Disaster on the River

I was sitting at my desk when my phone buzzed. It was a text from Angus Menzies, my best friend since childhood. Our plan to go canoeing near our hometown of Ottawa, Ontario, was a go.

“Got a brand-new canoe for us to use,” he wrote. “What’s your ETA?”

I replied that I’d leave work early to catch a bus to Ottawa that afternoon in July 2017. As I had arranged with my wife, Cornelia Mars, I would only be gone for 24 hours, a mini-vacation that seemed impossibly exciting after many months spent close to home helping care for our 2-year-old daughter.

I felt invigorated on the Greyhound bus a couple of hours later as it rumbled steadily onward, the forest a blur outside the window. It had been a year since I’d seen Angus. But as kids, then teenagers and into our 20s, we were inseparable, more like brothers than friends. Although we’d seen each other infrequently in recent years—both of us busy with our families and living in different cities—he never felt out of reach.

Angus was waiting in the parking lot of the run-down Ottawa bus station when I stepped off the bus into the hot sun. We hugged and climbed into his blue pickup, punk rock blasting. He drove and we shot the breeze. I felt the mix of comfort and apprehension that develops when you’ve known someone for 30-plus years—comfort at knowing the person in some ways better than you know yourself, apprehension as you wonder if you still have anything in common. But within minutes we had settled into an easy back and forth.

If Angus was the leader of our group of friends as we navigated our teens—the rest of us paying close attention as he defeated bullies and attracted the prettiest girls, inspiring the rest of us to try to be greater versions of ourselves—then maybe I acted as a sort of consigliere, a trusted adviser.

Because I sure wasn’t physically brave, or comfortable with girls, or tough. I can be cautious to the point of timidity, while Angus is quick to take on unknown challenges, often successfully, but sometimes with serious consequences. As best friends, Angus and I were complementary, my cautiousness contrasting with his confidence.

The next morning, Angus’s kids quietly ate breakfast as we grown-ups talked about the day to come.

“Didn’t you get caught in a storm last year?” his wife, Robin MacLellan, asked.

I remember that canoe trip well. We’d hit the river with a plan to camp for the night but without actually knowing where that would be. This was typical: Whenever we’d hang out, we would drum up some sort of adventure, maybe to prove that we hadn’t yet become old geezers incapable of spontaneity or handling adversity. We ended up landing on the sandy beach of a small island, where we pitched a tent and cooked sausages over a fire.

That night, it rained ferociously, thunder exploded overhead and we worried a tree would fall on our tent. The next morning, I stood on shore with my hood pulled up against the wind, studying the choppy, threatening river. I felt uneasy about the idea of heading out, but we had no choice. Soon we were paddling hard, cresting 2-foot-high swells with determination, and we made it across without capsizing.

Now Angus and I stood in his garage and packed up our sparse gear: paddles, two life jackets and a small cooler with trail mix, apples and beer.

“We’ll only be gone a few hours,” Angus told Robin.

We loaded the 16-foot canoe into the bed of the truck, its aluminum body gleaming under the late morning sun. When we pulled in at the launch spot at Shirleys Bay on the Ottawa River, the beach was deserted. With its wide belly and reinforced bow and stern, the canoe was heavy, and we struggled to carry it to where the river lapped at the sand. Then we stepped in and pushed off into the dark blue water.

Angus and I paddled at a steady pace on the swollen body of the massive river. Two months before, it had reached a record high of around 200 feet, the highest in nearly 40 years.

A few hundred yards out, in a gentle breeze, we stopped paddling. Angus cracked a Pabst Blue Ribbon and I munched on trail mix. A kilometre or so ahead, the shore curved inwards, narrowing the river. There, just offshore, was a small island. Steering us toward the channel between the island and the river’s edge, Angus said from the backseat: “That’s where we’re going—the Deschênes Rapids.”

Twenty minutes later the sun was beating down, the breeze gone. I spotted a sandy beach and suggested we land there to eat and take a short hike to look at the rapids.

“Nah,” said Angus. “Let’s just run them and then stop for lunch.”

We kept paddling. Soon I saw a thin white line on the water between the shore and the island—rapids. I said that if we could see the chop from this far away, the rapids might be treacherous and we should check them before venturing on. Angus pushed to keep going, and again I agreed.

Before long we heard a deep rumbling. It was the sound of the rapids.

I prickled with fear, but we pressed on. A few minutes later, we crossed a line of small red buoys that neither of us recognized as our last warning.

As we approached the channel, the rumble grew to a roar. We couldn’t see where the rapids were leading, since the river curved ahead, but the powerful current told me they would be more than we bargained for.

“Go for the island!” I shouted.

“Too late,” said Angus as we swept past its rocky tip. Suddenly we were accelerating, the water turning from deep blue to frothy brown. I had been on my knees in the hull and now quickly sat up on the bench.

We paddled over a 3-foot swell and came down with a smack as a bigger wave sped toward us. We hit it high and at an angle. As the canoe tipped over, I leaped clear, hitting the cold, rushing water. I quickly surfaced, my glasses and shoes gone, trying to get my bearings.I was moving fast down the rapids. The canoe, upside down, slid across the rushing current to my right. Angus took a couple of strokes toward it, couldn’t reach it and ended up behind me. I saw a surge of water ahead, took a deep breath and smashed through.

It was like getting bowled over by a fire hose. The current was impossible to resist. Feeling strangely calm, I relaxed my arms, pulled up my knees and let the river carry me. For a moment the sensation was otherworldly—like riding the back of some prehistoric creature. Another whitecap rushed at me and I ploughed through it.

After tumbling underwater I came up, shook the water from my eyes and saw the dam—a 20-foot-high wall of concrete and stone a few hundred yards ahead. I smashed through another rapid as Angus shouted something unintelligible behind me.

To my left, I could see the battered grey wall of the dam extending about 100 feet out before it crumbled, like a shattered staircase, into the rapids. The river was charging at this barricade as if insulted, blasting the wall and crashing back over itself in a white roil pierced by dozens of boulders. To my right, the wall of the dam met a second perpendicular wall, forming a sickening 90-degree deathtrap where the water swirled and fumed in a dark vortex.

I was sucked under and felt a moment of genuine serenity in the quiet and the dark, away from the nightmare waiting on the surface. Briefly, I thought, Where’s Angus?

I burst to the surface, the roar of the rapids all around me. On my right, the canoe had somehow kept pace beside me, bumping and scraping its way down rocks toward the dam.I still felt calm and clearheaded, even as I assessed my chances of death or serious injury as nearly inevitable.

I knew I couldn’t fight the river. I couldn’t swim to shore, or navigate the minefield of sharp stone ahead, or dodge the wall that my body would likely be pulped against.

As I flew down the rapids, I suddenly saw something more unbelievable than the dam itself: a hole, a portal through the century-old ruin through which I could see light, sky and calm water on the other side. That’s where I’m going, I thought.

My vision was a clear line to the jagged, window-size hole the river had punched through the concrete. I felt sure that if I didn’t struggle, the river would carry me through it.

Then, as if out of another dimension, I heard Angus’s voice, calm and confident, right behind me. “Hold on to the canoe,” he said.

I’d been trying to stay away from the canoe, fearing that the metal hull would catch a rock and bash me in the head. Now, trusting Angus, I reached across the churning water, grabbed the canoe and managed to drape my arms over it.

We careened down the rapids, the canoe and I, Angus somewhere behind, the boom of the water deafening. I put my cheek to the canoe’s upturned belly and closed my eyes. I knew an impact was coming, but I didn’t know when. And then we hit the dam.

The force of the canoe slamming into the wall made me see stars. Still hanging on to that canoe, I waited with my eyes jammed shut for the sound of my bones breaking, but felt nothing. I opened my eyes.

The river had thrown the canoe directly above the hole in the dam I’d been aiming for, half crushing it at the midpoint. The current held the canoe against the wall as I dangled a couple of feet above the hole where the river was blasting through.

I took a huge breath, let go of the canoe and dropped into the torrent. Immediately, I was sucked down into the cold undertow. I brought my hands to my head to protect myself. I was under for a few long seconds, balled up like a cannonball as the river flushed me through the hole. And suddenly I was bobbing in the middle of the river, the dam now behind me.

I looked around and there, 60 feet away, was Angus.

“You OK?” he asked.

“Yeah. Nothing broken. You?”

“My feet are wrecked,” he said. “I got dragged across the bottom. I thought I was gonna drown.”

“Where were you?”

Angus explained how he had grabbed a strap trailing from my life jacket and held it as we were carried downstream. When the canoe slammed into the dam, the force of the current had sucked him out through the same hole I’d dropped into moments later.

Now, as we treaded water, both of us without our glasses, the current moved us steadily along. We saw a strange shape some distance away and eventually recognized it as the canoe, half submerged and twisted into scrap metal. I suggested we swim for the far shore, since we had life jackets.

“Too far,” Angus said. “Let’s go for the other shore.” But remnants of the rapids were between us and land, so we agreed to flag down a boat.

By pure luck, a few minutes later a small pleasure craft came into view. We hollered and whistled, and the boat, piloted by a father and his two preteen sons, came over and picked us up. The boys gaped at us as we sat on the deck, soaked and shivering.

As we chugged in to shore we saw a fleet of fire rescue trucks surrounded by a crowd of about 30 people. They watched as the firefighters wrapped an emergency blanket around Angus and me. They checked us over—examining Angus’s feet, which were cut and scraped but not broken. One older fireman said it was a miracle we were alive.

“You guys should play the lottery today,” he said soberly. “We fish people out of there all the time.”

Angus and I learnt later that the area we had gone through was nicknamed The Coffin. Between 2007 and 2017, at least six people died or went missing in the rapids around the dam. Dozens more have been rescued.

The firefighters dragged the canoe in. It looked as if it had been hit by an artillery shell. A firefighter phoned Robin and asked her to come pick us up. When she arrived, Angus teared up and they held each other for a long time. We loaded the canoe in the truck and Robin drove us back to their place.

The brand-new canoe, after the crash. Photo: Courtesy of Nathan Munn

All I wanted to do was get home. We said a hasty goodbye. Angus passed me a wad of cash to pay for my lost glasses, shoes and phone, and suddenly I was sitting on a bench in the bus station, still soaking wet and in an old pair of brown Converse sneakers that Angus had given me, in a state of shock. I started to cry, then sob, alone on the bench.

For a week afterward, I was a wreck. At work, I’d have to excuse myself from meetings to go outside and weep, shuddering with the memory of the incident. At a cafe, I saw a dessert with blueberries on it—my daughter’s favourite—and I started crying, thinking about how close I’d come to never seeing her again.

A couple of years later, my wife gave birth to our second child, a son. As I play with him, watching him marvel over leaves and explore the world, I wonder if he will be as lucky as I’ve been to have a lifelong friendship, where simply being yourself with the other person helps you discover who you are, and who you could be.

Friendships between men are peculiar and mysterious things. In my experience, their workings are unaffected by missed birthdays, or months, and even years, of silence. They thrive on laughter and shared undertakings.

Angus and I still hang out a couple of times a year. And somehow, even after everything we went through—or maybe because of everything we went through—it feels just like old times.

© 2021, Nathan Munn. From Tethered Together, Maisonneuve (26 January 2021), maisonneuve.org