A moving memoir: An epic 'Journey to Daybreak' enlightens Canton man

Jan. 28—CANTON — John A. Clark had a dream — a "Journey to Daybreak." On bike, in boat and on foot, he arrived there, with a concluding vision of a new day ascending — a gift that matched his newfound sense of wonder on life, the power of nature and how he embraced that power through solitude.

In September 2012, when he sat on the shores of Cape Spear, a headland on Canada's Avalon Peninsula of Newfoundland, near St. John's, and a place where one can witness the first sunrise in North America, he reflected on his journey across Canada, the challenges he embraced and the "angels" of on high and of Earth who aided him on his three separate odysseys.

"It's a lot of hard work to row that boat or to ride the bike over mountains," Mr. Clark said earlier this month. "The physical exertion, the stress physically coupled with being solo in your mind opens up spiritual things that you don't learn in church. It's spiritual in a more grand way."

Mr. Clark, retired St. Lawrence University wrestling coach and athletic director, has chronicled his travels in the book, "Journey to Daybreak: Ocean to Ocean Solo by Bike, Boat and Boots," published by Glover Publishing, Canton.

Mr. Clark took to the road, the waters and the trails with no experience and with epic failures at the beginning of each. But a jaw-dropping sense of audacity triggered each trek.

"What I did was a combination of mind and body," Mr. Clark said.

The sport of wrestling, in which he was a champion and coached an SLU team in the 1980s to an NCAA championship, helped to forge his approach to life.

"As a wrestling coach, you are working with the body and the mind," Mr. Clark said. "Believe it or not, 60% of success in wrestling is the mind. You just train the body, technically. You get in shape and give it good technique. But for real champions, it's the mind."

Mr. Clark didn't put his mind to doing the three-activity journey across Canada as a total one-trip package. The journeys happened years apart, and in a serendipitous manner.

"None of this was designed," he said. "This was all serendipity. I had no idea what this trip was going to bring me. Everything that happened to me were treasures in secret places."

Bradley the bike

Mr. Clark gave names to each of his implements that were used to power his cross-Canada trek, using that sense of anthropomorphism to talk to each, sharing fears and silently, in return, receiving encouragement.

Bradley is a 27-gear touring bike made to fit Mr. Clark. At the beginning, they were strangers. "I was later to understand the importance of being one with my bike," Mr. Clark writes in the chapter that introduces Bradley.

Mr. Clark and Bradley, which still resides at the author's home, met in 2001. Mr. Clark was 55 at the time. In early September 2001, they flew to Vancouver, British Columbia, to begin the journey east, back to Canton 3,000 miles away, where they arrived in mid-October of 2001. Mr. Clark did no training for the trip, but had years of cycling experience. He grew up in Fulton, Oswego County, where "the bike was king" and where he developed a love of the sport.

Bradley arrived equipped with clipless pedals, in which cycling-specific shoes are held tightly in place by pedal mechanisms. For those not used to the equipment, it may take a while to adjust to them, which Mr. Clark discovered in the first few miles of his trip in downtown Vancouver.

At a traffic light, Mr. Clark slowed Bradley, forgetting he was clipped into his pedals. To unclip when stopping, it requires a slight maneuver of at least one foot, which he forgot to do, and he lost balance.

"I went crashing to the pavement, rolling the bike on top of me," Mr. Clark writes in his book. "I was thoroughly embarrassed, and all the cars honked their horns to celebrate my calamity." But the humility, he wrote, was a "fitting start to a life-changing experience."

Riding the Canadian Rockies challenged the "inexperienced, overweight and out-of-shape" cyclist and his mind became a "fog of delirium" as he climbed. Mr. Clark had to find a coping mechanism. He set goals by looking ahead — a tree or a landmark became a target to get to.

"You never think about the grand picture," he said. "You just keep breaking it down. On the bike, it was, 'I've got to get to the next tree.' Eventually, your body changes and you get better at it. Then I could go 90 miles up and down mountains. You don't think about the top of the mountain. Break it down to what you can envision."

That mindset also helped him beat the boredom of the prairie plains of Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba. From miles away, he could see grain elevators — "apparitions" to his now "telescopic eyes."

At Deux Rivieres, Ontario, about 350 miles from home, Mr. Clark gained a new perspective on his trip, and on life when he stopped into a small country store. The co-owner of the establishment, "Mikey," joined Mr. Clark at a table. A planned short break turned into a few hours, and Mickey became pensive.

"Her message to me was to live in the moment; tomorrow may never come," Mr. Clark wrote. "I resolved to change my perspective — to experience life's series of moments, to see the positive in each day, all the while continuing to hold the dream that was placed in my heart."

A new dream would soon surface.

Le Bouchon (The cork)

A few months after his cycling trip, Mr. Clark found himself in a Syracuse bookstore, where he said his hand fatefully landed on the 2002 book, "Rowing to Latitude: Journeys Along the Arctic's Edge" by Jill Fredston. The book documents how every summer for years, Jill and her husband, Doug Fesler, in separate ocean-going rowing shells, explored the rugged shorelines of Alaska, Canada, Greenland and Norway.

Soon, Mr. Clark was planning his own boating adventure: an arduous and risky journey to Canada's Arctic region in a specially made sea kayak outfitted with rowing oars. In the winter of 2002-03, at the urging of his wife, Donna, he had a physical exam in preparation for the trip. One test led to another and then a biopsy, which showed he had prostate cancer, in its early middle stage.

After persistent lobbying on his own behalf, he was taken on as a patient by Dr. William J. Catalona, then, and still the medical director of the Urological Research Foundation in St. Louis, Missouri. He was one of the first surgeons to perform and perfect nerve-sparing surgery in radical prostatectomy operations.

"I had a very fast-growing cancer and I would have died in four months," Mr. Clark said. "But I had the best (prostate) cancer guy in the country."

In late May 2004, he embarked on his St. Lawrence River rowing journey from an Ogdensburg wharf. After six weeks and nearly 900 miles, he reached sparsely populated Anticosti Island, located near Havre-Saint-Pierre at the outlet of the St. Lawrence River into the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

But like his bike trip, it was an inauspicious beginning. The first time he was in his boat, which he named Le Bouchon due to its penchant of acting like a cork, was on day one of the journey. He had never rowed before. His first efforts resulted in an unintended circle as he maneuvered the 9-foot, 7-inch oars. But finally, with the help of the current, he was on his way. A while later after entering Canadian waters and stopping to register at Canadian Customs, he fell overboard while trying to get out of his boat.

The boat was laden with 500-plus pounds of gear, which he said helped it to track better. However, putting Le Bouchon on shore each night became a wrestling match, sometimes 200 yards across shoreline.

But Mr. Clark was buoyed by a sense of aloneness in his "Journey to Daybreak."

"This is an important thing for people to know," he said. "What happens when you go solo is, it's you. You're in charge. Things change. The way you think, all of your senses get really sharp. You hear better. You can smell cedar trees, taste the wheat fields of Saskatchewan. When I was rowing, the St. Lawrence River is loaded with reefs and rocks. I could actually hear water lapping on a rock and know that I had to be careful in that area. Or I could smell certain kinds of flowers on islands."

In some passages of his book, Mr. Clark used the word angels, "for lack of a better word," he said.

"But angels appeared to me in time of need. If I wasn't going solo, I might not have recognized that. But when you go solo, your heart and mind are opened up. You just didn't recognize them because you weren't attuned to them. The thing about angels is that you have to be receptive to the fact that they're there and they do show up. They show up unexpectedly, they do their task, don't ask for money or payment in any way, and then they disappear. That's one of the great things I learned on that trip — they leave quickly."

An angel came in the form of a voice he heard as his boat was being drawn into the path of a freighter as he was forced to navigate in the shipping lane of the St. Lawrence.

"Their enormous size had the power of sucking me toward their hulls," Mr. Clark writes in the book. "They were like mountains moving and drawing me into their path."

One day, he could not escape the approaching mountain. The harder he pulled, the more he was pulled into its wake. "I was panicked," he wrote. "There was no escape."

But then he heard a voice, telling him to row into the ship's path. He reluctantly, and against instinct, rowed toward the oncoming vessel.

"Miraculously, the boat zoomed in front of the bow, missing a collision by 30 feet and then the wake propelled my boat away from the ship," Mr. Clark wrote. The freighter's bow had acted like a snowplow, creating a mound of waves that lifted his boat.

He then thanked the voice.

"I use the word voice," Mr. Clark said. "I have no idea whether it was an actual voice or it was my brain's voice. But I was given guidance. There's no question about it. I don't know, but I tell you, it exists. Angels exist. The voice exists. Part of going solo revealed that to me. Part of being exhausted and having your heart and mind open is to be open to influences like that."

An angel of a different sort appeared after Mr. Clark and Le Bouchon got caught in a storm, which led to, Mr. Clark wrote, "perhaps the most incredible experience of my life."

In the storm, Le Bouchon slashed through nasty waves on the way to the shelter of a shore. Near the shoreline, Mr. Clark had to jump overboard in chest-deep water in an attempt to stabilize the boat. A cross-current then put Le Bouchon in a spinning-like motion along the shoreline, pulling Mr. Clark along with it.

"I struggled to hang on, but we were headed back to sea, being pulled by powerful rip currents" he wrote in the book. He then highlights how a man ran out of the woods, lunged into the water and grabbed the stern of the craft, which was brought safely to shore. When he regained his breath, Mr. Clark asked the man where he came from.

"His words, in his native accent, echo in my mind today," he wrote. "We've been watching you ... For the last 10 days our people have been following your progress. We respect what you are doing. We are concerned for your safety. Today was my turn."

Mr. Clark doesn't think the rescue was a coincidence.

"I don't think anything is a coincidence," he said. "We just don't see who is pulling the levers."

He said most of the people who came to his aid were natives. "They respected what I was doing and I would sit and talk with them for hours sometimes. It wasn't coincidence that I met all those people."

After approximately 900 miles, Mr. Clark reached, and concluded his boat trip at Anticosti Island, a large and sparsely populated island in the heart of the Gulf of St. Lawrence. His original goal, to Quebec's easternmost community of Blanc-Sablon, was another 300 miles away. An acquaintance picked him up.

A few months after arriving home in 2004, Mr. Clark told the Times, "I accepted that I had six weeks to enjoy what I was doing. I wouldn't say conditions broke me. It transformed the way I look at things."

WILSON

On bike and in boat, Mr. Clark had traversed three-quarters of a continent. The idea to continue on and hike across Newfoundland came in 2012 during a dream at the cottage he and Donna own on Trout Lake, Warren County. His wife urged him on. "It's part of your dream," she told him. It was July, and he wanted to leave by early September. Mr. Clark ordered "boxes" of books to learn about hiking and Newfoundland.

With his newfound knowledge of Newfoundland, Mr. Clark and his trusty walking stick, Wilson, boarded a train in Canada and headed east to his beginning point. On the train, he had some eclectic company, and shared the episode in the book:

"I want to paint this picture for you," he wrote. "I'm on a train to Halifax, sitting next to a man from the prairies who has just revealed to me that he climbed Mount Kilimanjaro at age 80. All the while a harpist plays 'Danny Boy' and we enjoy French wine with Quebec cheese." As Mr. Clark reflects on the emotions he felt at that time, he is brought to tears.

It took Mr. Clark seven hours on a ferry, crossing the Cabot Strait, the passage between Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia and southwest Newfoundland Island, to reach his trek's starting point.

But like his beginnings on his bike and with his boat, Mr. Clark's hike across Newfoundland began with a hiccup. He strained under the weight of his backpack. He found a Canadian post office so he could send some of the gear back home.

Mr. Clark documents other difficulties on his hike in Newfoundland, which he called a "land of enigmas." But the greatest challenge occurred when he faced the wrath of Hurricane Leslie. He first met up with her at an unfortunate spot. The geographic location on Newfoundland known as Wreckhouse, at the southern end of the Long Range Mountains at the western mouth of the Codroy Valley, is known for its extremely high winds.

"Winds up to 120k (74 mph) slammed me and my forty-pound backpack," Mr. Clark wrote. "The storm was draining every ounce of energy I had."

But the experience also tapped new energy.

"I was driven by the remembrance of all I had over come with Bradley and Le Bouchon. I was not going to be defeated by Leslie."

As he walked east, he gained a new appreciation of angels.

"One of the dangerous things was that by the time I got to walking in Newfoundland, I'd get in trouble and go, OK, where are the angels?' It's a little bit dangerous when you expect them. Where are the angels going to come from?"

In a few weeks after 500 miles, he would make it to Cape Spear, where Mr. Clark and Wilson hopped into the Atlantic Ocean, and later awaited sunrise.

Documenting his 'journey'

It took Mr. Clark, 76, a couple of years, with about eight months of actual writing time, to complete "Journey to Daybreak."

"I would write for a while, put it down and come back to it," he said.

The Clarks own and operate White Pillars, a bed and breakfast in Canton. Mr. Clark credited his wife Donna for helping him stay on track while writing. Both are SLU graduates.

"My wife of 53 years kept me on the storyline," he said. "There was a lot more that I wrote, but she said, 'John — each chapter has to be like a miniature story.' She kept me focused, corrected my grammar. I was always a C English student. But I can tell a good story."

Each short chapter is preceded by a quote, from Dr. Seuss to Ernest Hemingway, to help set the scenes.

When he signs copies of his book, Mr. Clark has a phrase he favors to inscribe in them: "Whatever your dream, follow it."

"My thing was to cross a continent, under my own power, solo," he said. "But maybe for others it's time to be an artist. Maybe it's time to quilt a blanket, learn a new skill or write a book. My motivation was to talk to my grandchildren through my words. You can do things you've never done before. That's a strong motivation."

The Clarks have 17 grandchildren.

"I didn't want to leave this Earth without them knowing they had a grandfather that did this, and the story of it, but more importantly, what I thought and what my thinking is and to encourage them to do the same thing," Mr. Clark said.

"It changed my outlook on everything," he said of his "Journey to Daybreak." "I don't think there's anything, if I put my mind to it, that I can't do. But that could be the wrestling coach in me talking."

The details

WHAT: "Journey to Daybreak: Ocean to Ocean Solo by Bike, Boat and Boots" by John A. Clark

SYNOPSIS: "John Clark's chronicle of crossing Canada over rugged terrain and challenging waters. Along the way, he was inspired by the wonders of the natural world and spurred on by the generosity of strangers. He writes of action-packed adventures and solitary moments of quiet reflection."

PUBLISHED BY: Glover Publishing, Canton. Retired St. Lawrence University English professor Albert Glover is the book's publisher and Rick Austin, formerly of Rensselaer Falls, is designer of the 173-page book, which has 21 pages of photographs.

COST: $24.95, hardcover.

WHERE AVAILABLE: SLU Brewer Bookstore; Traditional Arts in Upstate New York, 53 Main St., Canton; Nature's Storehouse, 21 Main St., Canton; Bookstore Plus, 2491 Main St., Lake Placid; and at online retailers.