Luxuriating in Labrador

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 11/01/2018 (2293 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

TORNGAT MOUNTAINS, N.L. —When it comes to fall foliage, you can have your Vermont with its showy red maples and your New Hampshire with its brilliant yellow poplars.

Give me northern Labrador, where the mountainsides don’t feel the need to splash out their colours so gaudily.

Seen from aboard the Ocean Endeavour on Adventure Canada’s Greenland and Wild Labrador cruise last fall, the autumn hues, all low to the ground, are in bold but blurred bands of green, yellow and red, like an impressionist painting.

When you disembark and start hiking on ground that gives almost luxuriantly under your feet, they gradually resolve into individual plants. You’re surrounded by the goldenrod hue of dwarf birch, the scarlet of the aptly named fireweed, the shocking red of bearberry with its deep maroon fruit. The vibrant, electric-green puffs of sphagnum moss contrast with the dusty indigo of bog bilberries, and jewel lichen the colour of marigolds covers the rocks.

In some spots, the crowberries are so thick on the ground, they stain the soles of your boots purple. You can run your hands through the low bushes and come up with two scoops of ripe, blue-black fruit; the berries pop satisfying against your teeth as you bite them, releasing a tart-sweet juice.

But is it the colours that are most entrancing, or the skies? Ever-shifting and mercurial, they can be a grimly monotonous grey or descend suddenly into dark, thuggish charcoal, but more often they seem to streak though moods, with puffs of whimsical, wispy clouds so picturesquely placed they feel painted on.

As we sail slowly through the Torngat Mountains — a six-million-year-old range composed of some of the oldest rock in the world; about 3.9 billion years old — the peaks and planes are lit or shadowed so dramatically, they become almost abstract, Lawren Harris-esque.

Torngat Mountains National Park in Labrador, established in 2008 and Canada’s only national park run entirely by Indigenous staff, is vast — 9,700 square kilometres — and incredibly remote.

We’re very lucky to be sailing with a fleet of Zodiac boats to better access its fiords and inlets, but even seen from the deck, the vistas are serene, stunning, imposing and humbling.

One particular spot that brings colour, sky and light together in breathtaking harmony is Ramah Bay. It’s among the most beautiful places I’ve ever been, in ways that go beyond mere esthetic.

The place breathes history; it feels mystical and mythical, freighted with significance. It’s no surprise that the word Torngat stems from the Inuktitut word “torngait,” meaning place of spirits.

Disembarking on a beach of smooth, oblong stones that clink musically, we move onto treeless, mossy slopes bursting with colour in the low autumn sun.

The stone cairns known as inuksuit here have likely directed travellers for thousands of years. This place is the source of Ramah chert, a type of translucent sedimentary rock like flint that was the preferred tool-making material for the Dorset and pre-Inuit people; examples of it can be found as far away as New England, where it was likely traded.

The sunken remains of sod houses on the shore, overgrown with long grasses, are the remaining footprint of the Moravian mission that stood here until 1908.

It’s not easy to clamber up to the highest point passengers are allowed to attain, where one of the Adventure Canada bear monitors, Derrick Pottle, sits on a rock, gun by his side, scanning the area for danger and warning us from progressing further. The ground is so thick with moss and lichen it feels like walking on a sponge; the shrubs grab at your ankles.

But when you get there, the reward is a view that partly explains why people have been coming here for thousands of years. The Zodiacs heading back to the Ocean Endeavour leave silver trails in their wake and shadows chase sunbeams over the nearby peaks. The trip back to the ship comes too soon.

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When travelling alone on a smallish cruise ship (there are about 200 passengers aboard the Ocean Endeavour), there’s some strategy involved. It’s a delicate dance between appearing like an aloof jerk or an overeager joiner. Befriending people too early, before properly sussing them out, can be fatal. Choose wrong and you could be stuck dining for two weeks with Trump supporters… or worse, birders.

Blowhards and Pollyannas abound; it’s important to find people whose cynicism is tempered with a capability for wonder. You want to be able to roll your eyes at triteness, but take shared delight in the amazing things you’ve experienced. You also want to steer clear of black clouds, the kind of people who like to rain on everyone’s parade (including their own).

I luck out on this trip, glomming onto a group of lovely retirees, witty women from Sydney who are kind enough to adopt me as an honorary Australian and caustic enough to be wonderful dinner companions. They like a drink as much as they love shipboard gossip, and we meet most evenings at 6 p.m. to enjoy a cocktail in the Nautilus lounge, which is where the daily briefings are held.

A note here about the hotel staff aboard the Ocean Endeavour. This is my second trip on this vessel with Adventure Canada; my first was more than year ago. On Day 2, one of the lounge servers, Jerald, approaches me. “House whiskey, Jill?” he asks.

His use of my name is not surprising, as passengers are given name tags. The fact he remembers what I drink is somewhat more surprising… and when I look down, I realize I’m not wearing my tag.

This level of service is not just reserved for inveterate boozehounds or return passengers (of which there are many). The always-cheerful servers in the Polaris restaurant — which serves excellent buffet-style breakfasts and lunches and three-course à la carte dinners at set times — will quickly know how you like your coffee, how hard you like your eggs, whom you like to sit with.

But this is not a trip that focuses on luxury or pampering. One of the main attractions of any Adventure Canada cruise, aside from visiting otherwise-inaccessible areas, is the opportunity to learn.

The kind of on-board education provided by the family-run Canadian company goes beyond (admittedly excellent) lectures and demos — the kind of stuff you could read in a book — to something less tangible. Interacting with people who live and work in the places and communities you visit provides a new level of immersion and empathy.

I took Inuktitut classes, and though I absorbed only a few basic vocabulary words, I won’t forget the stories about the instructors’ lives in Gjoa Haven and Pond Inlet in Nunavut. I learned that in Inuit communities, keeping one’s eyes lowered is polite and that facial expressions say a lot (raised eyebrows signal “yes,” while making “a face like a bad smell” means “no”).

When we reach Nain, the administrative capital of Labrador and the capital of Nunatsiavut (an autonomous area claimed by the Inuit, the name means “Our beautiful land”), some of the Adventure Canada staff leave us; it’s their home and they have family to get back to and hunting to do before winter.

We are greeted at the docks by a brass band, hearkening back to an old Moravian tradition. Ryan, an AC staff member, takes some of us who have rented bikes on a tour through town, pointing out his house and the homes of other staff, some of which have dog sleds leaned up against them.

We cycle past Gilbert Hay, a renowned local carver, and stop to chat and look at his work. Ryan points out the shared community freezer, where hunters store surplus meat for use by those in the town who don’t have enough — a prime example of the co-operation that’s a hallmark of the Inuit way of life.

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It’s difficult to pick a favourite moment from a trip with so many firsts, so many I’ll-never-do-this-agains, so many I-can’t-believe-my-lucks. Here are some things I remember:

The northern lights lighting up the decks with their cold fire. Seeing a mother polar bear and two cubs picking their way carefully along the shoreline in Saglek fiord, and a herd of caribou. In Nain, a family of sled-dog pups tumbling over each other as their mother keeps a watchful eye. In Nachvak fiord, the still water like polished jade, a thin scrim of ice turning to a filigree of cracks as the boat slowly passes through. Spying an iceberg, its surface fancifully carved by the wind, off the coast of Labrador. In Terra Nova National Park, happening upon a group of pinkish-red lion’s mane jellyfish, pulsing gently in the water. Introducing Australians to dill pickle chips and laughing hysterically over who knows what at dinner.

Some of the experiences aren’t things you can even express in words.

“Is this you?” A fellow passenger holds out his iPhone, whose screen shows a picture of a woman sitting in long grass on the edge of the sandy strip of beach the Vikings called the Wonderstrands. Her head is tipped back, her eyes are closed and she is beaming.

It is me. And that picture is worth a thousand words.

jill.wilson@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @dedaumier