Earlier in the evening (Aug.2), the CBC National News covered the very issues I discussed in my last posting (Aug.1). I am very pleased, especially because the camera work from the venerable ice-breaker Louis Saint-Laurent was of fabulous quality. The political issues are complex. You can’t expect people to care about them unless they can visualize the vast, dangerous, and extraordinarily beautiful land that is at stake.
Someone has a poetic soul at the CBC. Nunavut is one of those places, like outer space, that forces even the most phlegmatic person to turn to poetry. Over a magnificent montage of images from the Passage, they played an old Canadian folk by Stan Rogers:
(chorus)
Ah, for just one time I would take the Northwest Passage
To find the hand of Franklin reaching for the Beaufort Sea;
Tracing one warm line through a land so wild and savage
And make a Northwest Passage to the sea.
(repeat chorus)
Westward from the Davis Strait ’tis there ’twas said to lie
The sea route to the Orient for which so many died;
Seeking gold and glory, leaving weathered, broken bones
And a long-forgotten lonely cairn of stones.
(repeat chorus)
Three centuries thereafter, I take passage overland
In the footsteps of brave Kelso, where his “sea of flowers” began
Watching cities rise before me, then behind me sink again
This tardiest explorer, driving hard across the plain.
(repeat chorus)
And through the night, behind the wheel, the mileage clicking west
I think upon Mackenzie, David Thompson and the rest
Who cracked the mountain ramparts and did show a path for me
To race the roaring Fraser to the sea.
(repeat chorus)
How then am I so different from the first men through this way?
Like them, I left a settled life, I threw it all away.
To seek a Northwest Passage at the call of many men
To find there but the road back home again.
(repeat chorus)
And if should be I come again to loved ones left at home,
Put the journals on the mantle, shake the frost out of my bones,
Making memories of the passage, only memories after all,
And hardships there the hardest to recall.
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