Shivering Beyond Empty:

Canadian Nico Manos before finding a sweet little left in the tundra

But, after nearly a week of aimlessly blazing through the sticks, we still hadn’t seen any more rideable surf. Yes, the area’s empty coast was serine, and yes, naming a wave had been novel, but things clearly weren’t working out as planned in the Great Unexplored North. So, we’d gone to town to check the online charts. Hence, our current state, staring through locked doors. We fussed around in front of the library trying to determine if the book keeping staff was out to lunch, or, if the building was actually closed, and realized we were screwed when prolonged glass pounding brought no one to our aid. If there was a computer inside, we weren’t going to get a look. So, we left the snarling countenance of the lobby’s embalmed gatekeeper behind and did what any self-respecting surfer would in a similar predicament—we unceremoniously barged into a nearby motel and insisted allowance to the Internet behind the front desk.

To the staff’s credit, they humored us—it’s likely they wanted us gone before Louba started watering the plants—and after a quick assessment of the NOAA buoy grids, and a deciphering of the matrix of blinking swell measurements on-screen, Yassine declared that, come morning, we’d bolt south. Hurricane swell was headed straight for the area where Nico had grown up—we’d be headed back to exactly where the boys had started.

On our last night at the Glacier Manor Lodge, where we’d rented the cabin that’d become home base, we posted up in the main hall and chatted with John, the establishment’s proprietor.

“My father was a fisherman,” he said in the lilting and barely intelligible accent of the area’s locals, a cross between Scottish, Irish, Canadian and Garbled. “He was a mechanic, an electrician, a plumber. Anything you asked him to do, he could do it, because, who was else was going to? But mostly, he’d fish. He’d go out till the weather would stop him and then, come winter, he’d be on the ice after seal. And when the weather got so bad he couldn’t go on the ice, he’d go into the basement and mend his nets and wait for spring.” Finishing the thought, John handed each of us a fresh Molson from the Glacier Manor’s bar and bid us goodnight and safe travels come morning. But he almost seemed disappointed to see us go. Not because we’d been particularly good guests—imagine the funk potential of three rain-soaked surfers and a constantly damp dog—but because he’d found us entertaining.