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On June 17, 2006, we quietly paddled the Heath Ledger across the Canadian border. We hadn’t exactly planned to sneak into Canada. Joe and I were on a mission—to reach Hudson Bay by canoe, still hundreds of miles to the northeast—and as we approached the border we realized that interactions with government officials might endanger that mission. For one thing, we were unsure whether the guards would let Joe, with his extensive juvenile record, into the country. We also carried a 12-gauge shotgun (for protection against the polar bears we expected to meet downriver), which authorities in firearms-phobic Canada would seize if declared. So we chose the path of least resistance across the frontier, paddling through swirling waters into shimmering twilight.

We could hear the distant rumblings of semis, and between silhouettes of weeping willows, we saw the glow from floodlights at the Pembina/Emerson border post a mile beyond the muddy banks. But on the Red River there was no customs station, no sign of welcome to “Friendly Manitoba.” The border here was marked only by a black trestle of crisscrossed girders without so much as a single red maple leaf. As we slipped under the railroad span, floating illegally into the country, we were pushed along by a welcome rush of current, the first significant natural flow we’d seen since the trip began on June 4, four hundred river miles south at Wahpeton, North Dakota—the headwaters of the Red.

Already we had been interrogated by officials from five different law enforcement agencies in the U.S. They seemed to think we were either terrorists, immigrant smugglers, or perverted lovers: a big sick white guy with a lip ring and his skinny younger Puerto Rican/Lakota boy-toy acting out a canoe version of Brokeback Mountain. The movie had come out a few months earlier and now it seemed that two men couldn’t go camping together without the assumption that they were gay. In response, we named the canoe after one of the film’s stars.

They all asked the same questions:
How do you two know each other?
Where are you going?
How long do you expect that to take?
How did you get time off for such a long trip?
How will you know where you’re going?
What are you going to do for food?
Why are you doing this?

I insisted on taking charge of these conversations after watching Joe lose his cool at the sight of uniformed authority figures. He would start running at the mouth, each jittery falsetto utterance sounding more sketchy and full-of-shit than the last.

My responses were cautiously worded to prevent the cop, sheriff, ICE official, game warden, or forest ranger from opening new lines of inquiry. If they had hauled us in for questioning they might have connected Joe to the recent Frogtown incident.

So I always told them the truth, albeit a painstakingly tailored version. Nevertheless, the cop, sheriff, ICE official, forest ranger, or game warden would nod suspiciously at what must have sounded, to their post-9/11 ears, like a hastily manufactured cover story: I was Joe’s mentor. We had met five years earlier at New Voices, a Minneapolis-based journalism program for American Indian youth. We expected our trip on the Red, Nelson, Echimamish and Hayes Rivers to take roughly two months. Joe’s employer, Pawn America, had granted him a leave of absence for the summer. I was a teacher, so I got summers off. We were navigating with topographical maps, compasses, and a Global Positioning System receiver; for sustenance we had freeze-dried camping food and the occasional gas station or restaurant meal.

I was careful not to mention that this trip was Joe’s way of lying low for the summer. My nineteen-year-old paddling partner had recently been mixed up in a street incident involving a sawed-off shotgun and a crack dealer named Sonic. Luckily, no one was hurt. But word in Frogtown was that Sonic was seeking swift retribution. Joe left with me days after the episode without telling anyone where he was going—not his older brother D, his closest friend and confidant, not even his mother.

Nor did I volunteer the intimate details of my life: I was a single father of four, an unemployed writer with no certain job prospects to return to, and no goal in life except to make it to Hudson Bay with Joe or die trying. I had embarked on this journey to try to stave off a nervous breakdown, having spent much of the previous six months alternating between dizzying waves of anxiety and fits of uncontrolled sobbing, symptoms of a depression resulting from a series of deaths and personal losses that began with my divorce in 2003.

Each time the police ran our names for warrants, there was an increasing fear that the law had caught up with Joe, and that this trip would end for us not at the sea, but in the penitentiary. I don’t know if it was the fact that we were an unusual pair of travelers heading toward an international border in an age of terrorism hysteria; or perhaps it stemmed from the kind of extralegal scrutiny many dark-skinned people in America endure every day. Either way, it seemed our trip was being viewed by government officials as a criminal act. In Grand Forks, we were issued a trespass warning after we spent the night camped atop a flood dike. In the tiny Red River Valley town of Climax, Minnesota, we stopped one night for cheese curds and beer at the Corner Bar and were questioned by a patrolman who said he had received “reports of two men with backpacks.” Thirty miles north of Drayton, North Dakota, a pair of game wardens in a speedboat approached cautiously after scrutinizing us through binoculars; they then grilled us at length about fishing regulations, even though we weren’t fishing.

The trickiest part of these interrogations was inventing answers the authorities would believe in response to that last question: Why? They demanded to know what was motivating this odd couple to travel over water and land from the heart of the Great Plains to the far edge of the continent, an endeavor that, judging from their uniformly dubious expressions, no sane person would undertake without sinister motive.

There was no innocent-sounding answer, so I again went with a clipped rendition of the truth. This trip was about physical and spiritual renewal. That’s what I told them: physical and spiritual renewal.

Joe, on the other hand, would puff out his chest and bluster righteously, Vacation! The word sounded suspect coming out of his mouth—anyone familiar with the Red River knows it is one of the most hellacious, unforgiving American waterways to paddle—but it, too, was partially true. Joe would often say life on the river, however difficult, was a cakewalk compared with his day-to-day in the city. The torture of paddling ten or twelve hours a day to make thirty or forty miles, eating and sleeping on riverbanks that were essentially mud pits, baking under the withering sun, and freezing through frequent cloudbursts, was, to us both, a welcome respite from the heartache and stress that had come to dominate our lives in St. Paul. There was an aspect of our days on the river that was similar to self-mutilation; the physical pain relieved our suffering hearts.

Crossing the border without incident, Joe expressed relief by mocking me for having intended to report to customs. It had been his idea from the start to steal across the border under cover of night. “Fuck them border bitches,” he laughed. “Them bitches can’t touch us out here.”

I realized how absurd some of my assumptions about the river had been. Even though we had seen a total of only five other boats in the past fourteen days, I half-expected to find a fully functioning customs station on this all-but-abandoned river. But since I was relying for guidance on Canoeing with the Cree, a book chronicling a 1925 expedition from Fort Snelling to Hudson Bay, I was bound to be wrong once in a while.

Upon arrival in Canada we experienced several firsts.

For the first time in two weeks we could see a mile into the future. The river, which had been infuriatingly serpentine up to this point (on an average day we paddled two river miles to travel one mile north) suddenly straightened out. I was, as usual, eager to keep moving, to dig in and put some distance between us and the border. Joe, as usual, had other ideas.

This was the first time Joe had traveled outside the United States, the first time he had breathed beyond the reaches of a government that had, at one time or another, for one reason or another, jailed almost every adult member of his family. He wanted to mark the occasion with a few Captain-and-Cokes, his signature cocktail.

For the first time in his life, under Canada’s liberal alcohol statutes, Joe was legal to drink, and he intended to stop at the first bar we could find and get fuckin crunk, as he had put it repeatedly since our departure. The map showed a town called Emerson situated immediately on the Manitoba side of the border. A few blighted warehouses rose above the flood wall to our right, but the town didn’t give the impression of a welcoming place to pull in and drink. Joe frantically began paddling us toward the eastern banks, but without my cooperation in the swift current he was never going to get there. I convinced him that we would find a more suitable place for his first legal drink a few miles downstream.

I was eventually going to have to fulfill the promises I’d made to get Joe to come along on this trip in the first place: I’d told him he’d be able to drink in bars, and meet lots of Native girls in the northern communities we would travel through. But minutes past the border was not the place to stop and get sloppy.

Luckily, Joe began to see things my way after a few minutes. It helped that it was one of those rare magical evenings when, like a cosmic reward for the labor and risk required on a lengthy expedition, nature offers a show of its magnificent power while leaving you unharmed. Massive thunderheads the color of orange Dreamsicles piled thousands of feet into the sky around us, every few minutes releasing a downburst of warm wind and precipitation without a drop wetting our skin. Around sunset we witnessed a bobcat scaling the trunk of a tall birch, saw the violent shaking of its branches, and heard the terrible cries of a nest of birds as they were being devoured. This was Joe’s first impression of Canada. “Damn, nigga,” he said earnestly, calling me the name he reserves for his homies. “It’s real out here.”

Five miles past the border we were off the road map I’d been using for navigation. I was well prepared to navigate the far north. But for about two hundred miles on the Red River I had only a common gas station map to go by; for the section between Emerson and Winnipeg I had only the poorly detailed and antiquated descriptions in Canoeing with the Cree. It was impossible to get lost on the river, and I knew Winnipeg was about a hundred river miles ahead; the problem was that I couldn’t tell Joe where we might find alcohol. We paddled past a couple dudes in ragged baseball caps fishing from shore, pulling out meaty channel cats. There was a “beverage room” ahead, they said. “Stop at the bridge in about seven river miles, and the town of Letellier is a three-mile walk to the west.”

The fishermen offered Joe a Molson out of their cooler but he declined; that wasn’t how he envisioned his first sip of Canadian alcohol. He wanted to be carded, then served a Captain-and-Coke.

The evening calmed into a warm, breeze-less night, and the black canopy above us was sliced in half by the glowing stripe of the Milky Way. We came upon the bridge around midnight and with the aid of headlamps found a dry rock on which to disembark. Even in daylight it was challenging to find a spot to land the Ledger without sinking crotch-deep in tarry soil. We almost always camped beneath bridges, since the earth beneath them was crusty and could support a tent.

We tied off the canoe and set up camp. Joe pulled on a sweatshirt and started through the tall grass up to the bridge deck. “You coming to drink with me, dawg, or what?” he yelled back.

> I followed him up to the road. The feel of solid pavement beneath my feet came as a welcome respite from the quicksand riverbanks on which we had mucked around the past two weeks. It was strange and exciting to emerge from the river and see road signs in English and French. Earlier that day we were paddling the Red River. Now were plying la rivière Rouge. I squinted into the darkness to the west. There were two or three distant twinkles of light, but nothing close to the constellation that would indicate an active human settlement. I persuaded Joe to wait until morning to make his excursion to the beverage room.

That night, as I tried to sleep on my bag in the muggy tent, Joe stayed awake pulling hairs from his chin—his preferred method of facial grooming—in preparation for the big day to come. Later, he turned out his headlamp and went to sleep without going through his usual refrain about “the white rednecks that are coming to kill us,” or begging me to let him sleep with the shotgun. We were both tired and thrilled to have made it to Canada, a serious milestone on our route to the Bay.

“Goodnight, nigga,” Joe said drowsily.

Having spent enough time talking to Joe and only Joe, I had unconsciously adopted his vocabulary. “Goodnight, nigga,” I replied.

Joe was not the first person I thought of to accompany me on a lengthy and dangerous river expedition. I’d been paddling with my friend Kris Koch since we were both teens, and we had talked for years of tracing the route described in Canoeing with the Cree. In early April 2006, I was struck with the sudden and unshakeable inspiration to paddle to Hudson Bay, but Kris wasn’t ready to go. He had recently landed his dream job as a chef at the Walker Art Center’s 2021 restaurant, and was unwilling to risk his career for what, until now, had been just a daydream. I had determined I would go alone, by kayak if necessary, even though, given my flimsy psychological state, I would not have lasted a week. Then two weeks after Kris turned me down, I received a 3 a.m. phone call. Joe was on the streets of St. Paul and needed my help.

I didn’t get the details immediately—he was frantic—but I later put together what had happened. Joe had been at Regions Hospital where his girlfriend Joan was giving birth. Joan is Ojibwe, and Joe is Lakota and Puerto Rican. When the baby came out black, Joe was the last person in the room to put it together that it wasn’t his. He cut the umbilical cord, and then a nurse grabbed his wrist and snipped off the hospital bracelet linking him to the baby boy.

No one in the delivery room had the compassion to stop him as he left the hospital in a state of shock and mourning. I’d known Joe during his crazy high school days, when he was selling crack, jacking cars, getting chased by police dogs, and doing time. But I’d never feared for him like I did now: I was familiar enough with Joe’s world to know revenge was his only option. For two days following the birth of the baby that wasn’t his, I kept Joe at my house and tried to talk him out of it. I asked him to consider loving Joan even though she had given birth to another man’s baby. But a week later, when I heard Joe boasting to his homies about going “toe to toe with that Sonic motherfucker,” I had a bad feeling about his odds of staying alive and out of jail if he remained in Frogtown for the summer. Out on the river, it was always a chore to get Joe going in the morning. I would start taking down the tent with him inside to convince him it was time to break camp. “Shit, bro,” he would whine, “you know I have a process. Just give me a few minutes.” Occasionally I lied and told him it was nine o’clock when it was really seven. But on the morning of June 18, with the promise of legal alcohol foremost on his brain, Joe was up and stuffing his clothes away not long after sunrise. I was eager to make Winnipeg—still about three days’ paddle—but there would be no convincing Joe that he should wait to get crunk, at least until we came upon a town that was close to the river.

I thought it would expedite matters if I stayed back, took down the tent, and packed our gear into the Ledger. As he left camp, nasty black thunderheads promised rough weather; I reminded Joe to take his rain gear and a two-way radio.

Three hours later I sat shivering under the bridge, wrapped in a tarp, as rain slashed me in stinging, horizontal streaks. It seemed Joe had traveled beyond the three-mile range of the radios about 45 minutes after leaving camp. For the first time since we shoved off from the headwaters, Joe and I were more than a few feet apart from each other, and I was angry at my young paddling partner. I finally decided to go after him.

Up on the road, I tried to thumb a ride in the downpour, but nobody wants to let a wet dog in their car, which is what I felt like on that long walk. After about two miles Joe finally responded to the radio. “Bro, I’m crunk as hell! Come down here, man. The place is called Barney’s or some shit, and the bartender has a smokin’ body. Hell yeah, dawg.” With each word I became more annoyed.

As I approached the prairie town of Letellier, a tidy collection of buildings that included a grain elevator, two modest brick motels (and their adjoining beverage rooms), I spotted a slender brown figure stumbling toward me. Joe had consumed two Captain-and-Cokes and was weaving around like the drunken teenage lightweight he was. I followed him back to Barney’s, where I watched Canadian Idol on television, ate a veggie burger, and drank a Moosehead. Joe downed another Captain-and-Coke, ogled the bartender (who was indeed smokin’) and whispered to me about wanting to “hit that.”

An hour later the sky began to clear and Joe and I headed back to camp. He talked much of the way about all the hos he was planning to tap in Winnipeg. I thought about the short leash I was going to have to keep him on when we got there.

I held out hope that we could still make meaningful river miles that day—until we returned to the bridge to find that someone had rifled through our gear, which I had left neatly stored under a tarp at the base of a concrete piling. The only thing missing was the one piece of equipment we could not replace in Canada: our shotgun. At first this seemed a more sobering development for Joe than it was for me. As a beginning camper he had a somewhat irrational and often overwhelming fear of potential dangers, like bears and white people. I knew from more than twenty-five years of outdoor experience—including some time in Alaska’s grizzly territory—that the gun was a precaution, and we probably wouldn’t have occasion to use it. But as we loaded the Ledger and prepared to shove off, I was struck with a sobering realization of my own.

There was now a smuggled shotgun on the loose, registered in my name. I could be liable for any crimes that might be committed with that weapon, unless I reported it stolen. But if I reported it stolen I would have to admit to law enforcement that we (and the gun) entered the country illegally.

“You guys need some help?” called a friendly voice from the bridge above.

Joe looked up at the guy, a twenty-something man on a bike, and inquired, “You Indian?” They had a brief exchange, establishing that our new friend was “Canadian Ojibwe,” and Joe was “Sioux.”

“We Sioux—we call ourselves Lakota—were the last holdouts against the United States. We killed Custer,” Joe informed him. This was a fact he would repeat to every Native person we met between here and Hudson Bay, and it always elicited genuine bouts of laughter—not because it was a humorous historical detail, but because it was the first thing Joe wanted others to know about his people, and because he was bursting with the kind of pride one might express if his favorite football team had just won the Super Bowl.

After a few moments of internal deliberation I bit the bullet. The guy on the bridge had a cell phone and I asked him to dial the authorities. Minutes later an officer from the Dakota Ojibwe Police Service came striding down through the tall grasses. Since we were paddling off map, I hadn’t realized we were on the Roseau River First Nation Reserve. After I more or less explained the situation—“We meant to pass customs but there was nowhere to check in!”—the officer told Joe to “sit tight with the canoe” and ordered me to follow him to his squad car and get in the back.

The town of Roseau River, several squat shuttered buildings and a cigarette store, was a two-minute drive from the bridge. The officer led me into a rusting building and locked the door. He pulled some forms from a file cabinet and gravely scribbled notes while I described most of what had led up to me unleashing an unauthorized shotgun on the citizens of Canada. He seemed to lack a sense of humor, so I tried to break him down by complimenting the children in the photos on his desk.

“Those are the sergeant’s kids,” he grunted. I had initially thought that since this officer was an Indian he might, perhaps, concur with my feeling that it was not an actual offense to cross from the United States into Canada unannounced; after all, the Ojibwe nation is one of many that were divided by the establishment of the (arbitrary) boundary. But his body language didn’t inspire hopes of imminent freedom. Then his phone rang.

He answered it on speaker. “You have to come right away,” a hysterical-sounding woman pleaded. “My son-in-law is walking down to the river with a rope and said he’s going to kill himself.” The officer calmly gathered the caller’s information and got up to leave. “I have to take this. I’m the only one working today—Father’s Day. Can you walk back to the bridge and wait there? I’m going to call an officer from the RCMP to meet you.” He twisted the deadbolt on the door and set me loose.

Back at the bridge I repeated my faux woeful tale to Constable James of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Even though he was an imposing presence—six-foot-five and barrel-chested in his bullet-proof vest—the bespectacled young officer reminded me of a mild-mannered fiction writer I knew in Minneapolis. He seemed more artist than thug, and genuinely mesmerized by the details of our international expedition. I chatted freely with James, even as he arrested us, confined us to the back of his white Explorer, and said we would have to leave our equipment in the canoe while he hauled us to the border for questioning.

There was no knowing if or when we would return to the Ledger, and whether there would be anything left of our gear.

It felt strange to move at sixty miles per hour after two weeks of flowing along at two to five, depending on wind. Joe was mystified by my amiable discourse with James, conducted through the metal grille between the seats. He sat behind the constable and gestured to me as if to say, “Why the hell are you talking to a pig? Are you fucking nuts?” But I thought the best approach was to let James get to know us; to humanize ourselves and our intentions, thereby, hopefully, diminishing suspicion. In fifteen minutes we had covered the same distance it had taken us four hours to cover by canoe the previous night.

We followed Constable James into the border post, where the desk-bound bureaucrats dropped what they were doing to gawk at us. Apparently, word had circulated about the captured American canoeists. We felt like stars, like celebrity perpetrators. A pretty young woman at the currency exchange desk seemed especially interested in what the cop had dragged in. As we sat down in the lobby, Joe returned her stares before sliding on his orange oversized sunglasses—his “stunner shades”—and kicking back like a cool dude.

“Keep your head in the game,” I whispered sharply. “The next few minutes are going to make or break this trip.”

“Shit, dawg,” Joe replied defiantly. “If I’m gonna go out, I’m going out like a G.”

Suddenly Hudson Bay felt like it might as well have been on another planet.

The ocean was our goal, but we were also looking to heal our hearts, and mine was mending but still wrecked. And even though I missed my children (who had agreed to stay with their mother for the summer), the thought of being sent home now—where misery waited with open arms—was unbearable.

“Stay cool, bro,” I said, as much to myself as to the burgeoning pimp at my side. “We’re gonna be alright.”