Rowing to Latitude by Jill Fredston

Author:Jill Fredston [Fredston, Jill]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781429931106
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2011-06-21T04:00:00+00:00

It is easy to be misled by the Beaufort Sea into assuming that few people have ever before stood on its shores. Harsh weather and incessant wind have shaped country that brooks no compromises and provides no reassurances. It seems almost a miracle that such apparent emptiness can persist in today’s world. The beauty of the region presents itself not spectacularly but subtly, over time, in ethereal lighting, isolated flowers, wolf tracks on a long gravel beach, and breezes that keep the mosquitoes at bay.

From the sea, the coast is nearly invisible, distinguished only by a thin rim of tundra and intermittent mud bluffs grinning white smiles—underground ice exposed by erosion. Battering storms have taken bites out of parts of the shoreline, leaving the tundra hanging like a carpet that has lost its floor. Further inland looms the wall of mountains known as the British Mountains in Canada and the Brooks Range in Alaska, which spawn fast rivers that flow north from the Continental Divide and spread as they cross the coastal plain. Offshore, skinny barrier islands, barely higher than the sea that surrounds them, parallel the coast like string beans laid end to end.

The flavor of the Arctic coast might best be captured by stripping away verbiage so that what remains is as spare and unadorned as the landscape itself. Given only ten words, I’d choose exacting, dynamic, flat, windswept, icy, vast, otherworldly, penetrating, moody, and stark. The problem with transposing familiar language to an unfamiliar landscape is the judgments the words imply. Bleak is a word commonly chosen to portray unsheltered, barren, treeless land by those of us who come from treed, hilly places in more temperate climates. It shouldn’t be assumed to mean boring, ugly, or expendable. It is impossible to know the places we visit as well as we know the places where we live; there is less time to develop personal relationships or to comprehend the nuances of what we see. We would do well, though, not to assume that others see the world exactly as we do and to bear in mind how alien and inhospitable our own landscape might seem to visitors from the North. Witness the words of Mabel Ruben, a woman from Paulatuk, a village on the coast east of the Mackenzie Delta, as quoted in Ulli Steltzer’s Inuit: The North in Transition:

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