CONTENTS
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Kathleen Winter
Map
Dedication
Title Page
Epigraph
CHAPTER ONE: An Invitation
CHAPTER TWO: Kangerlussuaq
CHAPTER THREE: Viking Funeral
CHAPTER FOUR: Sisimiut
CHAPTER FIVE: Cathedrals of Ice
CHAPTER SIX: The Captain
CHAPTER SEVEN: Bodies of Water
CHAPTER EIGHT: Annie’s Doll
CHAPTER NINE: Emily Carr’s Milk Bill
CHAPTER TEN: Geology
CHAPTER ELEVEN: Dundas Harbour
CHAPTER TWELVE: The White Garden
CHAPTER THIRTEEN: Beechey Island
CHAPTER FOURTEEN: Following Franklin
CHAPTER FIFTEEN: Tracing One Warm Line
CHAPTER SIXTEEN: Gjoa Haven
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: Jenny Lind Island and Bathurst Inlet
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: Supremacy of Rock
CHAPTER NINETEEN: Kugluktuk
CHAPTER TWENTY: Sacred Land
Picture Section
Acknowledgements
Copyright
Kathleen Winter is the author of the international bestseller, Annabel, which was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction, the Giller Prize, the Governor General’s Literary Award and the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. Boundless has already been shortlisted for the prestigious Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize – the richest non-fiction prize in Canada. A long-time resident of St John’s, Newfoundland, she now lives in Montreal.
In 2010, bestselling author Kathleen Winter took a journey across the legendary Northwest Passage – connecting the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans – alongside marine scientists, historians, archaeologists, anthropologists, and curious passengers. From Greenland to Baffin Island and all along this arctic passage, Winter witnesses the new mathematics of the melting North – where polar bears mate with grizzlies, creating a new hybrid species; where the earth is on the cusp of yielding so much buried treasure that five nations stand poised to claim sovereignty of the land; and where the local Inuit population struggles to navigate the tension between taking their part in the new global economy and defending their traditional way of life.
Throughout the journey she also learns much from her fellow travellers – about the original expeditions, how to survive in a wasteland, Inuit society, the real perils of climate change – and guides us through her own personal odyssey, emigrating from England to Canada as a child and discovering both what was lost and what was gained as a result of that journey.
In breathtaking prose charged with vivid descriptions of the land and its people, Kathleen Winter’s Boundless is a haunting and powerful story: a homage to the ever-evolving and magnetic power of the North.
Novels
Annabel
Short Fiction
boYs
The Freedom in American Songs
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
Version 1.0
Epub ISBN 9781448182602
www.randomhouse.co.uk
Published by Jonathan Cape 2015
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Copyright © Kathleen Winter 2015
Kathleen Winter has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work
First published in Canada in 2014 by
House of Anansi Press Inc.
110 Spadina Avenue, Suite 801
Toronto, ON, M5V 2K4
First published in Great Britain in 2015 by
Jonathan Cape
Random House, 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road,
London SW1V 2SA
Image of Shoofly’s garment courtesy of the Division of Anthropology, American Museum of Natural History
A Penguin Random House Company
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9780224098366
FOR JD
“Water, land, wind, sky — these are the only ones with absolute freedom.”
— BERNADETTE DEAN
“The body is a feather blown across the tundra.”
— AAJU PETER
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.
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 experts in 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 St-Onge, 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.
“I’ve been here lots of times, on scientific projects,” Pierre Richard told me. “But when you come for research it’s not the same as coming on a voyage like this, where you have time to walk and think and indulge your pure love of the land.”
A couple of seats down from me Nathan Rogers, our shipboard musician, laid his handmade guitar in a safe place, put a pair of noise-cancelling earphones on his shaved head, and sank into dreams of his own. Someone had told me that he was the son of Stan Rogers, the late Canadian folk icon whose haunting song, “The Northwest Passage” many of the passengers already knew by heart. I sat next to a Canadian Inuk woman, Bernadette Dean, who was, along with Greenlandic-Canadian Aaju Peter, a cultural ambassador; to them fell the task of teaching us about the North from the perspectives of Inuit women who have lived there all their lives — women who have come to know its animals, plants, and people, both indigenous and visiting, through long experience. As our plane took off, Bernadette busied herself writing in her notebook.
Our pilot had a cheerful American accent. As we flew over northern Quebec, he announced over the loudspeaker, “There you have it, folks, down below us … a whole lot of nothing.”
There was a collective gasp, which the pilot possibly enjoyed.
“That’s what he thinks,” muttered Bernadette, looking up from her work. Corners of photographs stuck out from pages where she had made extensive notes. The jottings were interesting to me and she saw me glance at them. “I’m writing,” she said, “to keep my mind off my little grandchild. He or she is going to be born, probably while we’re on this expedition. I’m going to wish I was there. These are notes about my great-grandmother.”
Her great-grandmother, Bernadette told me, was the Inuit clothing maker Shoofly, who in the early 1900s had fallen in love with a Boston whaling captain and given him many of her beadwork garments. He took them back to America, and Bernadette spent years trying to find them as part of her cultural heritage.
“I found them,” she told me, “in storage, at the Museum of Natural History in New York City. It took me a long time to convince them to even let me come and see them. My own great-grandmother’s clothes! Finally they gave me a window of two weeks. I accepted. I went down there and — here’s a picture of me looking at the clothes.” She showed me a photograph of herself lifting the garments from a museum drawer. “See, there’s the Scandinavian curator.” She pointed to a watchful figure standing beside her. “Look how close to me she is. See, they made me wear white gloves.”
“That curator looks worried.”
“They didn’t want me to touch my great-grandmother’s clothes. See her name? The whaling captain wrote her name, Shoofly, on her clothes.”
“I see it.”
“Then I said, ‘That’s not everything. That’s not all the clothes. This set of garments has other parts. Where are they?’ And that curator doubted me. She said there were no other parts. But I wanted to find them so I started looking. I started opening drawers until I found them. I found them and she didn’t even know what they were. She had no idea. It felt like being a kid again, having a white teacher.”
OUR PLANE TOUCHED down in Kangerlussuaq, where an old Russian bus waited, against sere grasses and rock faces seamed with snow, to take us to the ship. The landscape looked a bit like what I had seen of Labrador: rock loomed jagged and high against a big sky. Plants were dwarfed, yet sunlight shone through purple or white petals like a projector’s light blazing through film and lighting up the vegetation in illumined detail.
As we piled onto the bus, Pierre Richard, the marine biologist, called to Nathan Rogers, “We have another musician on board — she has a concertina in her beer cooler!”
There are a lot of disparaging things real musicians have on the tips of their tongues about people with concertinas, and in this regard Nathan was no exception.
“Keep her miles from me, then,” he said. “And hoist her concertina overboard — you gotta nip that kind of torture in the bud.”
I knew Nathan’s father, Stan, had died in a tragic plane mishap when Nathan was about four years old. On our voyage Nathan would sing his father’s beloved song about the Northwest Passage, as well as songs from an extensive world-folk repertoire and compositions of his own. He would also teach the Inuit girls of Pond Inlet how to begin Mongolian throat-singing; but I knew none of this on the Russian bus. I just knew that with his shaven head, his radical tattoos and prickly comments, he looked like someone I might want to give a wide berth.
Our bus had rounded a corner in the crags of Kangerlussuaq, and there in the bay was our ship, floating so crisp and blue and white it looked as if someone had ironed and starched it and stitched it into one of those three-dimensional pop-up picture books that had enchanted me when I was a child. When you open the pages, the world inside the book springs forward with hidden niches and bridges and stairs. Here, twinkling in the Greenland bay with its flags and decks and portholes, was a storybook ship I would come to love and care about as if it were a living being.
I’d spent years in Newfoundland, watching ships from the shore and wishing I was on them. In the distance they’d looked wistful, dreamlike — when their lights twinkled and they floated on the sea, distant and small, how mysterious they appeared, as if made not of substance but of thought and story. Now, as we boarded Zodiacs — motorized dinghies that waited on wet stones then sputtered into noise and spray as the helmsmen jolted us through the choppy water — our ship loomed larger, not a dream at all but muscled and humming from its own deep engine room.
As Noah had mentioned on the phone, the very first Arctic educational voyages had, like this one, been on Russian icebreakers, but melting ice in the North meant that ships going through the Northwest Passage no longer needed to be utilitarian workhorses. Our ship was equipped for icy conditions, but it combined utility with grace. Its flags and decks were bright. On the main decks were several comfortably appointed areas whose simple lines satisfied everyone’s appetite for ruggedness yet still bordered on elegance. In the forward lounge people could sit on expansive corner settees, or have a drink from the bar at small tables gathered around a stage area like a floating cabaret. At mid-ship we had another bar with couches and stools, and songbooks containing some smart person’s best estimate of just about any song we might have wanted. In the dining room at the aft of the ship lay an airy, many-windowed expanse of white tablecloths and glittering stemware. There would be five-course menus that changed daily, as well as a buffet featuring endless slices of smoked Arctic char, yellow figs bobbing in their own syrup, capers and Danish cheeses, marinated peppers, olives, and piles of fresh provisions that Nordic suppliers would replenish in crates stacked on various beaches along our route until they could reach us no more.
“I feel,” I confided to Elisabeth, who attracted me with her quiet, sympathetic air, “a bit like the Jumblies.”
“The Jumblies?”
“Edward Lear’s nonsense poem.” The demented Englishman’s poem had been a favourite of mine since I could read. “He wrote ‘The Owl and the Pussycat,’ too. He wrote limericks. But my favourite is ‘The Jumblies.’ He wrote it not long after the lost Franklin expedition: Their heads are green, and their hands are blue, / And they went to sea in a Sieve — a bit like Franklin, and their provisions were astonishing, like ours — And forty bottles of Ring-Bo-Ree, / And no end of Stilton Cheese.”
Elisabeth laughed. I sensed that her mind stretched into enigmatic places — I felt she had made herself a quiet sentinel, on guard for any ambush of curious news, and would remain calm in any circumstance. I liked this very much. She was slender and her hair floated in a cloud of curls that she tried to keep somewhat tame under a little beret. Next to her I was a bit of a clodhopping galoot, but I was used to that.
It was time to go downstairs to my cabin, number 108, and I realized on the narrow staircase that things below the main deck grew progressively less ornamental and plainer, more robust, in the descent. The air grew warmer, the passage walls more confining. The doors were small and some were made of metal, and the farther down I went, the louder came the thrum of industrial noise from the engine room. Higher up, through open doors, I had seen passengers’ deluxe cabins with big windows looking out over Baffin Bay. By the time I descended to my own little cabin, there were tiny portholes, and when I pressed my nose to the glass, there lay the sea surface, at the level of my rib cage. I did not mind any of this: I found that the thrumming noise, with its accompanying vibrations, comforted me immensely. I was a small animal nestling ever closer to the heart of its mother, and we were setting off for the Northwest Passage — land of fables, channel of dreams.
I LOVED MY cabin. It was in the bowels of the ship next to a door painted with the letters WTD — I would later find out what that meant, and would be unsure whether to be comforted or terrified by it. The cabin was tidy, with a sink and shower, and lamps that let my cabin mate and me read and make notes without disturbing each other’s sleep. My cabin mate was the young leader of the small Japanese expedition, and she worked night and day as their translator. If we rose at six-thirty for an early anchorage and expedition by Zodiac, Yoko got up before six. If the northern lights put on a show that meant everyone stayed up until midnight, she stayed up long past that, then wrote expedition notes on her laptop for another hour. Everyone on the staff worked conscientiously like this, but she kept some of the longest hours and displayed utter seriousness.
A lot of the time she was not in the cabin, which meant that, as a reclusive writer, I had it gloriously to myself. I could lie on my bunk and play my concertina, or kneel on the pillow and look out the porthole at the water mere inches from my face. I loved the fact that when I stood on the cabin floor, my body was below sea level. And when the ship moved, when we had broken anchor and were away, I gave in to that feeling of landlessness beneath the body. While the ship tilted and the cabin hummed and shook with the engine, when the sea and clouds beyond our porthole started moving and the bit of Greenland we’d stood upon became a ribbon, then a fainter ribbon, then a line of dream-substance in the distance, I knew that being on a ship headed for Baffin Bay was a thing I’d longed for, unbeknownst to myself, all these years of hobbling on rock and boulder and valley. A Pisces, I was now in my marine element, and I wanted the journey to be endless.
There’s a womb-like aspect to being in a cabin in a ship’s belly, especially at night, when you are lying in the bunk before sleep comes. The cabin is so small that it would not be an acceptable size if it were on the ground, but because the ocean sways beneath, you feel an old feeling that might be the feeling of floating in amniotic fluid, and the walls can close in all they want: the ship is your mother, whose organs cradle you, and she is breathing. I wondered how I’d ever sleep on land again.
This floating away from the shore came not long after another, shorter sea voyage in which I’d begun to understand how the sea can wipe away the tumult of difficult times on land. Through the years of my first husband’s illness, a malaise had entered me and nothing had been able to cure the root of it. I’d kept the small house where we’d lived with our daughter at the foot of a mountain called Butter Pot. The mountain often had a dusting of snow, the moon and stars illuminating its whiteness. A stream ran under our window and in summer, marsh toads and hermit thrushes gave the water music funny bass notes and sent mysterious bars of song — “Carambola! Carondelet!” — receding over the spruce and fir tops. The snipe in June made another sound: reaching great heights over the bog they would plummet, air winnowing through their tailfeathers with a phantom tone.
The snipe’s call echoed the sadness of our life there, which, while beautiful in its simplicity, was spoiled by the fact that my husband was dying and our relationship had turned into one of many disappointments. In winter the pond behind our house froze and we skated in the moonlight: my last memories of our marriage are of James, in his overcoat and fur hat, walking on that ice, his daughter and I skating freely while he grappled with leaving all he loved, though much of it had departed from him before he died.
I walked miles behind that house. Songs came to me, and I sang them beside stones to which my daughter and I gave names, graceful stones that had personalities. On a boggy trail up the mountain I hunkered beside bog orchids, marvelling at the veins in their lobes, and I learned the names of plants like the blue-bead lily and the almond-scented twinflower, Linnaea borealis. I had not forgotten the visionary glimpse of reality I’d sensed in my youth, the feeling that the ordinary world, with its plants, stones, and people, became infused with a kind of glory that then retreated or hid. It had not come to me lately, and I’d begun to fear it had been a passing blessing of youth. When I was young I’d seen jaded people, bitter and disillusioned, and I’d vowed not to become like them. But it was hard, during poverty and illness, not to lose hope in that early intimation of glory, whatever it had been.
My disappointment made me hard to live with. I knew there were books that exhorted one to bloom where one was planted, to embrace the Zen of dying husbands and unwashed dishes and a well that froze in January and dried in August. But where was the book that would show me a map to the end of hardship? Whenever I could escape household duties I walked, ran, and wept in those trails in the woods, asking sky, alders, and water to talk to me, to bring me back that hint of something majestic and all-encompassing.