A Voyage Long and Strange

by Tony Horwitz

  “Are you going to have a sweat?” Don asked me.

  “Um, sure. I mean, if it’s okay.”

  “It is if you haven’t had any drugs or alcohol for four days. And if you want your spirit cleansed.”

  I hadn’t had a beer for several days, so was more or less clean on that score. About my spirit I wasn’t so sure. But the night had turned cold and drizzly, the same as it had been for most of my stay in Newfoundland. A nice, hot sauna sounded appealing, as did the chance to experience a more traditional aspect of Micmac culture than karaoke.

  “When’s the sweat start?” I asked.

  “The fire’s hot enough. All we need are bodies.”

  The first to appear was Joey Paul, the ceremony’s leader, or “sweat keeper.” He was tall and broad-shouldered, with blue eyes, a heavily lined face, and a New York Yankees cap over a ponytail that fell almost to his waist. “My Indian name is Rainbow Child He Who Speaks Like the White Buffalo,” Joey told me. “It is a name the spirit brought to me in a vision.”

  Joey had grown up on a reserve in New Brunswick and been sent to a residential school at the age of six, as part of a government program to assimilate Indians. “When I returned to the reserve, at twelve, I couldn’t speak my language anymore and the other kids treated me as white,” he said. “They shunned me, or beat me up. So I turned to animals. Birds and bugs became my friends.” He paused. “I can learn from an animal. People give you a runaround.”

  Joey had also apprenticed himself to a Cree medicine man in Alberta. The Micmac, like other tribes from eastern Canada and the United States, freely adopted the traditions of Plains Indians. “A lot of our songs and stories and rituals were lost,” Joey said. “So we borrow from out West, where Indians were closer to their traditions. I pick up pebbles wherever I find them, any wisdom I can get.”

  As we talked, fifteen or so people gathered, more than enough to fill the sweat lodge. They appeared restless and self-absorbed, pacing around the fire and swilling water from plastic bottles, like tennis players before a big match. The fire had burned down to a pyramid of blazing coals. Beneath them, I now saw, lay a pile of large stones.

  Joey wandered off for a moment and reappeared bare-chested, wearing only a rough skirt. The others started pulling off their shirts as well. “You’ll want to take off your pants and shoes, too,” Joey told me, “and also your glasses, unless you want them melted to your face.”

  This was the first clue that I was in for something more intense than a locker-room sauna. Also disconcerting was the exodus of prospective sweatees: most had drifted into the night, including Don, who had suggested it to me in the first place. That left Joey and his girlfriend, a willowy Frenchwoman wearing a singlet and cotton skirt, three Micmac men in boxer shorts, and me in Gap briefs.

  Joey knelt by the fire, burning stalks of sweetgrass and leaves of tobacco and cupping his hands to channel the smoke onto his body. He called this “smudging,” or cleansing himself in preparation for the sweat. Then he led us to the lodge.

  We crawled through the heavy flap covering the low entrance. Inside, there was only about four feet between the grass floor and bough ceiling, and just enough space for us to squat in a circle, shoulders touching. Then the flap opened and a pitchfork appeared, with several glowing rocks perched on the tines. A designated “door man” was filling the shallow pit at the center of the lodge. The flap closed and the cramped space instantly filled with dense smoke. Everyone began coughing and clearing their sinuses.

  Joey, who sat just to my right, gave a long oration in Micmac, a singsongy tongue that sounded vaguely Asian to me. Then he broke into English, introducing the ritual’s props: pipes, a rattle, a small drum, an eagle feather, and a birchbark bowl filled with blueberries. Each had significance, which he’d tell us about as the ceremony proceeded.

  Then he shouted, “More grandfathers!” The flap opened again and another pitchfork full of hot stones spilled into the pit. Joey said the stones are called grandfathers because they’re ancient and wise, and “help open us up.” He dipped the eagle feather in a bucket of water and ladled it onto the rocks. The lodge filled again with the sound of hacking. Then more water, more smoke, and still more coughing, until the lodge sounded like a sanatorium.

  Joey chanted, his voice rising above the coughs. “Our lodge door faces east,” he said, “so we begin our prayers there, with the eagle, with spring, with vision. We pray for the eagle to bring us the gift to see beyond, to seek enlightenment.”

  The others answered by saying “Te-ho,” a Micmac assent or amen. I was hacking so hard that it took me a moment to realize my skin was on fire. The heat not only burned my face but scorched my throat and nose each time I breathed. Just when I thought I couldn’t bear it anymore, I heard the sizzle of more water sprinkling on the rocks. This made it easier to breathe, but also much hotter.

  “We pray for our relations,” Joey went on. “In Micmac, we say umsed nogamuch. That means all of God’s creation. Fire is the oldest life force on Mother Earth. It is a living thing and needs air to live, like us.”

  Te-ho, I thought, no longer able to speak. Joey splashed more water on the rocks. The coughs in the lodge now mingled with moans, including my own. The heat and smoke made my head cloud, and the two mooseburgers I’d consumed weren’t sitting well, either. They seemed to be recooking inside my gut.

  Joey held up a pipe and said, “The pipe represents connection. The spirit passes through the bowl, which represents the people, and then into us as we smoke. Tobacco is an offering for the ancient ones to be with us.”

  He intoned a prayer, sucked hard on the pipe, and passed it to me. Just what I needed: more heat and smoke in my lungs. The tobacco was strong and sweet, and seemed to offer momentary relief, or perhaps just distraction. I took several long puffs and passed the pipe to my left. By the time it returned to me, a second and third time, the smoke in the lodge was so thick I couldn’t keep my eyes open. Joey sprinkled more water on the rocks. My nose hairs felt on fire. I was about to spontaneously combust.

  Then, just as I’d decided to crawl over the others and flee the lodge, Joey shouted, “Bantadegawi!” Open up! The door man threw open the flap and a gust of oxygen flowed in. I gulped at the fresh air, relieved and elated, until I realized the ceremony had only just begun. The open flap framed the bonfire outside: a vision of hell still to come.

  Joey passed around a jug of water for us to sip and said we could go out for a few minutes, women first. His girlfriend stoically shook her head. “Then you other ladies may go out if you wish,” Joey said. There was a moment’s pause before the man closest to the door crawled out, quickly followed by the two other men and myself. We had been inside for about forty-five minutes.

  It was cold outside and drizzly. I rolled in the wet grass like a puppy. “That’s a powerful sweat,” said one of the other men, who introduced himself as Gary. I nodded, and confessed that Joey seemed to have a heavy hand with the water. “Don’t fight the heat,” Gary advised. “Go with it. Give in.”

  I followed him back into the lodge. “More grandfathers!” Joey shouted. The flap opened and more glowing rocks piled in, like coals shoveled into a coke oven. “Our prayers go clockwise, so the next door is south, the direction of the thunderbird,” Joey began. “The season is summer. People get angry and frustrated and desperate when it’s hot. Pray for them.”

  I tried, but could only find a prayer for myself. I loved my grandfathers, they were kind to me. But two of them had been enough. Please, Lord, let this stop. . . .

  My plea was interrupted by more water and a wave of steam so torrid it seemed to blow my head off. I tried pleading in other languages. No más. Ça suffit. Chalas!

  The pipe circulated again. Sucking hard, I became even dizzier. I thought of what Gary had said. Go with the heat. Give in. I had a momentary sensation that I’d left my body, or fantasized that I had. My pores weren’t just open; they were spigots. Sweat cascaded down my brow and neck and sides, pooli
ng in my lap. My head began to swim. I was going under.

  “Bantadegawi!” Joey shouted.

  This time everyone crawled out. Joey came over and said, “You’re doing well. A lot of people don’t make it through one prayer their first time.” He said it helped to take short rapid breaths, which didn’t burn as much. “Or you can lie down and clutch Mother Earth.”

  I asked if people ever passed out, as I’d felt I’d been about to.

  “Oh, yes,” he said. “That’s when the spirit is really with someone, so you don’t want to wake them up.”

  We returned to the lodge for round three, which was west, autumn, the bear spirit, and prayers for healing. The hottest round, Joey said. He passed around the bowl of blueberries: an offering to the bear, which represents medicine. As Joey shook a rattle, Gary blew softly on a bone whistle and used a feather to fan yet more heat on us.

  I tried the rapid short breaths Joey had suggested. This made me hyperventilate. Finally, I stopped struggling and gave in to the torment, entering a trancelike state, less from heightened consciousness than from impaired body function. What spirit I had wasn’t raised; it was crushed.

  At the end of the third round I felt too weak to go out. Anyway, the earlier breaks had only made me feel worse, deepening my dread of what was still to come. Eyes closed, I noticed for the first time the sound of karaoke drifting across the field. Someone was singing, “Knock, knock, knockin’ on heaven’s door.”

  Round four was north, winter, and the white buffalo—all cold images that seemed impossible to conjure while seated a few inches from a mountain of white-hot grandfathers. A sweat’s intensity is measured by the number of hot rocks in the lodge. We’d reached forty-two, not quite a “bear sweat,” the pinnacle of suffering, with fifty-six stones and only one break. Still, as Gary had said, a powerful sweat.

  Joey talked about the spiritual wisdom of the buffalo. I tried to summon snow-laden bison charging across a wintry plain. But inappropriate images kept intruding: funeral pyres, molten lava, Joan of Arc. Then Joey told us to think of our ancestors and their suffering. Gary began mumbling in Micmac. The man to his left softly wept. They were experiencing a powerful communion with their heritage, as I was with mine—the part that perished in the ovens of Auschwitz.

  When the rocks’ glow became so low that we couldn’t see one another, I took Joey’s second piece of advice. There was just enough room to lie back in an awkward curl. Closer to the ground, the air wasn’t quite so searing, and when one side of me felt cooked I contorted myself to barbecue the other. I wasn’t so much clutching Mother Earth as writhing on top of her.

  “The last prayer is for ourselves, but not for money or material gain,” Joey said. My prayer wasn’t answered; the ceremony still had some time to go. There was another pipe to smoke and more chants. Then Joey asked each of us to speak. One man told of his long battle with diabetes and said, “I wake up every day and thank the Creator I am still alive.” Gary thanked his ancestors for surviving so he could be here. Joey spoke of a five-day fast followed by a bear sweat with a hundred-year-old man who said of his spiritual quest, “I am only at the beginning.”

  By comparison, my four hours of self-involved misery seemed banal. I said I felt ashamed that I’d thought of little during the sweat except how to endure. And then we were done. Following Joey’s lead, we slapped our chests and blessed ourselves before crawling out of the lodge, into the light of the guttering bonfire. Our faces glowed like grandfathers. Streaked with sweat and dirt, hair matted, my soaked and filthy briefs clinging to my loins, I felt like one of the Irish hermits encountered by Vikings on North Atlantic islands. A mad monk, minus the spiritual insight.

  Joey took me aside in the dark. He wanted to speak to the confession I’d made at the end. “If your spirit is clear,” he said, “you have less to cleanse and don’t suffer so much.” Then, putting a hand on my sweat-slick shoulder, he added a consoling note. “It’ll be a lot easier next time.”

  I AWOKE THE next morning at a no-star motel near the powwow site. Grass and grime still clung to my legs. An angry rash covered my torso—from the heat, or from rolling on ground carpeted in poison sumac. My throat felt as if I’d spent the night snorting ash. Staggering to the bathroom mirror, I saw a figure that looked vaguely Beothuk: red face, red eyes, and red-striped chest, to go with the swollen bug bites.

  “Rough night?” a man asked, watching me drain a pitcher of orange juice in the motel breakfast room.

  “First time in a sweat lodge,” I mumbled.

  He nodded sympathetically. “I once saw a man go into a sweat on crutches and come out running. He was that eager to get out.”

  This cheered me up a little, as did the orange juice. At one deranged moment the night before, I’d felt so sapped of vital fluids that I half expected blood to start spurting from my pores.

  The powwow had several more days to go. But I only lasted until early that evening, when the moose meat reappeared and the emcee announced another night of karaoke and sweats by the sacred fire. Like the Norse, I made ready to depart for my own country.

  During the long voyage home, and the itchy week after, I read the last chapter of the Vikings’ saga in the North Atlantic. Though driven from Vinland, the Norse stayed on in Greenland for several centuries, becoming gradually more isolated from European affairs. The last news trickling out of the colony, in the early 1400s, told of a man burned at the stake for witchcraft, and the marriage of a Sigrid and Thorstein. Then, silence.

  In 1721, a Lutheran missionary sailed from Norway to Greenland in search of converts (among other developments, Greenlanders would have missed the Reformation). But he found only ruins and a few tales among Inuit of white men who had vanished long before. Three centuries later, archaeologists in Greenland uncovered hundreds of Norse graves, bones of butchered dogs, and other hints of famine. A Danish anatomist concluded that the “tall Northern race” had “degenerated” in Greenland, becoming puny and weak-minded. More sober theorists have since attributed the colony’s mysterious demise to a mini Ice Age, plague, pirate raids, or Inuit attacks.

  But the latest trend is to blame the colonists themselves. The scientist Jared Diamond used Norse Greenland as exhibit A in his 2005 bestseller, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. The Norse, in Diamond’s view, brought about their own extinction by clinging to Eurocentric ways that depleted scarce resources and left settlers unable to adapt as the climate and circumstances changed.

  The Norse venture to Vinland is likewise remembered for its failure. Daniel Boorstin, one of America’s best-known historians, offers a typical view in The Discoverers. “Was there ever before so long a voyage,” he writes, “that made so little difference?” His short chapter on Vikings in America is titled “Dead End in Vinland.”

  If judged only by its legacy, Vinland was indeed a dud. The Norse achieved little, and what knowledge they gained of America died with them. There’s no evidence that Europeans who set off across the Atlantic in later centuries were aware of the Norse voyages that preceded theirs.

  But after visiting Newfoundland, and learning about life in A.D. 1000, I found it strange to look back at the Norse and see only failure. At the time Eirik the Red discovered Greenland, Europeans rarely sailed out of sight of their own continent. By the time they began doing so, in the fifteenth century, mariners sailed in swift and nimble caravels, steered with rudders and guided by sextant and compass. The Norse lacked these tools, yet voyaged countless times across the stormy North Atlantic.

  Vinland’s brief flicker was even more extraordinary. When Leif and his siblings set off, Norse Greenland was only fifteen years old, with a population of about five hundred. Vinland was a satellite of a satellite, its voyagers on the medieval equivalent of a space walk, tethered to a mother ship already at the furthest reach of European society and knowledge. Almost five centuries would pass between Leif’s sail and the next attempt to so much as cross the Atlantic. What seems most surprising is not
that Norse Vinland failed, but that it happened at all.

  Nor was the Vikings’ fate anomalous. The Europeans who resettled America after 1492 brought horses, guns, and other advantages unknown to the Norse. Yet they, too, found it hard to sustain a toehold, even in settings much gentler than subarctic Canada. Dozens of early colonies foundered in mass death or abandonment. Failure was the norm, not the exception.

  According to America’s national saga, English settlers ultimately triumphed because of their superior grit, idealism, and entrepreneurship. But Thomas McGovern, a leading scholar of Norse settlement, draws on the field of biogeography to make a less ennobling case. Not only humans, but all invasive species struggle to survive when colonizing new environments. Small incoming populations rarely take root. The difference between success and failure typically depends on the number of times a new group arrives, and in what strength.

  The mortality rate among early settlers of Jamestown was close to 80 percent. In Plymouth, half the Mayflower passengers died within six months of landing. But waves of settlers kept restocking Virginia and Massachusetts. “Sheer weight of numbers and the backing of increasingly powerful mercantile states,” McGovern concludes, proved critical to success.

  So, too, was English colonists’ ability to subdue, destroy, or displace the host population. The Norse lacked this power, at least in America. Their swords, axes, and Viking bravado made them deadly in close combat, but not against a mobile force in canoes, wielding bows and catapults. Outnumbered, on alien terrain, and at the end of a supply line fifteen hundred miles long, the invaders gave up. In the first recorded contest between Europeans and natives of America, the home team had won.

  The next encounter would occur five centuries later, on very different ground, between very different players: southern peoples, meeting on hot, sandy beaches near the Tropic of Cancer. But in one respect, the saga of first contact would repeat itself. America, discovered accidentally by Bjarni Herjólfsson, would be rediscovered by a man who didn’t know where he was, or what he’d done.