Extreme Frontiers: Racing Across Canada from Newfoundland to the Rockies (2 page)

I was so excited that I was on deck in a flash, hanging on to a chain to keep from toppling overboard. I’ve seen glaciers
when I’ve been skiing, and I’ve seen ice hanging off mountains, but encountering this enormous block of ice in the open sea
was different. I was amazed to see that it was actually a very pale blue, not white at all. Running from the top of the iceberg
to the bottom was a strip of deeper blue, as if someone had hopped over there and painted a stripe on it. In the wheelhouse,
Russ asked Dean about it. ‘It’s got to be a crack, hasn’t it?’ he said.

‘Yep, pretty much,’ the skipper told him. ‘Different parts of the ice are at different temperatures, and the result is that
deep blue fissure you can see right there.’

Only a small portion of the berg was showing, of course: it’s easy to forget that only a tiny section actually breaks the
surface. Dean reckoned that this one was sitting in about twenty fathoms of water; with six feet to a fathom, that was at
least one
hundred and twenty feet deep. It was mind-blowing. I mean, we’d seen some sights on our travels, but this was just awesome.
On an otherwise grey day it was like a sculpture, and as we came around the tip we could see that it actually broke the surface
in two places, with a sweeping dip between them that formed a foaming bay of water right in the middle. The water around the
base of the berg was lighter than the rest of the sea as it reflected the depth of the ice.

‘Look at the colours!’ Even Dean was impressed, and he lived here and saw icebergs all the time. ‘What a spot to go through,
right there.’

‘Hey, Charley,’ Russ called, laughing. ‘Dean’s going to drive through the gap.’

‘Yeah, right,’ I said, gazing at the ice just below the surface, ‘and I’m going to get in the lifeboat.’

From the shore it had appeared just like any other iceberg, I suppose, but as we got close, it was like gazing on the horns
of some mythical leviathan; some giant of the deep.

‘All right, Dean,’ Russ called. ‘Take us in close, lad. We need some ice for our rum and Coke tonight.’

He was serious. Moments later we were both on deck and Russ was demanding a hammer. Eagle-eyed, he’d spotted where some of
the ice had broken away, and was determined to chill his drink with North Atlantic iceberg. Sweat beading his brow, the skipper
eased us in closer and closer. Russ got behind me, gripping the chain overhead, and told me to lean out; he’d make sure I
didn’t fall.

I don’t even
like
rum and Coke, I thought to myself. I’d prefer a nice glass of Sancerre, and you don’t need ice for Sancerre. But there I
was, leaning over the rail, clutching the hand axe Dave had just given me.

We edged close to where one section of the ice formed a gentle slope that might be accessible – the water below us was white
now, and we could see ice perilously close to the hull. I had one foot over the side, axe in hand, with Russ holding me by
the scruff of the neck. I was almost there, about to slice off a chunk, when the boat drifted away; Dean couldn’t hold the
position.

We weren’t about to give up now, though. Straddling the rail again, I told Russ to grab a boathook as a chunk that had already
broken off came floating by. I was scrabbling with the axe, Dave had another hook, and between us we tried to land the floater
like we would a gaffed fish. Dumping the axe, I found another boathook, and at last we had it! Dave on one end, me on the
other – I was all but over the side. Inch by inch we lifted the chunk of ice, then the hooks slipped and we lost it again
to the sea.

‘Have you got a net?’ Russ was desperate now, and I was as determined to land the thing as he was. Dean backed the boat up
and we were in business again, Dave and I with boathooks while Russ leaned over and hacked off a chunk with the axe. He lost
it, couldn’t grab it. ‘It’s going under the boat! It’s going under the boat!’ he was yelling at the top of his voice, and
I imagined Roy Scheider in his rubbers with the great white shark diving beneath the hull.

God knows what we looked like. All you could see were two pairs of legs and the soles of our feet as we scrabbled with our
prey while the fishermen looked on. Eventually Dean had had enough.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘Get out of the way! Out of the way, you landlubbers.’ He found a grey plastic fish-packing pallet,
and with Dave on the hook they heaved a hunk of broken iceberg into the pallet and finally hauled it on deck.

We were soaking. Russ was clapping his hands and hopping from one foot to the other, while Dean just stood there shaking his
head. ‘Crazy people do crazy things,’ he said. ‘And you two are crazy for sure.’

On the way back, Dean and Dave told us a terrifying story. In the winter of 2007, while hunting seals, they became stuck in
eighty miles of drifting pack ice along with about a hundred other boats. It was like nothing any of them had ever experienced
before. Their boat was one of six that was actually lifted out of the water to rest on an ice pan. The Canadian government
sent every breaker at its disposal to the area and seventy people were airlifted out by helicopter, but the crew of the
Patey
would not leave the boat. She was their livelihood and worth a couple of hundred thousand dollars; they couldn’t just abandon
her to chance. They showed us a diary they kept while they were out there. ‘Day thirty-eight,’ Russ read. ‘Still stuck in
the ice and morale is low. Perry is frying ham for breakfast; the coastguard is coming for us. We’re still stuck in ice. We’re
still stuck in ice.’

He went on to read an entry Dean had written a little later. ‘Still stuck. I spoke to Megan today. After I got off the phone
from her she made me cry.’ Megan was his daughter, and for a moment we all felt a little of his anguish. Then Russ read on.
‘Perry is still shooting shit, though. He’s full of it.’

Dean told us that the diary had been published in the magazine
The National Fisherman
and people all around the world had been able to read it.

‘We were OK, I suppose,’ he said. ‘We had eight hundred gallons of fuel on board, so we had plenty of heat, and there
was enough food; the only thing we didn’t have plenty of was sex!’

There had been five men on the boat, one of them always on watch while the others slept in a tiny cabin right in the prow
with the bunks in two tiers, one edge all but touching the bunk on the other side. I could hardly imagine it. It must’ve been
like being in prison, only there were no bars to keep them there; just a sheet of ice.

Back on shore we said our goodbyes. Meeting Dean and Dave had been a real treat and exactly what I’d been hoping for from
this trip. If all my experiences were going to be as rewarding, then it was going to be one hell of a trip.

L
eaving the boat, we headed into St Anthony in search of a drink to put our 20,000-year-old ice in, some food and perhaps some
Newfoundland craic as well. As we made our way downtown, we came across a good old-fashioned Irish bar called O’Reilly’s.
I’ve mentioned the accent already – there really is a lot of Irish in it, which makes this home from home for a Wicklow boy
like me. Inside the bar a guy was performing some weird kind of song. Or at least I think that’s what it was. Dressed in fisherman’s
oilskins, he was dancing around and slapping his palm with a canoe paddle, giving up a kind of staccato rap while the crowd
clapped along.

After another verse or two the singer stopped and called across the floor to a member of the audience. ‘Feller,’ he said,
‘what’s your name?’

‘Greg,’ replied a young guy with a pint of Guinness in front of him.

‘All right, Greg. Where are you from?’

‘Ottawa.’

‘Ah.’ The singer cocked an eyebrow. ‘Down from the ivory tower then, are you?’

That must have been an in-joke, because suddenly everyone except us was laughing. Then, maybe just because we weren’t laughing,
the singer turned his beady eye on me. ‘And what’s your name, feller?’

‘Charley,’ I said, on my feet now and ready for whatever he was going to toss my way.

‘And Charley, where are you from?’

‘London.’

‘Oh,’ he said, putting on a mock-cockney accent now. ‘We’ve got one from across the pond, we do.’

He was a screecher. That’s what they call the sort of half-chant, half-song he’d been performing. As we sat at the bar, he
explained that it was a tradition that had been going on among fishing communities for generations – I guess you could call
it a sort of shanty. He told me that years ago, his father had entered a talent contest but hadn’t known what to perform so
had asked his own father. The old man, who had been fishing the Labrador coast all his life, had spoken of this sailing tradition.
This guy had listened to his father and taken up the screech himself.

There was more to it than just the verse, though; in the bar he’d pick on a newcomer and slap them across the back of the
head to see if they had the mettle to be a ‘Newfie’. Part of the deal was kissing a cod. Yeah, I know, a cod – and I was the
one who had to kiss it, puckering up my lips and planting a smacker right on its greasy mouth. The screecher told me that
in the old days the fishermen traded fish for rum with the Jamaicans, so after the fish-kissing the newcomer had to down a
shot. Soon, suitably slapped and fish-kissed and having downed the rum in
one, I found myself on my knees with an oilskin hat on my head being dubbed (against my host’s better judgement) an honorary
Newfie.

We spent the night in St Anthony, bedding down in a B&B while rain swept the coast. I could easily imagine this landscape
as Leif Erikson might have seen it, all those centuries ago. And the next morning, with the wind howling across the tussocks
of grass, we made our way to the Viking settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows in the bitter cold. I couldn’t quite get my head
around how cold it actually was here, given the time of year. God knows what it must be like in winter. The remains of the
settlement were discovered in 1960 and the site proved that Europeans had been on the North American continent long before
Christopher Columbus. Since then it has been rebuilt to look exactly as it would have done when the Vikings were here; it’s
a snapshot of how they lived in the days of Leif Erikson.

My guide was a local historian, Agill, who was dressed like a Viking in buckskin trousers and moccasin-type boots tied with
strips of rawhide. Seated by a traditional peat fire in the massive main hut, I asked him what it would’ve been like back
in the eleventh century. There’s one large building in the reconstructed settlement, together with a couple of smaller ones.
Each hut was made exactly as it would have been a thousand years ago, with a post-and-reed framework and peat-brick walls.
The walls are two metres thick to keep out the cold. It would have been warm and dry, if a little smoky from the fires they
kept burning. Agill reckoned these buildings would have lasted for about twenty years. We were looking out on another peat-walled
hut that was open on one side, with a turf roof and a kind
of stone anvil sited in the entrance. Beyond that the land was desolate – and I mean to the point of being quite eerie – and
he told me he thought this was the same view they would have had a thousand years previously. The hut was littered with Viking
memorabilia – in one corner was a wooden chest, in another a bunch of shields, swords and helmets.

This place had been a jumping-off point from where the Vikings sailed south or west or back the way they had come. Agill told
us that they didn’t sail by the stars; during Greenland’s summer it is daylight all the time and there are no stars to guide
the way. So they navigated by always keeping land in sight, island to island, iceberg to iceberg, until finally they bumped
up against their destination.

It was in this village that iron was first smelted on the American continent. There is a reconstructed smithy where a ground-level
double bellows contraption heats a peat fire, which smoulders until it reaches the required temperature. I watched as a blacksmith
worked away at the bellows, pumping each side in turn until the fire was hot enough for the iron to be shaped. The guy told
me that smelting iron was a two-man operation. If he’d been the blacksmith to the real settlement, his son would be working
with him. But he didn’t have a son as apprentice; he had a Charley instead.

He soon had me hunkered down, working each massive bellow individually while he piled coals on the already red-hot flames
with his bare hands. Of course I got it wrong. There I was, feeling like Gandalf in a hobbit hole, when he told me I wasn’t
consistent with my strokes. Apparently I was pausing between them instead of maintaining a perfect one-two rhythm. It was
important; a pause meant the bellows were blowing in a sort of puff-puff, if you see what I mean. What you need is a
continuous stream of air with no gap, to make sure the temperature remains constant.

We were making nails – a length of iron went in the flames, and when it was hot enough, the blacksmith would retrieve it with
tongs, then cut off a section and hammer it into shape on the anvil. It was with nails like this that the Vikings would fix
the overlapping planks on their boats and pin the wooden frames of the buildings. It was incredible to see it being done now
just as it had been a millennium before. I had a go myself and found out just how important the consistency of the heat is.
I sort of managed half a nail, but I have to admit that I’ve got some serious time to put in before I can claim to be any
kind of blacksmith.

Early the following morning we took a plane south-west to Nova Scotia, at only 53,000 square kilometres the second smallest
province of Canada. Mind you, even though it’s seven times smaller in land mass, the population is almost double that of Newfoundland
and Labrador.

Having experienced how Vikings in Leif Erikson’s day had lived and worked, we thought that some time on a raft would give
us a feel for how they must’ve felt when they first sought a place to land. We’d managed to pick up a flight after hearing
about the tidal-bore river run at a place called Maitland.

We met Burton, one of the river guides, on the road above the Shubenacadie River. He told me that the plan was to travel six
miles downstream, where we’d encounter the tidal bore, the point at which the leading edge of the incoming tide meets the
outgoing water. It was quite a thought, especially when Burton explained that, depending on the weather, the bore could be
anything between a ripple and a wave a dozen feet high. Tidal bores aren’t unique to this stretch of waterway – they occur
on the River Severn, for example, back home, but that’s only on the spring tide; what we were going to experience happens
every twelve and a half hours.

The view from where we were standing was truly impressive; the outgoing water making a sweep around a series of massive flattened
sandbars alongside a section of open water. The sandbars were the key – deep water would hit them, creating shallows that would
dance with standing waves, and that was where we’d be trying to surf them.

After a quick safety briefing, we made our way down to the boats. Burton told me to be careful because the walls of the canyon
were greasy with river mud. Too late. Before I knew it I was arse over tit and my oilskins were covered in gunk. Never mind,
I was soon zipped into my life jacket and in one of two boats with another guide called Corey. He was going to pilot our boat
while Burton navigated for Mungo, Nat and Russ. I’m sure it was so they could film my death and push up the price for the
TV show.

This was more like it! OK, so it was hardly a Viking longboat, but I felt like one of the first adventurers, racing downriver
with the wind in my hair. We hit the tide just before the bridge – what initially looked like a river-wide ripple coming at
us actually threw the boat clean in the air – and in an instant we were riding the wave back the way we had come, like surfers.
Seeing the way the incoming water raced towards you several feet higher than the water you were on … well, it was like smacking
into a flood.

We’d had quite a watery beginning to our Canadian adventure and as we left the river I cast my mind back to the
amazing iceberg we’d seen out on the boat with Dean and Dave. It was an iceberg that caused one of the worst disasters there
has ever been at sea – the sinking of the
Titanic
, of course. I was thinking about that now, because we were on our way to find out more about the history of the tragedy.
We were making for the provincial capital, Halifax, and to get there we’d be riding a couple of BMWs.

Not bad, eh? On this continent for just three and a half days and already I was on two wheels. It felt just right. Coming
up to the toll bridge outside Halifax, I asked the attendant if I could pay for both Russ’s bike and mine, and he said, ‘Of
course you can, Charley.’ He recognised me, told me his wife was a big fan and even wanted to take my picture. Of course I
obliged him – he was the first guy since we’d landed who actually knew who I was!

Leaving one happy attendant behind us, we crossed the bridge and rode into Halifax, Nova Scotia. I loved the sound of that,
I loved the way the name rolled off the tongue; like Newfoundland, it evoked all kinds of images. Right then one was uppermost
in my mind: a state-of-the-art passenger liner gliding across the ocean one dark night with a mountain of ice blocking her
way. Ninety-nine years later, we were on our way to Fairview Cemetery to pay our respects to some of those who died on the
Titanic
.

Fairview is a large cemetery situated just off the main highway. It is very calm and quiet and very, very sad. We were met
by local guide Mark Barnett, who told us that it is the resting place of more
Titanic
victims than any other graveyard in the world, save the bottom of the ocean. He took us to the
section where the victims lay, and I found myself a little choked up.

I’ve suffered loss in my family; my sister Telsche died of cancer, and the fact that there’s somewhere we can go to still
be with her has always been so comforting. But here, thirty per cent of the small marble stones carried no name. Amazingly,
the effort to identify the unknown victims still goes on – the names of two women were established only recently from original
information held by the coroner. One was recovered from the water wearing a shawl with the initials L.H. stitched into it;
the initials didn’t correspond with any of the names on the passenger list, but years later researchers found out that she
was Jenny Lovisa Henrikkson from Finland, who had always been known by her middle name.

Three hundred and twenty-nine bodies were recovered from the site of the sinking; 119 were buried at sea and the rest were
brought to Halifax. Eighty-six of those were taken home to be buried by relatives, and the remainder were interred at Fairview.
Each stone has a number signifying when the body was brought out of the water. Even among all this sadness, one really tragic
story sticks out. Alma Paulson from Sweden went down with her four children, though hers was the only body recovered. Her
husband Nils had come to America a year earlier to find work and set up home in Chicago, as so many immigrants did. His family
were on their way to be reunited with him when the
Titanic
struck that iceberg. Alma’s stone is larger than the others in the cemetery: her husband paid for it so he could include
the fact that his children were lost to him too. You can only imagine how Nils Paulson must have felt when he heard the ship
had gone down and his entire family had drowned. It makes you wonder what happened to him. How did he cope with such
tragedy? Did he stay in Chicago? Did he go home to Sweden? I imagine his loss was compounded by the fact that most of the
dead buried at Fairview were men. The ‘women and children first’ edict had been adhered to, and only ten female bodies were
recovered. That kind of chivalry is personified in the headstone of crewman Everett Edward Elliott, aged just twenty-four.
Below his name is the inscription ‘Each man stood at his post while all the weaker ones went by, and showed once more to all
the world how Englishmen should die.’

We went down the hill to where violin player John Law Hume is buried, one of the three band members recovered from the water,
identified by their uniforms. Among fresh flowers at the stone, somebody had left a photo of him – these were the guys who
famously kept on playing right to the very end.

In the movie
Titanic
, Leonardo DiCaprio’s character is called Jack Dawson – a third-class passenger who won his ticket in a card game. Mark showed
me a stone bearing the name J. Dawson – Joseph Dawson, actually, who’d been a coal trimmer in the ship’s engine room. Who knows
if the name is a coincidence or not … we’ll have to ask James Cameron.