December 24, 2012.
Flying northwest on Japan Air from sunny snowless Boston, it takes just a few minutes until snow dots the Vermont hills. Then more snow and suddenly it’s all white somewhere beyond Ottawa where civilization slips away and the great north begins – white, silent, unbroken except for one straight road and another that appears in parallel and then stops. An hour later and we’re over James Bay, the thumb of Hudson’s Bay, and the surface is caked with giant slabs of cracked white. I love it when the map of the world proves true. It’s a thrill that never gets old.
Flying northwest on Japan Air from sunny snowless Boston, it takes just a few minutes until snow dots the Vermont hills. Then more snow and suddenly it’s all white somewhere beyond Ottawa where civilization slips away and the great north begins – white, silent, unbroken except for one straight road and another that appears in parallel and then stops. An hour later and we’re over James Bay, the thumb of Hudson’s Bay, and the surface is caked with giant slabs of cracked white. I love it when the map of the world proves true. It’s a thrill that never gets old.
The sunlight turns to rosy dusk at 2:45 PM EST. The horizon seems to curve and float on rainbow prisms as the three-quarter moon rises. (I am half-waiting for the shadow of Santa’s sleigh to dash across it’s surprised man-in-the-moon face.) It’s neither day nor night – a solstice sky. We fly with a glowing orb on each side, sun and moon, yin and yang, in balance.
Somewhere over Nunavit, the former Northwest territories, the unbroken surface is a Jackson Pollack canvas in white and grey. A prehistoric riverbed appears, the banks fossilized in lacey frost, cell-like, primeval. Then smooth, smooth sheets of white ripples in a sweep across the tundra. The sun drops in a red ball half hung in a crimson ribbon to the left. On the right the moon glows above an almost Caribbean sky of pink and hazy azured violet. I am on a spaceship floating above the roof of the world, pure and stark with no hint of man. The plane banks west and it’s suddenly pitch black.