“We are Going to Die out Here”
By John Luthens
The silent stroke of paddles, gentle waters, fun-filled laughter echoing across a pine-ringed shoreline: A canoe trip can portage the entire family together and brighten the darkest days with sunshine.
But this ain’t one of those tales.
This woeful legend launches from the landing with a half-foot of rain sluicing down the clay banks of the Bois Brule River in Douglas County. Thunder bouncing down the valley like drunken giants in a bowling match and lightning burning atop the white pines in strobes of fire.
Storied trout pools drop into chasms. Rapids swell into chaos and drown out the loudest of shouted words. It is a narrative thick with vampire mosquitoes awakened by the rain from their coffins in the cedar swamps and bogs. A piercing melody, blackening the sky, chewing the skin into lumps of smoldering flesh and sounding like aluminum claws scratching across the Brule’s pebbled bottom.
“What do you mean we have to sign a waiver? Let’s just forget this whole canoe-trip idea and go back to the cabin.”
My sister-in-law’s voice was calm, but her eyes darted with a troubled look. She was a novice to the game, not familiar with the legal waves that will capsize a canoe-rental shop if they don’t come clean and take care of business up front. She was the smartest of our crew. I’ll call her victim 1.
The ill-fated drama had set itself up several days earlier with a Brule Country visit from not only victim 1, but also three of my nephews, victim’s 2, 3 and 4, who had been dragged by their parents from Milwaukee to enjoy the outdoor beauty of nature, but who’d mostly been swatting mosquitoes and fortifying themselves with video games inside the cabin to escape the endless rain.
Last, but certainly not least, my brother-in-law headed up the family of visiting pilgrims, a fun-loving, energetic guy who was game for new challenges and not afraid of a few pesky bugs or a bit of flood water. He wasn’t a victim. His name was Bill. I’m willing to take my share of the blame for our canoe trip into hell, but the really bad stuff rests squarely on his shoulders.
When the storm clouds finally parted, and our visitor’s time was running short, I assured our faltering group that a scenic float down the waterway of the Brule would raise our rain-dampened spirits. The river gurgled approval down in the valley. More like a flooded bellow of approval, actually – but did I mention the storm clouds had parted?
Loading into the canoe-rental van with trailer in tow, we headed up to Stone’s Bridge, which is a famous jumping-off point for Brule River explorers. Sunlight pierced through wet leaves in sprinkling rainbows of freshness. The spring-fed headwaters glistened beneath the balsams.
It seemed for a moment that our luck had changed and we’d outrun the mosquitoes, until, that is, we got out of the van to assemble our gear. Seemed the downriver clan had phoned ahead and their upriver relatives were waiting in ambush. The family slaughter commenced in methodical order.
We were sweating and swatting. No time to take in the historic scenery and no time to think. Two canoes and six passengers. For better or worse, but mostly for the worse, the heart of our Brule River adventure got underway:
I don’t know if victim 1 ever signed that waiver, but someone must have forged her name, because there she stood on the brink of the Stone’s Bridge landing. She appeared a bit unsettled, possibly because she’d been stripped of her title as the smartest of our crew, giving it up to a pair of my nephews who’d wanted nothing to do with the journey and had opted to remain intelligently enclosed in the confines of the cabin.
Bill stood stoic in a maelstrom of bugs, twirling his paddle and looking ready to take apart the heaviest rocks the Brule could heave at him. He was busy practicing his best used-car salesman bit on the remaining nephew, wheeling and dickering and finally closing the deal by promising him 20 bucks to “get out of your comfort zone and into the canoe this instant!”
Captain Bill quelled the warning cries that were coming faster than the current from both victim’s 1 and 2 that “none of our bleeping family has ever been in a bleeping canoe before!” and the Milwaukee trio was promptly shipped off the bridge and into the waiting arms of the Brule.
I launched in the second craft, with both my wife and my mother coming along for the ride and licking their wounds from the mosquito assault in the bottom. Neither of them could be considered a victim in any sense of the word, seeing that both had lived with me long enough to know full well what the heck they were signing up for.
Like the fabled S.S. Minnow sailing for Gilligan’s Island, the cruise started pleasant enough. The mosquitoes failed to follow us into midstream, and the headwater currents had been softened and soaked by the surrounding moss and bogs. Wild orchids bloomed along the banks. Forger-me-not flowers sprung from the shallows to decorate the river like a floating garden. Trout surfaced in hungry ripples, and hummingbirds and cedar waxwings flitted about to see what the rain had washed up for breakfast.
The Brule River newbies got off to a decent start. There was the usual amount of crashes into the brush when an errant stroke occurred and, by the sound of it, victim 1 was continuing to paddle under protest. But with a few shouted words of swearing, cussing and wisdom from me and Captain Bill, they righted the ship in fine order and even managed to navigate several stretches of upriver rips in streamlined fashion.
Indeed, I became so confident with their progress that I shot ahead of them down a particularly wild stretch. The current had finally collected enough surge from the recent storms to pick up steam, and it was all we could do to swing around into a pool behind the boulders at the bottom. I sprung from the canoe with my camera and sat on a rock, eager to take an action photo of all the family fun the Milwaukee crew was going to have splashing down the rapids.
I think it was my mom who first saw the canoe cushion floating down the run. My wife spied the paddle. I sat on my rock with the camera and waited…and waited…and waited. The Brule River crashed endlessly around the bend, but there was no sign of a canoe or any family fun. There wasn’t even any sign of a family.
Finally, when the game seemed to be turning a bit too dire for even my tastes, I crashed into the alders and up the bank to try and asses the score. I hoofed it through the brush for 100 yards, bleeding from thorns and bleeding from bites across every inch of my body. The worst was yet to come.
Across the river, in a heavy stretch of whitewater, I found their canoe. It was swamped beneath a log and half upturned with water cascading over the bow like a wild fountain. Crashing water and spray shot into the air with a rumble, but the shipwreck, itself, was eerily silent. I heard no calls of distress. And there were no survivors to be seen.
Swimming across the rain-swollen rapids wasn’t as grueling as one might expect, but digging the canoe out of the deadfall debris, flipping it right side, and bailing it back to the surface while standing chest-deep in the icy Brule rush amounted to a lucky miracle. I nearly left the plastic heap to sink and shelter the trout, but I was more than a little nervous that that there might be a body floating beneath, which thankfully, there wasn’t.
Pushing the phantom canoe against the current, I forged upstream and screamed at the top of my lungs to connect with my missing adventurers. The Brule River sucked in my voice and bounced it back at me off the roaring rocks. Echoes from a century’s worth of maritime disasters sprayed in the mist and into my imagination. I heard Gordon Lightfoot wailing about the deaths of every sailor in the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, after it was sucked into the iron-stained depths of Lake Superior which pulls the Brule to its final resting place some 20 miles downstream.
It happened in slow motion, like a sunbeam peeking from fading darkness and spreading through the pines. I shook my head to pop the water out of my ears. Gordon Lightfoot stopped lamenting. I began to hear distant shouts in the forest.
I hollered like a wild savage in the watery torrent, trying to hold the canoe steady and volleying with the unseen voices in a classic, Brule River game of blinds man’s bluff. Marco…Polo…Marco… Polo. With a final crash of mud and tree branches, the Milwaukeeans stumbled from the swamp and shimmed above me on the bank.
They were a sight to behold: muddy to the waist, legs scratched from brambles; panting with fatigue and covered in the angriest patterns of mosquito welts I’d ever had the misfortune of witnessing. They’d started the trip as an average family, but the Brule River had transformed them into a trio of back-country hoboes in a matter of hours.
“We leaned over to avoid an overhanging tree. That’s when we started taking water,” Bill panted. I gave the order to abandon ship, and we splashed to the bank, but the canoe had other ideas. It filled up like a sponge. And down the river it went.”
“Why didn’t you just wait in one spot for me to come and get you?”
“I thought I saw a clearing up the hill,” Bill said. Told everyone we could stroll out to the road. We still had one paddle, so we used it to start whack through the brush.”
“You do know that we’re a good 5 miles removed from even a logging lane?” I said.
“I do now. If we hadn’t got turned around in the really thick stuff and happened to wander back to river, and if we hadn’t heard you yelling, we’d probably still be lost out there!”
My nephew appeared to be taking everything in stride. He had the hood of his sweatshirt tied gangster style over his face to ward off the bugs. He was holding the remains of a paddle like a machete, the blade covered in blood-soaked weeds and slain mosquitoes. He had a wild look in his eyes that would have caused a marauding black bear to whimper and run in the opposite direction.
Victim 1 was a different story. Her eyes were glazed with shock, and although her welted arms were crawling with mosquitoes, she was no longer making any attempt to brush them off. She was silently mouthing words, almost like a prayer, the same line over and over.
“We are going to die out here…We are going to die out here.”
“I told her not to be dramatic. Told her we weren’t going to die,” said Bill. “But once she gets an idea into her head, it’s pretty difficult to talk her out of it.”
Turned out Bill was right. Not only in regards to the fact that we’d live to see another day, but also that when victim 1 got an idea into her head, it was like playing tug of war with an outgoing oar freighter in Lake Superior.
When I casually mentioned that we could all pile into their canoe and make it down to where my wife and mom were waiting, and that we could then switch up the passenger arrangements accordingly to ensure a smooth sail back to the cabin, victim number 1 switched up her deathwatch mantra in a hurry.
“I’m not getting back in that canoe! I want to get out of here, and I want to go home now!”
We were forced to circle back and forth for another hour into the philosophical pros and cons of our party being strategically tucked in the deepest wilderness of the Brule Country. Barring an escape down the remaining slide of the river, our only other option was to hoof it out blindly and pray that the mosquitoes would leave enough of our remains behind for a search party to identify our corpses when the leaves fell and the underbrush died back in the autumn.
Victim1 finally fell exhausted into the canoe, and there was not a heck of a lot to argue about after that. Below the rapids, victim 1 took the middle seat with my mother and wife in one craft, while me, my nephew and Captain Bill continued in the other. The river rushed us home in wet, uncomfortable silence, but we made our final landing in the town of Brule with no further mishaps.
I guess it turned out ok in the end. My nephew was promptly paid for stepping out of his comfort zone after we’d beached the canoes, snaking into dad’s wallet with a grimace and pulling out a soggy twenty bucks. And by the time Captain Bill and I had destroyed our second piece of my mother’s homemade blueberry pie back at the cabin, we were embellishing the adventure with the lusty song of pirates who’d just returned from sinking a galleon and making off with the treasure.
As for Victim 1 – It’s was a sorrowful day in the fiberglass runs of the paddling community. She quit cold turkey and swore off canoes for the remainder of her life, opting instead for a rehabilitating drive to a clinic in Superior to tend to her bite-swollen body.
Don’t mourn for her too much, though. The resident doctor at the clinic asked and received permission to scientifically analyze her blood in hopes of identifying and protecting the entire world from new and uncharted strains of mosquito viruses.
How awesome is that!
John Luthens is a freelance writer from Grafton, Wisconsin. This story is an excerpt from his upcoming book, Writing Wild: Tales and Trails of an Outdoor Journalist. His first novel, Taconite Creek, is available on Amazon or at www.cablepublishing.com or by contacting the author at Luthens@hotmail.com