A test of love: 3200km in a canoe
Why did a couple with no rowing experience paddle the Yukon River? Hilary reports.
Rose
Ask most couples what they argue about and they will probably say money or whose turn it is to put the bins out.
The only thing that Adam Weymouth and Ulli Mattsson seem to disagree on is whether grizzly bears were the most dangerous thing about canoeing across the Alaskan wilderness.
‘‘Yes,’’ Weymouth says, with all the conviction of a man from Wiltshire.
‘‘No,’’ Mattsson replies at the same time, with the ease of someone who grew up in rural northern Sweden and clearly thinks there are worse things in life than being eyeballed by a bear.
The bear issue arose on a trip they took. In 2013 – two years after they met and at a time when most people might be thinking of settling down – Weymouth and Mattsson spent four months paddling the length of the Yukon River in a 5.5-metre canoe. They had the clothes they stood up in, food, fishing gear and a tent. That was pretty much it.
For weeks on end, it was just the two of them in the middle of absolutely nowhere, paddling down a river for eight hours a day, with thousands of miles of uninhabited Alaskan wilderness stretching out on either side. You might think it would test most relationships to breaking point but it cemented theirs.
‘‘It brought us closer in a very fundamental way,’’ says Mattsson, 40. ‘‘Sharing every moment and building the trust that you need to make decisions and stay safe. For weeks, there’d be no communication with anything or anyone apart from nature and the weather. When you do a trip like this, either it doesn’t work or you become stronger.’’
The aim of the trip was for Weymouth, 34, to write a book about the salmon of the Yukon and the people who earn their living from these fish. He had been fascinated by the river since he visited Alaska in 2013.
At nearly 3200km, and stretching north from British Columbia across Alaska to the Bering Sea, the Yukon is the longest salmon run in the world but the numbers of fish returning to their spawning ground are showing a catastrophic decline.
Thanks to global warming, commercial fishing to meet worldwide demand for cheap salmon and a proliferation of sea lice from fish farms that can kill young, wild salmon, Yukon’s examples weigh only about 9kg, whereas 36kg used to be common.
Part memoir, part natural history, part reportage, the book is a fishy version of John LewisStempel’s Meadowland, with a few fascinating facts thrown in. Did you know that salmon can distinguish a single drop of water from their birthing location among two million gallons of seawater?
‘‘We made the same journey as the salmon,’’ says Weymouth. ‘‘We wanted to have a conversation about how you can’t take culture and the decline in salmon numbers in isolation. These things are all connected.’’
It’s difficult to comprehend the vastness of where they were. The distance they paddled is the same as from London to Athens – but empty. Getting from one tiny village to the next could take a week or more of paddling. In the absence of paved roads, the main highway is the Yukon; motorboats in the summer, snowmobiles when it freezes in winter, and a canoe for Weymouth and Mattsson.
You might think, then, that they would be experienced canoeists. Alas not. They had barely even sat in a canoe. ‘‘We had to learn quite quickly,’’ Weymouth concedes.
He started his trip in May, when the river had thawed, with a local wilderness expert for company.
Mattsson joined him six weeks later, upon finishing a master’s degree in osteopathy. ‘‘Of course, we argued but not loads. In the beginning, before we were used to the pace and how fast the river was flowing, it was a very stressful situation. You have to not think about disasters.’’
And bears? The consensus if you meet a grizzly is that you back away slowly, don’t make eye contact and don’t scream.
What did they do? ‘‘We screamed and yelled and put our hands in the air and waved them about,’’ says Weymouth. ‘‘But it felt like the right thing to do, and it turned tail and fled.
‘‘A lot of my conceptions about the romance of the wilderness – me forging a path through it, the whiteadventurer thing – kind of fell away. That’s a fantasy. The whole story of our journey is about community and relying on other people. It’s about interdependence.’’
‘‘In the beginning, before we were used to the pace and how fast the river was flowing, it was a very stressful situation.’’ Ulli Mattsson