How two adventurers survived a canoe trip gone wrong

I was sitting at my desk in a mirrored office tower south of Montreal when my phone buzzed. It was a text from Angus, my best friend since childhood. Our plan to go canoeing near our hometown of Ottawa was a go.

“Got a brand new canoe for us to use,” he wrote. “What’s your ETA?”

I replied that I’d leave work early to catch a bus to Ottawa that afternoon in July 2017. I’d only be gone for 24 hours, a mini-vacation that seemed impossibly exciting after many months spent close to home with my wife, Cornelia, caring for our two-year-old daughter.

It had been a year since I’d seen Angus. But for years we were inseparable: as kids, then teenagers and into our twenties, we’d been more like brothers than friends. Although we’d seen each other infrequently in recent years—both of us busy with our families and living in different cities—he never felt out of reach.

Angus was waiting in the parking lot of the run-down Ottawa bus station when I stepped off the coach into the hot sun. We hugged and climbed into his oversized blue pickup, punk rock blasting on the stereo.

He drove and we shot the breeze. I felt the mix of comfort and apprehension that develops when you’ve known someone for 30-plus years—comfort at knowing the person in some ways better than you know yourself, apprehension as you wonder if you still have anything in common. But within minutes we had settled into an easy back and forth.

If Angus was the leader of our group as we navigated our teens—the rest of us paying close attention as he defeated bullies and attracted the prettiest girls, inspiring the rest of us to try to be greater versions of ourselves—then maybe I acted as a sort of consigliere, a trusted advisor.

Because I sure as hell wasn’t physically brave, or comfortable with girls, or tough. I can be cautious to the point of timidity, while Angus is quick to take on unknown challenges—often successfully, but sometimes with serious consequences. As best friends, Angus and I were complementary, my cautiousness contrasting with his confidence.

The next morning at the wooden dining table, Angus’s kids quietly ate breakfast as we grown-ups talked about the day to come. “Didn’t you get caught in a storm last year?” his wife, Robin, asked.

I remember that canoe trip well. We’d hit the river with a plan to camp for the night and ended up landing on the sandy beach of a small island surrounded by warm, shallow water, where we pitched a tent and cooked sausages over a fire.

That night, thunder exploded overhead and we worried a tree would fall on our tent. The next morning, I stood on shore with my hood pulled up against the wind, studying the choppy, threatening river. I felt uneasy about heading out, but we had no choice. Soon we were paddling hard, cresting half-metre-high swells with determination, and we made it across without capsizing.

Now Angus and I stood in his garage and packed up our sparse gear: two life jackets, paddles and a small cooler with trail mix, apples and beer. “We’ll only be gone a few hours,” Angus told Robin.

We loaded the 16-foot canoe into the bed of the truck, its aluminium body gleaming under the late morning sun. When we pulled in at the launch spot at Shirleys Bay on the Ottawa River, the beach was deserted. With its wide belly and reinforced bow and stern, the canoe was heavy, and we struggled to carry it to where the river lapped at the sand. Then we stepped in and pushed off into the dark blue water.

Angus and I paddled at a steady pace on the swollen body of the massive river that divides Ontario from Quebec. Two months before, it had reached a record high of just over 60 metres, the highest in nearly 40 years.

A few hundred metres out, in a gentle breeze, we stopped paddling. Angus cracked open a beer and I munched on trail mix. A couple of kilometres ahead, the Quebec side of the Ottawa River curved inward, narrowing the river. Steering us toward the channel between an island and the river’s edge, Angus said from the back seat: “That’s where we’re going—the Deschênes Rapids.”

Twenty minutes later the sun was beating down, the breeze gone. I spotted a sandy beach and suggested we land there to eat and take a short hike to look at the rapids. “Nah,” Angus said. “Let’s just run them and then stop for lunch.”

We kept paddling. Soon I saw a thin white line on the water between the shore and the island—rapids. I said that if we could see the chop from this far away, the rapids might be treacherous and we should check them before venturing on. Angus pushed to keep going, and again I agreed.

Before long we heard a deep rumbling. We let the canoe drift, wondering if we were hearing a highway nearby. Then we realised it was the sound of the rapids. I prickled with fear but we pressed on. A few minutes later we crossed a line of small red buoys that neither of us recognized as our last warning.

As we approached the channel, the rumble grew to a roar. We couldn’t see what lay ahead—the rapids were hidden by a curve in the river—but the powerful current told me they would be more than we bargained for.

“Go for the island!” I shouted.

“Too late,” Angus said as we swept past the island’s rocky tip. Suddenly we were accelerating, the water turning from deep blue to frothy brown. I had been on my knees in the hull and now quickly sat up on the bench. I heard Angus buckle his life jacket behind me.

We paddled over a metre-high swell and came down with a smack as the next, bigger wave sped toward us. We hit it high and at an angle; just as the canoe tipped over, I leaped clear, hit the cold, rushing water and quickly surfaced, my glasses and shoes gone, trying to get my bearings.

I was moving fast down the rapids. The canoe, upside down, slid across the rushing current to my right. Angus took a couple of strokes toward it, couldn’t reach it and ended up behind me. I saw a surge of water ahead, took a deep breath and smashed through.

It was like getting bowled over by a firehose. The current was impossible to resist. Feeling strangely calm, I relaxed my arms, pulled up my knees and let the river carry me. For a moment the sensation was otherworldly—like riding the back of some prehistoric creature. Another whitecap rushed at me and I plowed through it.

After tumbling underwater, I came up, shook the water from my eyes and saw the dam—a six-metre-high wall of concrete and stone a few hundred metres ahead. It was horrifying. I smacked through another rapid as Angus shouted out something unintelligible behind me.

To my left, I could see the battered grey wall of the dam extend about 30 metres out before it crumbled, like a shattered staircase, into the rapids. The river was charging at this barricade as if insulted, blasting the wall and crashing back over itself in a white roil pierced by dozens of boulders. To my right, the wall of the dam met a second perpendicular wall, forming a sickening 90-degree death trap where the water swirled and fumed in a dark vortex.

I was sucked under and felt a moment of genuine serenity in the quiet and the dark, away from the nightmare waiting on the surface. Briefly, I thought: Where’s Angus?

I burst to the surface, the roar of the rapids all around me. On my right, the canoe had somehow kept pace beside me in the narrowing rapids, bumping and scraping its way down rocks toward the dam.

I still felt calm and clear-headed, even as I assessed my chances of death or serious injury as nearly inevitable. I knew I couldn’t fight the river. I couldn’t swim to shore or navigate the minefield of sharp stone ahead, or dodge the wall that my body would likely be pulped against.

As I flew down the rapids, I suddenly saw something more unbelievable than the dam itself: a hole, a portal through the century-old ruin through which I could see light, sky and calm water on the other side.

That’s where I’m going, I thought. My vision was a clear line to the jagged, window-sized hole the river had punched through the concrete. I felt sure that if I didn’t struggle, the river would carry me through it.

Then, as if out of another dimension, I heard Angus’s voice, calm and confident, right behind me. “Hold on to the canoe,” he said.

I’d been trying to stay away from the canoe, fearing that the metal hull would catch a rock and bash me in the head. Now, trusting Angus, I reached across the churning water, grabbed it and managed to drape my arms over, abandoning my original plan.

We careened down the rapids, the canoe and I, Angus somewhere behind, the boom of the water deafening. I put my cheek to the canoe’s upturned belly and closed my eyes. I knew an impact was coming, but I didn’t know when.

And then we hit the dam. The force of the canoe slamming into the wall made me see stars. Still hanging onto the canoe, I waited, my eyes jammed shut for the sound of my bones breaking, but felt nothing. I opened my eyes.

The river had thrown the canoe directly above the hole in the dam I’d been aiming for, half-crushing it at the midpoint. The current held the canoe against the wall as I dangled above the hole where the river was blasting through.

I took a huge breath, let go of the canoe and dropped into the torrent. I was immediately sucked down into the cold undertow and brought my hands to my head to protect myself. I was under for a few long seconds, balled up like a cannonball as the river flushed me through the hole. And suddenly I was bobbing in the middle of the river, the dam now behind me.

I looked around and there, around 20 metres away, was Angus.

“You okay?” he asked.

“Yeah. Nothing broken. You?”

“My feet are wrecked,” he said. “I got dragged across the bottom. I thought I was gonna drown.”

“Jesus. Where were you?”

Angus explained how he had grabbed a strap trailing from my life jacket and held it as we were carried downstream. When the canoe slammed into the dam, the force of the current had sucked him out through the same hole I’d dropped into moments later.

Now, as we treaded water, both of us without our glasses, the current moved us steadily along. We saw a strange shape some distance away and eventually recognised it as the canoe, half-submerged and twisted into scrap metal. I suggested we swim for the far shore, since we had life jackets.

“Too far,” Angus said. “Let’s go for the other shore.” But the remnants of the rapids were between us and land, so I nixed that plan. We agreed to flag down a boat.

By pure luck, a few minutes later a small pleasure craft came into view. We hollered and whistled and the boat, piloted by a Québécois father and his two preteen sons, came over and picked us up. The boys gaped at us, soaked and shivering, as we sat on the deck.

As we chugged in to shore we saw a fleet of fire-rescue trucks surrounded by a crowd of about 30 people. They watched as the firemen wrapped an emergency blanket around Angus and me. Angus asked if we could have separate blankets, and the firemen and crowd laughed.

They checked us over—examining Angus’s feet, which were cut and scraped but not broken—had us sign a few forms and then went to collect the canoe. One older fireman looked at us squarely and said it was a miracle we were alive. “You guys should play the lottery today,” he said soberly. “We fish people out of there all the time.”

Angus and I learned later that the area we had gone through was nicknamed “the coffin.” Between 2007 and 2017, at least six people died or went missing in the rapids around the dam. Dozens more have been rescued near these ruins, which are now slated for demolition due to the danger.

The firemen dragged the canoe in and left it on the shore. It looked like it had been hit by an artillery shell. A fireman phoned Robin and asked her to come pick us up. When she arrived, Angus teared up and they held each other for a long time. The crowd dispersed. We loaded the canoe in the truck and Robin drove us back to their place.

All I wanted to do was get home. We said a hasty goodbye. Angus passed me a wad of cash to pay for my lost glasses, shoes and phone, and suddenly I was sitting on a bench in the bus station, still soaking wet and in an old pair of brown Converse that Angus had given me, in a state of shock. I started to cry, then sob, alone on the bench.

For a week afterwards, I was an emotional wreck. At work, I’d excuse myself from meetings to go outside and weep, shuddering with the memory of the incident. At a café, I saw a dessert with blueberries on it—my daughter’s favourite—and I started crying, thinking about how close I’d come to never seeing her again.

In the end, Angus and I agreed that the incident was, in many ways, his fault. Still, I wasn’t blameless: my ignorance and ill-preparedness definitely didn’t help.

Knowing how close I came to losing my life that day has left me with a kind of quiet in my mind and heart. When I wake up, I say thank you to whatever higher power is out there, grateful for every breath I take.

A couple of years after the incident, my wife gave birth to our second child, a son. As I play with him, watching him throw balls and marvel over leaves, exploring the world, I wonder if he will be as lucky as I’ve been to have a lifelong friendship, where simply being yourself with the other person helps you discover who you are, and who you could be.

Friendships between men are peculiar and mysterious things. In my experience, their workings are unaffected by missed birthdays or months, or even years, of silence. They thrive on laughter and shared undertakings.

Angus and I still hang out a couple of times a year. And somehow, even after everything we went through, it feels just like old times.