I haven’t been many places. It’s shameful – twenty-nine years old and I’ve barely left the country. I went to Disneyland, once, and I hope to see Europe soon. But I have been one place few people have visited – the North. The far, far, far north. The frigid, lifeless tundra. Up there. Way, way up there.
I’ve wanted to write about it for years now, but I’ve never known where to start. Do I start with the landscape? Do I mention the trees, how they get thinner and thinner the further you go? Do I mention the endless blinding white, the fields of snow and ice that go on forever, and how it burns the eyes until the world is all quiet and white? Do I mention the sky, the vast Northern sky? I don’t think there are words enough to describe the sky. In the summer the sky is blue without end, and the sun never rests. In the winter the sky is lit up every night. I can’t even describe it, the pink and blue and purple and red and green ghosts dancing across the sky, the elegant unfurling spirits bowing to the foxes and caribou and whales below. Nothing in my life will ever, ever compare to the first time I saw the Northern Lights. I wish I could describe them for you. I wish I could describe the majesty of them, how I willingly stood outside for an hour in -40 degree weather just to watch them move. The ballet of color and the elegance of movement. There must be a word, in Gwich’in or Inuvialuit, that captures the dance perfectly.
Or, do I start with the people? The people who have lived there for thousands of years, people who have somehow contrived to live and thrive on seal’s blood and the fat of whales? People whose language consists of endless vowels and consonant sounds formed deep in the throat, long words only recently translated into a complex language of triangles and dots? I could tell you about the people who come to the North because they are running away from something. Bad marriages, debt, black eyes, and fat lips, drugs – all the sadness of the world, I’ve heard every story. There is so much sadness in the Arctic Circle, at the top of the world, you wouldn’t believe it. We all went there to escape our sadness, and found a different kind of madness. The kind you never shake. The tundra goes on forever, and there is only so fast or far you can run, up there at the top of the world.
The theme is forever, in the North, did you notice? The sky goes on forever, the snow and ice last forever, the sadness is forever. There is something so permanent, so lasting and final about the North. Something about the darkness in winter that you’ll never escape. You leave the North with a taste for plastic, neon signs, and fast food. There is too much weight there, too many years of unwritten history. You walk away craving something less than what you came for – something that ends. It’s no coincidence that the suicide rate is so high in the North.
So, I could start with the landscape, or I could talk about the people, or I could try to describe for you the inherent sadness Up There, or the futility of tundra. I could. Or I could give you specifics – why I went, and where exactly I went, and what I did, and who I met, and how I got there, and all that. I could tell you that I met some of my best friends up there, and I fell in love, and I went back, years later, even though I thought I never would. The first time I went there, I was running away from a broken heart. The second time – well, I suppose it was for the same reason. I’ve spent at least five years of my life living near the tundra, under the flayed and bloody sky. One of those years I was drunk nearly every day. My friend who killed himself, I met him Up There.
I could describe all of these things for you, but you would never really understand. I could talk about the cold, which so far I’ve hardly mentioned. You never use the word ‘minus’ in the North. From October to May, it’s twenty or forty degrees out – it’s never minus, it just is. I could mention the cabs you take everywhere (five dollars flat fee anywhere in town), or the prices (four dollars for a kiwi, fifteen dollars for a pack of tampons), the Post Office (mail isn’t delivered; you will see everyone you know at the Post Office), the buildings on stilts (it’s the permafrost, you can’t dig into the ground), utilidors (above-ground sewers; permafrost, again), the smell of muktuk hanging out the window to freeze (whale skin and blubber, a delicacy, although the worst delicacy I’ve ever smelled), and ravens the size of cats. I could describe all of these things, but something would still be missing.
Have you ever felt your eyelashes and nose hairs freeze? Have you ever seen the sun at midnight? Have you seen the sun peeking timidly over the horizon at three in the afternoon? Have you heard arctic wolves howling across a frozen river? Have you taken a cab for three blocks simply because it hurt to breathe? Can you pronounce the word Tsiigehtchic?
I could tell you so many things. There are so many things I’ve left out. There are so many things I can’t describe. I haven’t told you about the ugliness of the North, the
desperation and degradation and violence of it. I saw too many black eyes and bloody faces in the North. I saw too many filthy, sad-eyed children. I saw too many people passed out drunk in the snow, and I saw too many people walk past them and laugh.
I prefer to remember the lights though. There is no violence in the lights, just the never-ending dance of the ancestors. Sometimes I think that if I step outside in the evening – and the moment is just right – and it’s cold enough, and dark enough, and magical enough – I will see them again.
0 comments:
Post a Comment