Vanessa wanted to go back to the Moisie River… But this time the trip would be different. There would be no camp kids with their battered wooden paddles, no river-weary canoes and definitely no gear wrapped in garbage bags.
While Vanessa remembered all of the Moisie’s rare beauty from 10 years before, the river had also marked her with the darkest of fears. A river-centre hole had claimed her canoe and as she was tossed beyond rescue by the river’s whims, a thousand hands had pulled her down. But in its own time, the water had released her and she crawled away, dripping and in shock, cursing and beaten, swearing that this was her last river. These few moments became the stuff of a decade of sweaty dreams, but the magic of travelling rivers was just too strong to keep her away.
The Moisie begins softly, like all rivers. A tiny dam is the height of land and the Labrador border, and from there it’s 400 kilometres of gathering excitement, southward through Quebec to the St. Lawrence River. We had given ourselves 18 days for the descent, though it’s been done in 11 and more rightly should be done in 23.
The river tripled quickly in width and flow, changing from a channel that seemed to have most of the water missing to continuous busy rapids. Speckled trout rolled in the mid-river rock eddies as we hurried past, wave splash flashing white in the drizzling gloom of this perpetually rainy river. We camped above the river’s gorge with long views upstream and down, water tumbling over ledges below us, where monster crystal eddies whispered the siren song of huge and foolish fish.
In camp we would often hear Vanessa talking about the old days because every campsite triggered a thousand memories of the ones that came before. At 17, she had paddled out of the Mackenzie Mountains and then hiked back along the Canol Road to the mountain put-in where she had started months before, an endless summer of adventure and deprivation. She paddled north out of Yellowknife to reach Wilberforce Falls on the Hood River, and that had devoured another summer. By the time she was 21, she’d tracked her canoe up the George River and over the height of land into Labrador to descend the frothing Notakwanon into the fiords of the Atlantic. She had camped in so many places, places so beautiful that it made you ache. And she was only 31.
Inconceivably, she had already been down the Moisie twice, both times with camp kids stretched to their limit, hyperventilating with excitement and hounded by fear.With male trip leaders as role models, and a girl-boy ratio heavily biased toward the male, she fought to be seen as an equal. She carried more and carried longer, making the torturing wooden beast that was their wanigan her own personal challenge. The teenager became a woman with tempered steel behind her brown eyes, a character seemingly hammered and forged by water.
For this third trip down the Moisie she combined a group of solo playboaters whose very lives revolved around fast rivers. Each paddler was paired with their Significant Other, so there would be lots of women to do the swearing and the distaste- ful heavy work.Vanessa told her partner of the Moisie long before he had ever held a paddle. She told him of the darkness of her long minutes there, of the terrifying glimpse of her own mortality. And then she led him into her passion for wild rivers until they played in moving water with every spare moment of their lives. They tumbled together into the garden of river obsession and he became an inseparable part of her critical armour.
It was on the Moisie that we all began to reflect on how we had changed as people who travel rivers. Vanessa’s mind was now always sifting and sorting the chaos of water, planning her own self-rescue. We paddled the canoes loaded, we searched for the bold centre lines of the playboater and we lived in our moving water world with great comfort and respect.
Playing our way down the Moisie, we watched our world change from the sparse spruce monoculture of the caribou wintering grounds into deciduous forest ready to riot in the frosts of September. Water poured into the deepening canyon in white free-fall at every bend, draining the river’s high plateau in threads and curtains and monster churning draperies.
Sixty-five kilometres from the St. Lawrence, we drifted out of the natural world. Hydro towers stalked over the hills, and the tracks of the QNS&L railroad joined us on the left bank. As we rafted up and drifted toward the “Railway Sets,” the adrenaline-soaked climax of a very challenging river, Vanessa may well have been the only one thinking about what lay ahead.
The first of the Railway Sets had a recirculating hole spanning half the river backed with a wide field of surging boils. A line of standing waves showed vertical faces capped with white below the hole. Vanessa had logged thousands of miles and run hundreds of rapids since she last saw this place. She had even paddled the black and whispering rivers of winter, too impatient for spring. So serene and so certain, so ready for this water that had tried to break her, she didn’t even recognize it. To her, the Railway Sets equalled just another “point and shoot” piece of water.
Vanessa and her partner paddled down to a right-side eddy and sat there for a moment processing the river. Scouting the rapid from the canoe, they spoke briefly of their plans, arms extended, pointing. Vanessa twisted around to touch paddle tips—the final piece of the ritual.
They carved out in an arc, driving hard to hit the precise piece of water to start their line. Their angle turned downriver then, and Vanessa faced the hole that leapt and churned with pure madness. She did a cross-forward stoke that lasted only a heartbeat and they rode their preordained track through a metre-wide window. A grey wall of mixed air and water stretched above her, near enough to touch, and her ears filled with the primal scream of gravity pushing unimaginable weight down the giddy slope. They rode up a wave that rolled the boat under them to 90 degrees. In crazy contortions they wave-blocked for dryness and reached for balance as the wave took them over its peak. Then a well-timed paddle- stroke pulled them beyond the heaving nightmare of the boil-line to safety.
We camped there, our last night on the river, to sleep on arching polished rock like the backs of granite whales. Vanessa sat, staring at the water, drinking tea from a battered mug that had seen almost as many rivers as she had. And then she remembered.
“This is the set. This is where I almost drowned.” She spoke with surprise and wonder, as if she’d discovered her terrible demon with a stake already driven through its heart, and that now she was free to travel without its fearsome company.
Our journey down the Moisie had taken 18 days. But Vanessa’s had taken a decade.
Brian Shields is a sun-mangled river rat, boat outfitter and creator of mean doggerel for friends’ birthdays.
This article first appeared in the Summer 2003 issue of Canoeroots Magazine. For more great content, subscribe to Canoeroots’ print and digital editions here.
