“An OPP Otter aircraft out of South Porcupine conducted its final intensive aerial search yesterday,” said Sgt. Hamilton, but it will “continue observation while on its regular flights up and down the coast.”
The search will continue through Friday in a reduced form as three police and Ontario Natural Resources Ministry aircraft and private aircraft owned by Bushland Airways, “as part of their regular flights,” patrol the west coast of James Bay and Hannah Bay in the southern end of James Bay, he said. On Friday the situation will be assessed, and will likely continue until the people have been found.
Those flights will watch for any sign of the four paddlers who haven’t been seen since July 18 when they left Fort Albany for Moosonee. The search started August 1 after an American relative contacted police to say they were overdue.
Missing are Andrew Grinnell, 16, and his brother George, 22, both of Lynden, their cousin Alexander Host, 30, of Old Greenwich, Conn., and Betty Emer, 23, of Cresskill, N.J.
“Four days after they left Fort Albany the area was hit by a bad storm, which grounded OPP aircraft for four days,” Sgt. Hamilton said.
On Saturday, the search team found a running shoe, a cooler, two foam pads, a tent, and a backpack containing Andrew’s wallet. Also discovered were two abandoned canoes, which dimmed hopes of finding the foursome alive. Two life jackets that may have belonged to the group were also found.
A rope was tied to the stern seat of the canoe Sandy and Andy had been in. The other end of the rope was tied to the bow seat of the canoe Betty and Georgie had been in. The rope was broken. Andy’s body was never found. May God have mercy on them all and also on me.
After they died, Sylvia took me hiking in the Arctic; she took me kayaking on the Saint Lawrence; she walked me across England, walked me across France, walked me up the Alps. She did everything she could for me. She is a wonderful woman and I am eternally grateful to her, but I was despondent and only wanted to escape this world. I did not know where I wanted to escape to, I just wanted to escape—from my job, from people, but most of all, I wanted to escape from God.
Sylvia, Dr. Sylvia Bowerbank, was not an escapist: published scholar, award-winning teacher, rising force in the feminist movement, at work on a major treatise on “landscape and literature,” she was not ready to walk away from life. For five years she would not let me walk away, either, so I paced back and forth in front of students at McMaster University, where I had taught the history of science for twenty-four years.
In class one day, Laurie, a student, shared with me a poem that she had written:
Seconds screamed loudly
Where there were no words
And up against a wall
He would pace out terror
And then begin.
He would lay his thoughts
On the platform of words
Carefully, cautiously, one eye
On the clock to measure the space
Where Hell lay, and where one must recant
The words of Angels.
Half admiration
For those who didn’t care—
And contempt, really, for those who did.
Faces were perspectives
Where one tried universes
And maintained the God
Of art and poetry and hopeless science.
Each step measured out anger,
And fevered isolation, and disregard.
Framing the question
Almost as an afterthought—
The anguished attempt to catch a harmony
One has once heard—
Eyes were wild gesticulations,
And humaneness lay buried
Beneath outright fear.
A pause would recline silently
Blinking back from a yawning gap.
And what did this have to do anyway
With the deaths of sons
And all those painful living minds
Could not account for the two that were stilled
And silent, endlessly silent,
And the quiet of a stone
Where a life once was.
Sanctuary was not here.
When my sons were killed, I felt drained of all desire, but eventually desire returned, and it was the same desire I had felt when I had helped that mosquito into flight after it had filled itself with my blood.
The ancient Greeks claimed that there are two types of love, eros and agape. Agape is the divine love that surrounds the universe and flows through empty vessels into the souls of those who have been emptied. Agape is the love that makes the grass grow and the heron dance:
In a room where there were faces in frames,
Continuations, God and Music
Children were again born,
And fatherhood stirred
Against the questions and the presence,
Part of the Lecturer drowned
Washed up against the quiet of stone
And the aliveness of Earth.
Every time I look into my daughter’s eyes, I can feel once again the love of God, but when that love flows through me, my avarice, my envy, my anger, my sloth, my gluttony, my lust, my pride—my sins—distort that love as I pass it on to others.
Joseph Conrad tells the story of an idealistic young merchant marine officer named Jim, who, at the moment of truth, saves himself rather than risk his life to save some of the passengers on his ship. He then spends the remainder of his life doing penance for his act of cowardice. Running before his reputation, he eventually finds himself up a remote river on an island in the South Seas. Among the natives he becomes revered for his kindness, courage, and wisdom. They call him Lord Jim.
One day, however, pirates sail up the river with the idea of plundering the native village. Jim leads a successful defense of the village and traps the pirates on an island in the middle of the river. Surrounded and defeated, the pirate captain raises the white flag and asks to speak to Jim. The pirate admits that he has done wrong and asks for a second chance. Jim speaks to the chief of the village and persuades him to forgive the pirates and allow them to sail back downriver in freedom. Against his better judgment, the chief agrees, and the pirates are allowed to leave. Before reaching the sea, however, they raid an outpost downstream and kill the chief’s son.
Over the years, I have continually lost my balance as had Jim in Conrad’s tale, but I retain a memory of a time when my fears had been elevated through beauty into awe, when my vanity had been transformed by awe into love, and when love had bathed my soul in the waters of eternal peace. For this gift, the gift of satori, I thank my mentor—flawed human being that he was—Arthur Moffatt.
CHAPTER 26
Gratitude
Do small things with great love.
—MOTHER TERESA
Because I have been trying to write this book for years, I have accumulated many debts, mostly to my partners over the years—to Nancy, my first wife, whose love and support put me on my feet after I was wandering about lost and alone; to Sylvia, whose strength held me together for another twenty years; to Laurie, whose amazing insights inspired the first edition of this book; and to Loretta, whose gentleness, kindness, and wisdom bathe my soul today in bliss.
More particularly, this book came to be because a friend, Professor Ed Chalfant, after hearing me tell of my trip at dinner one night, forty-nine years ago, invited me to his place the following day and handed me his typewriter. “Tell the story,” he said.
Viking, Harper, Norton, and many other publishers have turned down various versions of this book in the past, and I am very grateful to them because every time the book was turned down, I rewrote it. I think it is a better book because of their rejections.
If many have rejected Death on the Barrens, others have encouraged me to publish it. George Luste asked me to tell the story at the 1986 meeting of the Wilderness Canoe Symposium and again at the 1995 meeting in a longer version, which he then put into print the following year. The thousand copies were
quickly sold, but I had the feeling that my writing was still not quite right. I enlisted the help of a bicycle-courier colleague of mine, Jennifer Books, who made some twenty thousand editorial improvements in the writing. I would also like to thank Jessica Sevey, editor at North Atlantic Books, who shepherded the current edition to completion.
There were really two voyages here: outwardly, six of us set out across the Barrens in 1955, but there was also an inward voyage, which I found more difficult to tell. I am therefore particularly grateful to Rod MacIver, whom I met at the 1995 session of the Wilderness Canoe Symposium. He was starting a journal called Heron Dance in which his watercolors illustrated the spiritual voyage in search of satori. In the end, all pilgrims are on the same journey. The quotations at the beginning of each chapter are drawn from Heron Dance. The poetry in Chapter Eleven is Laurie’s.
THE ARMS OF ARCHES
I have come to the outstretched arms of arches
Looked upward to the eyes of softness
And opened with hands of mornings the heavy doors
I have cried out in creeds and poetry
Knelt amongst the rose and amber
The warmth of wood
And risen with tears of voices
To touch the great vast stillness of prayer.
Yes Adagio, I see your Arctic now
I see it, and am awed.
Everywhere is white
And distance
We live among diamonds
Fragile and perfect
And the sun who truly loves
This place of peace
Touches its warmth of red
Upon the arches of white
And rests the horizon of its silence
Upon the diamond distance
And you and I grow rose and amber
In the great vast prayer of stillness.
—LAURIE
AFTERWORD
Art took us to a place of peace, and ever since—during these last fifty-three years—I have been trying to rediscover it. When our duties at the university were over, my second wife, Sylvia, and I would go searching. Each spring it took us four hundred miles of walking before peace would enter in. We searched the Pennine Way until we found it in the Lake District (where the poet William Wordsworth had found it before us), searched the French Alps where Mary and Percy Shelley had found it on the glaciers of Mont Blanc, searched the wilderness of Baffin Island where Inuit had found it fishing the rivers and hunting seals along the coast, searched the windswept shore of the Saint Lawrence where European settlers had found it cultivating the fertile soil, searched the hills of the Ardèche where our ancestors had found it 25,000 years earlier living in harmony with the animals that they killed and ate in reverence, and searched the coast of England until we came to Land’s End.
When I was employed as a professor, Sylvia recommended I read E. F. Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful, so I returned to the woods down in Cape Breton to “live simply that others might simply live,” as Schumacher recommended.
After I married Laurie, my third wife, I quit my job as a professor and bought thirty acres in the woods of Nova Scotia thinking we might live simply in the abandoned homestead on the property, but the windows in the old house had been shot out by hunters, the kitchen was falling into the root cellar, the stove had been stolen, and the roof of the barn was flapping in the breeze. There I stood, overeducated and ignorant. The problem was that while I held three learned degrees—a bachelor of science, a master of arts, and a doctorate from the most prestigious schools on the planet: Harvard, Columbia, and the University of California at Berkeley—I had never learned how to plant a turnip, drain a root cellar, or keep a well clean.
No wonder Laurie picked up our daughter, Bethany, and fled two miles down the road to a house with heat, electricity, and a toilet that actually flushed.
Fortunately for me, God looks after fools.
Although Thibeauville, where the homestead is located, had all but ceased to exist—fallen in population from one hundred and sixty-five down to six—the honorary mayor, Clarence LeBlanc, placed me on the Thibeauville welfare rolls and fixed the leaky gas tank on my secondhand pick-up truck. Then he fixed the water pump, the alternator, and the power-steering pump and replaced all the other parts that fell off at regular intervals owing to my total incompetence and neglect and owing to the potholes on what had once been the Thibeauville Road. Meanwhile, Leslie, the mayor’s son-in-law from nearby River Bourgeois, volunteered to mortar the bricks on the fallen-down chimney, taught me how to snare a rabbit, and introduced me to George and Sharon DeGout, who happened to have a wood stove out back that they were not using. Sharon, being head of the Catholic Woman’s League, invited me to dinner, and then to another and another. I was so totally incompetent that I could not even be trusted to feed myself, so Penelope, Leslie’s wife, brought me soup and baked me bread, as did Leslie’s mother. Elsie, the mayor’s wife, fed me fish chowder and wild strawberries, and sewed for me a beautiful patchwork quilt in the old-fashioned way with needle and thread, which kept me warm throughout the winters. Because of the broken windows, when it was thirty-seven degrees below zero outside, it was thirty-seven degrees below zero inside, yet I was always warm. Terry, a cutter down from Newfoundland, taught me how to jig cod through the ice, set an eel trap with a pair of his wife’s panty hose, and sharpen a chain saw; while he was about it, he helped repair the foundations of the house and replaced two of the broken windows. His lovely wife, Diane, fed me Newfoundland boiled dinners with enough nourishment in them to keep me alive through the winter or at least until Basil—who had learned all there is to learn about living off the land by avoiding school whenever possible—provided me with smelts, clams, and mussels from the sea. The choir at the church of Saint John the Baptist carried me to heaven, where angels looked after whatever needs the good people of River Bourgeois had not been able to provide, and when I visited Gladys, Virginia, Sister Madeleine, Cosmos, and Jack Thibeau, they told me stories of their happy childhood growing up during the Depression in Thibeauville because the cows continued to give milk, the chickens to lay eggs, and the bees to gather honey. “Those were good times,” Jack said and pointed out to me where a spring of clear water surfaced below the hill; so it came about that I survived in spite of all my learned degrees.
For the next twelve summers I returned to Thibeauville and started digging out the collapsed foundations of the barn. Seven years later I had dug halfway around but realized that I would die of old age before ever restoring the rest.
In despair once again at the pointlessness of my life, I heard Sylvia reminding me that “every sinner has a future,” but realistically, at seventy, what future did I have?
And then another miracle happened; three friends, Omar, Angela, and Jenn, bicycled down for a visit. When they saw the condition of the old barn, they began to work. They finished restoring the foundations, cultivated the garden, and rebuilt the old well. Last year, rainwater had filled the foundation trench under the barn, and Angela found a frog swimming in it.
“Where are your friends?” Angela had asked the frog.
The next day, there were three frogs swimming in the trench, so Angela, Omar, and I decided to call ourselves the Thibeauville Frogs. We won a lot of prizes at the Cape Breton surfing competition that summer thanks to Michelle Richard, who taught us how to surf.
This year, the woods at Thibeauville are filled with the laughter of children because another friend, Jim Campbell, came down to help rebuild and brought Veronica, his wife, and Zoe and Ella, his children, with him.
Laurie called to say that our daughter, Bethany, told her that she had been her mother’s daughter for fifteen years; now she would like to become, once again, her father’s daughter as well.
This evening Laurie, Daryl, her partner, and their adopted kids will be going out to celebrate my birthday at a restaurant where Bethany works as a waitress. Bethany wanted to “home school” this year, and I had come down to help her with
her math and science. One of the assignments was to “calculate the gravity of a foreign planet.” I looked forward to giving a long lecture on the topic, but suddenly I hesitated. She looked at me, and I looked at her, then put the book down.
Today, at sixteen, Bethany works two jobs: during the day she is a clerk at the local drugstore; in the evenings she is a waitress in a gourmet French restaurant that caters to tourists. Last year she had a ninety percent average at school. She is bright; she is beautiful; and she is the apple of my eye. People are always warning me that she should finish high school, or she will not be able to get a good job later on.
There are many ways to learn.
Yesterday Laurie called and asked if she could borrow the boat in which Georgie, Nathaniel, Andrew, and I had rowed eight hundred miles down the Saint Lawrence River from the steel mills of Hamilton, Ontario, to the Agricultural College at La Pocatiere, Quebec. That was a quarter of a century ago, when Georgie was working the drugs out of his system.
Laurie’s partner, Daryl, is from the Mic Maq First Nation, and Laurie’s job is to reconcile the government of Nova Scotia to the ecological policies of that First Nation—not an easy job. Laurie and Daryl adopted two young girls, and they have been camping out at Loch Lomond this weekend, but the kayak they had taken with them was too small for everyone. That is why she asked me if she could borrow Coho-turtle, as we call it. (It is slow like a turtle but graceful like a salmon.) “It is better,” she explained, “when we all row in the same boat.” Tomorrow I will start to repair the boat.
—GEORGE JAMES GRINNELL
RIVER BOURGEOIS, NOVA SCOTIA
JUNE 1, 2009
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Born into a prominent family, George James Grinnell was raised in New York City. He attended Harvard briefly before joining the United States Army. After being discharged from the army in 1955, he joined Art Moffatt and four others on a canoe expedition across the Barren Grounds of northern Canada. Upon his return, Grinnell received his bachelor’s degree from Columbia University and eventually obtained a PhD in the history of science from the University of California, Berkeley. From 1967 to 1991 he taught the history of science and intellectual history at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada. Now retired, he lives in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia.
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