Cold Oceans: Adventures in Kayak, Rowboat, and Dogsled

by Jon Turk

Overview

Cold Oceans recounts Jon Turk's expeditions to some of the most inhospitable regions on earth. Even after being shipwrecked off Cape Horn, stopped by ice in the Northwest Passage, and beaten back by Arctic blizzards, Turk has followed an irresistible urge to explore. Woven throughout the book is the deepening relationship between Jon and his frequent expedition partner, Chris Seashore, and the journey of self-discovery that the relationship fostered.

Finalist, Banff Mountain Book Festival.

"Turk's chiseled but understated prose is a marked asset in light of the often outlandish material that comes his way." Washington Post Book World

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781440112072
Publisher:	iUniverse, Incorporated
Publication date:	01/12/2009
Pages:	296
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.67(d)

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

Cape Horn

No, it is impossible; it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one's existence--that which makes its truth, its meaning--its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible. We live, as we dream--alone.
Joseph Conrad,
Heart of Darkness

The back porch of the 1890s bar is perched over a narrow slough that washes kelp, cannery wastes, and sea life back and forth with the tides. One Saturday afternoon in 1975 I was drinking beer with a group of Pacific Northwest fishermen and boatbuilders. As the empty pitchers accumulated, the talk veered to sailing, and my friend Craig announced that only people who had sailed around Cape Horn could toast the queen with their feet on the table. Craig wiped the foam off his beard and grinned. Another friend thought that you were allowed only one foot on the table, but no one was sure.
A second tide change reminded me that I had been drinking for over six hours and it was time to go home. I walked toward my apartment, which was one unit of four clustered duplexes that were slowly sinking into a common swamp. A week before, a public health official had flushed purple dye down our toilets to test the septic system, and no one was surprised when the swamp behind our buildings turned purple. Craig went on a midnight foray, stole a plastic pink flamingo from someone's lawn in suburbia, and set it among the cattails in the purple muck. Then he spray-painted THE GETTO on the west wall of the duplex.
I looked at the wall, turned back to town, staggered into the hardware store, and bought a can of fluorescent pink spray paint. Then I returned home and addeda capital H between the G and the E.
I had chosen my lifestyle. As I told the counselor during the breakup of my second marriage, I didn't want a good job, respectable career, house, new car, mortgage, and membership in the country club. I was on a different journey, and I didn't mind living in a few ghettos along the way. But at least I would spell the word right.
As I walked unsteadily toward my sagging front porch, I reflected that my grand journey had taken me only as far as La Conner, Washington, the ghetto, and the 1890s bar. An early evening breeze blew in from the slough, and small purple waves circled around the flamingo's skinny legs. I tried to imagine the huge rollers of the southern ocean.
A few days later I told my friends at the bar that I was thinking about sailing around the Horn.
No one said anything for a few moments, then one man shook his head. "It was just a joke, Man. That's serious shit. I mean, you're not a sailor. Buy a small sloop, sail around the San Juan Islands for a few years, take a test passage to Hawaii, learn about boats, buy a better yacht, then think about Cape Horn."
He was right and I knew it, but I didn't care. I had earned my Ph.D. in chemistry four years earlier. Then I had run away--from my career; from my first wife, Elizabeth, and our daughter, Reeva; and from my second wife, Debby, and our two children, Nathan and Noey. I had intentionally created a huge void to be filled by something else. But what? I had been earning a living writing science textbooks, but the job didn't fill the emotional vacuum. What about a sloping deck, wind in the rigging, spray in the air? I was too excited to plan this expedition over several years, so I drove to Seattle and bought Hussy, a forty-six-foot wooden sloop. On the way home I stopped to visit Debby, Nathan, and Noey. Despite our differences and divorce, Debby and I remained good friends, and she asked me to stay for dinner. We chatted about trivia and I played with the kids, but I didn't mention the yacht.
After dessert, Debby asked, "Did you just fall in love?"
"No, why?"
"Well, you're acting different; something happened in your life."
She knew me so well.
I told her about Hussy and my dream. Debby agreed with me that the mechanical details would fall in place if the journey was important enough.
I wanted to hug her and be close again, but her frightened eyes warned me away.
"It's late. I'd better go."
She walked me to the door, but I couldn't find my shoes. We searched the house--no shoes. Finally, Noey, who was three years old, approached. "Well, Daddy, if you can't find your shoes, maybe you'll have to stay. You could sleep with me but my bed is too small. Maybe you'll have to sleep with Mommy."
I knelt down and sat Noey on my knee. She smiled and snuggled. I asked, "Where are my shoes?"
She lifted her tiny hands. "I don't know."
I laughed and asked again, then spoke sternly. Finally she led me to her room and pulled back the bedcovers to reveal the hidden shoes.

What People are Saying About This

Jonathan Waterman

"Cold Oceans is the rare book that comes to the heart of what makes men wander. Jon Turk is a visionary adventurer who takes incredible risks and dares to fail grandly--but that is not the point. In this honest and elegant story, enriched with leaping porpoises, an animate landscape, and compassionate portraits of Inuit hunters, we have a glimpse into our own souls: how both love and adventure can heal man, and for Jon Turk at least, bring life full circle."

Galen Rowell

"Jon Turk clearly reaffirms his own personal integrity and his reader's faith in the waning spirit of adventure. His realizations aobut his sea-level adventures touch higher ground than the Mount Everest exploits recounted in Into Thin Air. A really great book."

David A. Console

KIRKUS REVIEWS, June 15, 1998

A chemist-turned-adventurer retraces the footsteps of polar explorers in some of the harshest conditions the earth has to offer.Observing the tired, sallow faces of his older scientific colleagues, Turk rejected a career in the lab for life on the land. His first adventure'kayaking around Cape Horn in homage to Sir Francis Drake'ends 50 miles short when he's shipwrecked and nearly killed. Next, he and his girlfriend and eventual wife, Chris, tackle the grueling Northwest Passage inside the Arctic Circle, where winter oceans freeze from North America to Asia and summer thaws produce ice floes the size of Texas. They attempt the trek (first completed by Roald Amundsen in 1906) by rowboat, alternately dragging themselves across ice and rowing through open water. They fail; the relationship suffers. Turk doesn't always or altogether enjoy his rugged travels. Still, he values them as manifestations of t

Gordon Grice

"Cold Oceans is a marvel: a fascinating adventure story, clearly and robustly told, seasoned with science and history. The human relationships give Turk's story a powerful emotional impact. And Turk's modesty is probably unique in the canon of first-person adventure. An excellent book."

Editorial Reviews

Some of the most forbidding areas of the planet, from the Antarctic seas to Canada's Baffin Island, form the backdrop to this lumbering, highly personal memoir of dangerous treks and voyages across inhospitable terrain and water. Despite little experience and, it would seem, not a lot of common sense, Turk, a chemist and adventurer who works on promotion and product development for the outdoor apparel company the North Face, consistently embarks on grand journeys in "some of the coldest, wettest, most remote regions of the world," then bites off more than he can chew. Ill-planned efforts to kayak around Cape Horn and dogsled across Baffin fall short of their goals. There are poignant moments along the way--Turk's account of a sled dog's death and images of snowmobile-riding Inuits who reverentially refer to "the old days" are memorable. But Turk's belief that he can tackle any endeavor without training or wisdom extends at times to his writing. His many wilderness descriptions and epiphanies sometimes lead to prose as rough-hewn--and nearly as compelling--as the landscape itself: "When you climb a mountain, the way back is always downhill." Though readers will likely find tough sledding even when on familiar territory, most will find it hard to be too put off by an adventurer who lost an opportunity to paddle through the Northwest Passage because, in planning, "I had ignored distance, ice, and wind." Five maps. (Sept.) FYI: The North Face is sponsoring Turk's six-city book tour in September.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Turk, an adventurer with a Ph.D. in chemistry, chronicles four separate expeditions over a ten-year period. Twice divorced and unhappy as a professor, he embarks on a stormy solo voyage paddling a 17' folding kayak south from Chile through the straits of Magellan to Tierra del Fuego to where, just 50 miles short of Cape Horn, he shipwrecks and is forced to abandon the journey. Undaunted, he takes his third wife along on a perilous icy northwest passage in a 16' wherry and later dogsleds Baffin Island, relying on the of help the Inuit for survival. A gifted writer and storyteller, Turk deftly folds bits of history and science into his narrative. This very engaging book, with its respectf ul, intimate glimpse of Inuit culture, is sure to be much read in public libraries.--John Kenny, San Francisco P.L.

Library Journal

A chemist-turned-adventurer retraces the footsteps of polar explorers in some of the harshest conditions the earth has to offer. Observing the tired, sallow faces of his older scientific colleagues, Turk rejected a career in the lab for life on the land. His first adventureþkayaking around Cape Horn in homage to Sir Francis Drakeþends 50 miles short when he's shipwrecked and nearly killed. Next, he and his girlfriend and eventual wife, Chris, tackle the grueling Northwest Passage inside the Arctic Circle, where winter oceans freeze from North America to Asia and summer thaws produce ice floes the size of Texas. They attempt the trek (first completed by Roald Amundsen in 1906) by rowboat, alternately dragging themselves across ice and rowing through open water. They fail; the relationship suffers. Turk doesn't always or altogether enjoy his rugged travels. Still, he values them as manifestations of the independent lifestyle he craves: "I am not at peace with this adventure, but I'm afraid of myself if I abandon it." In fact, Turk's soul-searching is dual. He examines his motivation for adventure travel (for which he jettisons family life) and his inability to proceed wisely. Obsessively goal-oriented, he's haunted by defeat. Faced with dangerous seas during the Cape voyage, he rashly pushes on instead of waiting out the storm, then repeats his mistakes on subsequent trips. Just when he seems ready to conquer his own foibles, he's saddled with a dangerously selfish traveling partner on a dogsled trip across Canada's Baffin Island. When the man leaves him stranded overnight in the Arctic without food, water, or heat, then quits without explanation, Turk must quit too.Finally, he and Chris successfully retrace the kayak migration of an Inuit band from Canada to Greenland, largely because she convinces him that discretion is the better part of valor. Genuine adventure and poignant self-exploration, too. (Author tour)

Kirkus Reviews