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“There
are some can live without
wild things, and some who cannot” Aldo
Leopold A
Sand
“Night and day …hold
each other’s the
hilltops” Lambert
de Boilieu, Recollections
of a
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A
1529 map shows it as a land called Terrra del Labrador with the notation: “This country was discovered by the people of the town of Today,
if you sail due west, along the 52nd latitude from Chester,
England, the first land you would see would be the land Fernandes saw:
“in all the earth….no coast so desolate, so brutally beautiful…. a
coast strewn with rocks scoured clean and smooth by the ice and
storms of centuries…” Beyond
this necklace of smooth grey
stones and rugged black
cliffs lies a still mainly roadless
wilderness lush with the
varying greens of the larch, the fir, the spruce, and the birch. A land
carpeted in pale mint green and grey foot-deep caribou moss. A
land where the willow and the alder creep along the ground to escape the
breath of winter’s winds. It
is a place called “wild,” “ a place apart” and,
to this litany, borrowing from the title of Dana Lamb’s book,
Some Silent Places Still, one may add a
“ a silent place”. Indeed, a, place where the primal silence
of the wilderness still lies, as yet, mainly undisturbed. What
is was that drew the 16th century sailors from Now
it is your turn to come to Labrador, “one of the last blank spots on
the map of
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