aised in rural Connecticut, Turk earned a PhD in organic chem- istry in 1971 from the University of Colorado. The same year, he co-authored the first environmental science textbook in the U.S., trig- gering a movement that led to the adoption of environmental studies curricula across North American schools. After a decade immersed in academia, mounting frustration with the conventions of career and con- sumer society prompted Turk’s decision to leave the laboratory for a life of adventure.
R
Turk’s maritime exploration began in 1979 with a solo paddling effort around Cape Horn in Patagonia. A harsh initiation that ended prema- turely when waves pinned him against coastal cliffs—shattering his kayak and separating his shoulder—Turk followed this with an unsuc- cessful attempt at the Northwest Passage. Recounted
in Cold Oceans (1998), a series of arresting
vignettes from his early adventures—many ending in desperation and failure —Turk’s 1988 expedition from Ellesmere’s Grise Fiord to Greenland was his first major success. The episodes collected in the pages of Cold Oceans are about pushing limits and trespass- ing into danger, each a sum of risks taken and consequences reaped, a portrait of determination from someone in so deep he has everything to lose.
“TRADITIONAL PEOPLE USE THE BEST MATERIALS THEY CAN FIND. SO DO I. I HAVE NO CRITICISM OF REVIVALISTS. I’M JUST NOT THE KIND OF GUY TO MAKE A WALRUS SKIN KAYAK.” PHOTOS: JON TURK
ppreciating Turk’s marriage of science and adventure requires a look back at the figures who emerged after exploration’s Heroic Age in the early twentieth century.
A With the exhaustion of terra incognita and historical firsts, a new
breed of explorer appeared, pioneered by Knud Rasmussen’s five-year dogsled across Greenland, Arctic Canada and Alaska into Siberia. Rasmussen suspected, and in time demonstrated, that the scattered pockets of Inuit peoples across the sub-polar region were ethnographi- cally one, despite their mutual isolation. The English publication of Across Arctic America (1927) unearthed a rich new vein for explora- tion, potentially limitless because it was not defined by geography or historical firsts.
In the tropics, Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki (1948) and Colin Turnbull’s The Forest People (1961) ignited popular imagination using expedition- based research on similarly remote, pre-modern populations in Polyne- sia and Central Africa. Like Rasmussen, both defied sensible thinking to remap our understanding of human place, early migration and the unique, near-forgotten worldviews involved. That their theories were later dismissed did not diminish their stature as visionaries or impugn their expeditionary approach to science. As controversial as these adventurers were in their day, Turk’s written
In a two-part journey beginning in 1999 and finishing in late 2000, Turk kayaked 3,000 miles from the northern tip of Hokkaido, Japan, along Siberia’s Kuril Islands and Kamchatka Peninsula to the 65th parallel, finally crossing to Alaska’s St. Lawrence Island in the Bering Strait. It was his first major scientific expedition, aimed at testing the possibility of early human migration from modern day Japan to the Aleutian Islands. In the Wake of the Jomon (2005), explores this thesis of ancient mar-
itime migration as an alternative to the land bridge theory, the long accepted account of a gradual, ambulatory crossing of the Bering Strait when sea levels were much lower. Could a small band of early mariners have paddled dugout canoes over the horizon in an inspired pursuit of errant whale pods or a cosmic imperative, like Moses and the Red Sea? Turk retraced their likely itinerary, meeting indigenous Koryak communities along the way, descendants of the Jomon. “If I could understand why the Jomon migrated across the Arctic,” muses Turk, “I might also understand why the first Stone Age ad- venturer hollowed out a log and charged into the surf, the notion be- ing that a love of adventure helped transform bipedal primates into human beings.”
64 | ADVENTURE KAYAK
work has met similar criticism. “Anthropologists got worked up, mostly because I’m not from their
field, so my claims and research were dismissed as spurious,” Turk re- calls. “I was misquoted and maligned in journal reviews. But that was eight years ago when there was very little evidence to support a marine migration theory.” Since then, numerous scientific papers have pur- sued the same thesis.
His proposal that migration was sometimes conducted out of a “spirit of adventure,” rather than out of pragmatic interests, also rocked a few boats. “In retrospect, I think it’s one of those arguments that you can get worked up about,” Turk admits, “but when you look at it closely, definitions break down. I believe we are a romantic species, even when we are being pragmatic; even if that sounds contradictory.”
ecades of maritime and terrestrial exploration—kayaking, ski- ing, trekking and dogsledding—in the Arctic and subarctic regions of North America, Greenland and Siberia saw Turk’s life become intertwined with rare individuals met along the way, from Canadian Inuit to Russian Koryak. Two years after the Jomon expedi- tion, Turk returned to Kamchatka to pursue questions that would lead to The Raven’s Gift (2010).
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