One starry night while watching the silhouettes of geese flying south, I experienced the most beautiful event in these northern latitudes, the aurora borealis. It was unlike any display of the northern lights I had ever seen. At first, a faint wisp of light drifted between the stars, a hint of a heavenly event. Then this faint wisp appeared to grow in strength. It became ever brighter, gathering colours from some unseen source. Like some great luminous curtain, it began to unfold across the sky as if set in motion by a celestial wind, its hues changing each moment. The once darkened sky was transformed by this mysterious expanding radiance. Next, as mysteriously as the aurora had arrived in the night sky, she began to fade and the stars, once pale, now regained their original brightness. Having seen such beauty, having stood beneath a moon wrapped in a blanket of stars while listening to the haunting voices of wolves, I entered a wilderness of one, where each footstep led to some new thought.
My life in the forest was filled with many happy experiences. I worked with rough and tough son-of-a-gun men who were never unkind and who would look out for one another. They didn’t write poetry or read the writings of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. They worked hard and from time to time sought out their own private spaces. If some knew that I saw them enjoying a sunset or standing with outstretched arms in a howling wind, I am sure they would have growled in embarrassment and told me to bugger off. In a notebook that I kept under my bunk, filled with observations, expressions of feelings, and random thoughts, I wrote, “I feel a sense of belonging here, yet I don’t know why. I’m almost afraid I’ve been lured into some strange chimera.”
One evening, I began to write the words and expressions I was learning in Ojibwa from a Native elder who lived in a nearby camp. The elder came into our camp looking to buy tobacco, paper, and matches. He had taken a shine to me, as I was about the same age as his son. I had asked him if he would teach me a few words in Ojibwa. When I had repeated them to him, he was astonished that my accent sounded perfect. I put this down to the fact that my first language was a Slavic one (a Bukovinian dialect of Ukrainian), in which the phonetics were quite similar.
The elder’s camp was only a few kilometres from ours, and on each of his visits, I would ask to be taught a few words, which I would write out phonetically. I learned the names of familiar things — birds, animals, the method of making a fire. I learned evocative expressions such as “the sun which shines in darkness” (referring to the moon) or “the place of talking waters” (referring to a nearby set of rapids). The Ojibwa elder talked of once travelling in a great schkoodayodabah, meaning the great fire sleigh or railway train. He talked of forest spirits, leaving gifts to the land, and the importance of showing respect. The one thing he never told me was his name. He simply referred to himself as neweecheewahgun, meaning “a friend.”
Each year, I returned to the North, leaving behind the amenities of the city, the pleasures of school life and good friends, and began to discover an awareness of the eternal beauty of the wilderness. I would see some new place, gain valued experience, and think about things only they could evoke. Each year, I found myself moving ever northward. No longer doing the bull work of my earlier days, I was now a partner in a reconnaissance team. We moved quickly on foot across the landscape, mapping hundreds of square kilometres in a single season. That sense of self-reliance learned while working under the eye of experienced old-timers became more important than ever. Now I often travelled alone. With only a one-day supply of food, a knife, matches, map, compass, and notebook, I ventured out each morning, with the expectation of a safe return each evening to a little tent somewhere in a vast wilderness. Often at night before falling asleep, I would conjure a fond memory; in reliving it, I would soften the sharp edge of loneliness. I would fall into a deep sleep, often visited by dreams too ethereal to remember. Upon awakening to the smell of spruce needles and sunlight entering the tent, I found that the lure of distant hills replaced the sense of loneliness.
In Ungava now called Nunavik (Arctic Quebec) at the age of seventeen.
In the early summer of 1949, I was no longer in the forest. The only trees I encountered were no higher than the length of my hand. I was now in the Arctic, where the earth remained permanently frozen. I was surrounded by a vast horizon, a sight I could never have imagined. Until that day, the Arctic of my imagination had been only a barren and icebound landscape. It was the most forbidding place, shaped in the mind’s eye by heroic tales and films that dramatized the land and its people. Even the numerous and often startling photographs I had seen merely confirmed my impression of a frightfully beautiful, frozen corner of the planet. In the years to follow, the Arctic I would come to know extended far beyond the boundaries of my imagination.
The powerful landscape of the Pangnirtung Pass (Pangnirtuuq), Baffin Island.
CONTOURS OF THE LAND
Arctic. The very word conjures an image of a frozen landscape in the grip of an icy sea. A place of icebergs and polar bears, where winter is cloaked in darkness and summer is an endless moment under the midnight sun. The stereotypical image we southerners have of the polar region emerged from early accounts of whalers and the few survivors of doomed expeditions. These words, written in the golden age of Arctic exploration, reflected what many souls endured at that time: “We seem to be dwelling in some haunted house filled with unearthly and mysterious noises,” wrote Charles Edward Smith, the surgeon aboard the icebound whaler Diana in 1886. “We sit like hares, startled and alarmed at the slightest sound dreading and fearing we know not what.”
Woodcuts and copperplate engravings often illustrated a fantastic world in which life and death teetered on the sharp edge of chance. All the while, somewhere out there lived a people who had adapted perfectly to their environment. They beheld their place as nunatsiaq, the beautiful land. To those who lived in favoured locations, it was nunatiavaluk, a very fine land rich in food and beautiful to behold. Nunarrak, the land, sea, and sky, was regarded as great living thing. Upon and within her dwelled the tuurngait, the spirits, and all things were temporarily imbued with inua, the life force.
The Arctic is often described as a cold desert where precipitation, including melting snow, averages a mere 14 to 26 centimetres annually. Imagine a place with so little precipitation, where winter temperatures average -34° Celsius and can plummet to -60° Celsius; where just below its surface, the earth can be frozen solid for hundreds of metres; where whatever soil thaws in summer is poor in nutrients, and anything that can grow must do so within 50 days.
When you stand upon the Arctic landscape for the first time, you are overwhelmed by its vastness, power, and sheer beauty. Whether you are at the foot of a glacier, on the crest of a mountain, or on the great plains of the central Arctic, you are surrounded by evidence of the unimaginable forces that shape mountains, melt glaciers, move oceans, and drive winds as far as the Gulf of Mexico.
No general profile of the Arctic landscape exists. The shape of the land varies from the great delta plain of the Mackenzie in the west to the imposing mountains of Ellesmere and Baffin in the east. Travelling by airplane from Inuvik to Iqaluit, you can appreciate the grandeur of the Canadian North. You begin the journey in the far west, gazing upon the sinuous delta landscape, an endless maze of twisting rivers and lakes — a surrealistic view of the planet where the infinite number of lakes and twisting rivers reflects images of clouds, as if the Earth were a giant perforated leaf floating on a calm, glassy sea.
As you travel eastward, the landscape changes from the water world of the delta to vast lowlands sweeping toward the coast. They pass in sombre tones of grey and brown, stretching to infinity. Here and there, last year’s snowdrifts lie in the protection of shadows, waiting for the arrival of winter. Below, you see the shadow of your plane continually changing shape as you pass over countless eskers, rivers, and lakes.
Flying