•	Features
•	Special CanoeSport Journal Supplement
•	Hotline
•	Destinations
•	Gear
•	Skills
•	Surf Zone

< May, June 2000
	Special CanoeSport Journal Supplement
Down the Crazy River Richard Bangs

The primary response is one of exhilaration, the splendid feeling that comes with gliding by the edge. The river is fast here, and the paddles swallow yards with each stroke. We stretch to pull into an eddy, but can't make it. Even though we have spray covers over the 17-foot red canoe, and just bailed the boat dry less than 10 minutes ago, water is splashing about my knees, and the canoe is reeling, like a sailboat in a squall. "We've got a leak," Erik yells from behind. But no time to ponder that information...just ahead the river roils, and we need a quick decision. To the right is a waterfall; down the center is a washboard running with white ribs of foam; to the left a narrow channel between an anvil-shaped rock and the shore.

"To the left," I scream back. We line up, and slew a good line to make the chute. Zen and the art of canoeing: I can feel my arms connected to the water and my mind to Erik's strokes behind me, and instinctively know what to do. The entry seems perfect, gliding toward the chute as though on a track, slipping down the drop as though by design. Then, a hidden hand seems to reach down, grab the boat, and push us back toward the rock. I drop my paddle, brace against the gunwales, and BANG...we crash head-on into Paleozoic stone. It stops us cold, and the canoe shudders, then wobbles back into the mainstream, miraculously upright, skidding on a crackling surge of spume. I can see two new holes in the bow. Water is swishing around my belly. We try to keep the canoe straight as we head into the tail waves, but it's like steering an overflowing bathtub. Instead of riding over the crests, we plow through them. When we spot our guide, Bart, downstream, we wag our paddles like semaphores, but he is too busy negotiating his own boat through the quicksilver to notice our distress. We're on our own.

Somehow, we make it to a shallow eddy by the cobblestone bank, and jump into the icy water with numbed feet. The air is dank as an oyster. Clouds fill the sky

and seal us off, enforcing a sense of claustrophobia. A short way up the loamy shore is a blanket of snow, and beyond cliffs that soar a half-mile high. We have no patching material, no detailed maps, food for only a few days, and the sun is beginning to fade behind the brooding peaks. Ours is the last trip of the short season, so no chance of someone paddling to our rescue. We can't camp here, as we were warned by an earlier trip that there had been a "caribou kill" by a grizzly nearby. As we bend to bail the canoe, Erik and I exchange a stern look...there is an ancient silence, as unbroken as the flow of the river, and I feel a bead of fear in my gut. Suddenly we both snap to a smile. "I can't think of anyplace in the world I would rather be," I offer to Erik.

"Yup...we're canoeing!" he practically sings.

There is nothing quite as satisfying as messing about in a canoe, and it gets better as the setting gets wilder, and warmer as the flame of risk burns brighter. When the late Bill Mason, Canada's quintessential riverman, said that nothing was quite as perfect as a canoe, he meant that perfection is attained not when there is no longer anything to add, such as in a rich man's yacht, but when there is no longer anything to take away, when a craft has been stripped down to its nakedness. But now, with our boat stripped of some of its skin, were we on a vessel beyond perfection?

We were on a river so remote it doesn't appear on most maps, the Blackfeather, a tributary of the Mountain River, deep in the Mackenzie Mountains of Canada's Northwest Territories, about 100 miles south of the Arctic Circle. These are wilderness waterways in the truest sense. The courses have no impoundments, no diversion projects, no bridges, no roads, no homes, no people, no pollution. The Mountain Dane people once hunted and trapped here, but they long ago moved to villages on the Mackenzie, and now the only remnant is a void. These rivers flow, as they have since time immemorial, in balance with themselves. The Blackfeather and Mountain, and every rill that feeds them, are in unmodified natural states. If they belong to anyone, they belong to the wildlife, superbly adapted to this inimical region: moose, wolf, wolverine, Dall sheep, mountain caribou, beaver and grizzly bear. While just three in our party, including our part-time guide Bart, who was making his first descent, we were planning on catching up with four others; two brothers, Peter and Paul, Erik's dad John, and master guide, Tim, at 22 a veteran of many northern river trips. Tim also had the duct tape, which can patch almost any hole in a canoe. They had launched the day previous, but in our current condition, the prospects of catching them didn't look good.

Now, as we bail the last gallons from the bilge, we assess our predicament. "Maybe we could tap some sap from the spruce trees and use it to patch the boat," Erik wonders. I love the idea, and suggest we camp and make an attempt to fix the canoe, bears be damned. But it would probably take a full day to make such a repair, which would considerably cut the chances of catching up with our group. Erik insists we make distance during daylight, and then explore the options. A part of me is drawn to the notion of trying to negotiate through this wilderness on our own, on a mission of survival, no itinerary, no planned meals, no accouterments to weigh down the soul...just a clear, present reason for going forward, for being. But, I know Erik holds out hope for our meeting his Dad and the others, and it is the right thing to do.

We re-launch, and it starts to rain. I look around. In the way that beach stones are more colorful when wet, the rain brings out the colors of the land, and for a minute I am entranced. The limestones and dolomites are buff and cinnamon; the shales a shiny black; the siltstones green, the sandstone maroon. Then I plunge back into the reality pudding...the canoe is full again, rolling like a three-ton log, nearly capsizing at every turn; we stop and bail, paddle for 15 minutes, then repeat. The wind is whipping the rain around like wet string. It's so cold my whole body is shivering, and whenever a shot of water meets my face it punches my breath away. My feet feel like they were used for batting practice. Then, just as I find myself surveying the cliffs for an exit trek, we turn a corner and the Blackfeather makes its final adjustments, like a settling stomach, and then merges into the murky waters of the Mountain River. There, across the channel, is an orange and white tarp, rigged like a sail, with men milling about beneath—our rendezvous, our Deliverance. My feelings are mixed. It will be exciting to be with fellow adventurers, and to know Erik's dad; and it will be a comfort to be with a guide who knows the river. But, for half a day, as Erik and I made our way with our leaky red canoe down a river of liquid lightning, there was a sensation, an alertness, a primal freedom, that comes with reducing existence to its core in the unavailing wilderness, challenging it on its own terms, and being a bit scared.

Looking back at the needles of light flashing off the Blackfeather, I knew we were leaving the fear of the unknown behind. In a 1757 essay, "Of the Sublime and Beautiful," Edmund Burke argued that the sublime began with a proper sense of dread: only terror "is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling." And even though the final strokes of the day were dissipating to shining ether the solid angularity of our earlier predicament, I locked it to memory, and let a wave of joy wash over me. And, I patted our canoe on its cheek—it had such a lovely place to run, and all downhill.