Death on the barrens: a true story of courage and tragedy in the Canadian Arctic

235 Pages·2010·4.64 MB·English

by  George James Grinnell

This book is dedicated to the memory of my father,
George Morton Grinnell (1902–1953),
to the memory of the leader of the expedition
across the Barren Grounds of Keewatin,
Arthur Moffatt (1919–1955),
and to the memory of Sandy Host (1954–1984),
Betty Emer (1961–1984),
George Landon Grinnell (1962–1984),
and Andrew Preble Grinnell (1968–1984),
who died together on the barren coast of James Bay.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Prologue
Introduction
PART I July
Chapter 1 The Mounties
Chapter 2 Embarkation
Chapter 3 Art Moffatt
Chapter 4 The First Sugar Dispute
Chapter 5 Panic
Chapter 6 The Broken Teacup
Chapter 7 The United Bowmen’s Association
Chapter 8 Separate Ways
Chapter 9 The Second Sugar Dispute
PART II August
Chapter 10 The Ceremony of Innocence Is Drowned
Chapter 11 The Blood-Dimmed Tide Is Loosed
Chapter 12 Caribou
Chapter 13 Tundra Time
Chapter 14 The Widening Gyre
Chapter 15 His Hour Come Round at Last
Chapter 16 I Was the River
Chapter 17 On His Own
PART III September
Chapter 18 The Garbage Dump
Chapter 19 Blizzard
Chapter 20 Death on the Barrens
Chapter 21 Our New Leader
Chapter 22 The Last Farewell
Chapter 23 Inuit
Chapter 24 Flies of the Lord
Chapter 25 The Longer Pilgrimage
Chapter 26 Gratitude
Afterword
About the Author
Heron Dance
PROLOGUE
The circumstances leading up to Arthur Moffatt’s death on the Barrens
were first described by Skip Pessl, the second-in-command of the
expedition, on the television program Bold Journey in 1955.
At about the same time, Skip’s bowman, Bruce LeFavour, told his
interpretation of events in the local newspaper of Amsterdam, New York.
Three years after Art’s death, Sports Illustrated published Art’s diary
with a commentary by Art’s bowman, Joe Lanouette.
Over the last fifty years, wilderness canoeists have concluded that Art
made “every mistake in the book,” but a Buddhist monk, Kama Ananda,
told me he was of a different opinion.
The purpose of art is to unite the particular with the universal, to
elevate the sordid into the sublime, and to bathe the tragic in an ocean
of compassion.

INTRODUCTION
On September 14, 1955, Arthur Moffatt, an experienced wilderness
canoeist, died from exposure on the banks of the Dubawnt River, deep in
the heart of the Barren Grounds of northern Canada. He was thirty-six.
The five younger companions with him just barely survived.
The result of fifty years of reflection, guilt, and gestation, this book
represents the personal story of that unusual wilderness sojourn and that
horrific day by one of its survivors. Intertwined and juxtaposed, it is also
a tale of George Grinnell’s travels through life. Both tales are
unconventional and fascinating.
The 1955 canoe story can be viewed from either of two extreme
perspectives. The first view is the practical and dismissive observation
that as a remote sub-Arctic canoe expedition, it was poorly planned and
irresponsibly executed, and its tragic conclusion was a natural
consequence of that folly. It is, however, a truthful story about a real
canoe trip, with all its associated petty human interactions and
problems. Many of the trip’s problems arise from the gnawing reality of
incessant hunger resulting from an inadequate daily food ration.
The second view takes a much deeper look at this story. Most
individuals who have traveled in the Barrens have been affected by them
in some spiritual manner. My own first canoe venture into the Barrens
was also on the Dubawnt. That was 1969, and due to the late ice that
year and similar food shortages, it was a hard trip. But it affected me
deeply, and I have returned five times since then to do similar crossings
of the Barrens in the same area in an attempt to recapture that same
spiritual experience. It is precisely this vivid spiritual experience that
permeates George’s narrative and makes it a joy to read.
In the words of the author, “The real voyage is traveled within one’s
soul.” And as a spiritual odyssey George’s adventure was a truly
extraordinary passage.
The majority of us live our lives in relative psychological security,
choosing to graze in the center of the pastures of the human asylum. We
leave it to genuine artists and individuals, like George Grinnell, to
explore the unseen and less-traveled edges of our enclosure for us. This
exploration of the human soul is far more difficult than any exploration
of the geographical landscape can possibly be. It is both difficult to
arrive at the edge, the place of enlightenment, of heightened sensation
and perception, and then equally difficult to return and to reattach to
the humdrum everyday world of the center.
Their three-month canoe trip across the uninhabited Barrens takes
George Grinnell to the lip of the abyss that separates sanity from insanity
and life from death. And it is his firsthand exploration of this uncertain
edge that provides the profound insights that make this a most powerful
and unique narrative.
To illustrate with just one such exploration in Death on the Barrens, in
Chapter Sixteen the author describes his experience of a temporary loss
of identity and the associated panic attack. He was in terror that his soul
was being “vaporized by the wilderness”—by an overwhelming
wilderness that lives forever and cares not a whit about a human
individual. The nothingness of the barren-land wilderness was almost
too much for the youthful psyche to bear.
Edward McCourt, in his book The Yukon and the Northwest Territories,
asks the rhetorical question, “Why do men go to the Barren Lands?”
In an eloquent passage, a portion of which follows, he answers, “The
Barren Grounds is a world so vast, so old, so remote from common
experience as to encourage the annihilation of self; its sheer immensity
reduces the individual by comparison to a bubble on the surface of a
great river, a foam-fleck on the ocean; and its great age—its rocks are
the oldest in the world—shrinks his life span to immeasurable
minuteness. It is a world that affords so little evidence of man’s existence
that it tends to suspend the passions we associate most commonly with
him—love, hate, pride, fear. And in the long run it makes what a man
does or does not do seem of little moment, even to himself. It is a world
that by reason of its seeming invulnerability challenges the brash,
optimistic young to attempt great things and assures the old that what
they have failed to do makes no difference.”