed the gunwale and looked inside. My two paddles and lifejacket were lying neatly on the bottom of the canoe; there was no water splash or bilge-water, just a dry, neat canoe with an apparent mind of its own. It was possessed.
I towed it back and restacked the two canoes with the others. Just to be sure, I tied the canoes together with a painter and secured it to a tree nearby. It was nearly dark and I hurried back to the campsite. I didn’t tell the others. It was my secret. I did ask if anyone had been down to the canoes earlier but everyone had been married to their evening cigars and whisky and warm campfire. I wanted to tell the others but couldn’t. They wouldn’t have believed me, anyway.
I have been back to Thunderhouse since, both with other clients as well as on my own. By then I had learned some of its secrets and made sure my canoes were either left at the campsite, or secured by ropes at trail’s end. People started sharing their stories with me during the time I was writing my guidebook about the river and researching the deaths, and the stories were as peculiar as my own. Several canoe parties had lost at least a canoe, or some part of their kit and gear, for no apparent reason or sloppy woodsmanship — it just disappeared. Others complained about disturbing dreams, voices from the woods at night, and even sightings of ghosts and other creatures at the edge of the campsite. A friend of mine stayed at Thunderhouse for two nights with her husband and confessed that she was never so terrified in her life. Each night was an ordeal of frightening dreams, and when she lay awake, the night sounds were unrecognizable and unearthly.
My last solo trip down the river was the most memorable for me. It was late September and frost was already forming on the overturned canoe each morning. There was ice in the tea pail, and the occasional snow shower. There was nobody else on the lower river at the time, just sandhill cranes and Canada geese. I had planned to stay at Thunderhouse for three days and nights, hoping to extract some of its mystery, to perhaps prove that the strange occurrences were simply explainable coincidences. When I arrived at Thunderhouse there was a light rain falling, and it was cold and windy. I sat on the precipice overlooking the conjuring rock, and in my own way requested permission to be there. Sitting thirty metres above the cauldron below, from the campsite perch, I could look at the rapids above the falls on a level plane before the river tumbled into the gorge. In the canyon, huge piles of refuse timber had nestled into the crevices of the walls, suspended ten metres above the diminished, passive late-summer flow. Swirling eddies and whirlpools cast out ribbons of spiralling white foam.
I visited my favourite spot on the rocks, next to the narrow second chute where the full spirit of the Missinaibi is compressed and compelled to expose itself. Between the upper falls and where I stood was a temporary pool — a foaming, pulsating maelstrom of liquid energy, surging in half-metre rhythms. The rain transposed the multi-coloured stones and rock into a gallery of glistening art treasures, like a high-gloss lacquer brings out the grain in a piece of wood. The more resistant rock stood out like veins gorged with blood; potholes, deep and sometimes conjoined were now exposed in low water — strange recesses with a prize in their bellies of a rounded stone; glacially-carved fissures, and deep grottos pockmarked the walls of this luminous art gallery.
I stood at the edge of the cliff once again and dropped some tobacco into the canyon. The wind took it and moved it in gentle circles, scattering the gift along the cliff wall and as far down as the river. I touched the rock with my hands, felt the wind on my face, and breathed the damp air. Most of the time I would just sit and listen and watch. For three days and nights, by the campfire, I listened to the rush of water through the canyon; loud but not so loud that I couldn’t hear the flying squirrels gliding about the trees above my head.
I had dreams; even dreams that I could remember, and none of them were apocalyptic or threatening. There was no malevolent spirit living here, not for me, anyway, but there was an energy that commanded authority and respect. I always felt that someone, or something, was watching me the whole time I was there. And I waited and watched and hoped for some little bit of magic to happen. But it didn’t. Maybe it was happening all around me and I was a part of it and didn’t realize it. Isolation without extraneous human interaction is a liberating experience; it also allows the mind to wander and absorb each nuance of the surroundings, without interruption or obligation. I wondered what muscaria mushrooms would taste like mixed in with my rice and beans.
Trail companion.
FOURTEEN
RIVER OF FIRE
It is with our passions, as it is with fire and water; they are good servants but bad masters.
— Aesop (620–560 B.C.)
“Let’s get the hell out of here NOW!” Hodding was yelling at Andy to get back into the canoe. “LOOK AT THE FIRE … WE’VE GOT TO MOVE OR WE’RE TOAST!”
Russell and I were two hundred metres beyond in our canoe taking pictures of the fire while Andy had pulled his canoe up to shore at the end of the rapids to take a piss … that’s when we heard Hodding screaming at the top of his lungs to get moving.
“Christ, this is bad,” I thought aloud. We had just finished running Nine Bar Rapids, a notorious 3.5-kilometre-long, hair-raising rollercoaster ride — a gnarly class 3 or 4 canoe eater. We ran the left side, eddying out twice to scout bends, and finished by dropping over a two-metre ledge, very nearly getting stuck in the hydraulic backwash. It was a fifty-foot drop — the type of rapid you can’t scout — and wide, with no discernable channel, steep enough to obscure what you were running beyond a quarter of a kilometre. If that wasn’t enough to get the adrenalin flowing, the entire north shore of the river was being engulfed in a conflagration the size of Prince Edward Island.
Russ and I sat in our canoe, completely enthralled by the towering flames that crowned at least two kilometres of river horizon, forming the leading edge of the wildfire. That’s when we heard the roar — or rather felt it — above the din of the rapids. It sounded like a powerful freight train barrelling toward us, and we were standing on the tracks. The fire was consuming boreal forest at an alarming rate, moving almost twice as fast as we could possibly paddle. It wasn’t the explosive flames so much as the threat of smoke engulfing us before we could get downriver to safety. We had been dodging wildfires for days, so bad at times that we had to brush burning and smoking debris off our clothing and canoe spray-skirts; we ran rapids while the shore vegetation burst into columns of fire and smoke, keeping just far enough offshore where it was safe. In places the fire had jumped the river and was burning on both sides. The current pull of the Seal was strong, drawing us further into the fire at a steady twelve kilometres per hour. But each day the wind miraculously carried the thick smoke straight up or away from the river, allowing us to sneak by unscathed. At worst, we had to tie wet bandanas across our faces to make it easier to breathe.
And now, sitting in our canoes dumbstruck, with the fire burning so fiercely, the air became saturated with burnt debris; a wall of black smoke descended on the surface of the rapids, just upstream, rolling toward us like a billowing, flowing tsunami. It was one of those moments when you feel that whatever you do would be futile. We had pushed our luck
