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CHAPTER 1
AN INVITATION
A week before I got the invitation that would revive an old, lost search of mine, I lay on a dock with college friends. This was our second summer reunion after thirty years of going on with our separate lives, and we'd all grown up. I'd turned fifty and could finally laugh with a kind of compassion at the heartbreakingly young faces of our yearbook photos. We'd forgiven petty old hurts and now saw each other with more far-sighted, more human eyes. I wasn't used to the laughter — I was used to long hours squirrelled away in a room, alone, writing, then my family coming home for supper; once in a while, a foray out to the library or to have coffee with one friend at a time, or a short pilgrimage alone. This was a dock party. I felt like a character in a Judy Blume book. We had cold beer and nachos, and the cottage was a scrap of heaven that Aloise, my old university roommate, had built with her husband.
Lying on that dock I remembered how many questions I'd had about life back when Aloise and I lived together as students, in a tenement above a tavern that pulsed coloured light into my bedroom. In those days I sensed, at times, a transformation of the ordinary world, catching a glimpse of something beautiful and strange. The glimpse transformed stones, apples, streets, and trees into something other than a storyless chaos: I saw the city bathed in a kind of inaudible music, or swirling transparence, with mysterious significance. In those moments, there was no such thing as ordinary. When the glimpse vanished, as it always did, I was bereft. I felt the world had been trying to speak. The whole of existence felt charged with a luminous significance about which I yearned to know more.
Throughout my youth these transcendent events plunged me, for a few minutes at a time, into a blaze of connectedness and belonging. It was as if I were a lost piece of energy — as if sometimes, for an instant of bliss, I accidentally got connected to the electrical circuit to which I'd belonged all along. But then the disconnection recurred, and the familiar sadness. The vision I glimpsed in those blazing moments was powerful and alive, but it was, too, mysteriously imperilled. Something told me that this life, with its simple, dear things — cranes against the skyline, dawn light on gulls' wings, and the loveliness of light and shadow on city staircases — this life was more than it seemed, and it was endangered in a way I did not yet understand. I asked others if they felt this, I studied my college texts to see if they could explain, and I searched spiritual paths as well; but the only real source was the natural world itself, its tangible objects, its light, and its forms.
I did find company in poets, who seemed to me to be the only people who understood. William Wordsworth wrote that in his youth, the earth and "every common sight" appeared to him clothed in light, with "the glory and freshness of a dream." But having grown older, he lamented, "Nothing can bring back the hour / Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower ..." I knew what he meant. After I left university my own perception dwindled to make room for the details of what my daughters would call my "homesteading phase." I wandered into marriage with a man who hoped I was someone I could never be. He fell ill and after two years he died, and sometimes I thought he'd died of disappointment in me. We had a little girl and after her father died she helped me stack wood and clean the chimney, standing under it with a bucket into which I, with a steel brush on the roof, swept the soot.
Then I met my second husband, a bricklayer, stone worker, and chimney expert, and things began to look up. We had a second daughter and got caught up in the work of raising a family. In that world, though there were beautiful times, that old, mysterious vision, or lost world, retreated behind soup pots and mortgage payments and feeding our goats. I quietly despaired of finding any key to the world I'd glimpsed just underneath — or somehow within — this ever-so-uninspired one.
But now that phase had neared its end. We'd moved to Montreal and I'd left my chimney brush behind. My daughters were becoming more independent and I could come here, to Aloise's lake, with the old friends who'd surrounded me in my youth, when everything was all about possibility. Lying in the sun as waves lapped the dock, I became my younger and older selves at the same time.
Every now and then one of us would blurt something we'd learned over the years, and it was Denise who said, "One thing I've learned is, always be ready to accept an invitation if it means you get to travel somewhere. If anyone says to me, 'Denise, wanna go skiing in the Rockies?' or if they say, 'Hey, four of us were gonna go see Scarlett Johansson on Broadway but Hadley can't make it now,' do you know what I say?"
"No, Denise," I said. "What do you say?"
"My. Bags. Are. Already. Packed."
"Wow."
"And I mean it. I have a packed bag in my closet that's always ready to go. It has a pared-down version of my toiletries, underwear, a couple of changes of clothes. I don't even need to look in it."
I loved this idea. I wasn't sure if it was because I was lying, sun-warmed, on the silvery boards of Aloise's dock in July — little slaps of the wavelets lulling me, then a loon call, and puffy white clouds sailing by — but I felt a thrill.
"I'll do it too," I said. "I'm gonna pack my getaway bag as soon as I get home."
"Don't just talk about it," Denise said, sucking on her beer with that same mischief she'd had thirty years before. Denise was an instigator. She was the one who dared you to spill your secrets, but she never spilled any of her own. She was a wicked woman and I felt some of her subversiveness rub off on me as I imagined packing my getaway case and stashing it in my bedroom closet.
"Don't clutter it up with too much stuff," she warned. "The bare necessities. That's the key. Don't pack a lot of clothes."
And I didn't. As soon as I got home I packed a bag and boasted about my readiness for adventure. My husband, Jean, and my youngest daughter Juliette kept quiet, as they have done through many of my personal announcements, because they know if they question me I won't be fit to live with. They are used to seeing me go through life intuitively, with inexplicable turns of events. They know it's torture for me, for example, to force myself to follow a recipe or to have to explain my plans for the day. I might throw figs in the stew, slide down the subway banister, or change my mind on the way to the public library and end up in a paddleboat on the canal. Why read The Wind in the Willows when you can be Ratty or Mole?
The new getaway suitcase was just another example of my need for the unexpected. But even I was surprised when the call that would activate the bag came within days. It was seven in the morning on a Saturday — a strange time for my phone to ring.
"Would you be at all interested," a writer colleague said, "in going on a vessel through the Northwest Passage?"
"The Northwest Passage?"
"Yes," said my friend Noah. "You might have heard that Russian icebreakers sometimes go up there and take passengers through. They like to have a writer on board, and I can't go, so I suggested you, but I wanted to check with you first that it might be something you'd like to do."
I thought of Franklin's bones, of the sails of British explorers in the colonial age, of a vast tundra only Inuit and the likes of Franklin and Amundsen and a few scientists had ever had the privilege of navigating. I thought of lead poisoning in the tinned food of Franklin's men, and of underwater graves and lost ships named Erebus, which meant "darkness," and Terror, which meant ... I thought of my own British childhood, steeped in stories of sea travel. I thought of Edward Lear's Jumblies, who went to sea in a sieve. I thought of Queen Victoria and Jane Franklin, and of the longing and romance with which my father had decided to immigrate to Canada. I thought of all the books I'd read on polar exploration, on white men's and white women's attempts to travel the Canadian Far North.
I felt Noah was inviting me to go to the place where an imaginary world intersects with the real: a place where time flows differently from the linear way in which we have trained it to behave down here, in the southern world. The name "the Northwest Passage" is not written on world maps: it is an idea rather than a place. I'd long felt the power of that idea pull me in a way I couldn't fully understand.
My daughters were no longer helplessly small, and I'd already set off on a few modest travels, leaving them temporarily motherless. To look on a map at the route Noah had invited me to take thrilled me with images of ice, sea, and loneliness. For a writer, loneliness is magnetic. The very names on the map excited me: Lancaster Sound, Resolute, Gulf of Boothia. I knew that to go to these places would activate something inside me that had long lain dreaming.
I thought of the soul's journey to any kind of frontier, physical or spiritual. The Northwest Passage was the epitome, in my mind, of a place so exciting I'd never dared to imagine I might see it. How many times had I sat in my kitchen with my guitar, picking out the haunting melody of the old broadside ballad "Lady Franklin's Lament"?
In Baffin's Bay where the whale fish go The fate of Franklin no man may know.
The fate of Franklin no man can tell.
Lord Franklin among his seamen do dwell ...
"The ship," said Noah, "leaves this coming Saturday. "You'll be gone two weeks. I realize it's short notice ..."
It was impossible for me to resist the vortex of excitement I felt that morning. Had the perfect response to this very invitation not been drilled into me only days before by Denise, on Aloise's dock? And when a man called Noah suggests you get on a ship, hadn't you better jump on board?
"My bags," I told him, "are already packed."
I tried to remember what I'd put in the getaway bag Denise had prescribed: a little black dress, two pairs of underwear, a T-shirt, and a pair of jeans. I remembered reading that Franklin and his men had ventured to their deaths in masculine nineteenth-century versions of much this same idea: knickerbockers, silk shirts, stockings. I pictured the mummified remains of Franklin's men, which I'd seen in history books, with their preserved grimaces, their emaciated agony. I decided to call my friend Ross to ask him what he thought. I've known Ross since high school in Corner Brook, where at seventeen we sat on dumpsters behind the main drag, looking up at the rock face looming behind Woolworths and pretending we were in Naples. We had both ended up in Montreal, which was, we decided, a pretty good substitute.
"The Northwest Passage?" said Ross.
"Yes. I'm a bit worried. Of course I'm excited, but ..."
"I can understand that. I can understand you feeling a bit worried."
"I mean Franklin's half-eaten body is still up there, under the ice."
"Yes, but —"
"Cannibalized."
"I know, but you'll hardly —"
"And riddled with lead poisoning, and I know the ice is melting up there, but it's still extremely off — outside of — I mean, much of it is still uncharted, for goodness' sake."
"Yes, but surely the ship's crew will know what they're doing. They wouldn't go up there if —"
"Right. But I mean you hear all the time, on the news ..." "I think you're understandably a little afraid. But I don't think it's as ..."
"You think I'll be all right? I mean Esther's twenty-one, but Juliette is still only thirteen."
"Yeah, it's normal for you to worry about your daughters. But that kind of worry can feel larger than, realistically —"
"You think I should just go?"
"Well, I mean, it's normal to wonder. But really, if you go, what's the worst thing that can happen?"
This final question was one we would remember later. But at the time, it seemed like a reasonable enough thing for him to ask, and the fact that he asked it assuaged my fears in the way that talking to an old friend can do even when there are no real answers. So I disobeyed Denise by repacking my bag, this time with a list in hand from the expedition leaders, whose packing instructions indicated I might need a woollen vest, and rubber boots, and hi-tech long johns unavailable to Franklin and his crew, whose delicates all had to be hand-stitched: the men vanished mere months before the invention of the sewing machine. I signed the expedition form and the waivers; I belonged to more modern times, a fact from which I derived a certain amount of courage. The forms and waivers came with photos of the other resource staff. I noticed they were nearly all men, and most had explorer-type beards. I happened to have a beard I'd crocheted out of brown wool on a train trip with my mother — it was a bit more Rasputin than Explorer, but it possessed loops that fit nicely around my ears, so I packed that as well.
The voyage list made no mention of musical instruments, but I'd read somewhere that Franklin's ship had carried some sort of piano and that the men had, before their deaths, tried to cheer each other in the typical English way by putting on pantomimes and singing and dancing for each other through the Arctic nights. I had been fooling around on an old German concertina for some time, and could play "Lady Franklin's Lament," a few Newfoundland songs, and "The Varsovienne," an old Warsaw folk dance that Gearóid Ó hAllmhuráin had taught me in St. John's. The concertina possessed no case, but I took it to Canadian Tire and fitted it in an insulated beer cooler that had a shoulder strap and claimed to be waterproof. If I grew lonesome in the Northwest Passage, or became stranded on an iceberg with all hope of rescue lost, I would have my concertina, which I remembered my father once said was also called a ship's piano.
"You should take my old Helly Hansen raincoat," my husband said as he saw me rolling up my flimsy rain gear and stuffing it in the bag. His coat was heavy-duty and looked like the tarp I used to fling over the woodpile.
"That'll never fit in the bag."
"Wear it."
"It has a hole under the arm."
"That is a perfect coat."
"And the pocket's ripped."
"Hang on." He went to the basement and came back with a brand new roll of duct tape, tore off a few strips, and plastered them artistically over the holes. "There you go. Now you're ready for the elements."
"You should take the rest of that roll of duct tape," Juliette piped up. She shoved it in the pocket now made mostly of its own self. And she was right. In the Northwest Passage, our ship and all its crew were going to need every scrap of duct tape we could lay our hands on.
CHAPTER 2
KANGERLUSSUAQ
We were to take a chartered plane from Toronto. At the airport our group straggled away from the well-dressed commuters with their streamlined cases on wheels: we lugged duffle bags and knapsacks with all manner of leather straps holding in binoculars, hiking sticks, and Audubon bird guides. The bearded men were out in full force; our self-named expedition leader and rear admiral were trying to figure out how to persuade airport officials that it was right and proper that they should be transporting guns.
"The guns are less for protection from wildlife," the gunbearers shouted to the rest of us, "than they are to keep you lot in line if you get out of hand on the tundra."
Security officials wanted to separate me from my concertina, but they appeared not to know what to do with it. They sent me to Oversize Baggage, even though its case had been designed to hold no more than a dozen cans of beer.
"Where is this headed?" asked the person behind the X-ray machine.
"Greenland."
We were flying to Kangerlussuaq, where our ship would be waiting to take us on the first leg of the journey, up Greenland's southwest coast. Then we'd set off across Baffin Bay and head for Pond Inlet, the first Canadian stop. From there we'd sail up Eclipse Sound between the northwest tip of Baffin Island and Bylot Island to Lancaster Sound, gateway to Roald Amundsen's Northwest Passage. We were to traverse the passage and disembark in Kugluktuk, or "Coppermine," to board a chartered plane back to the south. Just thinking about that itinerary made my breath catch.
"Where is that?" The official behind the X-ray machine wore latex gloves. She had her hair in a ponytail. She did not know where Greenland was. She had my concertina in her hand, and was about to thrust it into a hole in the wall. Some people can regard that kind of circumstance with equanimity.
"Greenland," I said, with as much restraint as possible, "is the large, ice-covered land mass to the northeast of Canada."
If Greenland was unknown to airport security, how remote from the known universe was the rest of our voyage going to be?
On board the plane a kind of peace settled over the hundred or so passengers who would become fellow travellers. We no longer had to explain to anyone our rumpled and vaguely unsettling appearance — our expedition sacks, our trousers full of flaps and extra pockets. The passengers had begun to arrange themselves around the resource staff expertsin their particular fields of interest. A group of birders huddled near ornithologist Richard Knapton, comparing camera lenses and matching up bird lists to see who longed to observe a white-tailed eagle, a red-throated loon, or a phalarope on our journey. I noticed a contingent of elegant Japanese voyagers travelling with a young woman who translated for them everything we were told by our pilot or our expedition leader. The rock people pored over a geology booklet the on-board geologist, Marc StOnge, had prepared for us. Historian Ken McGoogan launched into his impassioned story of how Franklin had not discovered the Northwest Passage at all — it had really been an intrepid Scot named John Rae. Ken's wife, the artist Sheena Fraser McGoogan, had coloured pencils and sketchbooks ready to give to anyone who wanted to draw or record wonders we would see on the land. There was a shy, quiet anthropologist called Kenneth Lister, and a marine mammal biologist, Pierre Richard, who'd brought his elegant sister, Elisabeth, who had long wished to see the land he so loved. Many of these resource people had been in the Arctic before, but that didn't stop a nimbus of excitement from sizzling around their conversations as our plane took off.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Boundless"
by .
Copyright © 2015 Kathleen Wintter.
Excerpted by permission of Counterpoint.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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