As I read this memoir and refamiliarized myself with many of Farley Mowat’s settings, passions, and adventures, it occurred to me that a couple of generations of younger Canadian readers probably don’t view him the way many of us do, as a constant and urgent presence in our lives, daring to go where most Canadians won’t, into wolf dens and onto ice floes, to bring back stories of our abiding but changing relationship with both a natural world and an older human world that we forget at our peril.

For those younger readers, who just see Mowat as a bunch of dusty volumes on their parents’ bookshelves, this memoir could be a good introduction to this Canadian version of the Ancient Mariner who is compelled to keep telling his splendid and harrowing tales. He is an extreme adventurer, a popular figure these days, and in this book he is also a lover – of a beautiful woman and a beautiful place.

The book begins with Mowat’s first encounter with Newfoundland in the summer of 1957, aboard the coast steamer Baccalieu, which plied its route from Argentia to Port aux Basques every week, dropping off supplies and picking up passengers for the ferry bound to and from “Canada.” It ends 10 years later with a retelling of the bloodthirsty event that became the substance of Mowat’s 1972 book, A Whale for the Killing.

The most important thing that happens in that 10-year span occurs right at the beginning: his meeting with his future wife, Claire, at St. Pierre et Miquelon. To say that Farley and Claire were meant for each other is a gross understatement. This is a lady who apparently was delighted to spend her first trysting days in the hull of the optimistically named Happy Adventure, a rough little schooner with five feet of headroom in the hull and a pair of plank bunks, each 16 inches wide at the head and 12 at the foot. The life of wandering mariners, exploring the Newfoundland coast in the worst weather known to man or beast, seems to have given her endless pleasure. For a change of scenery, Mowat spirited his lady love off to England, where they spent the winter in a “frigid stone shepherd’s cottage on the Dorset coast,” followed by a pilgrimage to John o’ Groats and Caithness at the northernmost extremity of Scotland, land of Mowat’s forebears.

The second five years encompassed by this memoir were spent nominally in a house in Burgeo, one of the coastal communities that Joey Smallwood designated a growth centre when he closed down many of the small outport villages in the 1950s and ’60s. But this is a briny maritime tale from head to toe, with Farley and Claire finding any excuse at all to continue exploring, particularly in the area known in English as Bay Despair, a corruption of Baie d’Espoir, itself a corruption of Baie d’Esprits.

From spirit to hope to despair sounds like a dolorous journey (although the Mowats give the area their own private love-soaked name, Bay Desire). And once again, through vivid storytelling and sharp detail, Mowat tells the sad narrative of the death of the way of life of the outports, where everyone looked out for everyone and communities felt like – and in many cases were – families. While poking around Raymond’s Point, one of the many abandoned outports, the Mowats visited a closed-down school and found this defiant message still on the blackboard, heavily underlined in red chalk: “THEY KILT THE SCHOOL BUT CAN’T KILL WE.”

Twice in Bay of Spirits, Mowat delivers the kind of impassioned set piece for which he is famous, describing and deploring the Newfoundlanders’ penchant for turning animals into hilarious blood sport, blasting away at seals “because dey’s dere!” and shooting a trapped whale to death in an inland harbour. But life is complicated, and nowhere does Mowat attempt to reconcile what is clearly his deep love and attachment to Newfoundlanders and their old way of life with his disgust at these outbursts of gratuitous cruelty. In fact, when it comes to the climax of the whale story, Farley abruptly turns the narrative over to Claire, whose own journal had recorded the tragic event. (He does this a number of times throughout the book, reminding us what an elegant writer Claire Mowat is as well.)

All in all, Farley Mowat has led a charmed and lucky life. Blessed with an endlessly curious and energetic cast of mind and an outrageously colourful personality, he has also been gifted with a perfect life companion and a love that has endured for many decades. Oh, and the fellow knows how to write, too, which always helps.