Walking the Line

“That looks pretty bad,” Colin said, eyeing me dubiously.

My ankles were swollen and discoloured, and the sores on my heels were several layers deep and oozing pus.

“Still,” he continued. “It’ll make a great photo. Can you stand over there for a sec in the light?”

“Bastard.” I complied with a wry grin.

I had to face the fact that walking on in such condition brought with it a high probability of permanent damage. I was also concerned about the increasing likelihood of blood poisoning, given the swelling and discoloration. There was no choice but to seek medical attention.

In an effort to draw off some of the infection, Colin boiled two pails of water, to which we added all of our salt. As darkness fell I soaked my feet and we discussed our plans. If the swelling went down by morning Colin would continue alone. If it was worse, he would wait until I was able to secure a lift out. Before switching off my headlamp, for the first time in all my travels I took the medic alert bracelet from my kit and put it on my wrist. If I became unconscious and unable to speak, I didn’t want a dose of penicillin to finish me off.

By morning I could see my ankle bones again. The infection still raged but seemed to have stabilized. I placed a call on the satellite phone to request a flight out. Through the cutouts he explained that a group of hunters would be flying in to Godlin by helicopter; the pilot would pick me up on the return trip. The only uncertainty was the weather. The mountains were socked in by low clouds. It could be a matter of days or more than a week. There was nothing to do but wait.

I passed the phone and the trip off to Colin, an experienced backcountry solo traveler. After a day of rest he hefted a now much heavier pack containing all of our shared gear. I watched from the doorway as he shrunk into the distance. He would make it to the end of the road and the Mackenzie River a couple weeks later, becoming just the third person in 2006 to succeed in a through hike.

I had six days of food, more if I stretched it. A stream 200 metres away would provide water. There was an extra stove in the cabin and plenty of fuel. I could wait out the weather, at least for a while.

Without a watch the long hours of northern daylight, coupled with the dimness of the Quonset, distorted my temporal senses, an experience also common among prisoners. Robbed of the small routine tasks that shape our lives, time warped and stretched like melting plastic.

I hobbled around the cabin reading the inscriptions on the walls. I dismantled, cleaned and reassembled the stove. I stared at the bin that held my food supply and I tried not to eat it all. When the dry wood eventually ran out, I crawled into my sleeping bag to stay warm. As the wind whistled through gaps in the walls and the pump station creaked and groaned, I dipped into a thick volume of Nietzsche and listened to the lonely soundscapes of The Church on my iPod. Most of the time I stared out the bleary window and I thought about the Canol.

Anyone with experience and strong skills can hike the Canol Heritage Trail. The hiking isn’t technically difficult; navigation is straightforward and the hazards are manageable. Its challenge lies in the mile after relentless mile of uncompromising terrain, in the way that a heavy pack grinds you down day after day, sapping your recovery and steadily depleting your reserves. That and Canol’s extreme isolation are what make it a testing ground.

You come to feel its isolation in a visceral way. The beauty of the North is cold and unforgiving. It isn’t malevolent, simply indifferent. The land is tolerating you and that’s all. You realize how easy it would be to die out there. You feel dwarfed by the land and by time, and you come to understand the folly of the day-to-day with its shallow self-importance. In the bigger picture, your existence doesn’t matter very much, nor do your hopes, dreams or schemes.

The Canol project was an impressive achievement, but doomed to failure. The Japanese threat to the West Coast had diminished even before the pipeline was completed. By then, the cost of oil pumped from Norman Wells was far more than the cost of oil shipped by tanker. In all, the cost of building Canol was more than $300 million in 1940s dollars, and it consumed more than a quarter-million tonnes of equipment.

Canol’s taps were turned off in March 1945, after less than a year of operation. Within a month the workers were gone. Quonsets were abandoned with tables set and beds made. They simply walked away. In the end, Canol amounted to an obscure footnote in wartime history, remembered by few and cared about by fewer.

Still, Canol is more than just a testament to haste and waste. The pipeline was removed long ago, but the Yukon portion of the Canol Road remains open in summer. In 1996, the Northwest Territories designated its portion of the road—abandoned in 1945 and impassible to vehicles—the Canol Heritage Trail.

Thanks to this resurrection, Canol is now a hiking route of legendary proportions: the dream of truly hardcore wilderness enthusiasts, a best-kept secret among the wearers of the boot. Like the original Canol pipeline project, it remains conquered by few.

Three days later the weather broke, and a helicopter shattered the silence of that desolate place as it swooped in to return me to civilization. Beyond the valleys that had hemmed us in lay range after jagged range of mountains, and rivers without name as far as I could see.

We turned away towards the east, and I caught one last glimpse of the Canol Road. It cut a slender thread of history across a wild and otherwise untouched place. It’s already disappearing from the land and from memory, and soon the only proof that it ever existed will be a dusty volume on a library shelf or a yellowed imprint in a fading photograph.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 7th, 2007 at 12:34 pm and is filed under Features. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site. Add to del.icio.us.