There’s a retired obstetrician, who might seem out of place in a group of geriatric men; but he specialized in difficult births, which present a physician with problems that are going to be solved one way or another, whether he intervenes or not. He intervenes. On top of that, he fishes the way most of us breathe, and afterward puts his surgeon’s fingers to filleting, breading, and frying his catch. We’ve traveled many hundreds of miles together over the years, on skis, on foot, and in canoes. But never in the same canoe – which will mean something only to other canoeists.

There’s an emergency medicine physician, the youngest of us. He brings the first aid kit, and knows what’s in it and how to use it. Triage is his strong suit. When I show him a bleeding boo-boo, he looks at me scornfully, and I abashedly retreat. Unlike some of the rest of us, he’s in great shape and can still squat; so he’s usually involved in stirring the pot on the stove. I count on his conservative, reflective approach to decisions. Once when I asked him to take his canoe (and his paddling partner) through a tricky rapid to see how it went, he demurred. We portaged instead, and it turned out he was right: There was a big, deadly rock right in the middle of the worst spot.

There’s a multi-careered retired nuclear submarine officer (read techie), investment banker, and business ethics professor who always can be relied on to get discussions going around the circle as we sit on the ground to dine and swat mosquitoes. He has the knack of tucking in his chin, lowering his head, and enduring when the going gets rough and the conditions terrible. He can cast a big streamer fly half a mile; I have several pictures of him with trout or char as long as his arm.

There’s an old prep school classmate, so much a Vermonter that if you punctured him, he’d bleed maple syrup. He went to UVM for agriculture, but entered the army instead, did two tours in Vietnam specializing in logistics, and retired as a lieutenant colonel. On a trip, he knows where everything important is located – can opener, stove funnel, cooking glove, duct tape. And he, too, can tuck his head down and go for it when it’s a long way away and upwind. He’s strong as a bull; often has he helped me ashore till I got my arthritic legs going again.

There’s a retired university properties manager who can fix almost anything. He’s a private pilot and can actually explain celestial navigation so that even I can almost understand it. Between us, and for different reasons (his technical, mine personal) we’ve decided that Robert Peary never made it to the North Pole. On our last trip, he and I were the “old boat,” and during days of heavy headwinds we reveled in showing the kids of merely 70 how paddling is supposed to be done. He also saved our bacon at the foot of a steep, frothy fall by backpaddling at just the right moment.

Last, there’s me, a retired schoolteacher, Outward Bound instructor, and remodeling contractor. I don’t do anything really well, and am eking out my declining years telling stories in as many media as will have me. I’ve been organizing these Great Northern canoe trips – one every two years – since 1989, and the end is in sight. But what a joy it’s been to arrange them!

The biggest change in twenty years has been in communications. In 1989 all the planning and arrangements were done by phone and fax machine. I got to listen to a whole slew of great Canadian accents, from the Anglo “eh?” to the Inuit mumble, and I met some wonderful people. Chief among them remains Larry Whittaker, who picked us up at the mouth of our 1991 river in his 47-foot schooner and carried us back to his home and the airport in Coppermine.

Since then, Coppermine has reverted to its original name of Kugluktuk, everybody’s got wireless e-mail, and the schooner’s been sold. Now Larry flits about in a two-seat ultralight, and has just bought a used Piper two-seater on floats. We’ll be an easy flight from Kugluktuk on our coming trip, and expect to entertain him and his wife, Helen, when they fly out to visit.

There were at least a dozen ducks to line up before the trip: a chartered van to and from Trudeau Airport (we don’t drive anymore because of an epidemic of thefts of US-registered vehicles in Montreal), plane tickets, canoe rental, a charter flight on floats to the river, satellite phone rental (I call home each Sunday morning to exchange news, if any), and little things like cooking stove fuel, which you can’t take with you on scheduled flights.

Meanwhile, Mother’s putting together her Tundra Treats, packaged and mostly freeze-dried meals; the docs are organizing the cooking gear and maps and testing the new stove; the professor is stashing a large flask of MacAllan in his dry bag and feeding way points into his GPS; the colonel has made a pound of his Grade A Fancy maple sugar; and the celestial navigator is, I hope, getting ready for the upwind slogs and the big rapids of the Coppermine.

Meanwhile, I’m wondering what will go wrong: Which of the ducks I’ve so carefully lined up will suddenly take wing? And how will we cope? We always have. If I were into chewing my fingernails, that’s what I’d be doing. But upon reflection, I hope I’d remember that it’s the very uncertainty of wilderness paddling north of the trees and the Arctic Circle – heck, anywhere, for that matter – that makes the adventure so irresistibly attractive.