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It starts with a river. The Red River plots a wandering course north across the Canadian Prairies, snaking its way through the city of Winnipeg. It curves through the urban landscape, spawning towering glass structures and grand-pillared offices at the point where it meets its tributary, the Assiniboine. The Red is Winnipeg’s lifeblood and the reason for its existence, a highway for the European colonizers who came in search of fur and an ancient gathering place for the Indigenous peoples they traded with. In summer, it hosts fishing trips and dragon boat races. In winter, its frozen waters become skating trails and hockey rinks. Beside its banks are the rail lines that brought Winnipeg its immigrants and wealth, and the suburban gardens where its citizens now relax. But the Red has a darker, more complex role. The river is a drain, a muddy artery clogged with secrets. The homeless build shelters on its banks, waste pollutes its waters, and the desperate choose it as a place to die by suicide, surrendering their lives to its brown, silty depths.
On the morning of August 17, 2014, the Red River was witnessing an unusual clamour of activity as police dive boats motored into position under the metal trusses of the Canadian National Railway bridge. Onlookers gathered to watch as police divers lowered themselves backwards into the water, causing ripples to glint gold in the morning sun. They weren’t looking for the fifteen-year-old Indigenous schoolgirl who had been reported missing the week before. The reality was that in Winnipeg young Indigenous women often disappeared into the underbelly of the city. It rarely warranted such a thorough river trawl. Instead, the boats were searching for the body of Faron Hall, a local hero who had, two days earlier, walked down to the river’s edge, removed all his clothes, placed them neatly in a pile, and waded into the warm, muddy water.
Hall was a homeless alcoholic who had shot to national fame in 2009 after performing two rescues in the river. The first was of a teenage boy who had fallen from a bridge while dodging traffic on a cold May evening. Hall had dived into the icy water and pulled the boy out of the strong current, which was dragging him under. Hall didn’t see anything special in the rescue. He had learned to swim during his childhood on the Dakota Tipi First Nation reserve, and he felt it was his duty to help those who weren’t so able. A few months later, he was called on to use his swimming skills again. After a day spent drinking with friends by the river, a woman had slipped and fallen in. Her boyfriend jumped in to help, and Hall, realizing that they were both in trouble, quickly followed. He managed to save the woman but not the man, a failure that weighed heavily on his conscience. “The Red is an unforgiving river,” he later told a local reporter. “It can take your life and spit you out.” For his actions, Hall was rewarded with a medal and money, some of which he donated to a local homeless shelter. But fame sat uneasily on his shoulders. On one occasion, he was beaten up after being recognized as the “homeless hero.” On another, he faced public shame when the press reported how he had been arrested for drinking and begging. Like many Indigenous men, Hall encountered an excess of violence and sadness in his life. His mother died young, his sister was fatally stabbed, and Hall himself struggled with addiction. He served time for assault and eventually returned to living rough in a makeshift tent on the riverbank, within sight of the sweeping cables of the Esplanade Riel pedestrian bridge.
On the day Hall walked into the Red, it wasn’t clear if he was trying to cool off, attempt a third rescue, or had something more melancholy on his mind. Whatever his motives, he was soon seen flailing in the strong current that swept beneath the bridge. A water taxi sped to the rescue, and the boat pilot tried to grab on to the homeless man. But the pilot suffered a heart attack in the process and was dispatched to a nearby hospital for treatment. By Sunday morning, the dive teams knew they were looking for a body.
At the same time that the divers were combing the riverbed, Alexander Cunningham, the captain of the pleasure cruise boat MS River Rouge, was finishing a late breakfast and returning to where he’d moored his vessel the previous night. Cunningham had taken the boat out on Saturday evening for a birthday party cruise. After motoring up and down the river, he had come to a stop at the wooden structure of the Alexander Docks, a kilometre north of where Hall was last seen. Decades before, river cruising had been a glamorous activity in Winnipeg, attracting tourists from around the province and from the US cities of Grand Forks and Fargo. The River Rouge had once been a fancy boat, its interior decorated with oil paintings, run by a man who liked to be known as the Commodore. It could even boast that Princess Margaret had been a passenger, back in the 1970s, when going on board meant formal dress for women and a jacket and tie for men. Half a dozen similar cruisers plied the river then, some with ornamental paddle wheels harking back to the glory days of the early settlers. But by 2014, only the River Rouge was left, hiring itself out for parties and private events.
Cunningham was in his seventies and had a lifetime of sailing experience. That summer, he had returned to captain the River Rouge after a decade spent piloting boats in the Yukon. He compared coming back to the Red to reuniting with an old friend whose character he understood intimately. Cunningham knew exactly where the Red’s currents ran strongest and how, if they combined with a strong offshore wind, his boat’s five-hundred-tonne bulk would act like a sail and pull him off course. He understood how much the river could fluctuate with the seasons as it crossed the floodplain on which Winnipeg was built. The captain could calculate the precise angle and speed needed to approach each bridge, and knew exactly when to slow down where the water was shallower. He also knew the effect his boat could have on the debris that littered the riverbed. Once, years earlier, when he had turned the River Rouge around quickly at the confluence of the Assiniboine and the Red, a dead body had popped up in the water in front of him. He was pretty sure it was the sucking action of his two propellers that had pulled the corpse up from where it had been stuck on the muddy bottom.
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