Down the river with Peter Heller

Two college friends, Jack and Wynn, paddle their canoe down a remote river in northern Canada, reveling in the wilderness experience before they have to return to classes. Seasoned and skilled, they pick wild berries, eat fish they catch in creeks, and marvel at the wildlife so close at hand--moose, mink, loon, bear. Peter Heller's novel The River begins as an idyllic tale of joyous adventure until it veers suddenly toward Deliverance.

Catastrophe arrives from several angles, first in small dribbles and later like a tsunami battering their fragile craft. The problems start not with a storm--"The two of them loved paddling in a storm"--but when the storm suddenly ends:

Then the wind died all at once as if throttled and in less than half an hour the lake glassed off and they felt suspended in fog. They moved within a moving nimbus in which only a few yards of black water were visible in any direction, and the pale fog drifted in tatters like stubborn smoke. The water whispered along the hull and it had a silver sheen that reminded Wynn of rayon. All of it was dreamlike; he thought of a Poe novel he had read in which the castaways are pulled toward the South Pole and the current they are riding gets warmer and calmer as they go.

The calm is punctured, though, by a scream from shore, and from this point on things get more complicated, and more deadly. Some problems loom large and allow them to prepare, like the waterfalls that force them to portage and the wildfire screaming its threats from a distance, but they're not prepared to deal with the unexpected threats posed by the destruction of their food stores and the presence of men with guns who may or may not wish them ill.

Pressed to their limits, Wynn and Jack rely on instinct and skill to get themselves and an unexpected passenger down the river. Breaking camp with a wildfire approaching, "They took time and care to douse the embers of their fire with water carried in the pot, though they thought, but did not say, that it was a little like stacking a line of sandbags before a tsunami. Well. With everything seeming to fall apart, good habits were one thing to hold on to." They trust in the efficacy of those good habits even while paddling through a burned-over wasteland devoid of berries, game, or fish, stopping at a small creek to fish:  "They figured if they caught any they could cook them over a still-burning stump. It lightened their spirits, enacting this simple routine, the steps of a ritual--piece together the rod, screw tight the locking ring against the reel, string the guides, pick a fly--the steps of a lifelong discipline that promised joy." 

Joy occasionally ripples beneath the surface of this book, but not in this creek, where Jack and Wynn catch nothing. The emotion more frequently roiling the surface is sheer terror. Heller's well-read adventurers evoke Poe, Huck Finn, Thoreau, Eliot's Wasteland, and a number of other literary texts, but it soon becomes clear even to the more optimistic Wynn that they've entered James Dickey territory and their deliverance is not at all assured.

The River held me captive from the moment I opened it, its straightforward but gripping prose carrying me down the river deeper into danger, with occasional side-trips into quiet contemplative eddies. The novel sparks questions about how much we owe to strangers in danger, how far we should go to protect those who may not be worthy of protection, and how we keep our crafts afloat when we're swamped by disaster and grief. I won't tell you how it ends--you'll have to make that journey on your own--but the closing image suggests that the most fragile craft can survive the batterings of catastrophe, but not without a cost.