Visitor to Ocracoke chronicles adventure then tragedy in Canada’s northwest

From OcracokeObserver.com

Does anyone ever get over their first great love?

If you are Asa Jonathan Zoesman, that’s a no.

Zoesman, 72, has been on a quest to come to terms with the tragedies that befell him 53 years ago when he lost his baby and later his wife, Maggie Goldberg, who drowned in the wilds of Canada’s Northwest Territories. He visited Ocracoke recently in his tricked-out Tesla, complete with a Starlink antenna on top. Emblazoned on the front in letters made with colored electrical tape are the words “Arctic Tesla Film.”  It causes double takes wherever he goes.

As an attention magnet, it’s supposed to engender discussions with people – and possible film producers and collaborators – to help get the word out.

“I just park the car and people come up to me,” he said about his transportation that has a passenger-seat film studio.

Zoesman applied those words to the car’s hood after having driven the car two years ago in the dead of winter to Tuktoyaktuk at the edge of the Arctic Ocean in the Northwest Territories. He was the first to do that in a Tesla.

But the vehicle is less important than the story.

“To be on that river that she disappeared in,” he said about his quest. “To go back to the river where she was never found.”

The film is a documentary about the couple’s love story and their experiences living in northern Canada in the early 1970s.

“I got married when I was 17 in 1969,” Zoesman recalled, noting that they’d known each other since the second grade.  “We were madly in love, and we went to Canada because the Vietnam War was happening and (Maggie) didn’t want me to die in the war or go to jail. We wanted to be free.”

Canada was open to Americans and because the couple wanted to homestead and live off the land they took off into the woods – first to Quebec and later farther northwest.

“It’s about cutting all the ropes and burning all the bridges,” he said about the film. “We wanted to get away from people.”

The film doesn’t have a title yet, and it’s not a total documentary. It has some live action, Zoesman said, but in the last two years he has traveled way up north in his electric car to rediscover the places where he and Maggie had lived and experienced tragedy.

The first one was the death of his one-day-old son, Aurora, so named as he was born under the northern lights in a cabin 252 miles north of Whitehorse.

After the baby died and since the birth wasn’t in a hospital, Canadian authorities held an inquest. An autopsy revealed that Aurora died of Hyaline membrane disease (HMD), also called respiratory distress syndrome (RDS), a condition that causes babies to need extra oxygen and help breathing.

They were exonerated but after that, the couple received chilly receptions from locals, some of whom had previously been friendly.

So, he and Maggie decamped to the Northwest Territories near Fort Liard where they had just homesteaded five acres of land for $5. They had a campsite along the Flett Creek and one day they needed to travel 70 miles away to the nearest town for vegetable seeds.

After trekking along the creek, they found some flotsam with which they quickly fashioned a raft and floated into the Liard River. A passing motorboat offered them a ride, though they lost their raft.

During the return trip, as the boat captain refilled the gas tank he spilled oil onto the boat floorboards.

And just as their campsite came into view, the captain threw a lit cigarette onto the bottom of the boat igniting a fire.

“It’s time to hit the drink” the captain yelled to the couple.

They did and swam to a mud flat in the middle of the river. Their campsite was 1,200 feet on the other side of the river, but the river current was fast.

Knowing they could not last overnight outside in the wet, the couple knew they had to swim across to the shore.

So, they jumped again, and after Zoesman fought the current and clambered to the shore, he was alone.

Maggie, didn’t make it. She was swept away.

“We searched in a helicopter 50 miles downstream,” Zoesman said, but Maggie was never found. “We were so in love and then, poof. Just like that it was taken.”

But never forgotten.

Since 2018, he has worked on telling this story. First it was as readings, but after a while it morphed into a film and Zoesman created a film studio in his home.

“My intention from the beginning was to make a movie that has never been made before; completely out-of-the box,” he said. “Not Hollywood, but a real thing, and it requires a lot of different input.”

For the last two years, to get scenes for his film, Zoesman has been driving his Tesla from his Petersburgh, New York, home to the Yukon, the Northwest Territories and the Arctic Ocean and getting press along the way.

As the spirit moves him, he’s made side trips, such as a recent foray to Plains, Georgia, where he witnessed the funeral for the late president Jimmy Carter, and then to the Ocracoke.

On one of the trips into Canada, he traveled to his son’s gravesite for the first time since that event. There he said a Jewish prayer and placed two stones his mother had collected from the shore of the Liard River after Goldberg went missing.

And he’s also learning things that are different from his experiences in the 1970s, especially gaining new understanding of the native people, their lands and their historic struggles with white settlers.

“I had no real concept of this when Maggie and I went there,” he said. “We just wanted to go out in the woods.”

So, in gathering film footage, he has included perspectives of First Nation chiefs.

“It’s going to be fascinating,” he said about the film. “People are going to learn from this. It’s going to be educational.”

An electrical contractor by trade, Zoesman, with the help of Jeanne Marie, his second wife of 45 years, outfitted the self-driving Tesla as a traveling film studio and home on wheels in which he can camp and park at charging stations.

“I don’t think I can separate what I’m doing from the vehicle that is carrying me forward, nor from the moment in time in which we live, nor would I want to,” he said.

He shares his progress with a 200-person mailing list.

A number of people in the film industry are working with him on the film, such as cinematographer Mike Rintoul, who has worked with director J.J. Abrams.

“There are hundreds of hours of footage, and it needs editing,” Zoesman said. “I’m in the film. I’m making the film. I’m working with all of these people trying to pull all of these things together.”

Zoesman will use AI to help complete the film, which he expects to be done by the end of this year.

The project has been a healing experience from the decades-old trauma.

Sometimes he leans back in the driver’s seat and lets the Tesla go where he has commanded it. It’s an adventure that has become reminiscent of his life with Maggie: floating down the river of life in a vehicle not unlike that long-ago raft.

“This craft is driving me,” he said about riding in the Tesla. “I am witness to the mountains sliding by. I lean back in my seat, down pillow cradling my head.

“Freedom. It might be borrowed; it might be quite temporal. That doesn’t matter. Such is life. Everyone wants to be free.”

Asa Jonathan Zoesman’s website arctictesla.org includes a PDF of the story titled “1000 Days: The Story of Maggie and Jonnie,” as told to Dalena Frost Storm, granddaughter of Robert Frost.