Going Home

We come to an area where the entire valley between the coulees is occupied by water.  This must be the start of the lake, but running all the way across is a forest of dead trees whose skeletal remains project up out of the water.  It is a maze.  I use the binoculars to search for a passage through, but nowhere can I see a penetrating band of open water.

            Since this edge of the phantom forest is a sharply defined line, I convince myself that its arcing nature must delineate the riverbank that would have existed before the valley was flooded.  I conclude that by running parallel to the line of trees we will most likely stay in the deep water of a river channel.  Following it should lead to the passage that somewhere must pierce the dead forest.  Perhaps it sneaks past the trees up tight against the coulee on the north side.  The binoculars do not reveal a break in the distance, but since there is no break here near the south shore it seems logical to heed Sherlock’s dictum that when all other possibilities are eliminated then the unlikely has to be true.

            There is one confounding factor, though.  One would expect the current to more or less follow the river channel, but here the surface water is flowing into the dead forest, perpendicular to its definitional arc.  But I can see no break in the trees in this vicinity and cannot believe that the river channel passes through them. 

            This is my line of thought as I ease Kobuk along the edge of the dead forest.  Then we run aground.  Since this has already happened many times, there is an automatic routine that I follow for getting free, and it involves wading around the boat at greater and greater distance to until I find where the water gets deeper.  This time when I hop over the side of Kobuk, however, there is no firm ground under me.  I sink as if stepping into deep water, although it quickly registers that I am in muck, not water.  Since I happen to be holding onto the gunwale as I jump overboard, I am able to keep my grip on the boat and arrest my descent at about chest height.  But for that, the Sakakawea muck might have claimed a careless victim.  I haul myself back aboard, black from the hips down with oozing mud.  My little swim makes a mess of me and the boat, and since it is hard to focus on a problem in a messy environment, I spend the better part of an hour cleaning up.

            So now, here’s the problem.  Kobuk is stuck in muck that is less than a foot below the lake surface.  When I probe down into it with the boathook extended, its full length goes into the stuff with ease.   The current is flowing rapidly towards the nearby trees and a light wind is blowing in the same direction as the current.  When I try the jet drive, it churns out horrible black ooze (and revving up the engine only churns it out faster) but Kobuk doesn’t budge.  When I run the auxiliary, it purrs merrily but fails to move the boat.  The south shore of the lake is distant and the north shore is much more than that.

            With a glass of wine at my side, I sit and think about how to get out of this mess.  It is a benign June day, and pleasantly warm to boot — the best to have come along since putting onto the water in Forsyth.  Fair weather clouds litter the sky and neither house nor fence nor tilled field is visible along the distant shores.  Beyond Kobuk, untrammeled nature unfolds like a vision of pre-Columbian America.