Shivering Beyond Empty:

When most people think of the east coast of North America, unremarkable beachbreak is the first thing that comes to mind. But after almost a month of probing various Canadian haunts we realized there's more to this stormy region than meets the eye.

With minimal pleasantries, we lashed my bag to the roof Yassine’s truck and drove dead north into a surreal and empty landscape. We spent 10 hours cruising through an inland park, past colossal peaks and lakes on a scale comparable with anything out West, but after finally hitting the coast and turning off onto a winding dirt road, we immediately found a little cobbled left to our liking. Antsy from hours of sorted travel, we decided to get wet.

“I think,” said Nico, as we paddled out, “besides me, you’re the only other person to have ever ridden this spot,” “Really,” I asked, eyeing the barren headland that swept past us into a series of bays.

“Yup. There are no surfers here. And none to our north. And to the south, we’d have to drive 800 miles before we found one.”

Clearly, we had the place to ourselves, and the four of us spent our first afternoon in this eerie zone of Northeastern Canada in undisturbed silence, surfing and driving beneath a fiery sunset that painted the nearby cliffs a gory hue of Martian red. The conditions were perfect—the first chest-high lines of a new artic-spawned swell burbled over the cobbles—and spirits were high as we loaded back into the truck after the surf. Bouncing over the lunar landscape, a strange and cold inverse-Baja—all crumbling mesas and low-lying tundra scrub—we went looking for other likely setups while Louba hung his snout from the passenger window and huffed the quickly chilling air. And, as the sun set, we found a stunning, shelving right, which spun along an uneven reef near a cluster of abandoned ghost-houses—a hamlet of decaying wood with moose munching shrubs inside the yards. Later, we learned the Canadian government had forced the residents from their homes—because the dirt road leading in from the highway had proven unserviceable through winter—but that hardly occurred to us as we stood in the afterglow of the last gasp of an Indian summer and watched the wave unwind towards us. We vowed to head back in the morning.

The weather, however, had other plans and it turned on us late that night in a way I’d forgotten it could. I’d grown up along the Eastern Seaboard, but after a long stretch in California, the mercurial temper of my home coast had become nothing more than a memory for me. But, passed out in a sleeping bag on the floor of the cabin we’d rented, I was reminded of it as the first gust of an approaching gale blew the door open in the dark and sent it flapping on its hinges. Waking, I found fat drops of frigid rain blowing through the opening on a blast of October air, and, leaning against the bucking panel to close it, I prayed we’d sleep late tomorrow and forget all about riding waves.