Sometimes Life Isn't Weird Enough

by Nathaniel Reade
Snowcountry Magazine

"Can I ask you just one question?" said my friend the Mad Dog, his eyes bulging out of his skull like poolballs as he sat at my kitchen table drinking cheap wine. "Why don't you go to Labrador in the summer, when it's not 8,000 degrees below zero?"

"Those aren't black marbles," added my friend James, using a fake British accent borrowed from some polar-exploration drama. "Those are my toes!"

Others assured me that I would experience hypothermia, snowblindness and frostbite. No one who heard I was planning to spend two weeks snowshoeing in frigid Labrador in February seemed to approve. Even a worker on the train that dumped our group in the subarctic wilderness felt compelled to shout, "You stupid Yankees! What's wrong with you? Are you crazy?"

Hell, I was concerned myself. A bona fide urban wimp, I burst into tears if my martinis aren't served properly chilled. Yet, I was going to snowshoe through the 30-below tundra of Labrador for two weeks, hauling my possessions on a Cree-style toboggan. The last time I'd been winter camping was in seventh grade. I huddled around a can of smoking charcoal by day and froze all night. Let others camp when the cold winds blow, I resolved. I prefer to hibernate.

So why was I standing in the middle of a subarctic abyss one morning two winters ago, clad in 14 pounds of wool clothes from New Orleans. I'll tell you why. Sometimes life just isn't weird enough, so you have to help it along.

It all started with Alexandra and Garrett Conover, husband and wife proprietors of North Wood Ways, a Maine-based guide service. I'd met them while looking for crooked knives, a backwoods tool which Garrett handcrafts. After graduating from college and getting married in a field, the Conovers apprenticed with a masterful old-time Maine guide named Mick Fahey who taught them, among other things, to borrow their outdoor skills from native peoples and old-timers, not the modern, high-tech catalog culture. They convinced me that winter camping their way was, as Garrett said, "loooxury." In a moment of madness, I signed on.

Labrador is in northeastern Canada; from Rhode Island, where I live, it is about as far away as the Caribbean. We-the Conovers and four of us "clients"-drove for two days from the Conovers' tents in Maine to the southern terminus of the hoarfrost-encrusted Quebec North Shore and Labrador Railroad. The only mass transit in Labrador, it makes the trip north about twice a week, and stops at every snow drift if someone demands it. It took 12 hours to go about 330 miles, which the Conovers considered record time.

Before we knew it, we were at a remote spot called Menihek Lakes, yoking into our toboggans while Garrett, a bespectacled 34-year-old, muttered "bully, bully" into his frost-whitened beard. It was starkly, remotely, whitely beautiful, this place: just snow, ice, rivers, lakes, rolling hills and us.

For the next two weeks, we headed across the lake and up, over and down a 45-mile loop of frozen, unnamed, virtually uncharted river systems. We were traveling, as promised, in the olde way: no bright red backpacks with anodized carbon-fiber frames on this trip; no tiny nylon tents or microscopic cooking stoves; not even a well-heated tour bus with a toilet in the back. Roped to my shoulders was a long, narrow, flat-bottomed toboggan made of thin, flexible ash and loaded with about 130 pounds of gear. Hauling it felt like tying myself to a car and dragging it in neutral around the block.

We'd been pulling our toboggans across Menihek Lake for about two hours when Garrett suddenly dropped to his belly and peered intently at something through his binoculars. Had he not been taking his medications carefully, I wondered? No, he'd spotted a pack of nine wolves. For about half-an-hour we sat quietly and watched them watch us. They looked nothing like Labrador retrievers. Chris Brown, client, cabbie, comedian and Alexandra's brother, lay out in the snow flopping like a wounded caribou, but they gradually worked downwind of us, smelled Garrett's Aqua Velva, and shot off.

Later at lunch we were debating the velocity of the wind when Chris said, "Well, I saw one of the wolves tip over." That day the thermometer read about minus 20 degrees Fahrenheit, with a strong breeze from the southwest. Though we had some toasty-warm 10- or 20-degree days, this weather proved pretty typical. Our lowest thermometer reading, or "bragging cold," as Herr Garrett called it, would be minus 42, although with wind-chill figured in, we hit about minus 70 at least once.

That sort of cold is different. If I took my fingers out of my gloves for two minutes, they'd scream at me. Dropping our drawers to excrete was a constant, strangely interesting adventure. When I wrapped a scarf around my face and breathed, it became a solid icy chunk before I'd walked a hundred yards. Beards, eyebrows and even eyelashes sprouted white frosting. One day Garrett had two-inch walrus tusks hanging from his beard. If I kept my water bottle three layers from my body instead of one, it froze solid.

I'd never snowshoed before, but everyone assured me it was hard, exhausting work that used such weird muscles I'd have to be helicoptered out of Labrador on the third morning with my ankles contorted around my ears. So I asked my friend John, who writes exercise books, for special snowshoeing exercises. "Put your feet through the handles of two full paint cans and lift up for hours on end," he told me.

Poor Alice. Alice is the world's best dog. The day I ran up and down the stairs eighty times was weird enough for her, but when I started walking around on paint cans, I thought she was going to have a nervous breakdown. So I gave it up for Lent.

As it turned out, snowshoeing is idiotically simple: You strap the suckers on and you walk. End of story. Anyone who can shuffle around the house in fuzzy slippers can snowshoe. The only difference between novices like myself and veteran snowshoers like Garrett and Alexandra is that I never did find reverse. Snowshoes are weighted so that the tails drag; walk backwards and they dig in. The Mighty Conovers could flip their toes into the shoe's crosspiece and kick up the back of the shoe to reverse. The rest of us had to make big, stupid circles.

I also discovered that the Conovers didn't care what kind of shape we were in-they've taken senior citizens on difficult canoe trips-so much as what kind of gear we were in. Toward that end, they sent each client a book-length manuscript describing what to bring. They advocate layers of wool for warmth, superior wear and water-wicking, and they fear high-tech for the sake of high-tech. "Beware of materials still in the experimental stage," they wrote. Catalogs and salespeople "are prone to teach you to 'need' what they want to sell." Garrett calls Gore-Tex "Leak-Tex."

As a chic urbanite, of course, I was more concerned with color and style. All those lurid reds and neon yellows sold by the manufacturers of bell-and-whistle-draped space-age outdoor clothing were decidedly ungroovy, my artist friends assured me, and totally out. I opted for army surplus in basic black. It's practical, formal and goes with everything. Including snow.

On the train we'd met a tall, thin French-Canadian dog-musher and guide named Richard (Ree-SHARD), bound for a two-week dogsledding trip in an area not far from where we would be. He happened to mention that clients with his outfit had lost toes last year. "Oh really?" I said, my jaw banging on the train floor. "And how about this year?" On their last trip, a Swiss woman had to have half a toe amputated.

This is why the Conovers made and provided us with light, breathable snow-shoeing moccasins. They had leather soles not much heavier than kid gloves and cloth uppers, which we wore over thick felt boot-liners and insoles. In camp, where moccasins could get wet, we switched our felts into rubber booties. Richard's crew seemed to be wearing non-breathable Sorel-type boots; these fill up with moisture, your feet have to warm that moisture, and before you know it your toes are blackened marbles.

The beauty of the toboggans was that we could comfortably haul far more weight: barn-sized cotton wall tents, real food and sheet metal woodstoves that could produce a sauna. Photographer Tom Stewart had spent a lot of time winter camping in the high-tech mode and was skeptical at first about this madcap Conover method. If we weren't dragging giant furnaces and cotton warehouses, he figured, we'd have been able to move faster. But when he took his first toasty warm bath in a 70-degree tent on a 15-below layover day, he admitted he was definitely hooked.

This Native-American/Conoverian method allows for lots of time luxuriating in a big, warm tent; while our clothes dried overhead, we'd sip cocoa, watch Alexandra whip up gourmet treats, and listen to Tom jam on the blues harp. Here I discovered that "we" were not macho, mile-bagging, granola-crunching swine, but as fine a collection of human beings as you could ever want to meet. Garrett is a ludicrous humorist. If he finds a piece of spruce bough in his oatmeal, he whines and whimpers about the "grunkular grinkus." Just mention "Morning Thunder" herbal tea and he flies into a twitching, glowering, mock psychotic rage.

Two years older, with beautiful auburn tresses and big blue eyes, Alexandra has the compassion and serenity you only expect to find in Buddhist monks, the raconteuring skills of a professional storyteller and forearms (despite her trim frame) that could probably tear up phone books. I'd kill off Garrett with Morning Thunder and marry her, except that she'd make me look like a wimp.

Something about these two attracts genius clients, which is to say left-handed people. In addition to Garrett and me, the lefties included Kimberly Kafka, 30. a tall, funny writer and woodswoman with a penchant for roll-your-own cigarettes, who had quit her job at Bennington College to make this trip, and Tom Stewart, 34, aforementioned photographer, philosopher, harmonica player, shiatsu masseur and all-around mensch. Chris Brown, although a righty like his older sister Alexandra, proved to be the trip's walking encyclopedia, comedian, word-person and Pirate King
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"In literature," says Alexandra, " 'The Labrador' always seems to represent starvation." Because food sources are so few-mainly caribou and ptarmigan- native populations historically remained small, and starvation was common. As recently as 1903, an ill-fated, overly bully writer for Outing Magazine named Leonidis Hubbard had died of starvation up here in Labrador, and that was in comparatively comfortable October. Even the trees have a hard time of it. We'd count 150 years of growth on spruces only three inches in diameter.

For us, starvation was not a major concern. The subject only surfaced, in fact, when people complained about the lack of it. No, a snowshoe trip to Labrador is not the perfect way to shed inches from your waistline. Because of calorie-burning cold and the amount of work we were doing, Alexandra figured we each needed 4,000 calories daily, or about 15 pounds of food per day, per person. Since fat contains the most calories per weight and volume, there was no lack of bacon, sausage or cheese. For lunch we ate deep-fried lard. No, that's a lie. Alexandra brought champagne for the first night, whipped up steaks and curries, baked bread and even cheesecake. What a life.

The highlight of Labrador, however, was the nearly 20 miles of hikes we took on our four layover days. On our last layover day, for instance, we climbed up a little bump of a mountain that was so quiet the only sound I heard when I stopped snowshoeing was my heart pounding. (It sounded like a screen door banging. Jeez, I thought, I'd better have that looked at when I get home.)

On top of the ridge, the bare stone tips of the mountains were scattered with grapefruit-sized rocks. "Looks like the glacier left about 15 minutes ago," Gar-rett said, and he was right. According to one explorer, the area was glaciated as recently as 2,000 years ago, which in geological terms is about 15 minutes.

Civilization, when we finally returned to it, seemed as weird as the wilderness had two weeks previous. Wooden floors felt hard to our snowshoeing calf muscles, and the people I saw looked pasty and pale-until I looked in the mirror and laughed out loud. We were brown, freckled, windburned, leathery. I'd turned into Grizzly Adams.

In conclusion, I recommend weird adventures in general, and winter trips to Labrador with the Mighty Conovers in particular. It's serene, it's fun, it'll change your life. And there aren't any bugs.