"In the early morning, before dawn, I dream of the far country. I dream of sparrow song and the Thelon going out on some bright, wind-tosed June day. The sky is full of birds and light. Geese are flying, and their gathered calls drift over the Barrens. In the dream, I understand where I am, what keeps me rooted in the world, and why this arctic ache, this desire born of emptiness and space and living things, will be with me always."
"This arctic ache" - just three words from the last page of Return to Warden's Grove, but they succinctly describe how I feel about the North, and the country that I first encountered during my canoe traverse of the Northwest Territories, back in 1977 and 1978. When we left the eastern end of Great Slave Lake in August of 1977 and ascended Pikes Portage, I found a land that in some ways felt similar to the alpine, but one that was built on an entirely different scale: "hard, huge, and haunted," in the words of The Tragically Hip. A few weeks after entering what the Canadians refer to as the "Barrengrounds," "Barrenlands," or simply the "Barrens," we arrived at Warden's Grove, a tiny grove of spruce sheltering nothing more than a small cabin. There we spent the better part of a year, with 180 consecutive days of below-freezing temperatures, the deep darkness of January, and summer's short, vibrant explosion of life. At Warden's Grove I learned to love the arctic, and so I was drawn there again, over a decade later, to conduct field research for my doctoral dissertation.
I have not been back to northern Canada since 1991, but I have been fortunate enough to travel to the edge of the arctic in western Alaska - the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta/Nunivak Island region at the fringe of the Bering Sea. Technically subarctic, the country has all of the sensory traits of the arctic - summer solstice light that lasts for twenty-four hours a day, fierce (sometimes) winds, a limitless horizon, brilliant light, and a sky filled with the gathered cries of birds.