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José’s brother emerged from the back seat of the Escalade and circled the scene. José hadn’t let him in on our plan. All D knew was that we were “going fishing in Canada for a few days.” That bit of knowledge, combined with the fact that he had recently watched Brokeback Mountain, had D thinking, as José would later put it, “that we were up to some real homo shit.”

D was a scary character, but I wasn’t scared. Nor was I fearful of any element of the trip. Not the deep wilderness navigation nor the murderous whitewater, not the risky lake crossings nor the polar bears, nor the possibility of medical emergencies and starvation. I wanted to be swallowed by the wide green landscape, to escape my suffocating sadness and despair.

Apart from singing along with rap lyrics, José didn’t say a word for a couple hours after we left Saint Paul. He lounged on the back bench of Kocher’s van, hidden behind two pairs of glasses—the new eyeglasses from America’s Best, covered by the stunner shades—moving and grooving to the thump of his headphones.