Wireless Communication in the Wilderness

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Outside Magazine March 2004

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Can You Hear Me Now? (Cont.)

THROUGHOUT the evening and most of the next morning, we portage an unrunnable section of the river, then load up and paddle on in a cold, steady rain. Occasionally, I look down and see the river rocks ten feet beneath the canoe, sliding silently by in their green-and-ocher world, mottled by the elongated shapes of grayling and char. When I look up, the world above seems just as liquid, the sodden shapes of caribou moving on the banks, the eagles flapping silently across the river, buoyant and drifting as fish.

Wind, rain, and low clouds sweep across the river but part by midmorning to reveal a pale Arctic sky. On cue, the sun emerges and we pull onto a cobbled beach at a place called Coal Creek, our alternate pickup site. We've been paddling hard for 13 days, stalled by storms for three of them, and have run out of time. As the crow flies, we're only 22 miles from the ocean, but we'd have to paddle another 97 miles of the Horton to get there. Our time is up, our trip at its end. We step ashore and shake hands.

A large moose antler lies at our feet, green with moss. Len suggests that I keep it as a memento. But I return it to the sand, and as I stare at it, wishing that the trip weren't over, Len pulls out his sat phone and calls his law office. His secretary briefs him on clients, then he chats with his partner, telling him that we've arrived at Coal Creek and how useful the borrowed GPS has been. I walk down the beach and look north.

When Len's done, we call the air-taxi service. Once, a few years ago, you waited until the pilot showed up. Now you call and say, "Hey, we're here, come get us." But this time it doesn't shake out quite that way. Another storm rolls in, the pilot can't take off, and Len calls home, telling his family about the delay. He then suggests I call my girlfriend, reminding me that she knows the day we're supposed to come out, and she'll worry. I also know that she'll call Anne and will then wonder why I was so thoughtless, or obdurate, that I didn't call her.

I walk down the beach, then dial her up. The connection is so clear, she could be down the block. I say, "I can smell the Arctic Ocean." She says, "It's warm here." Silence. Even though I use a computer, the Internet, and a cell phone daily, this seems to be crossing a boundary I'm unprepared to face. She senses my uneasiness and says, "Call me from a land line."

I collapse the antenna and walk back along the cobbles, thinking again of Sir John Franklin, who overwintered in this area and received mail eight months after it left England. Nearly a century later, sledding down the Horton, Vilhjalmur Stefansson learned of the Titanic's sinking a full three months and ten days after the ocean liner had foundered in the North Atlantic. Now, in the early 2000s, the lag time between the occurrence of a newsworthy event and one's hearing of it has shrunk to the thinnest of margins. In fact, even here on the Horton, the blessing of uncluttered mental space is no longer a function of remoteness but of desire: to bring the sat phone or to leave it. To use it or to keep it in the emergency pouch. To stay connected or to cut the cord.

Were it up to me, I'd leave it at home. The put-in on a river, the start of a climb, are doors to another universe, where the silence makes you think about why noise has become such a necessary part of our lives. Wearing the silence, you come back scrubbed and radiant. Or, with a certain mixture of bad luck and misjudgment, you don't come back at all. Before the sat phone, it was always so—no rescue, no farewell except the one you said upon departing.

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