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Sirens of the North For 65-year-old Doc Abel, this past summer marked 25 annual Arctic canoe expeditions…and counting Peter Church

Though we had seen more wolves and musk oxen than humans in the past 23 days, two tents interrupted the quiet torture of our 7:30 a.m. portage deep in Canada’s Arctic Barren Lands. Not sure if we could remember how to talk to strangers, we tried passing quietly, but with 150-pound loads subtlety is difficult. Rubbing groggy eyes, two men poked bearded faces out of their cocoons, grunted a sleepy greeting and mumbled something about brewing a pot of coffee. Pleasantries exchanged, they then told us they’d waited 10 days on Artillery Lake for the ice to clear. Mike, Diane and I exchanged grins as Doc deadpanned, "Oh, we just drag our canoes over that stuff." Then he sipped on his coffee and added, "We do some unconventional things with canoes."

Jim "Doc" Abel has been doing unconventional things with canoes in the Canadian Arctic for 25 years. In his normal life, Dr. Jim Abel, M.D., is a husband, father and physician. But for two to three months a year, Doc rounds up some friends, supplies and canoes and heads to the Barren Lands of Canada’s Northwest Territory and Nunavut to celebrate his birthday and unwritten purpose in life. Celebrating his 65th such birthday this summer, and 25th straight in the Arctic, he swears this will be his last trek north.

Since 1977, when he was 40, Doc has pushed, pulled, dragged, carried, lined, portaged, paddled, and in every way possible hauled himself up, down, across, and through about 30,000 miles of mosquito and black-fly infested snow-fields, frozen lakes, ocean shoreline, rocky tundra, boggy muck and, yes, the unspoiled rivers of one of Earth’s largest contiguous wildernesses. He’s awoken to grizzlies grunting at his tent, been tossed by a musk ox (thrice in one encounter), and has been stalked by Arctic wolves. He’s seen the elusive wolverine, restored a dislocated peregrine falcon chick to its nest, and helped an exhausted caribou calf find its mother. You’d think Doc has seen all the Arctic has to offer. But he claims the reason he returns year after year is that he’s still a novice. "I thought I knew everything there was to know about paddling the Arctic after five expeditions," he says. "But after 10, I got demoted to novice again. This place just keeps me guessing."

I met Doc in 1999 when I joined him and six others on an excruciating 70-day "first traverse" of Nunavut, which included walking 500 miles upstream. And as I thawed my board-stiff socks in the morning, slogged waist-deep in freezing rivers, grunted through portages and watched my daily thinning waist I frequently asked myself, "Why the hell would a man want to do this every summer of his life?" By summer’s end I was sure once was enough, never mind 25 times. But once was not enough. For now, in 2002, I found myself strapped into a Beaver Turbo floatplane along with Doc, Diane and my younger brother Mike, two canoes roped to the plane’s pontoons, while watching the blue water and green land at 62°27' become vaguely distinguishable shades of white and gray near the Arctic Circle at 64°09'.

In 1999 Doc told me that I would not stop thinking about returning to the Arctic until I did. He was right. I was bewitched by the circling midnight sun, entranced by the Earth’s oldest exposed rock, gripped by the land’s graveyard silence, inebriated from whatever witch’s brew it is that compels some to trade in convenience and comfort for hard work and unpredictability. The Sirens of the North sang to me every day for three years. When Doc told me that his 2002 expedition would be his last, I was quick to respond. These Sirens had overpowered Doc long ago. I would return north to see this old man set out one last time into the unknowns of the Barren Lands, a land Doc returns to as faithfully as Arctic Char return to their rivers.

So it was that on the afternoon of June 26 our floatplane landed on a lead of open water on frozen Aylmer Lake’s Rocknest Bay. We unloaded our 1,700 pounds of supplies and the plane buzzed us as it returned to Yellowknife, shrinking to a speck no larger than the swarming mosquitoes. Grumbling prop wash faded to a whisper and was gone. Silence. Doc’s mouth curled at its corners.

We paddled to a peninsula, set camp, ate dinner quietly and grinned at one another. Mist fine as silk set in. A rainbow materialized in the distance and we were lulled to sleep by thousands of miles of Arctic silence. The next morning, we scrambled upstream and made the first of the trip’s 59 portages. We scrambled and portaged eight days to achieve a lake system covered in rotting candle-ice, and then paddled the open shoreline. Once, as a storm came up, we crossed a lake, breaking through a fault line in the rotten ice to get to the lee shore. Wind and 2-foot-high waves slapped at our 700-pound canoes; 2 inches of freeboard wasn’t enough to keep out the water.

We set camp in thick weather and watched the wind move ice across the lake like a child blowing bubbles across a bathtub. The coming days brought more scrambling up rivers and dragging canoes over frozen lakes or paddling open shorelines. This was easy. In 1997 Doc and his companions dragged their canoes across 175 miles of frozen lakes, including 75-mile-long Contueto Lake, in just four days.

After seven days going upstream, we started down on day eight. On day nine, July 4, I glanced over my shoulder to find us the object of a wolf’s gaze. Slate gray like the sky, rocks and water, the wolf walked down to shore, flared his nose, and then swam unafraid out to our canoes. He swam near enough to touch, returned to shore, shook dry and looked casually over his shoulder at us before being absorbed by the limitless land. It was like being visited by a ghost.

Addiction
"It is an open secret among pilgrims and other theoreticians of this traveling life that you become addicted to the horizon."
—Anne Carson, Plainwater

Born in 1937 on a farm in Appalachian Ohio, Doc spent much of his youth roaming the hills and fishing. As a medical student Doc was driven to success but was overweight, smoked more than two packs a day and drank enough for the rest of us. In 1967 Doc decided time was ripe for change. He quit smoking, picked up running and stopped drinking quite so much. He ran the Boston Marathon and ran it again every year except one for the next eight. Running took its toll and Doc’s knees needed replacing. The surgeons told him to stop running. He and his wife still run every day at 5 a.m.

In 1971, Doc came across a news article about the Whitworth College Arctic Canoe Expeditions directed and led by Jay Pritchett. He wrote Mr. Pritchett explaining his interest in being the expedition physician. Five years later Doc received a call inviting him north.

Doc has celebrated his last 25 birthdays in the Arctic. It’s his life’s artistic achievement. And when you stand in Doc’s basement looking at the map of the Northwest Territory and Nunavut that occupies an entire wall and is marked with thousands of colored pins representing 25 years and 30,000 miles of Arctic travel, for an equivalent of four years, it strikes you that this man has indeed been creating a masterpiece.

Doc is like many artists who are cagey about rationalizing their obsessions. When asked, he usually evades questions about what brings him north. But in a moment of weakness Doc responded with something of a straight answer: "I do this because I want to feel alive. I want to have an adventure that is not contrived or predictable. I’m a doctor. And whether people should or not, they give me a lot of power over their lives. That can go to a person’s head. Up North, I don’t get much say. If Mother Nature doesn’t want you on the river, you’ll know because she’ll send in a hell of a storm to keep you put. That has to be respected. You’re very insignificant up here. Your welfare rests on your own decisions. You need to know your limits. You can’t come back year after year if you muck up. If you do, help is a long time coming. It keeps you honest."

Journeys are lessons in honesty and honesty drives Doc’s expeditions: "There is no one to tell you when to wake up, get in your canoe, portage until you are drunk with exhaustion, run a rapid or call it a day," he says. "There are no crowds to cheer you through dragging a loaded canoe across 175 miles of frozen lake. No one tells you to keep at it for 70 days. Making good decisions is the difference between being honest and dishonest. Dishonesty may get you killed."

At a glance one might mistake Doc’s balding head and angular nose for Patrick Stewart’s. When his white beard fills in he looks like Santa Claus and he can be as jolly. But with wry humor he does not suffer fools gladly. A drunken woman in Yellowknife’s infamous Golden Corral once asked him what Santa was going to give her that year, and he shot back: "Santa’s afraid of what you’ll give him." But he also has a wide, warm smile, which in the Arctic broadens proportionally to the amount of trouble in which he finds himself.

Looking at Doc’s 5’ 7", 130 pounds-dripping-wet stature, one would not guess the tremendous feats of which his diminutive frame is capable. But the man has an engine NASCAR drivers would envy. Though he has difficulty bending his knees because of the hardware holding them together, on portages he insists on carrying two packs that easily equal his own weight. Once Doc insisted on single-carrying one of our 17-foot Trippers. He told Mike to help him hoist it. Mike hesitated: "I don’t think that’s such a good idea, Doc." Doc barked, "I didn’t ask you what you think, boy. Put the damn canoe on my shoulders! I’ve got to see if the old man still has it." Mike complied.

Watching Doc at work in the Barren Lands is inspiring the way watching a great athlete is inspiring, like watching Larry Bird drain threes: It’s what you expect him to do. He is master craftsman and the Arctic is where he practices his craft. He reads water the way a fortune-teller reads Tarot. He sees the future in it. You see him cocked forward, putting his back into the rope slung over his shoulder while dragging loaded canoes across frozen lakes, or waist deep in freezing water hauling his canoe upstream, days on end. You see him masterfully command his canoe. In his eyes you see a love of this land and the creatures that roam freely here, and a sadness at human encroachment. You don’t question his devotion to this place. You know he is at home in his canoe in the Arctic.

A problem boulder spiced things up at our first rapid. Going right would take the canoe into standing waves; better to try for the narrow slot between boulder and river left shore. Hitting the slot would be tough, a technical move made more difficult by the 700-pound load. Doc and Mike back-paddled, tucking into river left. But the water was pushy. Sensing they wouldn’t make the chute, they pulled forward but were a split-second late. The canoe broached and the gunwales were immediately sucked under. They jumped onto the rock and watched the loaded boat fill instantly, bending into a "U."

"It’s cracking!" Mike yelled, visibly concerned.

"Don’t worry about that," Doc responded, calmly. "Grab the packs and get them on shore!" We waded out to help. "Now," Doc instructed, "raise the empty end of the boat and rotate it off the rock. Let the water do the work."

A 17-foot canoe filled with water weighs nearly a ton. Add the force of the flow and even letting the water do the work took some strength. The canoe flipped into the eddy below the boulder and returned to its original shape, with the addition of a noticeable crease under the center thwart. "Thank God for plastic," Doc said, even-toned. "Now let’s load this baby with those waterlogged packs and get the hell out of here before something goes wrong."

True Places
"It is not down on any map; true places never are."
—Herman Melville, Moby Dick

Doc finds rivers that require grit to get to, that frequently remain unnamed. Northern Canada may be remote to most, but some places are more remote than others and Doc goes through great pains—literally—to find the rivers that nobody travels. The Canadian Geological Survey requests that people report inaccuracies in their maps. Doc has found more than a few over the years and has marked them on his own maps, but he doesn’t report them. He prefers that unmarked places remain that way: true.

Doc usually begins his route-planning by pouring a glass of wine and then poring over his wall-size map for Arctic waterways he hasn’t visited. The big, famous rivers generally serve as ways to access untraveled watersheds in places where even Inuit have no reason to visit. Doc loves the true places more than he hates portaging and so the more upstream and overland travel, the harder the route looks, and the less likely that others have traveled it, the more appealing. "Nobody in their right mind would want to lug a canoe into these places," Doc told us one day as we portaged through just such a place. "So at least if we meet anybody out here we know they aren’t in their right mind, either."

When satisfied, Doc sends a letter to friends, reading, in part: "Team members will spend significant parts of their summer skirmishing with ice-obstructed lakes or rivers, swarms of mosquitoes and black flies, dangerous whitewater, taxing portages, upstream trudges and temperamental storms as well as teammates. Therefore, this expedition is not suited for individuals who object to inconveniences, stress, hard work or the recurring discomforts of being wet, cold, tired and hungry. Nor should this quest appeal to persons disinclined to tolerate unpredictable wildlife encounters. Nevertheless, the incomparable splendor found in these untamed tracts of vast wilderness captures one’s soul forever. . ." The letter could easily add, "Nevertheless, I still get knuckle-heads to join me every year." And indeed he does, year after year. It must be a way of making sure that he is not the only person out there who is not in his right mind.

"GET IN THE CANOES!" Doc commanded, as I was lost between his voice and the eyes of an onrushing Barren Lands grizzly. While Doc and Diane back-paddled furiously from shore, Mike and I stood transfixed in the quiet morning shadows trying hard to calculate the carnivore barreling at us. It was only a moment, just long enough to see the 70 yards between us reduced to 50. Self-preservation overrode awe and we shoved off and back-paddled like hell, then paused, entranced again by the muscle and bone standing in the very spot we had occupied seconds earlier, now rising on hind legs to catch our scent. The bear then dropped, turned and disappeared, a muscle-rippling mass of fur, into a landscape in which rocks and bears are indistinguishable.

At a dead sprint, grizzlies can run 35 mph. Fifteen seconds lapsed between first spotting the grizzly and him running away from us. We returned to shore and saw tracks in upturned sand the diameter of my spread-out hand and claw-marks gripping deep. Morning was again still: sky cerulean, air crystal, breeze gentle, sun soft, shadows long. Overhead, an Arctic gull saw everything. That was the morning of July 25, Doc’s 65th birthday. That night we passed around a bottle of Tennessee moonshine, and swam in our birthday suits to the refrain of a northern loon. Asked why he continues to return to the Barrens and has not gone elsewhere for a change, Doc responded, evasively: "Why don’t you ask the griz’ that?"

Aurora Borealis
"Travel by canoe is not a necessity and will nevermore be the most efficient way to get from one region to another...A canoe trip has become simply a rite of oneness with a certain terrain, an act performed...because there is value in the act in itself."
—John McPhee, Survival of the Bark Canoe

We lined nearly all of the 180 upstream miles on the Thelon between the Mary Francis River confluence and Lynx Lake in 10 days. The last weeks of the expedition were intermittently foul: a few days good weather, then storm clouds, winds, rains, dropping mercury. We stopped nearly every other day.

At dusk, while camping at an esker on the shore of Lynx Lake, the sun spilled molten gold across the water, a half-moon rose and a pair of loons called. Sleeping under the stars, we awoke at midnight as green vapor as fine as winter breath rippled across the sky. Cocooned in our sleeping bags, we watched for an hour as serpentine swaths of light morphed with a grace that tests the limits of language. Lynx Lake was a mirror in the morning and we paddled north onto Whitefish Lake before portaging into the Snowdrift River drainage. On our final day we decided to paddle until we were forced to stop by weather, exhaustion or by getting to Austin Lake, our trip’s agreed upon termination point. At 9 p.m. we stopped for dinner and coffee. Over a western ridge orange fingers of dusk reached heavenward. We sat abreast facing east, the same direction the empty sockets of a sun-bleached moose skull beside us stared. Land, water and sky were equally black.

Though we had portaged a Class V the day before, with maps we judged that the Snowdrift River was sufficiently gentle enough to permit night paddling. Into the tundra silence we paddled, a silence so complete that you could hear your own heart beat and swore that the moon pulsated to the same rhythm. Clouds diminished our light source as our black silhouettes blended into night-blackened river. Darkness, with occasional calls to one another ensuring we did not separate, matched the emptiness of knowing our expedition was nearing its end.

The rain came at 4 a.m. We found a place to land, crawled beneath a tarp and closed our eyes. We had made 102 miles in 22 hours before the rain stopped us. By 6:30 a.m. the rain ended and we were paddling again. The brief storm had been a blessing: around the bend were three rapids we could not have negotiated in the dark.

A rosy-fingered dawn gently pushed the night westward, leaving the sky sharp blue. Birch leaves, autumnal gold and twisting in the morning breeze, gave the trees a life beyond their roots. A pair of mergansers guided us to Austin Lake; we had traveled 125 miles with only a two-and-a-half-hour break. A bull moose rose from the middle of a mile-long crossing. We paddled beside him for a time and then landed at a beach littered with fresh bear tracks. This was expedition’s end. We pitched tents and collapsed.

Original Intent

"Some unwonted, taught pride diverts us from our original intent, which is to explore the neighborhood, view the landscape, to discover at least where it is that we have been so startlingly set down, if we can’t learn why."
—Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

This was to be Doc’s 25th and final expedition. And despite returning all these years he cannot answer the simple question, "Why?"

"It’s pretty stupid, really," he’ll say. "It doesn’t make much sense. I can’t stand mosquitoes and black flies and I hate portaging. But I come here every year and endure the bugs and plan routes that include lots of portaging." He is being flip and honest at the same time. For as we sat in the far reaches of the boreal forest waiting for a float plane to find us, as we talked about the two months we had shared and his 25 previous summers, Doc’s eyes glistened and a man who can be crass and irreverent was reduced to silence.

This exercise-returning to the Arctic year after year as regularly as the terns-exceeds habit; it is devotional, approaching the discipline of a monastic ascetic. Doc’s expeditions resemble the mandalas Tibetan Buddhists painstakingly create only to destroy: They are projects beautiful in themselves that achieve perfection in completion, and when they are done, they are, like art, useless and breathtaking because of it. "I don’t know why I do this," he says. "But look around you. This place just grabs hold of you and won’t let go."

Disrupting one’s life with hard work in places remote is worthwhile not because it serves a function, but because there are places worthy of devotion, worthy of months, or years, of one’s life. Doc has found a mystery whose source he cannot uncover, and there may not be a source. What he needs is not a reason, but a place to do what he is here to do: to canoe through untouched wilderness and view the landscape.

Summer long, Doc insisted this was his last Arctic canoe expedition. Leaving Yellowknife he told us that he would not return this way. But something in his insistence suggested he was convincing himself more than he was telling us. This place is in his bones. Opening a recent letter from him, I read: "Dear Pete, Plans for the 2003 Arctic Barrens Canoe Expedition are underway…"