Читать книгу Sharing Spaces - Nadia Nichols - Страница 3

Dear Reader,

I am haunted by Labrador. I first saw this wild and lonely land in 1991, behind a team of Alaskan huskies while running the Labrador 400 sled dog race. The race began in a snowstorm that ended two days later and found my team and me lost in a kind of wilderness we’d never experienced before. This is a land of caribou and wolves, of Innu and Inuit, of savage shrieking winds that both humble and exult. This is a land of brilliant displays of northern lights, a land where the silence—when the storm finally passes—is so still that it’s loud to the ears.

We eventually found our way out of that wild place, thanks to a bush pilot my parents hired to find us, but we never found a way to escape the pull of it. That pull brought us back to race the following season, and the memories of those two journeys tugged at me throughout the years and caused endless discussions of “going there again” with my father, who had been equally taken by the truly wild character of the land. In fact, one of the last conversations I had with my dad was about Labrador and buying a cabin there. I bought a place in Labrador last year, on the first anniversary of his death. It’s a remote cabin fifty odd miles from the nearest road, on the shores of the same wild lake that scrambled me and my team so badly in that first race. Wolves and caribou travel the gravel strand in front of the cabin, the wind blows free and the waves lap up against the shore. It’s a beautiful, lonely spot, a place that heals the spirit and nourishes the soul.

This story is about two people from different worlds and different backgrounds being thrown together as business partners in this remote wilderness. How they adapt to this reluctant partnership and come to terms with each other and with the land itself is a tribute to their characters, and perhaps even more than that, it is a tribute to the healing power of nature and love’s eternal optimism.

Nadia Nichols