Yukon River :
Great River Journey
A Canoe Trip down the mighty Yukon River.
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never understood why it was so important to them. “Does it really matter?” I finally said to them one morning, which was “one evening”, for them. They had no reply but looked at me as if I’d told them I was holding secret meetings with the Pope deep inside the earth.
THE CAPSIZED CANOE
One morning as we paddled down the river we heard a man shouting wildly but could see no sign of him. We looked up high to the top of a metal look-out tower beside the river, and there he was: a crazy fat man yelling at us. Dressed in army fatigues, he was nearly hysterical, waving his arms frantically. Incoherent and panic-stricken, he seemed to want desperately to tell us something. When we asked him if he wanted us to pull in, he shouted down, “Well, if y’all can, I’d mighty appreciate it.”
We pulled in for him. He wasn’t half-way down the tower when he started telling his tale, how he and his partner, hunters from Georgia, had capsized their canoe the day before in some monstrous rapids not far ahead, how he’d swum to shore and walked hours back along the riverbank to the tower he remembered passing, while his partner, who he thought was now probably dead, had stayed floating in the river to chase after the canoe, and save the ham. The lost case of beer was okay. His wife was always nagging him to cut down anyway, but that mother of a honey-baked ham brought all the way from Georgia, they'd really been hankering after that. All that food, all that beer in the bottom of the river. It was a crying shame.
Ernie plunked himself down in the middle of our canoe, causing it to sink so deeply into the water I feared a river disaster myself. Out of breath, Ernie commenced a one hour monologue. “Those rapids are a-comin soon and I ain’t gonna fall out again. I’m gonna hang on. My wife. I gotta call my wife. I almost died yesterday and do ya think she cares? Probably not. I’m callin’ her as soon as we get to a phone. We lost our ham, we lost our beer, shouldn’t have been sittin’ up on that beer case. Too shaky. Better to sit down low like this here. What part of the States you two from? (The Canadian part, Kevin told him.) Hell, I gotta find my partner. I doubt he’s alive.
Shortly afterwards we reached the rapids where the southern duo met their fate. The rapids were nothing more than a few barely discernable ripples in the water. How they’d managed to paddle through Lake Lebarge I couldn’t fathom. “It ain’t what she looks like. She’s a trickster this river. Hang on.” We paddled along as always, waiting for something terrible to happen. “Okay, maybe this is a better canoe. Those rapids were powerful yesterday. Nearly killed us. Jimmy, my partner, he’s probably dead. Yep, won’t be shootin’ ducks with Jimbo no more.”
Not far after the nonexistent rapids we came across Jimbo but Jimbo wasn’t dead. He was relaxing with his face aimed into the sun beside a campfire he’d built. Next to him sat a sleeping pad propped on its side with the word HELP written across it in large letters. “Howdy all,” Jimmy said, with a casual wave of his hand as if this were a church picnic. “Thought you’d be showin’ up soon, Ern.” Jimmy, in contrast to paunchy Ernie, was long and lean, slow-talking, with a scraggly red beard and felt hat pulled low over his head.
We pulled ashore. Ernie hauled his massive body out of the canoe, walked up to Jimmy, grabbed hold of him, and pulled rigid Jimmy into the wide spread of his sweaty chest, displaying a degree of tenderness I found surprising from this man who’d lamented his beer and his honey-baked Georgia ham. Jimmy, looking vaguely bewildered, didn’t hug Ernie back but Ernie didn’t seem to notice. “We ain’t dead, Jimmy, we ain’t dead. I love you, man. I love you… Where the hell’s our canoe?”
“Gone.”
“Ham?”
“Gone”
“Where’s everything else?”
“Gone.”
“How’d you get this fire lit? How’d you get this here sleepin’ pad?”
“Some friendly folk come by. They helped a bit. They left.”
That’s when it struck me for the first time. Kevin and I may have to take Ernie and ....