To North or Not to North. Is that a question?
There is a tale that weaves together Canadian identity with the lands around the Artic, the realms of the magnetic and haunting North. The months of winter along the 49th parallel cast this story into a tangible weft in the fabric of our being. I believed this whole-heartedly and finally, this February 2026, I experienced 58.7679° N in 3D and with all five senses and then some.
"Wait," you say. "Churchill, Manitoba lays south of the Artic circle. Can it count as 'North'?" How can a place that has a polar bear 'jail' not count as 'North', say I.
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| Polar Bear Holding Facility where naturally-fasting bears learn they won't get food if they troll this town. Released when ice forms on the bay, they are rewarded with a dinner of seals. Not bad, given the alternative to threatening humans is death. |
And the land is dotted with spruce 'flag trees', blasted by the rant of the Northwest wind so relentlessly that the branches on the side facing the tirade don't grow.
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| Flag Trees |
And let me tell you about the sea ice, in limbo between rocky shore and the unfrozen waters of Hudson Bay. Did you, like me, expect an ice shelf to be as flat and minimal as a skating rink? Ah, but the North lets loose forces that push and heave the solidifying liquid into a surface of sculpted turmoil.
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| The surface of sea ice between Hudson Bay and Churchill's shore. |
The ice self trims the shoreline close behind the complex that is Churchill's city centre. As we gawked, like the tourists that we were, out towards the bay and considered being fearful of a rogue polar bear, a moving dark dot resolved instead into a lone person trudging in off the ice. Dragging rafts. One of our group caught up with the trekker, discovering that it was a slender, British woman of colour who calls herself Polar Preet. That such an athlete selected this liminal space as the training ground for her solo Artic expedition, speaks much to Churchill's North-ness.
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| Preet, a brave Brit, training on the sea ice near Churchill's city centre for her trek to the North Pole. |
The North demands particular degrees Celsius in the season of snow. And the North must display particularly colourful celebrations of plasma intwined with magnetic fields. And so these will be the subjects of my upcoming blog tales about Churchill.
Just testing the blog settings :-)
ReplyDeleteI would love to know more about human/bear interactions and how people cope with them on a regular basis?
ReplyDeleteWhat is going on in the last photo?
Why were you going there to give a lecture?
Oh, and what physical forces cause the ice to buckle?
I re-posted a link to an article for bear info in the second paragraph. (Don't know how it got removed...)
DeleteLast photo: I fell over yet again in the snow. It looks like the snow came up to my knees. After my fall it became something of a "meme" for others in our group to kneel down to make it look like this.
I asked to be able to give a lecture. They were looking for potential on-going instructors so this was kind of a test run.
The forces I contemplate are compression (eg. against boulders; fractured pieces of ice against other fragments/sheets, etc) and pressure (wind; water flowing and heaving up and down below the ice surface). This could make an interesting expansion to this post, or even a poem, eh?
Thanks for the suggestions for items to address in a re-write.