It all started with borrowing a jackhammer.
I met Colin Graham one day about a year ago while visiting my mom at Extended Care at St. Joe's. I thought he was a pretty cool guy- certainly well-informed on a variety of subjects.
More recently, Colin was kind enough to loan me his jackhammer- I was planning to jack up an old sidewalk on our property in Cumberland. When he came over to drop it off, he told my partner Toby and me about a great adventure he was going on- the Yukon River Quest, a 720 kilometre canoe race down the Yukon River from Whitehorse to Dawson City, And that he had worked on this a long time, and it was happening in a couple of weeks and guess what- someone had dropped out, and there was a vacancy- and why didn't I come along!
To humour him, I asked more about the trip, and for some reason it started sounding interesting. It was going to be Voyageur canoe- so up to eight people at a time, mixed with men and women of varying abilities. Basically a little canoe ride among friends, no big deal, guaranteed.
Neither Toby nor I had ever been that far north before, and as we started to explore the idea, it just seemed more and more possible. Of course the website billed it as the most grueling, longest canoe race in the world, but how bad could it be? There were eight of us, for heavens sake, men and women of varying abilities.
So after trying to get friends to talk me out of it, and after all of them said how great it would be, I somehow found myself agreeing to participate in the longest most grueling canoe race in the world.
The key word here is race. A very long, long race.

There was a huge amount of preparation involved, and a major shopping spree. Everything we needed was available locally, but some of it took tracking down. I needed a regulation life preserver, two sets of all-synthetic, no cotton clothing in layers, waterproof jacket and pants, water bottles, special foot and hand wear, sun block, mosquito repellent, and of course enough food and liquid to last for up to four days. All the merchants we talked to were curious, excited and jealous, and I thank them for their good wishes.
Of course I took far more food than I needed- for example I brought ten little packages of dried fruit and nuts and barely used up one. I ditched the remainder at my first opportunity. But generally the food choices worked well.
With our bags packed, Toby and I flew up to Whitehorse to meet the rest of the crew, who were all up there already- most of them having driven up separately.
We got there the day before the beginning of the race, so there wasn't much time for preparation.
Our group consisted of five people from the Comox Valley who knew each other and socialized from work, and three others- a man from Saskatchewan, another from Ontario, and me.
It is a very interesting experience to show up, and join a group of strangers in an intense, possibly dangerous enterprise.
As was stressed several times, the Yukon is a wilderness river. There is very little settlement along its banks. And so we needed to be prepared for any possibility, including surviving on our own for a period of time.

It took a while to sink in that this was going to be at least three to four days- day and night of sustained physical exertion.
Consider the meaning of that. I am the publisher of a newspaper who typically sits at a desk. A good walk will last about an hour and a half. Chores like chopping and stacking fire wood and jacking up a walkway can go on for a few hours, with little breaks.
But the race meant three stretches of twenty hours each of more or less continuous paddling.

I am admittedly a tad overweight, but especially during the summer i take walks up around the hills of Cumberland, so i am not in terrible condition, But I had certainly done no special training for the race, while everyone else had, for months.
I have done some canoeing over the years- especially a week-long excursion into La Verendrye park in Quebec many years ago, and a night time float down a major river in New Brunswick.
But I had never raced in a canoe before.
At noon on Tuesday June 24, the race began in Whitehorse when about eighty teams in canoes large and small, and kayaks, took off from the shoreline. It was a sunny day, and there were participants from all over the world, Lithuania, Texas, England, and so on, including an ex-Olympian from Austria. Holy cow!
Right off the bat, a very quick pace was set- they were called marathon strokes- quick dips in rapid succession, and I found I could not master the technique.
Perhaps I was dipping my paddle too deep. Or maybe my conditioning wasn't up to scratch- at any rate, what worked for me was taking longer deeper power strokes, doing three to everyone else's four, or two to three, whatever worked. Of course this looked to some as if I wasn't working as hard as everyone else.
But I thought I was, and it was as hard as I could muster.
When I found a rate I could manage, it wasn't too hard to keep up. One gets into a pleasing unconscious rhythm, and it's possible to look around and enjoy the scenery.
If we needed a drink or something to eat, we would have to call ourselves “out”, and then back in again when we were through. Occasionally we would pull over to a beach and take a break.
In a way the toughest part of the race is near the start, Just outside of Whitehorse, the river flows into Lake Laberge, of Sam McGee fame, which is an endlessly long, and in our case, still body of water. Going down river with the current is a lot easier than making all your forward motion with your arms, as we had to do endlessly on Lake Laberge.
How do different people respond to stress, to challenges? Unfortunately, I was the one who felt compelled to speak up when it seemed to me that things weren't going as they should,
The race is roughly divided into thirds- the first third ends at a small community on the river called Carmack- and this is where I wanted to get off.
By the time I got to Carmack, about twenty hours into the race, it became clear to me, that I was not in a situation I needed to continue in. I was at odds with the boat leadership on how to navigate the river, and it seemed to me that the pace we were attempting would be impossible to sustain- several of our members were already showing scary signs of physical breakdown. I felt I had been misled, that I had done my duty, that it would be honourable to leave at this point, And I imagined spending the next few days with Toby enjoying a Yukon holiday, including rooms with mattresses and pillows.
When I got off the boat, I must have seemed somewhat crazed, and this is confirmed by Toby's reaction.
When I mentioned my plan to her, she could barely believe it- she said that if I quit, the whole team would be disqualified from the race. I confirmed with an official that this was true. What now? Continue on this madness, or wreck it for all these people who had worked so hard for so long?
I promised I would reconsider after trying to rest.
The race stipulates that everyone must stop at least seven hours in Carmack, and this is where our support crew worked so hard to prepare hot food, and tents for us to sleep in, and cleaned and dried our belongings.
I had some food, took a cold shower and tried to sleep in the small tent we had brought. The one where I can't quite stretch out to my full height without toes curling up the sides.
It doesn't get dark in the Yukon in the summer- the sun does hide away, but there is still some light out, especially if there are no clouds.
So it was still light, and the tent was hot. The wind high in the trees sounded like a firetruck convoy from hell. And there was a squirrel with the loudest loony tunes call I have ever heard, chattering and playing on a log nearby.
Crucial hour after hour went by without my sleeping, but I managed to lie down and rest, sort of.
Of course I wasn't going to disappoint the rest of the crew by withdrawing from the race. I joined them in the boat as we took off, drenching my left running shoe in the water as I climbed in. Oh good- a wet foot for the remainder of the trip.
Soon after we began our second leg, we hit the head wind. As far as the weather was concerned we had it as good as it gets- sunny, with some cloud cover, cool nights that required warm clothing, but nothing like the pouring tempest of some earlier years.
And yet it did rain, spottily, and there was cold in the dead centre of night, and there was plenty wind, when we were tired, and there were many hours more to go, and we started to lose our will.
Somehow, in the overcast night, because we had no other choice, we managed to crawl our way to our second stop- Kirkman Creek, where a pioneer family had set up a tiny remote settlement, and where we had a minimum of three hours to warm up and eat, and perhaps sleep a bit.
By this point, I was as crazy as I have ever been, Several of us- the stalwarts- had fallen away from paddling, nursing various feelings of dis-ease and exhaustion. I couldn't remember the last time I had slept, I had just finished screaming at Colin, our leader, and was in a spiritual territory of flux I had never visited before. Extreme, and vulnerably emotional, crazed and happy and thankful and hyper aware all at the same time. I prayed that I be granted at least a few hours of sleep, and I was.
It was amazing how even a short break provided enough time for people who seemed to require hospitalization, to come back to their senses, and return to functioning. This was just one of the many lessons of the river.
We left Kirkman for the last leg of the trip, which turned out in a way to be the easiest.
Sensing that we would actually complete this, and for some reason, no longer so concerned with our time (if only we had felt this moderately from the beginning) we paddled and drifted, and as the sun came out, the crew basked in it, and joked and kibitzed and tried to wring out some fun before it was all over.
The river became more beautiful as we moved along it.
Trees up in the Yukon look very different than the ones down here. They are much shorter and thinner. There is a ubiquitous pine tree of some kind, and remarkably thin aspens, which are the commonest types.
The river banks at first don't rise too high, and one side is often flat to the river when there is a bit of embankment on the other.
But over time, the hills became larger, and more interesting, the patterns of erosion were something I had never seen before, patches sloughed off a hill and filled in with greenery of another shade. Or perfectly flat bluffs with perfect vertical sides, as if finished with calipers and planers.
Most remarkable of all were the “visions”.
I had heard about this before, but the experience was something I'll never forget.
Working that hard over so long a time does strange things to the brain.
But the river encourages the experience. The way the striated rock is formed, with all of its colours and strange shapes, suggests an endless variety of faces and figures, some like weird cartoons, others like Egyptian, Mayan or Greek sculpture. One could imagine that all the dead souls of the world were represented here in a form which revealed their true character. The effect was like drifting through the world's longest and strangest art gallery, especially in the last third of the race, where endless cliffs of eroded rock shoulder right up to the river, The fact that one's own imagination completes the picture is what makes it so alluring.
Near the end, there was a time when it seemed as if we had gone past a checkpoint and would scratch the race. In the surrounding hills, giant native spirit faces were smiling and laughing at us (mostly) white folk.

Everyone seemed a little flipped out by the race. Most of us had experienced some kind of major physical crash, where we could simply do no more, and relied on the efforts of the others to get us to a safe place. These episodes, always just before a scheduled stopover, were frightening, and helped fuel my sense that things were out of control.
Amazingly, I didn't crash- probably because I wasn't fit enough to exert myself so exhaustingly at the beginning. Nor did one of the women, who showed incredible stamina throughout, keeping up with every single fast stroke, without waver or complaint. She outlasted every one of us.
At the end, I was involved in pretty deep rifts with some of the other crew, which coloured my ability to enjoy and celebrate the outcome. We finished, no one got hurt, we weren't last, and the river was mind blowing, but because of the unresolved unpleasantness, it's hard to exult.
Maybe better next year.
Yeah, like hell...