Icefalls

Welcome to Part II of my extremely intermittent series of reworked and reposted articles from behind the Irving paywall. You can read Part I here , but only if you’re okay with fiddleheads. 

The original version of this story appeared in the March 19th, 2016 edition of the Telegraph Journal’s weekend Salon magazine. I think it was my first story for them, and my poor editor Katherine Hudson had to try to make a printable story out of a convoluted misadventure. Without further ado, here is the director’s cut (i.e. my worse version) of that misadventure into rural New Brunswick. Sorry Katherine.

The Midland Ice Caves do not sound like a real place. I was going to say that they sound Tolkien-esque but that isn’t true either. They lack the grandeur. It sounds more like someone trying to sound Tolkien-esque but who doesn’t quite have the chops.

Believe me when I say that they also do not look like a real place. This impression is reinforced by the fact that nobody seems to know exactly how to get to them. They’re always “around” some place, or “over near” some other landmark.

You can Google Map the location of the ice caves. It drops a pin somewhere in “LOCATION” New Brunswick, which is less than helpful.  Through my phone, I have in my hand a map that is in many ways more than the territory, with a level of flexibility and detail that would have been the envy of cartographers drawing paper maps scant decades ago.

Photo: Alex Vietinghoff

But ultimately, the phone and the paper map are the same thing. An abstraction representing the actual world you are trying to navigate. And so, as with a paper map, navigating with Google Maps is in practice a lot of looking down, then up, then down again to see if that side road or that building corresponds with the tiny version of it in your hand.

Even with the help of modern technology, zooming in and out of maps with the pinch of two fingers on a mobile device while cell towers triangulate your position in real-time, the Midland Ice Caves are not a well-marked attraction. Situated on private property in the vicinity of Norton, the caves aren’t a landmark on the scale of a Grand Canyon or a Mount Logan. They are the kind of thing that used to be very local.

We, a collective which here consists of myself, photographer Alex Vietinghoff and chief navigator slash resident adult Shauna Chase (both of Manatee fame. I’m like, really well connected you guys) set out from Fredericton on a Saturday afternoon to end all Saturday afternoons. Azure skies (actually azure, I checked it against a colour chart), crisp but not really cold. The kind of day that fills you with that inexplicable desire to take a deep breath and sigh a little, which is lovely unless you pass a field and a pile of fertilizer in that moment, as I did. It was the kind of winter day that makes you believe spring might be possible.

Alex, Shauna and I went through a lot of  “Is that the place?” “Did we drive past it?” “I think we need to go back. We should go back” and “Let’s turn around up here.” 

Driving first on the highway and then later on the back roads toward Cambridge Narrows, we were getting less and less sure of ourselves, and trusted less and less in our miracle maps. We stopped at a gas station to make sure we weren’t horribly lost. Smartphone maps are incredibly useful, but if really want to know about a place, the roadside gas station is still the best resource.

As we walked in, Alex moved toward the cash and began to say

“Excuse me, but could you tell us where…”

“The ice caves are?” A trim, no-nonsense woman finished for him from behind the till.

She then confirmed that we were indeed on the right track. Out of some strange sense of guilt for getting this information for free, I bought some Gatorade, beef jerky and M&Ms before we left the store. Expeditionary supplies.

That woman is Lorraine Lingley. She has seen the local ice caves grow from local curiosity to provincial and now interprovincial interest.

“I’ve been here for like 17 years, and I went out and that’s before the age of social media. And so it was very well known around here but you’d never see anybody, like nobody would come come from Saint John or whatever. And it’s only been in the last, probably three years, the last two years have been way more traffic.”

She said that at peak times it wasn’t uncommon to have 300 people a day come through asking about the caves, which made me, at least, feel better about my navigational skills.

We found our point of entry within sight of the gas station, a tiny sign perched at the top of a weathered fencepost declaring “Ice Caves,” pointing up a rough logging road.

Photo: Alex Vietinghoff

The unseasonable warmth made the trek up the road a strange combination of muddy and icy. Vietinghoff pointed out sections where the field abutted the road that looked like miniature river deltas, broken stalks of wheat sticking out like tree stumps in some wasted post-apocalypse.

Photo: Alex Vietinghoff

We also saw, in the choked, half-frozen stream running beside the road, miniature previews of the cave we were about to see, tiny caverns of crystal sculpted by sun and water.

Photo: Alex Vietinghoff

Even under the trees, there was very little snow on the ground, which meant there would be no following others’ footprints to our destination. After a few less-than-fruitful turns, (including a fork marked by that most inspiring of New Brunswick back-woods sights, a rusted- out barbecue), we had a good Maritime debate about how to continue, filled with the usual suppositions, flawed logic, half-remembered bits of wilderness navigation lore and outright guesses before we decided to go straight.

Our miracle machine maps showed us a marker where the ice caves were supposed to be, but, not fully trusting them, we forged ahead. I was beginning to assume that if this story was ever read it would be by a rescuer reading notes typed into a dying cellphone. Maybe some quotes would make it into an article headlined “Millennials Perish After Fifteen Minute Hike Down Marked Trail.” Then suddenly, we heard voices.

We conferenced again and made the logical leap that anyone else in the woods was likely to be either at the ice caves, or heading toward the ice caves, and decided to follow the voices. Thus it was that after much wandering, we found a stream, that led to a winding gorge, that led to the caves.

In full winter, the caves look massive and shaggy and imposing, surrounded by snow. The warm weather had definitely shrunk them. But it had also removed the snow that softens their edge and blends the caves into the background. When we saw them, surrounded by burnt-orange leaf-litter, they looked… alien. The melt had softened and sculpted the shaggy edges. This effect was magnified by the fact that the falls emerge from the mossy forest floor as if by magic. There is no stream, no open water from which they flow, just a small cliff and a wall of ice hanging from its face.

Photo: Alex Vietinghoff

Professor Cliff Shaw, Department Chair of Earth Sciences at UNB, explained that although he wasn’t familiar with the ice caves in particular, that this kind of thing is not uncommon.

“It is not unusual to have water seepage from rocks or even to have significant flow from springs tapping into an aquifer,” wrote Shaw. “When there is a localised layer of rock that does not allow water to pass through you can get what is called a perched watertable.  If this perched watertable is exposed at the surface in a cliff face for example, you can get a spring. As long as the aquifer is below the frost line water will likely continue to flow even if temperatures at surface are far below zero.”

The melt had consumed and then refrozen a rope that was meant for climbing into the caves through one of the gaps in the frozen fall. We would later learn that earlier in the season some enterprising individual had actually carved stairs into the cave, although these were long melted when we got there. One of the families whose voices we had followed were busy climbing in via a couple of small trees they had braced into the gap.

Photo: Alex Vietinghoff

John Seyler, 39, of Quispamsis was one of the architects of the ad-hoc tree bridge.

“Me and my youngest daughter started doing a little more hiking last summer, went to Glenn Falls Gorge area, and it was through meeting some people doing that hiking trail that recommended the ice caves during the winter,” he told me. “It’s definitely impressive. It’s more than what I thought this time of year considering there’s no snow on the ground or anything.”

We decided to trust ourselves to the treebridge, and looked, I am certain, athletic and majestic as we ascended into the crystal cavern. Inside was every bit as otherworldly as out. Like the day itself, it really did defy any instinct toward archness, instead demanding sincerity. The ice was blue-tinged. Again the warmth had changed the character of the falls.

The ice was more translucent, allowing a strange were-light to suffuse the space. Green moss clung to the rock wall on the inside of the cave, beginning to thaw and dotted here and there with bits of cobweb hung with water droplets that twinkled where they caught that strange ice-attenuated light.

Photo: Alex Vietinghoff

Forty-four-year-old Barb Storey was also at the falls, but an injured ankle prevented her from climbing in.

“I’d like to come back when there’s more snow so it’s not as slippery with the ice. It’s very beautiful,” said Storey. “It’s not a bit like the pictures. You’ve got to see it in person. I’ve seen pictures of people inside and it looks really cool, so I’m disappointed that I can’t get in.”

We left the falls by a path winding up a side of the small gorge, lined in the most difficult spots with a makeshift rail of nylon rope strung at waist height. This eventually levelled out to a well-trodden trail that eventually brought us to … that barbecue from a few paragraphs ago. We had taken the wrong turn.

The random abandoned barbecue, the makeshift rails, the rope buried in the ice, and the jury-rigged trees we had used in its stead were a reminder of the difference between the ice caves and more highly-managed natural features. Without interpreters, without official provincial signage and stairs and standard safety rails, it felt like we were really discovering something, even if we weren’t, not really.

The balance between preserving discovery and preserving the landmark is a dangerous one. Look up some photos of the more-travelled routes around Everest if you want to ruin your day. But, if nobody knows about these places, nobody gets to experience them. And none of us, not myself, not Alex, not Shauna or John or Barb, would have been there if other people hadn’t told us it was there.

“Years ago it would be you take the picture, you take the film to be developed and the only people that saw it was your family, and now…you send it to your kid in Alberta and it goes on somebody’s Facebook account and then everybody in Canada and the U.S. knows where it is,” Lorraine Lingley told me, back at the gas station. “My personal feeling is that as long as people respect the rights and privileges of those people who own the land…then more people isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I think they’re an amazing piece of natural architecture that happens totally by accident every year.”

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Fiddleheads

Editor’s Note(Well, My Note But I’m the Editor Here, I Guess, So Just Roll With It)-This is an unedited version of a story that originally ran in the May 21st, 2016 edition of the Telegraph Journal’s weekend Salon magazine, under the title The Fiddlehead Frenzy: A Green, Coiled Craze. It was edited by an extraordinarily patient Katherine Hudson. If any of you have a Brunswick News subscription you are welcome to go read the original.

Now that May is here again, I wanted to revisit one of the coldest days of my life. When I arrived on the banks of the Saint John River to write this story, I was dressed for a warm, dry spring day, because I’m an idiot. I also spent several minutes joking about the size and condition of a tiny boat I was looking at before the owner of the boat indicated that was in fact the one we would be travelling in. You were nearly spared having to read this story since a slight breeze would have capsized the boat. Anyway, enjoy.

It’s about half past eight on a Monday morning. The calendar says it’s mid May, but the thermometer says otherwise, struggling to climb above freezing. Rain that is almost snow spits down from the drab, grey sky, as Daniel Boudreau, who runs Silver Valley Farm, and worker Santi Kuikel huddle in a small aluminum boat and steer against the current toward an island in the middle of the St. John River.

(Ed. Note-I should add that it took something like forty five minutes to move 500 metres upstream, me eyeing the cold water inches from the top of the boat and wearing a woefully inadequate windbreaker.)

The island near Fredericton isn’t much more than an ambitious sandbar, but it is not featureless. Slender trees line its edge, some dipping roots into the river, others growing in the river itself. Toward the centre, the island is dotted with gnarled and pitted trees surrounded by the yellow-grey of last year’s grass. As the boat approaches, a greenish hue near the ground resolves itself into hundreds of stalks standing out in sharp relief against the muted colours of early spring. Those stalks are the reason Boudreau and Kuikel are here.

 Photo Credit:Wikimedia Commons, Ɱ, Fiddlehead closeup, CC BY-SA 4.0

They are fiddleheads. The little green coils that show up in every grocery store, farmer’s market and roadside stand in New Brunswick each spring before disappearing again a few weeks later. Perhaps it’s due to their short window of availability, or the savoury sensation of biting into a steamed green showered in melted butter and sprinkled with salt and pepper, but each spring, New Brunswickers find themselves in a frenzy trying to get their hands on the furled, green sprouts. And the farmers are just as keen. For some, like Boudreau, fiddlehead harvests make up 10 to 15 per cent of their annual income. From the farmers busy plucking the greens to make ends meet and business models that have taken off from the province’s fields, fiddleheads are something of a local delicacy that New Brunswickers are crazy about.

Boudreau has been farming since 2001, and his Silver Valley Farm stand has become a fixture on the Woodstock Road as well as at the Boyce and Northside markets in the capital city. For most of that time, he has also been harvesting fiddleheads. Now, the farmer getting up at the crack of dawn to tend to cows or water crops is a cliché, but like so many clichés, it exists for a reason. Technological advancements notwithstanding, farming is still the business of managing living things, and living things work on their own schedule. Plant a field of corn in January in New Brunswick and see what happens.

(Ed. Note-Do not do this.)

A business built on growing and selling can be a tough one in a climate where not much grows seven months of the year. When spring hits and things are ready to grow, a farmer needs to be ready with seed and fertilizer. Of course, this is also the end of a winter where they’ve largely been living on the proceeds from last fall’s harvest and cash reserves are low. For smaller-scale operations like Silver Valley Farm, this is where a crop like fiddleheads can make a huge difference, accounting for between ten and fifteen percent of market revenue.

“Between the fiddleheads and the market, it will basically cover everything,” said Boudreau. “Our output costs to grow our crops, it helps cover most of that. All our fertilizer and our seed bill and labour, all that stuff, it helps.”

It helps, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy help to get. Fiddleheads don’t lend themselves to mechanical harvesting techniques. On the island, Boudreau and Kuikel move from bunch to bunch, backs bent, carrying a knife and a bucket. When they find the right plant, the blade flashes and they come up with a handful of fiddleheads that they drop in a bucket. And then they repeat. And repeat. And repeat.

Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons, Leslie Seaton from Seattle, WA, USA, Fiddlehead (5814407158), CC BY 2.0

Ed. Note-Me again. I also “helped” during this time, which largely consisted of me slopping around in sneakers and occasionally bending to cut a single fiddlehead.

“Backbreaking. We went out for like five hours and we only came back with about 50 pounds on the first day this year. But the last couple of days have been pretty good, hit the right spots. If you’ve got the ambition or the time to do it, you can pick 100-150 pounds no problem,” said Boudreau. “But not everybody’s got the stamina or the endurance to do it either. It’s backbreaking work and a day like today, it’s cold as can be and you’ve got to fight the elements.”

A lot of farming is working on someone else’s schedule. In this case, the fiddleheads usually start sprouting a week or so into May. There is a narrow window in which they can be harvested. Miss that window, and you’re going to have to wait until next year. Given the boost they give to spring revenue, that’s not usually an option.

“You kind of have to hit them at the right time,” said Boudreau. “They grow at different speeds and they can be hit or miss. Sometimes you get there and they’re just right, sometimes you get there and they’re too young or you miss them by a day or you’re too early by a day. It just depends on where you go.”

Most people who’ve eaten them know that fiddleheads aren’t a mature plant at all, but sprouts of the ostrich fern: matteuccia struthiopteris.

“It’s a plant that goes through cycles in it’s life. It spends part of its life as the fern that you see above the ground, the big, showy ostrich fern, and then part of its life as just a little green bit of plant that you don’t notice or see much of,” says Jane Tims, a writer and former botanist with the New Brunswick government. “Alternation of generations, is what it’s called. There’s a root-like part of it underneath the ground and it sprouts from that. And then it’s mostly picked when it’s first unfurling, and then those fiddleheads will unfurl to the adult plant.”

Truly seasonal, intensely regional foods like fiddleheads are less central to daily life than they were a few generations ago. Many foods still follow seasonal beats, but that has more to do with habit and culture than logistics. Regional variation in terms of what can be grown is less meaningful when anything else can be shipped in from anywhere else.

“If you go back a couple of generations, people understood much better what was available because they didn’t have the big grocery stores and the global circulation of food,” said Tims. “So they were more dependent on local food. I have a number of diaries of my aunt in Nova Scotia, and they regularly ate all kinds of things. They ate dandelion greens regularly. They would have eaten fiddleheads and they would have eaten many more things than we would not consider normal for our diet.”

Human consumption of fiddleheads follows a similar pattern to other foods that grow under specific conditions. They tend to be popular and widely consumed in the places where they occur naturally, and largely unknown outside those bands. While people from Western Canada might not have heard of fiddleheads, for Kuikel, who comes from Nepal, they are a familiar food.

Boudreau’s farm sits somewhere in the middle of the scale between hobby pickers who sell a few pounds of fiddleheads on the roadside, and much larger producers who ship huge quantities. Some, like Nick Secord of Norcliff Farms Inc. in Port Colborne, Ont., are banking on the sprouts’ popularity in regional pockets and beyond.

“We actually have the first official fiddlehead farm in North America,” said Secord. “We brought in about 300,000 plants from some property we have in New Brunswick and we transplanted them. We came in and we removed the brush, we left all of the major trees standing and then we planted in between and then we just let nature take over.”

Secord’s company ships to major grocers in North America and has also found a market for the product in Europe. Norcliff has also invested in production-line machinery to ensure the company can meet market demand. On a busy day, Norcliff Farms will harvest 40,000 pounds of fiddleheads. Automation, scale and planning help, but the fiddlehead still grows when it wants, and like Boudreau, Secord has to be ready when it does.

“When we start to come out with product, we process around the clock, 24/7. When the industry first started, they accepted a 20-pound bulk,” said Secord. “[Now] when you go to the store, you’ll probably see just about everything prepackaged. So that’s what we had to do, we had to go with the trend, so we invested hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

Back on home soil, the fiddlehead is ingrained in the province’s identity — the furled green dotting the province’s highways on the River Valley Drive signs. A Jim Boyd fiddlehead sculpture decorates the lawn of the Saint John Arts Centre. The Fiddlehead, UNB’s Atlantic literary journal has been published for 70 years. And the true measure of cultural import, Plaster Rock’s World’s Largest Fiddlehead statue.

John Boyd Fiddlehead Sculpture in Saint John, NB Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons, Skeezix1000, Fiddlehead Saint John, CC BY-SA 3.0

“It’s in the families of the people who use fiddleheads, their kids growing up, that’s part of their family tradition,” said Tims. “It’s a beautiful image as many natural images are. I think it does speak to people’s desire to get more connected with their natural environment. Do they really want to have all of their food come from 1,000, 2,000, 3,000 miles away? Or is it a good thing to have some of those cultural delicacies that we can claim as our own and get here locally and not have to depend on other places entirely for our food.”

Boudreau, as a local farmer, has built his livelihood on people wanting a closer connection to their food. He still washes his fiddleheads by hand in the St. John River or freshwater streams to remove the brown husk that coats the spirals, as well as any dirt or unwanted debris. The cleaned sprouts are then soaked in water and refrigerated to 2°C to extend their shelf life. Unlike the crops on his property, he has no special claim to the areas where he picks, and for that reason keeps the name of the fiddlehead island quiet.

(Ed. Note-When I started this article, I had no idea how much competition there was for good fiddlehead spots. Strolled right into a store and asked where they got their fiddleheads and it was like I’d asked where they keep the bodies. It felt like I was asking a cartel head to give up his supplier.)

“Over the last few years, there’s been just more and more people that are going out and trying to pick themselves to resell,” said Boudreau. “I remember when I first started, there was maybe half a dozen people in town that would go out and pick and sell. Now, you go out, every street corner and there’s somebody here, there and everywhere — a lot more competition than there used to be.”

Harvesting, culture, global markets, competition Fine. But not really what fiddleheads are about, and not really what they’re for. This is a plant meant for eating. First, do not eat them raw. Health Canada recommends 15 minutes boiled or 12 steamed. Also, ensure the plant is, in fact, an ostrich fern. Tims, whose newest book is a poetry volume centred around edible wild greens, encourages people to try wild foods, but to keep in mind the generations of trial-and-error that went into figuring out which ones could be eaten.

“I think that’s important for people to understand that not all ferns are edible. There are some that you can eat that would make you mildly ill. They have toxins in them,” she said. “It depends on this long, long tradition of knowing what food is good to eat and what isn’t. But many of the plants in the woods that people have eaten for years also have nutrients, they’re free, and they’re also good.”

Beyond that, and not to undersell them, treat fiddleheads like a vegetable. This isn’t an exotic food in terms of taste or texture. If you haven’t eaten them, think asparagus or green beans. Anything those two can be used in, you can use a fiddlehead for.

Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons, Tammy, Fiddlehead ferns, Portland Oregon, CC BY 2.0

“When I have them fresh, I eat them three times a day,” said Secord. “I’m very much into health food and, unless some truck runs me over, I’ll probably live to be 120-130.”

Back on the island, Boudreau and Kuikel dump their buckets of fiddleheads into bags as they fill them, repeating until they run out of bags or time. Then they pile back into the boat and head downriver to where they first launched. Their 200-pound haul for the day will sell for around $3.50 per pound, although that price will vary depending on location and season. They’ll be back nearly every day over the course of the three weeks or so the ferns are sprouting. And back again next year, on the fiddlehead’s schedule.

I know I remember picking fiddleheads with my cousins, and the sound of them frying in a pan with butter. What about you? Any fiddlehead memories?