Areas of Unrest

26 November 2000 - A Sense of Awe

QOTD: "There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy." - Robert Louis Stevenson

Reading: Phillip Lopate, The Art of the Personal Essay

Listening to: nothing, as it is well past my bedtime

I got home on Friday and I am still in post-vacation chaos mode. None of it helped by having a slight cold. I'm usually a bit frazzled after being away. But it's always worth it - and particularly so this time.

As usual, the travel stuff will get written up in its own time and place. And I will somehow manage to get around the oddity that the digital camera photos cause a general protection fault in my graphics software. (I appear able to copy files just fine, but can't view them. Admittedly all of this is with rather antiquated hardware and software, but I was really hoping to wait a few months to rebuild my savings before dealing with that. I've got a few options at any rate, so can probably work around the problems.)

What I want to say here is appropriate to Thanksgiving as well. Namely, I feel blessed. I've been able to see, from quite close by, one of the most dramatic sights in nature. I have a real sense of privilege at having seen the polar bears walk out to the Hudson Bay ice. We watched the last female bear with her two cubs walking away from our tundra vehicle, heading to the ice for the winter's hunt, and wished them all a good winter. May they have enough seals to eat. May the ice last long enough for them to fatten up for the months of fasting on land. May they be safe from hunters and from other bears. Whatever you believe in, you can't watch such magnificent creatures and not pray that they will endure.

But the nights carried yet another sense of wonder. It was overcast the first few nights and, after my disappointment last September in Fairbanks, I had resolved not to count on seeing the aurora borealis. When I got the knock on my door about an hour after going to bed on Sunday night, followed by the half-whispered words, "we have northern lights," I was thrilled. There was just a greenish-white arc in the sky, without much motion. But it was still fascinating to watch.

And then Monday night, I woke at 1:30 a.m. and glanced out my window - and saw a brighter arc, with some curtainlike edges. I knocked on other doors and raced up to the observation dome. This time, the lights moved all over the sky, swirling and twisting. We stayed up in the dome for an hour, unable to speak beyond a "look at that" or, simply, "wow" as new swirls of light burst forth. There was even some low aurora in the early evening as we headed to the train station on Tuesday night. (Plus a few glimpses from the train the first night out of Churchill.)

Churchill is a special place, but I've had that feeling of awe before. It's often associated with nature and I've felt it strongly in Antarctica and among the sand dunes in Namibia. But I've also felt it at the Tower of London and the Taj Mahal. I have this vague idea that it's possible to feel that sensation anywhere, but that I just haven't learned how to tap into it without being hit over the head by the big stuff. Maybe I'll never let out an involuntary "wow" over, say, the San Diego Freeway, but I can try to look more thoughtfully at the world around me. And maybe I can learn to feel a fraction of the awe in this urban tundra that I feel amidst the real peat and permafrost.

Be well, bears, be well.