The Lure of Labrador Canada’s Lake Asuanipi slows the pace of life way down to make time for fishing, napping

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In 1905, explorer Dillon Wallace wrote about it in his book “Lure of the Labrador Wild.” It’s a pull northward attracting the intrepid traveler who seeks to experience true wilderness – beyond the range of human contact.

Or, as I told a friend on the eve of my own departure north, a chance to endure a quantity and quality of biting bugs greater than in Maine.

In fact, venturing to the mainland half of Canada’s Newfoundland-Labrador province is an adventure unto itself. It’s close to 500 miles north from the Maine-New Brunswick border to Labrador City.

So one early summer afternoon, I set off with a friend and her mother for Lake Asuanipi in the wilds of Labrador. We were wedged into a silver Mercedes station wagon with two kayaks lashed to the top. We had packed enough gear, bug dope and food to see us through the entire summer.

It was a spectacle that fairly screamed, “tourist.”

The first leg of the trip took us to the riverside city of Matane, Quebec, about four hours from Fort Kent – five if you get lost, just so you know. Fortunately, I was traveling with a registered Maine guide, who noticed the sun was setting in the opposite direction, indicating I had somehow taken a wrong turn and we were actually heading back to Fort Kent.

In Matane, we boarded the ferry for Godbout, Quebec, across the St. Lawrence Seaway on the North Shore. We were joined by a score of 18-wheelers, a smattering of RVs, hundreds of smaller cars and a truckload of elephants. That’s right – elephants. Apparently the circus was in town and, like us, bound for points north.

From Godbout on, it’s not a bad idea to have a fearless driver at the wheel, especially if the wheel in question belongs to someone else.

Since it was her mother’s car, and since she had done the drive before, my friend negotiated the lonely 350-mile stretch of Route 389 from Baie Comeau, Quebec, to Labrador City. It’s twisty, narrow in spots, and the only route in or out for the dozens of commercial trucks transporting goods to and from the north.

It’s safe to say: No one gets to Labrador by taking a wrong turn. There are just no wrong turns to make. It’s at the end of the gravel road definitely less traveled.

Anyone attempting the drive should be prepared with a full tank of gas and a spare tire or two. In fact, if there is room in your vehicle, throw in a spare muffler, oil pan, exhaust system and windshield, while you’re at it.

While the Mercedes – despite the somewhat dour predictions of the gas station attendant at Baie Comeau – made the trip north unscathed, the rocks and sharp gravel along Route 389 are famed for punching holes in car tires, undercarriages and windows.

The drive is not completely devoid of civilization, although such evidence grows increasingly less the farther north one goes.

The first 125 miles, we passed a series of five hydropower dams. At the largest and final one at Manic Five, gas and basic accommodations were available. The next opportunity to refuel was in another 105 miles at Gagnon. From there on, it’s a long, dusty drive to the Quebec-Labrador border.

Oddly, however, there is an unexpected break in the dust about 55 miles north of Gagnon, where the road is suddenly paved again for several miles. In fact, it’s a divided highway complete with curbing, driveways and manholes, which are all that remain of the long abandoned mining town of Fire Lake. Evidence, too, of the boom-and-bust economy that accompanies the region’s chief exploitable resource: iron ore.

Labrador City, along with nearby Wabush, Labrador, and Fermont, Quebec, was built on iron ore, literally. Tailing piles – the rock left over once the iron is extracted – form their own mini mountain ranges around the three cities. Huge, gaping pit mines feed a seemingly endless stream of trucks and rail cars carrying the ore south for processing. Lakes adjacent to the towns are colored a deep red from the extraction runoff.

It is the base of the Labrador economy and what makes the area such a contradiction. People who live there, by and large, make a pretty good living working in the mines or in related jobs.

But beyond the pits and the piles, there is nothing but miles and miles devoid of human impact. Of course, to get beyond the comforts of civilization, we needed one more modern convenience.

Well, not exactly modern, but certainly convenient.

The final leg of this trip north was by plane. Not just any plane, mind you, but in a genuine bush plane flown by a genuine bush pilot. “Built in the north for the north,” the DeHavilland Beaver is the preferred method of backcountry air travel from Labrador to Alaska.

Most of the planes were built in the 1940s and are known for their relative lack of moving parts. I think I counted five. They are also capable of flying considerable distances ferrying quantities of gear under the skillful hands of the right pilot in and out of incredibly remote areas.

Pulling into the Labrador Air Safari parking lot, I thought our Mercedes with two kayaks strapped to the top might raise a few local eyebrows. But I had the distinct feeling the folks at the floatplane base had just about seen it all over the years.

That feeling was reinforced when Air Safari ground crew member Trevor Young informed me that other clients recently had flown out on a larger Otter floatplane with an all-terrain vehicle lashed to the fuselage. It made it easier to request that our kayaks be secured to the Beaver’s floats.

Pilot Jocelyn Paris – looking every inch the bush flier – revved the engines turning the propeller, fiddled with the lever between the front seats to operate the flaps and gave a thumbs-up to Young, who cast off the last line holding us to the dock.

Slowly, we taxied out to the far end of the lake, which did not look big enough to my untrained eye.

But this is what the Beaver is made for. Throttling the engines even higher, Paris turned the plane loose, skimming across the water, and within seconds, we were airborne, banking over and away from the mines for our half-hour flight to the lakeside cabins that would be our home for the next week.

From the air, the Labrador wilderness was a carpet of tall black spruce with a yellow understory of reindeer-moss lichen visible below. The trees were broken by myriad ponds and lakes dotting the landscape.

Just when I was getting accustomed to the flight, Paris announced over the throb of the engines we had arrived over our destination. This was met with a look that could only be described as startled horror from my friend, the only one of us who had been to the cabins before.

“Those are not the ones,” she told Paris, vigorously shaking her head and looking down at two white cabins hugging the shoreline.

Looking equally startled, Paris scanned the landscape and circled the area several times, insisting, “We are there.”

Finally, he turned over his air chart to my friend and the two of them spent several anxious minutes peering at the map and ground. Finally, just as I was sure we were going to have to head back and get directions, the two spotted the small cabins nestled in the black spruce.

With sighs of relief all around, Paris executed a textbook water landing and taxied us to shore. In no time, we had our gear piled on the rocky beach and, with a wave, the pilot pushed off and was soon airborne.

We were alone in the Labrador wilds. Well, not exactly alone, we immediately had about 10 billion black flies keeping us company.

A word on northern boreal forest flying bugs: They work in shifts. The daylight hours belong to the black flies. By afternoon, swarms of larger moose flies and deer flies join them. In the evening, just as they are knocking off for the day, the mosquitoes fly in. It is a fiendishly efficient system, obviously honed by centuries of evolution.

But we were not unprepared. We had come fully armed with at least four brands of bug sprays and lotions, mosquito coil smokers, bug nets for heads and bodies, and a butane-powered bug repellant gizmo extolled in the pages of the Bangor Daily News.

Whether it was the nets, the sprays, the smoke or the gizmo – or the combination of all four – actual bug bites sustained were in no way proportional to the quantity of bugs themselves. And a good thing, too.

At one point, sitting on the beach after supper, we looked up to see a virtual tornado of mosquitoes rising above us. The evening before, those stinging pests had been collected in a raftlike flotilla and extending as far as the eye could see across the lake.

The specter of all those biting, bloodsucking insects descending in a unified attack was just too horrible to contemplate. It was easy to see how entire herds of caribou could be driven into panicked stampedes at the height of bug season in the Canadian North.

Labrador, we quickly learned, is a land of extremes. Having all been there in the winter at one time or another, we knew about the frigid temps and massive snowfall. Now it was time to experience the opposite season.

We were far enough north for the daylight to last well beyond midnight with sunrises starting around 4 a.m. The darkest it ever got was a deep twilight.

During the day, temperatures averaged around 70 degrees, though it did warm up enough one day for us to take a quick, heart-stopping plunge in the lake. That same day, the sky suddenly darkened, the winds picked up and a thunderstorm rolled through, whipping the lake into a white-capped frenzy.

The storm left as quickly as it came, leaving behind a cold front dropping the temperatures down to the high 30s by the next morning.

While we ventured into the bush behind the cabins, we were careful to always keep the lake – or at least our relative position to the water – carefully in mind. It took just a few steps to lose sight of each other and it became very apparent how easy it would be to get swallowed by in that maze of spruce, lichen and rock.

If I could get lost simply driving from Fort Kent to Matane, I could only imagine my fate if I wandered too far into the forest.

Not wanting my mummified corpse discovered in 5,000 years, thereby becoming a future NOVA documentary, I made sure to know at all times where my two friends were. These two women come from a long line of outdoorsmen and know their way around the woods.

After our arrival, one of our first big tasks was construction of so-called bear mats. As she laid out pieces of aspenite, my registered Maine guide friend told me this was the preferred method of keeping marauding bears from crashing our party. She was not speaking out of complete paranoia – the front windows on the cabin had, a year or so earlier, been broken by a bear looking for a free meal.

Together we pounded scores of nails into the aspenite, rendering the wood into bear-deterring beds of nails. We placed one under each window and at the door. Fortunately, none of us ever rushed to the outhouse in the dead of night forgetting about those mats. And, who’s to say they didn’t work? We didn’t see a bear all week.

Our days in the Labrador bush fell into an easy pattern; one in accordance with the season and climate. Early mornings were for small chores and steaming cups of coffee.

Later on, we went on extended treks into the forest and along the shoreline. Afternoons were spent in quiet contemplation – well, naps actually – but there was some degree of contemplation.

By early evening, the lake was like a mirror, and we were able to glide along in the kayaks observing the bird life and the natural world around us.

Because of the extended daylight, supper often was not until 9 p.m. by a fire on the shore. It became very easy to believe we were the only humans on the planet.

The only break in the routine came on the day a Labradorian friend and two fishing guides appeared to take us out for a day on the lake. The outing reinforced something I had long suspected. Fishing – even with duel submerged fish-finders on each side of the boat – is more about luck than any degree of skill. That fact was proven when after only a half-hour of sitting and holding a rod, I reeled in my very first fish, an 18-pound, 34-inch lake trout.

The guides’ excitement as the monster was hauled into the boat was eclipsed only by their looks of disbelief when we told them to let the fish go.

My traveling companions have a long tradition of catch-and-release fishing in their family.

“That’s one lucky fish,” the guides said as the 18-pounder and the four other lake trout we reeled in that were gently placed back into the lake.

Of course, no fishing trip would be complete without “the one that got away.” In this case, it was a fish that, once striking my friend’s line, actually lifted her off her feet and almost out of the boat before spitting out the hook.

Once our guides had left us, we saw not another soul for days. It was heavenly.

Of course, not everyone had been amenable to the idea of us spending a length of time without any means of calling for help.

So my friend’s brothers pitched in and bought her a satellite phone for use in case of an emergency.

Luckily, we had no emergency. Despite numerous attempts to test the high-tech device, all we could ever get it to do was flash the cheery message, “Make Safety Your First Call” across its tiny digital screen.

That was it. The foolish thing was never able to establish any satellite link. In a worst-case scenario, we could have used its shiny plastic case to signal passing aircraft.

Too soon, it seemed, it was time to pack up and bid farewell to the Canadian jays and family of squirrels who had been our only neighbors for five days.

For the drive home, we did take an alternate – and shorter – route to cross the St. Lawrence, ending up on the Quebec North Shore at St. Simeon. We caught the ferry to Riviere du Loup, just an hour and half north of Fort Kent.

Along the way, we did manage to make time for a stop at the gas station in Baie Comeau to show off a thoroughly dusty, but unscathed Mercedes.