Alumni Association Home > Minnesota Magazine > Past Issues > 2007 > January-February 2007

I am haunted by a woman I never met. Jane Ferguson was 50 years old when she drowned in the Kopka River, just a few weeks before I paddled it with a group of friends.

The Kopka skirts the southern edge of Wabakimi Wilderness Park in north-central Ontario, where pristine boreal forest composed of black spruce and carpets of green moss surround the remote river. Jane’s death occurred along a section we call the “Kopka Puddles,” where the river drops more than 300 feet in five breathtaking waterfalls and rapids into deep, cliff-sided pools below, plunging toward Lake Nipigon.

Jane, an Outward Bound instructor, and her husband, Gary, a nature writer, had recently completed a whitewater skills course in Ontario and decided to practice on the Kopka. They started below the first section of falls, which has navigable rapids for those with some whitewater experience. The Kopka then pours into the northeast end of Obonga Lake. Just past the southeast corner, a mile away, the river snakes quietly from the lake, turns a corner, and surges through a narrow rock chasm. You can see the river veering sharply south, but there are no clues, not even an echo of the water’s roar, to warn of the waterfall.

We heard about the accident from the outfitter who gave Jane and Gary river information before they departed. He warned us about the falls several times, pointing out the portage on our map and writing “Do Not Run” next to the river channel. We were starting a 16-day trip through Wabakimi Wilderness, down the Kopka, and into Lake Nipigon. I was preoccupied with Jane’s death for the 14 days it took us to canoe to Obonga Lake and I knew, even then, I would think of her all summer.

I’ve been canoeing all my life, learning to j-stroke and feather when most paddles were taller than me. In the clear waters of northern Minnesota, Mom or Dad instructed me patiently as the boat turned in circles.

I learned to fear water, to understand its power, while guiding four teenage girls on a 30-day wilderness canoe trip in 2003. I made a poor choice of rivers to paddle. The Little Jackfish River was more turbulent than I expected: the rapids large, fast, and overwhelming. We began calling it “the hell-roaring river of scary death,” which may have been bad karma. The three girls in the second canoe flipped just upstream from a large rapid while trying to ferry across the river. Two swam to safety, but the third floated from sight. As I ran down shore with a rescue rope in hand, with what seemed like her life and mine flashing before my eyes, she emerged from the river. No one was hurt, but we were shaken; suddenly life felt precarious.

We kept going, despite having lost our maps, some food, and our passports in the river. Our route took us down the Kopka and into Obonga Lake. As we neared the river’s outlet, we encountered an elderly couple fishing in their motorboat, where the current meandered toward the bend.

“You girls looking for the portage?” they asked.

I didn’t know what we were looking for, but I said sure.

“There’s a big falls downstream, eh? You’ll want to take the portage,” the man said, pointing to the sandy landing where the trail began. Then they motored off.

As the girls and I prepared to portage, the wind began blowing the canoes from our shoulders. The sky began oscillating blue and black clouds, so we gathered in the woods behind a huge, dead tree to wait out the storm. Seconds later, the sound of splintering wood filled the air. We dove from the tree’s path before it crashed down where we’d been standing. One girl sprained her ankle, and because she couldn’t walk, we decided to paddle back across Obonga Lake to a road that crossed the river upstream.

The storm subsided and twilight approached. We needed to hurry. Almost back across Obonga, the light waning to gray, I noticed the girls’ hair standing straight up. I thought, that’s what happens when lightning is going to strike. An intricate web of electricity filled the sky and thunder reverberated down my spine.

I’ve often contemplated the improbability of so many near-death experiences in one trip, and it wasn’t until I returned two years later that I realized the couple’s warning about the falls saved us from another tragedy. I began to wonder if they were angels.

Jane and her husband must have been alone on Obonga Lake that day in May 2005. Maybe they listened to the rolling waves lapping against the shore and the calls of sparrows and wrens, arriving from places south to find mates. I still don’t know how the accident happened; a local outfitter said they couldn’t find the portage so they tried to run the falls and swamped. Another person told us they were just walking along the shore, but Jane slipped and fell in. Maybe they assumed they could pull over but couldn’t stop in time. In May, the water was icy cold and flooding up into the brush and along the tree trunks; a slip of the foot and sudden plunge into cold water would have been paralyzing, the current so powerful it would have overtaken her.

I find myself trying to recreate the exact events, as if then I could avoid the same mistake. Yet I know that how it happened doesn’t matter. Jane took the same risks I did, and the outcome was beyond her control. What I do know is that Gary, having smashed his leg, used his paddle as a crutch to hike through the woods for help; he couldn’t find his wife.

Three weeks later, my friends and I paddled straight to the portage. I noted the dead tree, still lying where it fell two years earlier. The portage leads up a steep hill and down the other side, ending where the falls empties into a pool. Matt and Josh each hoisted a canoe onto their shoulders, disappearing up the hill. John and I shouldered two large portage packs, clutching paddles and fishing poles in our hands. I struggled over tree after fallen tree, first sitting on the log, swinging one leg over at a time, while untangling my fishing poles from the branches. Sometimes the trees were piled so thick, I had to shove the pack through a space between the limbs and then crawl through after it, tearing my pants and scratching my arms. Finally, I reached the bottom. At the water’s edge, Jane’s abandoned canoe floated eerily, as if she could be back for it any time.

The canoe was an Old Town Tripper, good for running whitewater, with its tough plastic hull and shape that allows quick turns. Though half full of rainwater, the canoe appeared unscathed. I knew I was intruding, but I couldn’t help looking in the canoe and picking up their Nalgene bottles, still full of water. I thought of Jane taking a sip before nearing the falls. I opened the dry bag marked with her name and found extra clothes, packed in case the weather changed. There was a pair of binoculars and two netted bug-shirts, just like the one I wore. Part of me thought I would like these things, but I quickly re-packed the bag, pushing it from my mind.

As a favor to the outfitter who needed to retrieve the canoe, we decided to pull it to the nearest road, towing it around the next set of rapids and across Kopka Lake. Before leaving, we paddled around the pool at the bottom of the falls to see if anything else had washed ashore. I believe we were the first people there since Search and Rescue pulled out Jane’s body. We paddled without speaking, all four of us caught by the still air, imagining what had happened.

If I had been there a month earlier, I might have sat basking in the beauty of falling water or taken pictures. Instead I thought of Jane’s life ending in this place, how my own life would go on from there, the rivers I would paddle that she would not, how our two lives had intersected in this vortex from which only I would emerge.

I looked back toward the falls as we paddled away. A bald eagle perched in a dead tree at the bottom of the cascade. There is a native belief that the eagle is closer to the Creator than any other being on Earth, and so the eagle is given the honor of carrying the prayers of people between the World of Earth and the World of the Spirit, where the Creator and ancestors reside.

I remembered eagles circling overhead at a drumming ceremony I attended as a child and at a memorial service held for a friend. Maybe the eagle carried the prayers I thought for Jane that day; maybe it carried Jane’s prayers as she left this world. All of this seems far-fetched now, but that day, I felt close to a woman I never knew and comforted in the presence of a bird. I felt its eyes on my back as I paddled away.

Erin Altemus is studying creative nonfiction in the M.F.A. program at the University of Minnesota. She spends summers canoeing and writing about wilderness rivers in Canada.