i used to live in the Arctic…north of the tree line, north of the Arctic Circle, on an island in the storied Northwest Passage.

if you look at a map and find Winnipeg, and then keep a finger tracing north until you hit the archipelago of ice and islands way near the top of the world, you will find the little Inuit settlement - a hamlet, formally, which caused my English-teacher self no end of amusement - which was the site of my first real, full-time teaching job, my own class, day in, day out.

i stayed only for two years, which in the Arctic marks me as one of those thousands of expendable white folk who come in and out of the landscape like the caribou, seasonal and interchangeable, running past in search of adventure or escape or just steady work, but not one who stayed long enough to be a colourful character the way so many of the longtimers are, memorialized in legend, at least by their own kind. i don’t know even if my students would know me now, more than ten years after i left…i don’t know if my name would ring bells for them, or if they know that they cross my mind, that i wonder about them, their kids, that i remember names and faces, that i still wish i’d done a few things differently. i was young.

and they, in some ways, were not. i taught high school, grades ten and eleven, English and social studies and computers and gym - laugh on, oh gods - and was the regular ‘chaperone’ for the youth drop-in centre and tried to run a drama club. i was twenty-three when i got there, and most of my class were only a few years younger, with a few who stripped me in years. Lucy was twenty-nine. almost all of them were parents, even the youngest ones, fifteen and sixteen, ripe with bellies i spent the first months trying to pretend weren’t there because i had no frame of reference for a people among whom teen pregnancy was just a fact of life, no frame of reference for a people for whom school was only a thirty-year-old intrusion - a colonial intrusion in which they saw little reflection of themselves, no matter how progressive I or the system tried to be - rather than a reason for being. i spent the first year angry, i think, half at them, half at me, deep in the grips of a culture shock more gutting and destabilizing than anything i experienced in Korea or anywhere i’ve globetrotted to since. in the second year, the anger faded and was replaced by something far more complex, but i realized - with some shame - that once my student loan was carefully repaid i had no interest in spending the rest of my twenties in a town that had only a hockey arena and two small grocery stores as public venues, even if that made me just another itinerant carpetbagger from the south. and so i bolted back homeward, back to the Atlantic coast i’d yearned for with its bars and fiddles and some small chance of occasional anonymity and belonging.

but it was stark, there, and beautiful, and just so fucking big…like the sky had stretched out because it was the top of the world. when the midnight sun faded into the slanting days of autumn and the early snows, the land shone, golden, for miles unending. i have never since seen light like that. photographers eat each other for light like that. and then, it goes. and for months, there are only stars. the town sits so far over the curve of the earth that even the northern lights were dim in the frozen sky, those winters, the town a little white curve of electric light nestled around a natural harbour, everything else inky blue-black out to infinity.

the first winter, when the dark came at Hallowe’en and the last threads of noonish dusk faded from the sky by the first week in December, i trudged confused and busy through my days in the unrelenting blackness, only to waken late every Saturday morning and cry myself back to sleep. i felt like Alice, toppled down the rabbit hole, on all fronts.

but the second winter was remarkably easy, when the dark came on. i was easier in my skin by then, and happier, and i hibernated without rancour and got engaged that Christmas to the one i’d dragged up to that godforsaken outpost of civilization, the one who nested in the dark with me and kept me warm and semi-civilized myself. in a place where they only cancel school at -65 degrees, warm matters. and civilized…i thought that mattered a lot. we left, eventually, because we thought it mattered so much.

but i remember the day i glimpsed it, that thing that the north has that makes people crazy and wild, that gets under their skin and makes them unable to ever be contented anywhere else on the planet. it was early January, and we were back at school, and it was an ordinary morning, maybe working on To Kill a Mockingbird or Midsummer Night’s Dream or one of the other ambitious things i tried to re-cast in light of Inuit culture that year, and only half-failed. and somebody was at a window, gazing out into the blackness, probably wondering when lunch would come, and then the hint of it crawled up over the heretofore invisible horizon and suddenly…there was light. a sliver, but light.

and my entire class crowded to the row of windows, me included, all of us pressing against the cold glass like paparazzi, our mouths open but silent, watching the oldest thing in the world: the sun, flirting with us, announcing.  it was one of the most beautiful things i have ever been part of, that minute or two, before we all went back about our business.  nothing much was said - not much was ever said up there, in the way of commenting upon the obvious.  and yet, with our gaze we bore witness together, me and those kids, those un-kids, enacting a ritual that i suddenly understood was as old as their culture and yet utterly spontaneous, unpredicted, unavoidable.  drawn like moths to flame, we were for that one moment in my teaching career all truly captivated,  mesmerized by the turning of the earth, by the promise of light.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
i noticed, today, in spite of the four foot (and still coming down!) snowfall, that the days are beginning to grow longer, to inch their way back to the light.  and i remembered.