After sailing here over a thousand years ago, I imagine the early 'Farfarers, as Farley Mowat called them, would have been terrified of smashing their tiny double-ender boats onto the rocky shores of Ungava Bay in Arctic Canada.
Even after they managed to land safely, though perhaps no longer seen as dangerous, rocks like these would have had no apparent value - that is until they needed to find a way to get through the harsh winter. Then these very same rocks, when piled up carefully in the right shape for fitting their overturned boats onto, would provide the very shelter they needed to survive.
When spring came they would be able to return home in their double-enders now bulging with valuable cargo loads of walrus hides and tusks they had accumulated the year before.
The distinctive boat-shaped stone walls they left behind still remain to this day as documented archaeological sites, and too, as reminders.
That which we try to avoid, or at best, consider useless, can sometimes be the very thing that save us.
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