8. RECALCULATING & REIMAGINING
I started this project a year ago, and in the planning process I started reaching out to people in Northern Ontario to talk through feasibility of the project as originally planned. It became clear that the only way I was going to be able to make it north on foot on my planned route was to utilize stretches of the rail system since the route moves through marshlands and several river crossings that were too wide to wade. Unfortunately, walking the rails is a felony in Canada, and since I need the help of the Canadian government to make this trip happen, I can’t break their laws. So I started reimagining what this project could look like, and I learned some very startling facts about the Canadian North and what could be possible with this project.
First I looked into the possibility of driving the stone north along the James Bay Road to Radisson and then over to La Grande and ultimately to Chisasibi where I thought I would be able to take a plane to Whapmagoostui, the northernmost Cree village in Quebec. The name means “the place of the beluga” and it is on the Great Whale River, and I thought I could leave the stone there. But I couldn’t find a plane that would depart from Chisasibi and land in Whapmagoostui, and I wasn’t able to find a charter. Fortunately in my search I started looking at route maps from CanadianNorth:
source: https://canadiannorth.com/plan_your_trip/route-map/
Originally I had planned to keep this trip below the 60th Parallel North which according to my agent at the Canadian Border Services Agency would have made permitting much easier, but when I started looking at this route map, I realized that heading into the Northwest Passages would get me very close to the Barnes Ice Cap. That’s significant because this ice cap is the last remnant of the Laurentide Ice Sheet, the glacier which originally moved this stone during the last ice age. Instead of tossing this stone into the Arctic Ocean and leaving it behind, it became clear that for this project to be as beautiful as possible, I must take this glacial erratic to the very ice that made it into an erratic in the first place.
source: Jesse Allen & Robert Simmon - NASA Earth Observatory, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11755305