Far-Flung Postcards is a weekly sequence during which NPR’s worldwide staff shares moments from their lives and work world wide.
Rising up in Canada, I at all times thought-about the Arctic a part of my yard, part of the nation’s identification and historical past. So I used to be overjoyed a number of years in the past after I acquired what I thought-about a dream project: a week-long voyage via the fabled Northwest Passage, a sequence of waterways excessive above the Arctic Circle.
I used to be aboard the CCGS Louis S. St-Laurent, a hulking Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker affectionately identified by the crew as merely the Louis.
Forward of that tour, I had been doing month-long reporting rotations into Afghanistan and Pakistan, and was feeling floor down. All that evaporated as soon as I used to be aboard the Louis. I felt my soul replenish with pleasure as I breathed within the frigid, clear air and gazed out on the countless expanse of ice — there have been no buildings or boats, nor any trace of humankind for a whole lot of miles in any route. The ice twinkled with the sunshine of the solar, which shone 24 hours a day at the moment of yr.
My leisure was the polar bears like this one which day by day lumbered as much as the aspect of Louis, cocking their heads as if inquisitive about who these interlopers had been.
It was breathtaking to be the place so few individuals on Earth have traveled, to really feel the thick ice crack beneath the ship, to look at the polar bears strategy the ship, all of the whereas figuring out this swiftly altering hinterland would by no means be the identical.
I feel usually of that magical time after I examine huge cruise ships or oil tankers now commonly making their method via the Arctic. It breaks my coronary heart serious about the influence on the pristine area. It is egocentric, however I will at all times treasure the time I needed to myself on the prime of the world — and the majestic creatures that decision it house.
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