across the river and we panic. We look at each other, J kills the motor, I jump out of his way so he can grab the oars and he rows hard through what are, without a doubt, the biggest rapids of our entire river. Class 3+ at least, with three-to-four- foot standing wave trains. We miss most of the rocks but suddenly Miss Moose hits a huge rock, and the little boat shudders and we hear the worst and most revolting thump, or rather, crunch, and we are sure that she will have sustained a huge hole and our journey will be over. Already her hull is ragged. We clear the rapids and I see J is shaken. He is not a man who is shaken easily. He nods to me, is speechless. The rapids had come as a total surprise as earlier I had made contact with a woman named Bianca at one of the lodges we passe, the Carrieres, I am later told. I had asked her where it was safe to moor our boat at Cumberland House and she told us her uncle lived on the river and would accommodate our boat, that it would be safe there. ‘It’s before the bridge and before the rapids’, she told me. After hitting the rapids we realise she thought we were coming up the river and not downstream. Seeing no sign of the uncle’s house, we tie up on the muddy shore. I notice a man on a UTV on a bridge in the distance. He has stopped mid-bridge and is watching us. Everybody watches us wherever we go. Nobody has ever seen a sailboat on this river we’re told over and over again. I wave him over. A few minutes later we are in his UTV and he takes us on a fast tour of Cumberland House. His name is RD, he’s Métis, nice-looking, wears wraparound gangsta sunglasses, his teeth are bad, very bad— something I have noticed in north country, and would desperately like to get out of Cumberland House. He drives us through Pemmican Portage, the reserve, then up to the village, struggling into the twenty-first century but trying hard to keep life together. Outside the Métis Hall, a row of elders, mostly women, chat in the sunshine when a truck pulls up and a man jumps out and sets up a table with baskets of fresh strawberries, cantaloupes, tomatoes, cucumbers and potatoes onto the table. Soon the mayor, Val, arrives. She gives J a traditional Métis sash. Another woman gives him bannock filled with meat and cheese and it’s delicious. The market garden is Val’s initiative. She wants a self-sufficient community that is healthy and the garden is filled with produce and
third dock of our entire river and a big group of men came out waving to us. They are members of the Chemawawin Cree Nation and they clear the lake for Manitoba Hydro. Their community, Old Post, was flooded in 1965 and their people were relocated to Easterville, maybe 70 km away. With this relocation went a life. The flooding included flooding their graveyard. Suddenly gravestones were peeking above the waterline, sometimes bones. In the past 10 years Hydro tried to make things right by making a breakwater, and protecting the graves and erecting a large memorial stone, heartbreaking — the elders still come to it and pray to their ancestors. We spent the evening with the workers, two of them took us to the old church that still means so much to the people of Ch’wawin (Easterville). They hold Christmas services there; they come by boat. The altar was covered with memorial service cards of all the recent dead – many of the faces staring back at us so very, very young. We spent the night in an abandoned camp with Miss Moose moored at the second dock of the entire river, then had breakfast with the workers at the Old Post and crossed the lake with a good wind - Skip sailed most of the day; inexplicably, I cried all day. The waves, the open water brought up memories of Courtenay, lost at sea eight years ago. Our hearts are broken forever. I wept too because of the flooded way of life of the Cree hunters and fishermen we met along the way. As we crossed the wide lake J thought he could see the original channel, or rather, the current. I read to J from our book on the river and I read about Grand Rapids, our final destination, and how one day the great river was turned off like a tap and people whose generations had grown up listening to Our Lady the Saskatchewan crash through a canyon into Lake Winnipeg, suddenly had absolute silence, their homes and life were utterly changed. We arrived at Ch’wawin at 4:30. I wasn’t off the boat five minutes when a Cree fisherman offered me several pounds of fresh caught pickerel and pickerel cheeks. Later I gave him a tin of BC sockeye –‘I’ve never had salmon in my life’ he said. All evening and next day people stop by the dock to look at this strange thing, a sailboat. Many say, I’d like to try that! And indeed, the lake would be a great sailing water as long as the winds and the half-submerged stumps were minded – but these people know the water and the wind so very well.
healing herbs. ‘We lost our way of life when they put the dam in. And now the water is no good. I get sores from taking showers. We have to go all the way to Nipiwin for fresh water’. We leave Cumberland House, stopping first at the graveyard, all red and green and pink crosses decorated with silk flowers and solar lights and they glow in the dark. We set off at 1900 hrs. Drift for a few hours then moor in peace. We are entering another country. Cree and Métis country where trappers and fishermen and radio station hosts and children will be our guides, and they will feed us. We have already been made welcome. J has learned to say thank you in Cree. Kinanâskomitin he says to me. ‘Knee, chin, gun’. The Cree laugh and smile when he says this to them. I have begun to braid his hair with snake braids. He is getting asked for his treaty number when he goes into stores or buys gasoline though he is white, white, white. We are becoming new people on this river. Three nights ago we stayed in a hunter’s cabin in the marshes in the Saskatchewan River delta after Cree hunters told us the location of it and because the weather was poor. The same hunters gave us a big feed of freshly caught moose meat and bannock and sent us on our way. The day on this, North America’s largest freshwater delta, had been gorgeous Day 40 N 53° 27’ 37” W 100° 36’ 40” Steele: and extraordinarily beautiful and so we decided to motor on long past our usual 6 pm stop. The sunset in the wide, wide prairie sky was unlike anything we have ever seen—mango and lavender and indigo. We checked out a few cabins but they were locked, then came upon a clean, dry cabin. We brought in our provisions, our bedding, J made us a lovely fire, we ate and slept well. This simple cabin was luxury to us on that cool night. A proper bed. A camp stove, candles, and dusk in the marshes. We leave a note for the owner but having no pen with us, we sign a paper plate with the tip of a bullet. We have become northerners. In the morning we headed into Cedar Lake, the flood lake caused by the Hydro Dam in 1965. We were told by the hunters to watch out for the work crews at Old Post and that we could stay the night there. At 5pm we saw buildings and the
55 on site review 49 :: shorelines
Made with FlippingBook interactive PDF creator