Troubled Guides

These were the two local guides who led me astray. But if it weren't for them I never would've sped so fast to Mary's Harbour where I met the person who gave me the opportunity to volunteer on Battle Harbour. So it all turns out good in the end.
I will post date some blog entries to give you a reason to check here. I have absolutely no way to update the blog on the island. I started out as Oggy from the future and now am living in 1890. Go figure! So I'll post date the entries as I'm in Mary's Harbour for a few hours having resolved my visa issue one day ahead of the end of my visa. I've got 6 more months to enjoy the hospitality of Canada's lovely people.

The Great Auk

Someone once said, "There will have to be another Earth and another Heaven before the Great

Auk is seen again."

I heard that anecdote from the lips of Gordon Slade as he read his Great Auk poem in the Anglican Church on Battle Harbour on the day a smithsonian research vessel returned from a urchin expedition near Nain. The name of the boat. Alca i. out of Portsmouth, NH.

I later learned that the boat rarely stays in Portsmouth but is stamped thusly for tax savings. Those smithsonian folks must be minding the budget.

I thought Alca i meant Alca I. Like number 1. And somewhere was an Alca II. But Alca is a lonely genus with only one member. The great auk is gone and I mourn his passing. My work will hopefully ensure the arctic wolf does not vanish as well.

On a lighter note an American tour group showed up (they all got an earful of my wolf quest) so an American Flag was raised. It rebelled against the wind for some political reason so when the southwesterly came in, the stars and bars pretended it was a nor'easter. Maybe it was pointing me toward my country.

Oggy Strikes Back

I've applied for "environmental refugee" status in Canada. The deciduous memories of America are falling into the duff of flat desire.
One day I'll sing you my sea shanty song called "The Queen of Labrador"
"Oh, Dana, sing me home. Oh, Dana, sing me home. Oh, Dana sing me home once more, to the land of Labrador."
For now you will have to entertain yourself with this unplanned rant I vomited forth. It looks like a good green screen photoshop effect but I forgot to zoom out after filming the icebergs and so I look big and outlined in the pristine air quality.
I am chopping wood and carrying water as I await my shrimp boat to leave for Nuuk, Greenland, the stopping off point for Ellesmere Island and arctic expeditions.
Everyone loves the wolf idea now.
It's one thing to tell a Maine Potato farmer that the wolf is imperiled but it is another to tell a world explorer on boats.
"I'll tell you how to get to Ellesmere..." he begins.




Rant VideoAs for freedom, if you think a government provides freedom then you are an asshole who couldn't spell freedom. Despite what PHS taught you, Freedom is an individual ethic, not something you choose from a political bill of rights like #5 with chicken fingers off a Kim Lai menu. Governments protect land thieves from the peasants with pitchforks.

New Leaf - Old Forest

I'm out of touch with some of the details that previously would consume me with resentment for the abomination known as Man.

I'm broken and slowly finding the pieces of my new transformation and identity to weld back together. Poems whistle through spruce twigs and finally the old foliage has fallen away and perhaps a new spring will replenish the nutrients diminished in the desert. The caribou herd is lost.

The wolf is the sentinel of man. Be brave. Walk proud. Think for yourself and see with your own eyes. This is a natural state for humans except when the media war begins on their young minds and wins by triumphing over their nature in stages of abuse conspiring with the weak parents who are defeated by upward mobility and plantation owner mentaility.

I have hunted for my home like a lonely humpback whale whose flippers are marred by coral reefs. Self imposed exile from the world may be my path. A 19th century salt cod village happens to be my oasis. I'm shit out of luck, you say? No, because one still exists at Battle Harbour. The loathsome 20th century passed this place by but the Petermann Ice Island made a visit with many

Bergy Bit

Impossible to blog from Battle Harbor Island. Everyone needs to come here and sit around the fire at the bunk house and I'll explain my situation as ghosts of former fishermen hover around us. But I am basically extending my visa in Canada so I can hike Gros Morne in the fall where my blue eyed angel awaits with wolf dreams and fox colored hair.

Resident naturalist Oggy Bleacher spends his time splitting wood.

Battle Harbor, Labrador

Hired two local Innu guides who promised to get me to an arctic wolf but I became one in a long list of white adventures who were misled by nefarious natives. Read of the Hubbard/Wallace expedition in 1903. My tale is an updated version of that ill-fated trip. So, this led to serious peril and finally to my being conscripted to work at Battle Harbor historical site as promotional videographer in exchange for food and housing. Ah, Oggy has found his island paradise in the arctic Labrador Sea. Bergy bits and whales and sealing nets stretched long on the wharf. Walking in the footsteps of Peary and Macmillan and Bleacher.
Oggy becomes a cooper, sealing vats of flaked cod for shipment to Spain.

Vacuum Modulator

The search has been narrowed down to a vacuum valve on the back on my transmission known as a vacuum modulator. If might as well me called the Flux Capacitor for all I know about it. I will look into finding it around these parts and trading a red squirrel pelt for it but I'm not going to hold my breath. I had to go into the forest and find an old GMC truck abandoned to the elements to salvage some scrap vacuum hose in the hope that the hose was the problem but I think it is the modulator itself.

I am irked that I have a visa calling me back to the border destiny with my lovely border guard dream woman in New Brunswick. This time I will invite her to coffee. What is she gonna do? Throw me out again? Hahaha.

I am planning to spend time in Gros Morne and Cape Breton but that leaves no time to get there or delay my trip to interview an Innu woman who snowshoes from North west River to the Mealy Mountains to raise awareness for caribou and the plight of First Nation people. I'll be cutting it close to getting out on time at this rate if nothing else goes wrong.

I did hear a wolf today so maybe I'm getting closer. It was a bark bark then howwwwl echoing through the valley of the hippies as I picked up trash.

It is many many kilometers from here to Port Hope Simpson and any trace of copper of fiber optic communication lines so silence will be my only message to the wolf spirit to guide me on this trail of tribulation across the Mealy Mountains. I expect several days of travel.

Again, take a moment to honor the animal masters.

Animal Masters

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The Innu villagers make altars of animal bones, especially the bear, out of respect. I know of respect, but I don't think I actually know respect. Nope. It's like the difference between surfing the internet and being a computer programmer.
Americans are moving toward a mechanized society where the poor are enslaved by walmart pharaohs to sew underwear and paint GI Joe play figures..."in the name of progress".
The bear and the wolf are seen as obstacles, enemies. The Innu shaman called them Animal Masters and the respect was deep.
I was thinking about that frog at Muskrat Falls who knows nothing of the impending development of that river. It's habitat will not be submerged, rather it will dry up as the river is diverted. Is this justified? IS there a difference between killing a single frog and killing the frog's habitat? These are the questions I would ask the Innu elders if I could speak their language. The Labrador Interpretation Center in NWR is very nice with these recordings of Innu people explaining their heritage. There was a "Shaking Tent" where they would go to communicate with the animal spirits. An elder would beat a drum...and you could not beat the drum until you had dreamed about it three times. Imagine that...it's a form of destiny. You don't choose the drum...it chooses you through your dreams. And the shaking tent would tell the destiny of the caribou (did I mention the 1993 census of the George's Caribou Herd was 300K and this year it is 73K. The Mealy mountains once had summer snow patches where the mosquitoes would not go. With the warmer weather those patches are gone and the Caribou have nowhere to hide. Does the wolf get them?



A sign requested I not video or photograph the shaking hut on exhibit at the center. Out of respect. You have to go to North West River to see it. The elders believe animals have been disrespected to the point where the shaking hut is not useful anymore. They are sad as the caribou that was once plentiful is no more. The women eat twinkies and kids shop at quickiemart for slurpies. Dogs grow hungry and the fish do not swim. Their dreams are filled with neon and the time of the elemental man has passed with the digital man metamorphosing into the surrogate animal.
Take a moment to dream of the wolf. I have not dreamed of it and this is why I can't find it. The wolf finds you...you do not find the wolf. Like Labradorite...look for it and you will not find it. My path is uncertain as mechanized culture has cemented my dreams in the pizza and lithium-based world. What will enable me to break free?

Canada Day and the End Of The Road

Canada had a bloodless fight for independence. Sometime in 1868 England decided to unite the whole of their fur trapping, logging brothers into something called "Canada" The British still had some control but having their own name was enough to satisfy the peaceful Canadians. It wasn't until 1982 that British Parliament finally cut the cord completely and now Canada's free health care, cultural exchanges like Rush and Joni Mitchell, legalized pot and such are their own responsibility.

Today finds me as far north east as you can drive...North West River, across the river from a reservation called Sheshatshiu. All the signs here are in two languages, English and something that is totally foreign to me...a native language. I'll try to interview someone who speaks it. Why am I here?
I'm here to find some Labradorite and the elusive wolf. I think I found some wolf tracks as they are around here. Then a red squirrel with no tail jumped onto my van and climbed down the side of the window looking for a way in. I could tell he was a male...he was that close. He was upside down hanging by a claw against my side window. Where there are squirrels there are wolves. Moose about here also but I haven't interviewed one yet.

North West River...where the rain falls and stops falls and stops all summer long until it turns to snow and then people come out of their metal Qwanset huts and start to fish and trap.

America's independence day is not celebrated here but my thoughts are with you all. I stopped at a closed park, empty. set up camp and heated some water on the wood stove for a sponge bath. Then people started coming all at once. The whole town of Happy Valley to this one little park which turned out to be the place they blow off the fireworks. I shook my head. So typically me to park in the one place I'd be on display. The next day I went down a one way road to the river.

Goose Bay

Eventful days in Goose Bay. Living in the lap of luxury as I await research news on my van dilemma. I'm actually so far away from everything that it would cost me more money to try to get back to NH without my van. So, I'm much better off doing whatever I can do to fix the problem with the shifting. I'm going to hunt for some labradorite rock as I wear my prospecting hat. Rain comes in all sizes here. I've been fighting the mosquitoes and no see-um bugs all week. No bear sightings. There are more moose in Labrador than people.
The trip to Nain will have to wait, I think. $500 to take the trip and sleep on a boat for a week. This is a low budget trip with high concept documentary. I still hesitate to get the interview footage because it's really testing the patience of these kind Canadian people who are off the beaten track. Borat is not known here. I met a Leghorn chicken farmer who hand builds canoes. His response to my wolf quest was indifference. Had I told him I was from the future, a future that is torn apart by climate deterioration and lacks all arctic wolves since their habitat floated south, he might've snapped. Still, that is the concept and I'm trying to work up the courage to interview an Inuit villager. Oh, what to do? Please keep the wolf in your thoughts.

Another Animal That Doesn't Put Dinner on your Table

I can't seem to get close up pics in focus. Damn 2004 digital camera! Maybe I didn't center the toad so the camera doesn't know what I wanted in focus. This is a toad I can't identify.

Muskrat Falls

Three teenagers tried to kayak these falls and only two were found. The third one is probably in the 100ft deep cavern under the falls doing cartwheels in his sleep.




I thought the chicken farmer had followed me...