“GOING SOLO IS GREAT. IT PUTS YOU CLOSER TO THE EDGE, AND YOU’RE MORE CAREFUL AND AWARE. THAT SAID, HAD I DONE ELLESMERE ALONE, I WOULD HAVE DIED.” PHOTO: ERIK BOOMER


TListening


O SPIRITS BY JON TURK


A low, flat-topped, improbably purple island ris- es out of the middle of the river. You would have to be blind, deaf and insensitive not to know that this is a place of power in the landscape. As a First Nations elder from the Crow Nation once said: “If people stay somewhere long enough— even white people—the spirits will begin to speak to them. It’s the power of the spirits com- ing from the land.”


The book recounts his relationship with an elderly Koryak shaman whose rituals mend a broken pelvis Turk sustained in an avalanche years before. The customary quarantine between observer and narrative subject is ignored, as Turk allows happenstance, unlikely Samaritans and bitter setbacks to enrich his immersion in the shamanism of the empty tundra. The result is a stark departure from the classic exploration account, with its em- phasis on victory or defeat.


“We all fail in life,” he explains. “You aim big, you fail bigger. Every failure teaches us something. In wilderness adventure, if you don’t know when to back down from danger, you’ll die. So you always need to be ready to back away—and that isn’t failure. Success is ultimately what you learn from a mission and what you enjoyed while doing it.” With The Raven’s Gift, Turk once again polarized readers. “Some people get hung up on whether the magic and healing I undergo are believable,” he confesses. “Things do hap- pen in this world, within and beyond human consciousness, which defy scientific logic.” “I guess my message, or the main thing I’ve learned from living with traditional peoples,


is to approach the world in a softer way: to live with less, in order for human existence to be sustainable on the planet. They take only what they need. We take and use way more than we need; the consequences are obvious.”


n increasingly rare breed of scientist, adventurer and writer rolled into one, Turk’s literary achievements are among the gems of expedition literature. Couching theo- ries of magic medicine and early marine migration within grand kayak adventures, they become gripping narratives. Informed by the Ellesmere odyssey, Turk is at work on a new book. It promises more of his inimitable blending of adventure and inquiry. Rather than inflaming scientists and anthropologists, “this time I’m trying to write something that connects with a wider audi- ence—urban, rural, regardless of politics,” he says. The new book will explore “how people reclaim control over immediate threats and risks, whether they’re hunter-gatherers in the Amazon, or citizens of the South Bronx,” he says. Turk will be spending time in both places to complete his research. “Our individual impact on the way the world is evolving may be infinitesimally small, but


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we are still responsible for how we react to this evolution,” he continues. “I want readers to see what people share in these two jungles, to see that sanity at the personal level is still within our control.” The book recounts the early Polynesian islanders who felled towering tropical hard- woods with stone tools, fashioned them into 60-foot double-hulled catamarans, and sailed 2,000 miles across the ocean to find the impossibly slim sliver of Hawaii. Returning to Polynesia, they initiated a trade route between the two outposts. “If we look directly at this ancestral past, certain strengths emerge that we share,” Turk says. But he acknowledges that we’ve stepped away from this mode of knowledge—“The self-reliance to learn from direct encounters with nature and with others.” So how are the feats and beliefs of our ancestors relevant to modern society? What wisdom does Turk distill from his intrepid kayak journeys and explorations into historical origins and spiritual understanding?


“Let your relationship with the world and your environment be your primary teacher.” DIGITAL EXTRA: Click here to read the full interview with Turk.


We drift lazily to the downstream side of the island to find a large eddy and join together, our little flotilla of Innova inflatable kayaks bumping softly into one another. The mystery is here, as I knew it would be, tactile and palpable before us— an eroded cut-bank full of caribou bones amid the fireweed. I look at the familiar faces in our lit- tle tribe: my wife, Nina; younger daughter, Noey; her boyfriend, Glenn; and my older daughter’s husband, Deryl.


We scamper up the 10-foot-high bank, walk across the small plateau, and find a collection of long-abandoned circular homes made with closely interwoven caribou antlers—the rem- nants of families not so different from my own. Families who had once hunted the giant herds that migrated across the river at this wide, shal- low ford. I have kayaked in the Arctic all my life, charg- ing hard and hungry over tumultuous seas and dangerous, shifting icepack. At the end of my Ellesmere circumnavigation—on the medevac aircraft, racing time against death—I told myself, “I’m done. Finished. Sixty-five years old; too old for this harsh environment. I quit.”


Later, lying in the hospital bed, I recalled sites I had visited during my travels: ancient stone igloos, food caches and bleached kayak ribs ly- ing, half buried, on the beach. I thought about our ancestors who had raised families on this barren tundra and hunted these frozen seas, stealthily moving across the ice with only a rock tied on the end of a long stick, pursuing two-ton, saber-toothed walrus and Nanook, the fearsome polar bear.


I am proud of my expeditions. But there has been a sterility to these endeavors—two men alone in the vastness, racing toward a self-de- fined goal. So, in my late sixties, I’ve decided to turn a page and approach the Arctic from a dif- ferent perspective. Now, I am back in the land that I love, but this time moving more slowly, with the people whom I love—my family. You don’t have to GO BIG to have a meaning-


ful experience in the Arctic. After basking in the sunshine and the flowers, we float onward, to- ward the ocean. There are rapids to run down- stream, fish to catch, mushrooms and berries to pick and grizzly bears to startle us. This is a gift and a legacy I can continue to enjoy and can leave for my people—“The power of the spirits coming from the land.”


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