13 Apr The Trip that Changed My Life: Gulf of St. Lawrence by Ben Bressler
Ben Bressler, founder and director of Natural Habitat Adventures, on a harp seal ecotour, the trip that changed his life.
In this first article in Adventure Collection’s “The Trip That Changed My Life” series, founder and director of Natural Habitat Adventures Ben Bressler describes how he discovered his future in providing adventure tours at the young age of twenty-five, when he was asked to lead a group of baby harp seal fans through the pressure ridges of the Gulf of St. Lawrence — and through political turmoil. Each month, one of our Adventure Collection member company leaders will tell you the story about the one trip that forever changed the course of his or her life. If you ever needed proof of the profound ways that travel can affect us, read on!
At twenty-five years old, I would never have guessed that one phone call, $600, and eleven months would end up changing the course of my life forever. Oh, and one very wacky photograph.
Caught between my ambition to build my small travel business by cold-calling another fifty schools to solicit student groups and my desire to head to the $6 public golf course for nine quick holes, the single-line phone on my desk rang for the first time that day in 1987. It was 3:00 in the afternoon. On the other end was the development director for the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW), rather professionally inquiring about my travel company’s interest in running helicopter adventures to view baby harp seals in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. “Sure, I’m interested,” I said, thinking at the same time, if I only knew where the Gulf of St. Lawrence was.
I was young, but my youth was surpassed by my ignorance. Three years earlier I had started my travel business after a short stint as a prep-school history teacher. At best, I was a very poor teacher, colliding with the somewhat stuffy New England administration on such vital issues as wearing a tie, fastening my top shirt button, and playing Frisbee with the kids on the commons while the sounds of Jimi Hendrix’s guitar blared out of a dormitory room window. Fortuitously, I had arranged a spring break trip to Colorado for the school’s ski club; and, after running that trip and thoroughly enjoying the adventure of “guiding,” I figured I’d start a company designed to operate such tours for high school kids. I clearly had to get out of teaching and, given my rebellious nature, it was also probably a good idea for me to work for myself.
The going was rough. For a capital investment, I had $600 I saved from driving a garbage truck at an amusement park in New Jersey. For the next two years, I slept on the kitchen floor of my brother’s Manhattan apartment and stole his laundry money for subway fare. I was fortunate that the local Chinese take-out served portions slightly larger than my brother’s appetite, so my dinner was pretty well guaranteed on a daily basis.
Now, here I was, at 3:00 in the afternoon, several years after leaving my short-lived teaching career, and I was at a bit of a crossroads. I was running some adventure trips for students and teachers, plus arranging promotional ski trips for organizations and corporations, but it was sporadic. In truth, I had very little business. That one phone call changed everything.
After a few meetings dressed in my borrowed suit and tie, I signed an agreement to operate helicopter-based expedition trips to visit baby harp seals in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. The adventures were designed to replace seal-hunting dollars with seal-watching dollars, a system defined by the newly emerging term “ecotourism.” This sounded great to me, as I had always loved adventure travel, and though I hadn’t quite yet uncovered my inner environmentalist by this time, I did find it “cool” to be helping out a beautiful species such as harp seals. Plus — an added bonus — it all sounded pretty easy. But then, at my young age, I had no idea what I was getting into.
The travelers I met were deeply committed to protecting cuddly, white harp seal pups, and they were anticipating the experience of a lifetime. ©David White
I found out. After eleven months of arranging helicopters and airplanes, leasing hotel rooms and restaurants, and sending tens of thousands of brochures and letters out around the world, we had 330 passengers from eleven different countries committed to showing up in northeastern Canada in the middle of the winter. These dedicated people, who had for years donated money, written letters, and protested to help protect cuddly, white harp seal pups, were anticipating the experience of a lifetime. It dawned on me, just one day prior to the first departure, that it was now my responsibility to provide it for them. That was a lot of pressure on a young kid who had never even been in a helicopter.
When we lifted off from the airport at Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, we quickly left all land behind. Flying low over seemingly endless pans of sub-Arctic ice, the fiery-orange sunrise lit the wintry scene with a warm glow. Though I was technically in charge of this expedition, my travel experiences had been limited — mostly to those ski trips I had been arranging — so the heli-flight itself awakened an exciting spirit for adventure in me that I had not yet known.
The other passengers and I did not really know where we were traveling in a directional sense. We left that to the pilot. We only knew our destination: an ice pan suitable for landing, one hopefully littered with mother harp seals and their newborn, white-coated pups. Circling at several hundred feet, we slowly descended in long arcs, each sweeping curve revealing more small, dark dots that turned out to be mother seals. And right next to them — invariably within five to ten feet — were the baby seals, or “whitecoats,” the lovely creatures that had captured the world’s attention and created a generation of environmental activism.
Commercial hunts devastated harp seal populations in the Atlantic. Between 1950 and 1970, their numbers dropped from somewhere around 2.5 million down to half of that. ©Colin McNulty
For thousands of years, native people of Canada’s eastern seaboard hunted harp seals for meat, fur, and other purposes. It was a sustainable, subsistence hunt much like any other in indigenous communities. Several hundred years ago, that all changed. The commercial hunt, mostly for the seals’ rich oil, began; and in the late eighteenth century, the first wooden sailing ships arrived to commence a boat-based hunt. It is estimated that the baby harp seal catch exceeded 500,000 animals during many of those years. By the mid 1900s, the mainly Norwegian fleets had arrived with steel-reinforced hulls and, though the population had already dwindled, hundreds of thousands of seals were still “harvested” annually. Between 1950 and 1970, harp seals in the Atlantic decreased by 50 percent, from somewhere around 2.5 million down to half that number.
In 1967, a Welshman living in Canada and working part-time at the New Brunswick Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA), Brian Davies, was invited to witness the seal hunt amid growing concern that the method used was cruel. The seal-hunting community anticipated Davies would approve the hunt and move on, but what he witnessed that first day on the ice floes shocked him. Davies went on to form the IFAW, dedicated to ending the commercial harp seal hunt.
After years of heated battles, a European Community Directive in 1983 banned the import of harp seal skins, resulting in a dramatic decline in the hunt during the following years. But there was still a landsman hunt, where locals would sail or drag dories out onto the ice floes. It was now Davies’ idea to replace that hunt with seal-watching tourism. This is where I came onto the scene.
Though each person experienced the harp seals’ birthing grounds differently, none of them could hide their strong emotions. ©IFAW
Emotions ran deep on both sides. “How could they murder such innocent, little creatures,” screamed the seal lovers. “Who were the Americans and Europeans to tell us to change the way we have lived our lives for hundreds of years” was the angry reply among the seal hunters and fishermen. The issue was hot; although most of the locals looked forward to a new and exciting adventure industry in the islands, the initial reaction from some islanders was that I was another protester. And here I was, for the first time, about to bring hundreds of seal lovers into the center of the storm.
Jolted from my vibrating helicopter trance, I suddenly became acutely aware of my co-travelers who had, for the past forty-five minutes, been sitting nearly on top of me. They had traveled quite far and paid quite a lot of money to witness the harp seals’ birthing grounds, and it occurred to me that they were the reason I was in that helicopter at all. One woman held a tissue to her eyes as she sniffled and cried tears of joy. Though each showed it differently, none of them could hide their eager anticipation. Unlike those dedicated and passionate people, I hadn’t spent a lifetime defending these animals, so my affinity with them was fleeting. I hadn’t dreamed of their protection, nor had I written a single politician to garner support for their cause.
At the time, I didn’t know that intense devotion to an animal species, or to anything, really. So this particular trip to Canada was not only an extraordinary tour experience, it was also the start of a personal journey, one full of potential for finding my place in the field of adventure travel. From high school to college to teaching, I hadn’t settled on any one direction. But that day, sitting in my orange expedition suit cramped between two elderly ladies from opposite sides of the planet, I began to discover my path. Though the temperatures were in the single digits and we were in an environment more suited to a polar bear than to a guy from New Jersey, I somehow felt right then and there as though I was born to do this.
Upon landing, we felt a faint thump. Then we waited — first for the engine to cool and the blades to slow; then for the pilot to check the ice conditions. Every one hundred yards or so, pressure ridges — where two, round ice pans collide, pushing ice chunks upward a few feet — rose from the flatness, and around them lay the majority of the seals.
Everyone headed off separately to have private time with the seals. ©Mike Bruscia
With ski poles in hand to test the ice before we stepped, we each headed off separately so we could experience our own, personal time with the seals. While the pilots kept a watchful eye out for our safety, I began by helping the older women, some of whom had barely seen snow in fifty years, much less walk on it with heavy boots and a restricting expedition suit. When they were all situated near the seals, each with a private view, I wandered off alone.
I didn’t quite feel comfortable snuggling up to a seal, thinking that they probably didn’t want to see me given my far lesser connectedness to them. So I explored the ridges, stopping for a few seconds at each mother and pup, taking a mental picture and moving on. I kept an eye on my co-travelers, too, and I found that their excitement was as captivating to watch as looking at the seals. Some of the women may have been well into their seventies, but they were little girls on the ice floes that day. I thought about their lives and the years they had seen, perhaps some of those years difficult ones since they had been raised during the Depression and World War II. I knew that they had earned this important and meaningful experience. I began to feel a sense of pride in having been a part of providing it for them.
I returned to the hotel that evening with just one photograph, that of a baby seal wearing my New York Mets cap. But I also brought back my future.
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