Spindrift, page 6
She slips her warmest wool sweater on, ties her hair back and stretches a small LED headlamp over her forehead. Poseidon rubs his thick purring body against her leg, noses her hands as she pulls on her gumboots. “Coming?” she asks, stroking his silky fur. Then she steps outside, into the cool pre-dawn blue, and heads across the apple orchard toward the sea, the white cat bounding through the tall grass beside her.
—from The Year of Broken Glass (2011)
Tentacles of the Protean Sea
Rudy Wiebe (1934– )
Sitting in his university office in Edmonton, novelist Rudy Wiebe ponders what it means to be “inland,” away from the sea. He finds a poetic link with rivers.
But “inland” is a convenient chimera, a mythological beast concocted by our refusal to imagine and thereby to understand. Though we ordinarily think that rivers run from the heights of land and mountains to eventually vanish in the sea, when you approach a river from the ocean it becomes much more enlightening to recognize that rivers are the gnarled fresh fingers of the sea reaching for the mountains.
Below my office window move the waters of the North Saskatchewan River. I can also say that below my window move the waters (running with ice pans now) of that vast inland sea, Hudson Bay. And less than a hundred kilometres north of me on the North Saskatchewan is the Athabasca River which is the water of the Slave River, the Mackenzie River, of the Beaufort Sea, the Arctic Ocean. My city Edmonton began as a fur-trading post in 1795 and the reason it grew to become the dominant northern trading settlement of the nineteenth century is exactly because it is at the closest point between the two water systems: here sixty miles of horse-drawn carts could take you from Hudson Bay to the western Arctic Ocean. The North Saskatchewan and the Athabasca are merely two small (though several thousand kilometres long) tentacles of the Circumpolar Sea, call parts of it what we will—Arctic, North Atlantic, North Pacific, Bering, Beaufort, Chukchi, East Siberian—whatever, that great global sea which surrounds us and in so doing defines our true boundaries …
If then the endless tentacles of the sea lie everywhere on the land, it is both philosophically proper and imaginatively pleasing that the first whites to systematically explore the Canadian Arctic tundra and its coast were sailors …
I have been contemplating arctic Canada more as water than as land: the sea, the rivers, ice, cloud, fog, an occasional lake. The people I have talked about moved across the landscape largely by means of water: the two Franklin expeditions, Back and King, the Yellowknives, Green Stockings and her linear husbands and children, Albert Johnson, the men who pursued him, Tony Thrasher. One might deduce from my considerations that all human beings, certainly all whites, made their entry into the arctic landscape by means of water and that for most of the last four hundred years of arctic encounter the whites have not wanted land there at all. They want water, and not in its peculiar, inconvenient at best and deadly at worst, mix of ice/fog/liquid either. They want nothing except liquid water so they can get past the land because they do not want to stop in the Arctic at all: they merely want it to be a convenient passage to another place altogether.
And the Arctic has never cooperated; it is too much itself to be merely a means for anything. The image of water I have used thus far certainly corroborates such a deduction. It also affirms the idea that movement within a landscape, whether on water or occasionally land, can be seen in the linear image of water moving down to the sea, or, if you grant me my original reversed conceit, of the rivers being the tentacles of the protean sea reaching over the land. In other words, the movement (life) of human beings is always analogous to the line water draws upon land.
—from Playing Dead: A contemplation concerning the Arctic (1989)
The Northwest Passage by HBC Canoe
Duncan Pryde (1937–1997)
In August 1967 Duncan Pryde and Erik van Veenan undertook a 1,300-mile canoe trip from Cambridge Bay along the Arctic coast to the Mackenzie River delta. Fitted with a 15-hp “kicker” outboard as backup, their 20-foot “HBC canoe” had a beam of five feet and was considered reasonably stable.
We had hoped to find an Eskimo camp at the harbour but the settlement was deserted. There were several cabins along the shore which showed no signs of having been occupied for years. There was a solitary cabin on one of the northernmost points of land jutting into the harbour, and towards it we worked our canoe. It was a small affair with one room about ten by twelve feet and a smaller one, which had apparently been used as a fuel shed, attached to the rear. The main room was comfortable with three small beds, a set of tables and an oil stove. There were even cooking pots and cutlery neatly laid out by the last occupant. Utter luxury. There was also a large sign reading RCMP above the door. I knew that Bernard had been the site of the Canadian Arctic Expedition from 1913 to 1918, a thriving trading post at the time, later an RCMP station, and then a temporary DEW line camp.
The weather was still exceedingly rough, so we made a cache of our gear on the beach and just carried our sleeping bags and grub box up to the cabin. It was not hard to talk ourselves into camping there. All we needed now was some fresh water, so we took the canoe to look for a small creek. On the way we noticed some crosses on the island on the opposite side of the narrow channel, and went over to have a look. They marked four graves.
Three of the graves were set side by side, while the remaining one lay about twenty feet apart and had a rough wooden cross, which looked as if it had been banged together from the slats of a box and had no name or inscription on it. The other three crosses lay in a row and had been meticulously carved so that the names and inscriptions stood out in relief. I copied down the carving on each cross, for the day would come when the wind and rain and the driven snow would obscure them and make them unreadable. Like the fourth cross, they would bear no witness to these people who had lived in the country before us … The inscriptions read: Samuel McIntyre, Died Jan. 8, 1927, Aged 68 years; Frederick William Bezona, Died Sept. 10, 1927, Aged 44 years; Frederick Talik Bezona, Died Oct. 31, 1927, Aged 2 months.
As I stood on the barren, wind-swept slope with the ground drift swirling around my feet I felt an empathy with these people that is hard to describe. Forty years before, they too had been alive and living in Bernard Harbour and had probably been well familiar with the region which seemed strange and unknown to Erik [van Veenan] and myself. I wondered about them. Samuel McIntyre, who had been the first to die: he was probably a trader for the Hudson’s Bay Company, for the Bay had a post there in 1916, one of the earliest built east of the Mackenzie River along the coast. He had lived his life span and had probably died of old age in a land he knew and loved.
The other two graves had to be the record of a tragedy, the record of a man who had died in the prime of life less than two weeks after the birth of his son and shortly before the baby himself had died. I felt sympathy for the woman who so many years ago must have lost both husband and son within a seven-week span and wondered if she were still alive somewhere. If she had died here she would have been buried alongside her husband. Surely her grave would have been marked; it wouldn’t be that lonely grave set to one side.
—from Nunaga: My Land, My Country (1971)
Adrift on the Ice
Julian W. Bilby (1871–1932)
The Reverend Julian Bilby’s Nanook of the North appeared three years after the release of Robert J. Flaherty’s classic silent film of the same title. Like the film, his novel tells the story of an Inuit hunter and chief who, bearing the common name, Nanook (The Bear), leads his people in their heroic struggle for survival in the Canadian Arctic. Here, young hunters defy traditional wisdom by heading out onto the shore ice in rapidly deteriorating weather conditions.
The young hunters forced their way through the shore ice and out to the main ice beyond; and then they saw the effect of the gale to the south. Where the floe-edge had been there was nothing but masses of broken ice, extending many miles. Cracks ran in every direction, like a vast plain of glass which had been struck by a monstrous stone.
The tide was low and the wind was on shore, and so the cracks were closed. The hunters drove slowly and cautiously, hoping to find a seal-hole; all keeping close together and within sight of each other …
Shortly afterwards a shout from Illkaluk announced that he had been successful. A seal had come and he had speared it and was drawing it out on to the ice, where he killed it. “Do not come!” he shouted warningly, for already he was faced with the serious problem of rejoining his companions. The thin ice might bear one man, but it would certainly not bear more. All the support it gave he needed for his own salvation and securing his seal, which he had no thought of abandoning. Illkaluk now put all his energy into the task of returning, and his memory became full of tales of what hunters had done when in danger like his own. He glanced around him, and realized that unless he could save himself he was lost.
“I will do as Atseak told us he once did,” muttered Illkaluk. He uncoiled his long seal-line, to an end of which the barbed spear-head was attached, and pushed the spear-head through the nose of his prize. Then with a half-turn he fastened the line round the seal’s neck, knowing that such a fastening would bear any strain; after which he made a loop in the other end and slipped it over his neck and arm.
“That is all good,” Illkaluk told himself. He glanced around once more, knowing that it might be for the last time, and then, lying spread-eagled on the ice, he began an exhausting crawl to safety, dragging his seal at the full extent of the long line, to distribute the weight.
The crawl was a desperate adventure, a forlorn hope. The salt-water ice was tough and did not crack under his weight as fresh-water ice would have done, but even so it bent as Illkaluk laboriously advanced and every instant threatened to collapse and let him fall into the sea. His companions had abandoned their own hunting for the time and watched and encouraged him, Kakka’s voice rising strong and clear, and his skilful right hand holding a line ready to throw as soon as Illkaluk could reach one.
“Keep your eye on us—we will not let you go,” shouted Kakka, as Illkaluk crawled nearer. “Now!” Kakka threw his line and it was caught. With slow, steady pulls Illkaluk was drawn to the sound ice, and the seal disappeared.
“It might have been you,” said Kakka. “But we will get it in.” He and his fellows hauled on the line and the thin ice broke away as they pulled the carcass in and left it at the feet of Illkaluk, who had slowly risen.
“Yes,” said Illkaluk, again glancing round, “it might indeed have been me.”
—from Nanook of the North (1925)
At the World’s Edge
Al Purdy (1918–2000)
In the summer of 1965 Al Purdy found poetic inspiration while staying with an Inuit family near the hamlet of Pangnirtung on Baffin Island.
I was curled up in a sleeping bag, feeling lost at the world’s edge, bereft of family and friends. As the tide went out, icebergs were left stranded on the beach. With the water’s support removed, they collapsed on themselves with a crash whose echoes kept repeating themselves. A dog would howl, and others join in, a bedlam chorus. Old Squaw ducks moaned about how awful life was, an OUW-OUW-OUW dirge for the living. And all these sounds repeated themselves, as if some mad god were howling from distant mountains.
Somewhere in my head a poem began. One of the lines was about those ducks, the loneliness and defeat the birds signified: “I think to the other side of that sound”: I think to a place where uncertainty and loneliness are ended, to a happier time. But, I say to myself now, think again: I was never really happier than when I was lying in a sleeping bag on an Arctic island, listening to those noisy ducks at the top of the world and writing a poem.
—from Beyond Remembering: The Collected Poems of Al Purdy (2000)
Spring Breakup in Labrador
Harold Horwood (1923–2006)
Drawing on his extensive travels in “the Labrador,” Horwood offers an arresting historical narrative of life in the harsh North. His story features eight passengers on their voyage northward from St John’s aboard the passenger-freighter SS Kyle. Built in 1913, SS Kyle served routes between Newfoundland and northern ports of Labrador until she foundered in Harbour Grace in 1967.
On land, the spring came early that year. By the first week of June the snow had vanished except for a few banks in shady places, and, of course, the almost permanent white mantles of the mountains. Spring breakup was followed by a cloudburst. The solution of thawed dog crap that fouls the village every spring was washed away, leaving the grass banks and footpaths that served for streets clean and sweet smelling. The woods woke up. White-crowned sparrows and purple finches began building nests. The rain was followed by a week of sunshine that warmed the land until you could walk about comfortably in shirt sleeves, and the hardiest of the children began playing in and about the tidal pools along the rocky shore.
But the sea ice, drifting southward from Hudson and Davis straits, was unusually heavy. It blocked all the outside runs as far as Port Manvers and Dog Island and beyond. It packed tight into Windy Tickle and around Cape Harrigan to the south and showed no inclination to move.
The harbour itself was clear, however, the water blue and warm even though the ice hovered just outside, and a few arctic char—sea trout as we called them—were taken in nets and on lines by the few boys who bothered to fish for them; the main trout runs would not begin until July.
The ice did not stop local travel. People took boats to the ice pack, hauled them up, launched them again as needed. You could see dog teams riding in boats, and boats being hauled by dogs. This amphibious mode of travel is fairly common along all our ice-bound coasts at certain times. It’s a bit unwieldy, but it gets you there.
At that time I was still young enough to be deeply affected by the spring breakup, the smell of the uplands and the bays in motion. Wild geese came winging in wedges from the south, and long, ragged lines of ducks glided down, settling and mottling the bays. The sea hawks—skuas and jaegers—dived overhead and went screaming northward toward their nesting ground. Whales cruised into the runs, rising and falling in slow motion. Seals bobbed like gnomes in the water—round, whiskered heads thrust upward, gazing pensively at passing boats or at the slow progress of castellated icebergs moving toward their appointed end in the warm Gulf Stream a thousand miles to the south.
—from White Eskimo (1972)
Cabot Strait
George Whalley (1915–1983)
Cabot Strait runs between southwest Newfoundland and Cape Breton Island.
No lasting furrow here,
no waving silk of corn,
no gathering gold together
under an August moon.
Never does the Spring come
with a wild delicate wonder
to warm the seasonless
inscrutable face of the sea.
Nor is it ever summer;
though rain strikes warm on the face
and lightning flows in sudden
freshets down the sky.
The rain stops; and the night
brings from a great distance
over the dark sea
the fragrance of the land:
scent of pine-needles, soft
as the whisper of wind in them;
scent of grasses rooted
deep in the black mould;
sunheavy musk
of wild flowers and ripe
wheat and the dark cool
sweetness of green leaves.
But this tender reaching
Out of the land to touch us
is changed by the sterile sea
into exotic strangeness.
At sea home is always
locked up close in the heart;
a warm intimate secret,
nourishing the dark.
And nowhere except at home,
out of the sea’s bitter
way, can summer be other
than freedom from winter.
—from The Collected Poems of George Whalley (1986)
Islands
Charles Bruce (1906–1971)
Islands are a different country. Something more
Than straits and channels and the sweep of sea
Divides their beaches from the blunted shore.
Some island thing, in moss and grass and tree,
Nursed by the wind and rooted in gray rock,
Stubborn as time and sharp as winter thorn––
And something in the look and step and talk
And touch of men and women, island born.
An absent look, a listening in the eyes.
As if they heard, in blood and flesh and bone,
Between the breakers’ rise and fall and rise
Some word let fall between the sea and stone.
But never ask me what. How should I know?
I was born inland. Half a mile or so.
—from The Mulgrave Road (1951)
Lighthouse
Frank Parker Day (1881–1950)
Young Gershom Born has been appointed to succeed his father as keeper of the light near fictional Rockbound Island off the coast of Nova Scotia. The position is highly sought after among the islanders, for the keeper receives eighty dollars a month, besides fuel and lodging—and this represents great wealth in the islands during the 1920s. Gershom’s friend David Jung goes along to help with the move to the lighthouse.
So, one morning in late November, David set off with Gershom to install him as keeper of the Barren Island Light. They landed at midday and relieved the temporary keeper, who was glad to be gone. The island was an eerie place, for one heard naught by day or night but the tiresome beat of surf, the moan of the sea wind, and the shrill screams of gulls and carey’s. Though David was an agnostic in regard to ghosts, he could not deny that there was something queer and unearthly about Barren Island. Even the government engineer—so ran the tale—who had built the light’s foundation, had reported to the islanders that things were not as they should be. As the friends stepped out of the lighthouse one blowy night soon after their arrival, to make the round of the cliffs, Gershom gripped David’s arm and said: “Listen!” From the northern end a hoarse, distant voice seemed to cry: “Help! Ahoy, there, ahoy!” and from below the cliff wall came sounds like the rattling of oars and the banging of a shattered boat, but when they reached the cliff’s edge they could see or hear nothing. After nightfall they kept close together, for both knew that the old man’s haunt would linger about the island for a little while.
