Solstice 2006

A Glint in the Southern Daybreak

© Bryan Zepp Jamieson
12/21/06

Anyone who has ever lived in the True North knows what the first sunrise after the winter solstice is like. On a day that most people have marked on their calendars, there is a glint of sunlight almost directly south. It’s a sad and lonely little thing, this southern sunrise, unable to raise the temperature and lasting only a minute or so. Then the sun sets again, followed by a long twilight. But it comes after up after weeks or months of no sun at all, and it lifts the spirits of the people in a way that no other unfulfilled promise can.

There’s a song I’ve heard on Vinyl Café a couple of times. The main lyric is “In the cities lies the heart of Canada, but its soul lies in the north.” That’s probably true of all countries that cross the Arctic Circle, whether in Scandinavia or Russia or a place like Alaska, a state that has an entirely different identity when you get into the far north.

Fairbanks isn’t True North as the Eskimos reckon it. Nor is Yellowknife, or Iqaluit. All are below the Arctic Circle, and all see light year round. You have to go to the North Slope, or the vast, flat islands of northern Canada for that. Few people can handle the dark, especially when it’s combined with fantastic cold and horrible storms. Most humans need that little glint of light, that reassurance that they are still in the known world.

After 50 odd years, I finally happened to stumble across the origins of Canada’s name. I knew that “cañada” was the Spanish word for canary, but there is little about Canada to suggest canaries. The name, however, is of Spanish origins. An early 16th century cartographer, drawing what was known of the explored world, had the features fade to blank about 100 miles in from the eastern seaboard, and the coastlines faded out, with an inference that at some point they might become a part of Asia. Across that terrible white blankness, the cartographer had written, “Aca Nada.”
“There is nothing there.”

It’s a strange world, the Canadian and Alaskan north. The countryside is called “tundra” (which is Finnish for “barren.” Aca Nada.) and is low, often marshy, with literally millions of small lakes. Bereft of trees or other large vegetation, it is flat and seemingly endless. You could put Texas in there and nobody would ever see it again. This might not be such a bad idea.

Aca Nada. There is nothing there.

Except, of course, there is. There are mammals with white fur and small, dark eyes, and short, furry ears. In the rivers and lakes and the ocean live fish by the trillions. And there are people, the nomadic tribes who, within living memory, constructed dog sleds from frozen fish and really did live in igloos. Decimated by plague and drink and the lure of the south, their numbers, never huge, are small now, but yet they remain in this inhuman land.

It’s actually easier to travel about the north in the winter than it is in the summer. The planes do better in summer, of course, but planes cannot carry the tons of material the alien cities like Yellowknife and Whitehorse require. There aren’t any roads, and there never will be unless someone figures out how to build something that survives the freezing and thawing of the land, and the extreme weather. So they build temporary roads every October by simply compacting the snow and plowing right along the rivers (which, when frozen, are “the highways of the north”) and across the muskeg and the lakes. When the ice gets to be four feet thick, an eighteen wheeler can cruise along over it at about 45 miles an hour, although he desperately needs to slow to 15 miles an hour as he nears the shore. You see, ice is flexible, and the weight of the truck pushes it down. The bulge under the ice moves with the truck, and this in turn forces a wave of water in front of it. Fine and dandy until you approach shore. Then the water area gets abruptly shallower, and that wave – carrying all the force of a fully loaded truck moving at 45 miles an hour – has nowhere to go but UP, and the shoreline surface literally erupts dozens of feet in the air in big chunks of ice in front of the astounded driver, leaving the truck nothing to drive on but water. Trucks, as a general rule, sink. So they stick big “Speed
Limit–25Km” on the ice near the shores, since getting a truck out of the water up there is a real bear.

The people are different, too. They view their incredibly high rates of suicide, depression, and alcoholism with what can only be described as a sort of gloomy satisfaction, and in places like northern Quebec and Nunavut, missing fingers are something of a status symbol. It marks times when someone got drunk, got sloppy, and got frostbite. At minus forty, unprotected human flesh can begin to freeze in mere seconds, and in minutes there is irreparable damage.

Iqaluit is the capital city (population 2,500, making it the largest city in the million-and-a-half-square-mile territory) and sometimes vast herds of caribou pass through town. It’s near the southern end of Baffin Island, which is larger than California and doesn’t have a single tree. The city is nestled at the very top of Tinikjuarbiusirri, which the English mercifully renamed Frobisher Bay. They still talk about how a robin showed up there a few years back. Nobody had ever seen one before. And even in this unworldly place, flowers grow in profusion during the brief summers – over 200 varieties.

But even Iqaluit is well south of the Arctic Circle, and at the winter solstice, the days are four hours long. There might be a howling blizzard at minus 40 raging outside, but at least it’s daylight.

The only place in the world where a lot of people live north of the Arctic Circle is Scandinavia, which is warmed by the Gulf Stream. Thus it’s one of the few places on earth that has trees above the Circle.

Only there, and on the Alaskan north slope, will you find a sizeable group of people who watch for that glint of light to the south. Some despair and don’t live long enough to see it, but it comes nonetheless. Without fail.

These have been dark and depressing times, these recent years, and we’re all looking for a glint of light to the south. We all know that it will come, that it’s just a matter of waiting out the darkness. But even in the dark, there is strangeness, and wonder, and beauty. One need only look.

Happy Solstice.

And don’t lose hope. Never lose hope.