A week ago tonight I was aboard a Swedish inter-city train, rolling south in darkness through a snowy wooded landscape, en route from Östersund to Stockholm. Those simple facts — that just seven days ago I was over there, and that now I am here at home — are quite astounding to me. I am not a world traveler; I last ventured outside of North America in 2017, on another trip to Scandinavia.

You see, I suffer from periodic bouts of Scandi-envy. A friend of ours who worked for decades at the CBC introduced us to that term, and that affliction, claiming that many of the movers and shakers behind the scenes at Canada’s national broadcaster are similarly afflicted. I gather that my own case must be slightly different from theirs, though. I don’t pine away for a 25% sales tax, or the intrusion of a “nanny-state” into even the niggliest details of my day-to-day decisions and affairs.

But I still have it, that envy, oh yes. There is so much to admire over there in Scandinavia, that “other North.” And oh yes, since you ask, I am sure I could live there happily ever after, wherever assigned, you name it: Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Iceland, Finland. And who knows, maybe someday I will…

I love the landscapes and seasides, even the big cities — at least at this phase of my naivety. The sky, the broad white fjells, the jagged peaks, the rivers and coastlines. It is a pocket of the world, as Texans like to boast, where the women are all pretty and the men are all handsome. Even the kids, even the teenagers and college kids for Pete’s sake, come across as fit, firm, and friendly… well, friendly enough, in taciturn Nordic style. And hey, the trains and buses all run on time, and they come and go often, and they move very fast. If one is forced to drive, the roads are smooth, mostly two-lane and narrow, and almost all of the traffic is small and sensibly-sized vehicles, driven to very modest speed limits. Having so much as a miniscule trace of tipsiness in your bloodstream whilst behind the wheel will get your license suspended for years.

I have close family over there now, but another aspect of my fascination with these countries stems from my summer flying work, which for many years now has been chock full of carting around visitors from Norway, bound for the remote corners and watersheds and taiga edges of the Northwest Territories. The Northwest Territories are to Norwegian outdoor folk what the Yukon has for years been to the Germans — a fabled, distant, free-for-all paradise. In a typical recent summer, I fly six or eight parties of Norwegians into our little corner of the North here, most of them drawn at least tangentially by the legacy of another Norwegian who was here nearly a hundred years ago.

In 1927, a young Helge Ingstad appeared at the far east end of Great Slave Lake, where he spent just under three years living the life of a trapper and hunter. He returned to Norway in 1930, and not long after that he had written a book. The Land of Feast and Famine is the title of the English-language edition, and it is a great read. I gather it reads even better in the original Norwegian, because Ingstad was a gifted writer. His best-seller, set hereabouts, describes his sojourn in this region, and it was widely translated and today remains in print. I often try for, and usually get, a somewhat bewildered, somewhat offended, smile from my Norwegian-paddler customers, by referring to Ingstad as The Rock Star of Reliance. Nearly a hundred years on, his star here still burns brightly. Summer after summer his admirers arrive, to pore over his photos and words around their campfires, and to search for some further remnants of his fleeting youth in this part of Canada.

I admit that I was thinking of Ingstad and his legacy, and also pondering those summer paddlers and my own Scandi-envy, during my flight home, perched up in the Flight Levels enroute from Iceland to Toronto, last Saturday. In bright February sunshine we passed over the south tip of Greenland. From seven miles up I could make out a tiny cluster of colored dots at the head of a fjord, and offshore the white foam wake of a vessel heading in to harbor from the open sea. Something struck me. This did not feel quite like Scandinavia anymore, although yes, Greenland is politically a part of Denmark. (And let’s all hope it stays that way.) The soul of the icy land I was looking down upon had changed. This was more raw, more wild, more out there in a way I had not felt for the past few weeks, over there.

Then we lost sight of that south tip of Greenland and began another long crossing of open ocean, the Labrador Sea. Pan ice, floe ice, sheet ice, and mile after mile of smooth black water. An hour or more, at 400 knots. Yikes.

And land ho! Labrador! A jagged coast, and the taiga forest stretching inland. But here, try as I did, on that crystal clear afternoon, I could not find a single speck of a sign of humanity. Of course, yes, there were some people down there somewhere, a powerline or two, a mine, some short rugged stretches of road. But mostly a land looking much as it has for the past six or eight thousand years — whenever it was that it peeked out from beneath the last Ice Age glaciation.

Empty-ness.

Vast-ness.

Free-dom.

I get it, I thought. I get why they still come, year after year, clear over to Canada. We still have this wild and utterly empty magic. No wooden sign-posts pointing the directions and distances to tidy little huts, sculpted trails, and nearby peaks. No signs pointing to anything at all, and scarcely a hut, and almost never a real trail. This North, over on this side of the pond, is now emptier and quieter, in terms of quotidian human traffic and livelihoods, than it was even 95 years ago in Ingstad’s time. This may well be a portent of calamity, I think, but it is also kind of a thrill.

My virulent bout of Scandi-envy tucked its tail and slunk away, at that first glimpse of the Labrador forests, rocks, lakes, and rivers. It will come back, now and then, I’m sure. It always does.

By the time I left Toronto on an Airbus 320 later that night, the sky and land were all pitch dark, so I could not view the rest of the route, north of Lake Superior, southwest of Hudson Bay, up past Stony Rapids and Lake Athabasca. It was twenty below zero and snowing gently when we walked down the steps from the plane and into the terminal at Yellowknife, at one o’clock in the morning.

“Finally getting warmer again. Spring is coming,” said the cab driver.

What a month. What a week. What a day. I said we should buckle up, right? But holy shamoly.

It’s the last night of the month, and I was working on something else, but it’s been a long solo day in deep cold and all I have gumption for tonight is to post these closing passages from “Lighting Out,” the second chapter of my 1994 book North of Reliance. Now it is year 38 here, almost 33 years since I wrote that chapter, and when I happened across it again the other day the tone of it (so… confident? brash? glib?) made me pause, and cringe, and smile.

And oh yes, since you asked, we’re still together, and stayin’ warm.

_______

I proposed marriage to Kristen one morning in 1988, with the thermometer at fifty-two below zero. We were sitting by the big south window in the little eight-by-eight-foot cabin we’d built that first autumn at the Hoarfrost, “the cracker box,” as our neighbors called it. It was February, the month that always looms as a troublesome one in the northern bush. More feuds, petty disputes, grand schemes, vicious gossip, and sweeping changes have been born in February than in all other months of the year combined. It is a month to endure, and a month to be careful.

    We were trying to see the future that morning. Kristen had been invited to join a group of six women who would paddle the 600 miles of the Back River the following summer. It was a choice, and it brought into focus the question that was looming over us that February:  what to do when winter ended? When there was more to do each day than buck wood, stoke stoves, cut new trails and run the dogs… what would we do? Spring was coming. Already the daylight lasted until 5:30 in the evening, a two-hour gain from the solstice.

    “We could get married.” That is how I first broached the idea. Casually, as if I’d said, “we could build a shed,” or “we could enter that dogsled race in Fort McMurray.”

    Kristen asked me to repeat myself. I gazed out through the window at the thermometer, still stuck at fifty-some below, and back at the lovely dark-haired woman with the skin peeling from a recent frostbite on the tip of her nose, that nose that had been split down the middle by the handlebar of a sled almost exactly a year earlier, on a steep drop to the Yanert River valley in Alaska.

    “Will you marry me?”

    Silence. A pinging from the sheet-metal stove.

    “Yes.”

    February was beaten, and our days here took a giant step more deeply into permanence. Now year by year I watch the log walls of that tiny cabin weather and darken. I will always remember that there, right there, we decided to get married.

    A few nights later I passed the news out over the HF bush radio: “Kristen and I are going to get married.” Richard Black’s voice crackled back from his camp seventy miles to the east: “Well, now you’ll have someone to keep you warm all your years at the Hoarfrost.”

________________

A Lighting Out will, one hopes, lead to an Arrival. The lighting is the easy part; the arrival takes years. A part of arriving here has been to get a clear view of my motives; another part is the comprehension of my range. What is the extent of my territory? Where will I concentrate my efforts?

    If a person owns a certain acreage, that must be a help. This forty, this quarter-section, this yard and garden plot help to focus and narrow the attention. Here I own a single acre, a square 200 feet on a side. Beyond that in all directions lies uninhabited land and lake, all belonging to that vague Canadian government entity, The Crown. Of course my range must spill out beyond this acre. Learning how far it goes in any given direction is a part of finally arriving here.

    It is taking me a long time to grasp the scale of this country. Its resources are more sparsely scattered than were those of my old stomping grounds. The animals that live here have a wider range; the fish grow slowly and do not make such dependable and prolific spawning runs. Soil is a precious rarity and the trees grow tall only in sheltered pockets of fertile ground. Stands of stunted, twisted spruce cover most of the lowlands and dwindle to a few hardy individuals on the ridge tops.

    The enormity and emptiness of the country at first inspired me with visions of a huge territory. I would learn it all, from Aylmer Lake to the Thelon River, south beyond the Snowdrift River, west to the road-heads at Resolution and Yellowknife. Flying my small plane helped bolster those early notions of a vast range, but the longer I live here the smaller my territory becomes. The part of the landscape that feels truly familiar to me, and those certain places that have gained a personal significance – here I killed a moose, here we camped in that storm – is much more limited than those first grandiose visions would have had it.

    Country seen from an airplane, however low and intricate the flight, is not truly encountered. Only when I slow down and walk, stand behind a team of dogs, or paddle along in a canoe can I match the input of impressions to my capacity for interpretation and memory. It is only that realm within which I need no map, in which if pressed I could sketch an accurate map, that will become my range. From anywhere within it I could always find my way home, on foot or by canoe, with no supplies enroute.

    In his essay “Walking” Thoreau wrote “There is in fact a sort of harmony discoverable between the capabilities of the landscape within a circle of ten miles’ radius, or the limits of an afternoon walk, and the threescore and ten of human life. It will never become quite familiar to you.”

    I differ a bit with his limits – twenty miles, round trip, being more than an afternoon walk for me, but his idea is accurate. In every season since I arrived here I have found myself for one reason or another in some spot ten miles or less from our cabin, but as new and unfamiliar to me as the headwaters of the Nahanni or the coast of Labrador. I come ashore on beaches I have never seen before, or follow flocks of ptarmigan into a hidden stand of tall straight spruce. Despite its paucity of species and the relatively simple chains and webs among them, despite its straightforward geology and steady, dependable climate, this land still overwhelms my ability to know any more than a tiny tract of it. 

    Thoreau’s circle of 315 square miles, when skewed by the shape of the shoreline and the slant of these northeast-southwest watersheds, is the approximate size of my range. The area takes me well up the Hoarfrost beyond treeline, in a swath a few miles wide. It runs east and west along the coast of the big lake, and up other drainages I have come to know. Those creeks have no names on the map; we know places by the names we have given them:  Hawk Owl Creek, The Big Burn, Windy Lake, Obelisk.

    My restlessness has met its match. Gradually those old envies, that feeling that perhaps I was born too late, slips away. I lit out; at last I begin to settle. In  The Big Sky, A. B. Guthrie summed it up well:  “The feel of the country settled into Jim, the great emptiness and age of it, the feel of westward mountains old as time and plains wide as forever and the blue sky flung across. The country didn’t give a damn about a man or any animal. It let the buffalo and the antelope feed on it and the gophers dig and the birds fly and men crawl around, but what did it care, being one with time itself? What did it care about a man or his hankerings or what happened to him? There would be other men after him and others after them all wondering and all wishful and after a while all dead… He clucked to his horse and rolled in the saddle to its downhill jolt.”    

I am often astounded by the nonchalance of most airplane passengers during the critical moments of take-off. The plane takes position on the button of the runway, and there is a brief pause. Clearance comes from the Tower, the throttles are shoved ahead, and the roll begins.

When I am a passenger, on an airliner or even just a local sked flight, when takeoff time comes I am glued to the little window alongside my seat. I’m not saying I’m worried; I’m just interested. I love to watch as the runway markers clip past, and I imagine the terse back-and-forths up front on the pilots’ intercom. Acceleration, more acceleration, still more, and then the lift, and that incredible climb rate as the welded-bolted-glued-wired-shimmed-inflated-lubricated-ignited-repaired-signed-off behemoth strains upward to its preferred habitat of Flight Level 350, six or seven miles above terra firma. As a corny airshow commentator back in the Midwest could never resist saying, “Wow, folks, lookathat, she’s climbin’ like a homesick angel…” (A witty pilot friend of mine says, about less impressive climbs, “Looky there boys, she climbs like a ruptured duck.”)

And yet, all around me in the plane – even in the tiny planes I fly on floats and skis and fat tires – the moment of take-off is apparently hardly worth a glance from today’s jaded passengers. Everyone’s phones, of course, demand constant staring and pecking, and if those are already stowed away my fellow voyageurs just adopt the slightly-perturbed blank stare which is the default visage of the modern traveller.  You’d think that, instead of hurtling down a runway to rotation and liftoff, we were all on a Greyhound bus two days into a long trip, pulling out of the A & W in Kalamazoo, half-delirious and bored stiff.

In 1993 my mother – who happily turns 88 years young today – Happy Birthday Mom! – was in the Peace Corps, stationed in Armenia.  That was a mixed-bag experience, I gather, since she was over there to help the locals promote tourism, just as Armenia blundered into a half-hearted border war with neighboring Georgia.  The prospects for new tourist business tanked.  (My Mom had other overseas adventures, including a late-1980’s hike up to Everest Base Camp in Nepal. I – who have hardly been overseas at all – like to make much of those journeys whenever I introduce her these days. What a gal!)  

That summer, 1993, the Diamond Rush was in full swing up in the NWT (there was no Nunavut yet.) I was busy being a lowly co-pilot and human forklift aboard the Twin Otters at Air Tindi, so I did not go along when my father and sisters went to Armenia to visit my mother.  (And yes, I will regret that decision as long as I live.) On Mom’s summer break they all flew together from Yerevan to Paris, on a jet operated by Aeroflot, the notoriously haphazard Flagship Airline of Russia.  For the rest of his life my Dad loved to tell the story of that take-off from Yerevan, after being stranded for many hours on the tarmac, awaiting clearance. 

Evidently the Aeroflot crews in 1993 viewed the various “critical” phases of flight a lot more casually than most of us North American pilots do. For instance, there were several too many people aboard the plane, so some seatbelts had  been made into makeshift seats by buckling them together across the aisle to form a sitting sling.  And as the takeoff began at last and the plane began to gather speed, some passengers were still standing up, so they just braced a hand up against an overhead bin and steadied themselves, as they would in a street-car rounding a sharp corner downtown. Some were smoking, some were pouring shots of vodka, and everybody was obviously tickled to be on the way to gay Paris at last. And, needless to say, these decades later, even with all those hard-and-fast rules broken, it all worked out.

And here we all are, on the button of the runway again, tonight, cleared for takeoff into the brave new world labelled 2025.  Over the past week or two, though, my Dad’s vivid account of that Aeroflot take-off has been flashing again and again into my thoughts. What’s up with that? Well, I have that same mixture of dread, bemused and detached interest, and weary resignation that my Dad told me he felt that day in Yerevan, hurtling toward the stratosphere at last.

I can’t help but wonder, after all these years, whether this time around all the pre-takeoff checks are truly complete. Has the Minimum Equipment List been ticked off item by item? Is the crew licensed, current, and proven competent? Have they had a good night’s rest? Are the most recent repairs and service to the airframe and engine all signed off “in accordance with the acceptable standards of Airworthiness” and have the engineers scrawled their initials in the logbooks?

 Well, hmm.  I remain unconvinced. But hey, it looks like we’re about to roll.

Times like this, I sometimes find solace in a longer view. Or an even longer view. At least a slightly expanded version of our puny human-lifetime view.  I like to go backward or forward a stretch, say 300 years, or some similar blink of an eye.  Out beyond my own links of flesh and blood, back up the ladder past anyone I ever met or spoke to in person (ending in that direction with my grandparents) and down the road to my children and the newborn children of their next generation.

Some days, when I am flying around alone above the vast emptiness that is our home terrain, I ask myself, “What has changed, right here below me, since the year 1725?” Or again, “What will change, right here below me, by 2325?”  Rock. Sky. Lake. River. Herds of caribou, flocks of ptarmigan, fat fish in the rivers. And the very merest almost insignificant smattering of Homo sapiens.

I find solace in that long view, puttering along above that ever-enduring wilderness, on a New Year’s night like this. 

Buckle up your seatbelts and review those Safety Features Cards, folks.

Or, alternatively, just have a shot of something strong, light up a cigarette and brace one arm against that overhead luggage bin.  Maybe even this time, once we’ve lifted off and we’re climbing at 3500 feet a minute, it will all work out, yet again. Anyway, one way or another, we’re rollin’.

I was far away from home for the latter half of this month. I departed on floats on the sixteenth of October. Yesterday afternoon I landed the Husky on fat tires back here on the snowy little “airstrip” just up the hill from home, where we keep the planes during this shoulder season of freeze-up.

I set out tonight to try to say something original, insightful, amusing, inspiring. (As usual, I’d have happily settled for any two out of the four.) And then, hemming and hawing, not knowing where or how to begin, I came across this poem that has been among my five all-time favorites ever since I first read it, in 1978. And I still remember where and when: Nemadji Forest, the tiny log cabin so far off the beaten track, the dark night.

I’ll be back, in my own voice, next month. Or hey, let’s just say I’ll try again.

But for tonight, in this final hour of October 2024, “What more can I say?”

“Allegiances”

A poem by William Stafford

It is time for all the heroes to go home
if they have any, time for all of us common ones
to locate ourselves by the real things
we live by.

Far to the north, or indeed in any direction,
strange mountains and creatures have always lurked –
elves, goblins, trolls, and spiders – we
encounter them in dread and wonder,

But once we have tasted far streams, touched the gold,
found some limit beyond the waterfall,
a season changes, and we come back, changed
but safe, quiet, grateful.

Suppose an insane wind holds all the hills
while strange beliefs whine at the traveler’s ears,
we ordinary beings can cling to the earth and love
where we are, sturdy for common things.

On the seventeenth of August, mid-afternoon, I was alone in the bigger of our two little float-planes, eastbound to pick up yet another in this season’s onslaught of Norwegian canoe parties. This time it was a married couple, who had called for a pickup about six days earlier than originally booked. They had finished their planned route and did not want to proceed down the Thelon River any farther, nor did they fancy staying in one place for a week. They called me on the satellite phone and laughed and said “We’ve had a great six weeks. We are ready for some chicken wings and cold beer. Come get us if you can.”

I could. I did. And on that one-point-two hour flight I had another of the moments that come along every now and then in aviation, to keep us airborne humans humble.

This time it was a pair of golden eagles. Sometimes it’s a swallow, total gross weight around 25 grams, just under a tenth of an ounce, swooping into a one-inch-diameter nest-box opening in the teeth of a twenty-knot wind, and nailing that precision approach and touchdown every time. Sometimes it’s an Arctic tern, shrugging its feathered shoulders through a morning mist above the shallows out front, only to tuck and stoop and pull up in a near-hammerhead stall with a meal in its beak.

Or the ospreys of the Hoarfrost River, about whom I keep writing here. Two young this year, since you asked, now beginning to jump up in the nest and spread their wings, flapping in place. Building up muscle, I guess. Getting ready for the big day, a week or two from now, when they will rise from the nest, flap almost nonchalantly, and fly. Just like that! And then, after a few more weeks — long after the two parents have up and gone and left the youngsters completely alone — those two fledglings will disappear south, wending their way to wintering spots a thousand miles and more from here, somehow knowing where to go, somehow finding something to eat along the way. This feat of aviation, navigation, nutrition, and inspiration all from a bird that in early July was still just a warm lump inside an eggshell.

I digress. The eagles. I was droning along at 3500 feet above sea level, about 2200 feet above the tundra. 700 meters, for you more enlightened types. Artillery Lake shining blue ahead, a broad long swath. From the cockpit, movement caught my eye at 11 o’clock high. Two huge soaring birds and the glint on their golden plumage unmistakable. I was passing by them at a distance of under a hundred yards.

The two of them surely saw and heard my noisy stinky contraption, but they remained completely unflappable, if you’ll pardon the pun. Wide wings outstretched, floating. Circling up, riding the convection of a summer day. Up close, up high, they were about as beautiful a thing as I can imagine ever seeing.

I could almost hear them, as I have imagined hearing other birds over the years. “What the hell is that thing?”

Yeah, well, it’s the best we can do. It’s flying, but not really. Not like the real flyers of this world.

Ten years ago Kristen was here, alone with our forty (back then) sled dogs and our pair of oddball cats, waking to a day that got right down to business with heavy smoke and a roaring, bone-dry northeast gale. By the end of the day wildfire had consumed our home, and in the mayhem of fleeing two big sled dogs had perished. A tired three-man fire crew and a skilled helicopter pilot had arrived by evening, our neighbors the Catling family had braved the bay in two small boats and were the first to appear and help, and I had finally, much too late, made it home from a remote camp up on the barrens, on what I hope will forever be the scariest flight of my life.

That night at one a.m. we stood on the deck of the workshop, stunned and safe. One of the young fire-fighters added a little comic relief to the night when I spotted him roasting a hot dog on the embers where the house had been, and the pilot told us about letting one of the panicked dogs sit inside the helicopter for a few minutes, until it was clear that all forty wanted to join him in there.

A new chapter in our lives began that night, and today we flip the page from a ten-year portion of the story.

Today, ten years on, it is raining, and I am standing in our “new” house, built between 2017 and 2020 using around 250 logs of fire-killed spruce. It is windy again, but today out of the west. Around 25 miles off to the west there has been a tall plume of smoke these past few days, rising from a lightning-strike fire south of Misty Lake. No threat there, I promise. My flight for the day to fetch some Norwegian canoers at Yellowknife and bring them out to the headwaters of the Hanbury River is on hold for now, what with the waves and rain.

Out the window I see green. Green in all directions, not tall green, and nothing like the big 200-year old spruces that burned ten years ago, but green. Last night, trying to bring a four-wheeler and trailer “the back way” over to what we call Blue Fox Bay, to fetch a drum of fuel, I was turned back in a stare-down with a big bull muskox, happily munching on all that rich green.

What to say? Nothing profound. There is a lot of glowing malarky written about how wonderful wildfires are, how healing and cleansing, and how much we should all love them. I suppose some of it is true. It has been amazing, yes, to watch ten years of change, to see jet black turn to summer green. The little spruces are now eight to eighteen inches tall, the birch and some of the alder clumps are topping eight feet. The fields of fire-flower will be psychedelic purple by late July.

I found these three passages copied into the back of my journal, all snippets lifted from Annie Proulx’s wandering historical novel, Barkskins. I was thinking of posting only one of them, the one about fire, and leaving this post today as just that one quotation. But when I dug them up they all three rang true, in different ways, and then I started rambling on. As I do.

— “It is uncomfortable to live in a spinning world of hallucinatory change. But how interesting it is.”

— “The fire had been the salient point of his life. He had an absolute knowledge that nothing — nothing — would ever be as it had been.” (from part VII, chapter 49. “stupendous conflagration.”

— “If business and enterprise is a fruit, we must understand risk is its inner kernel.”

So many people have lent a hand in this past decade. Our thanks to every one of you.

Onward, into the green, and the change. It’s really raining out there now. Yeah, baby!

Oddly enough, July has never been a favorite month of mine. Oh, it has its days, and those days have some great moments, don’t get me wrong. Yet as the height of summer looms, I find my thoughts turning to October at least once or twice a day. How goofy is that?

But still…

The wood-stove glowing, a layer or two of wool on, nights cold and dark but not bitter and endless, the dogs running in harness again, and happy — overjoyed, in fact.  Bands of ptarmigan appearing just at dusk, white in the twilight, dropping into the scrub and rock north of the house to settle for the night. Some piano-playing after supper, upstairs. The airplanes off of floats and back on their fat tires, lashed to chunks of angle iron pounded down solid in frozen sand on the little autumn airstrip…

Hold on, it’s nearly July, not nearly November. Float-flying season will accelerate, peak, and fade, all in the next nine weeks, as everybody and their brother and their dog tries to get out, get moved, get picked up, get re-supplied, get dropped off, collect samples of rock or water or what-have-you, find adventure, find treasure or data or a bit of both, or just see the sights. There are six or eight canoe parties counting on me and my flying machines, six or eight geologists who have been planning their forays all winter long, six or eight land-use inspectors with long lists of sites to visit, some biologists, some water-survey people, some hikers, and maybe (although we can hope not) some wildfire crews to haul and smoke-patrol sorties to fly.

I am twitchy. A lot can go sideways in this business, with just a float dinging a rock or a magneto missing a beat, four or five hundred miles from easy back-up and assistance, out where you punch Nearest Airport on the GPS and it flashes up a single word: None. Every day a setting out, every evening a happy return to home or camp or dock. I know I will relax into the rhythm of it, once it starts, but the anticipation is something else. The romance of the mom-and-pop bush-plane business fades in the face of the fact that when all is said and done, well, guess what, it’s still just mom and pop. No fleet, no company, no dispatch, no hangar full of happy mechanics, no eager young dock-hands flinging half-hitches onto ballards. Just a pilot old enough to draw a pension, and his cheerful spouse and better half, and these two little airplanes.

Today it starts. Easy one, a couple of sight-seeing hops for a group of lifelong buddies who gather every Canada Day at the fishing lodge across the bay. Weather is good, waters are calm.

Mom is away right now, overseas,  and Pop’s at the plane.  He’s got his head down. He’s pumping the floats, checking the oil, and from here it looks as though he’s muttering to himself. I thought I caught the word “October.”  How goofy is that?

May 31! What?

Tonight I’m 150 miles northwest of home, up at Wekweeti, Northwest Territories, a small Tlicho community of maybe 150 souls, once known as Snare Lake or Snare Village. It’s been a long eight days of flying the Husky on fat tires, first from the Gacho Kue diamond mine airstrip and then from the little airport here. Thousands of miles flown already, with one day left to go — all of those miles low and slow and watchful, 70 knots and 45% power and two notches of flaps down as we troll along the sand-and-gravel eskers snaking across the Barrens. We are looking for active wolf dens at the precise time of year when the wolves are most likely to be sticking close to home, while the pups of the year are born. It is a project for the government wildlife department, and I’m flying with one of the biologists. He is a friend I have known for years, and we chatter away on the intercom as we keep eyes glued to the ground on each side of the plane, hour after hour.

These are some beautiful days in the far north with winter giving way to spring and the first inklings of summer. We’ve been landing on smooth white ice whenever we need a break, to stretch our legs and clear our heads or eat our lunch. The ice is changing by the minute, by the hour, and by the day — and it is important to keep that fact in mind — but it is still strong and white on the bigger lakes beyond treeline. In some places the ice is so smooth and consistent and strong I swear you could land a Lear Jet on it and touch down at over a hundred knots on those funny little nitrogen-filled tires. Climb out, take a leak, and roar back up to 41,000 feet.

Some amazing sights, and some very long empty miles in between. Every now and then one of us will adopt a David Attenborough accent and intone, “The Barrenlands are a misnomer, for in fact the tundra is teeming with life.” Yep, there’s life here. We’ve seen some big white wolves, a griz with her two newborn cubs, herds of muskox with their own young (and one confounding group of 70, with nary a newborn in the entire group), some moose, a few straggler caribou drifting lazily toward the coast, and the other day a big golden eagle out the port window, sharing the airspace with us. Hundreds of white ptarmigan going brown by the day; geese, falcons, ground squirrels. And, Sir David, a whole lot of rock, lichen, sand, gravel, and ice, all swept by a cold wind. As I’ve written elsewhere, it’s more a land of physics than biology, when you come right down to the nitty gritty.

Seen some worrisome sights, too. The water is astonishingly low throughout the north, as spring comes on. Hundreds of thousands of miles of freshwater shoreline look exactly as if the tide has gone out. Only thing is, instead of expecting a rise within six hours, we might reasonably pin our hopes on something like six years.

My grandfather had a few pet phrases, and the other night at about three a.m. — the hour at which Napoleon Bonaparte claimed there were few brave men — one of them was thrumming through my head: “A day late and a dollar short.” He used that one to describe anyone who hadn’t quite gotten their act together in time to be effective. Some of his others were, “You zigged when you should have zagged,” and — for pompous gents needing to be brought into humble focus — “He still puts on his trousers one leg at a time.”

I was feeling anything but brave the other night, lying there fretting about what lies ahead. And I mean this in a broad context, not a personal one. The low water, the wildfires already burning in May, (although some of that threat, at this writing, seems to have passed. Let’s have a tentative “Hallelujah” for that.) And just a vague sense of unease that is never helped by an evening dose of headline news.

In the wee hours of the night the specter of low water struck me as a portent of malevolent change. And that led me to wonder whether we (the big “we,” as in humanity) are going to wind up “a day late and a dollar short.” Oh, I hear all the talk, but talk is cheap. There is talking, there is hand-wringing, there are warnings and admonitions, and there is doing, changing, and stepping up. I wonder, can we curb our insatiable appetites, listen to what the earth is telling us, mend our ways, forego some of our ridiculous luxuries, and toe the line? Do we collectively have the cojones to do what we know needs to be done, or will we order up another bowl of guacamole from the irrigated avocado groves, and continue to fiddle while Rome burns? I don’t know; you tell me. Some days, I am cautiously optimistic. I see hopeful signs, and you likely see some too, wherever you are, and the news of those hopeful signs is too easily smothered under doom and gloom.

What’ll it be today? Pollyanna, or Cassandra? Or Joe Friday — “Just the facts, ma’am.” All I know is I keep waking up hearing Grandpa Jim: “Smarten up there Buster, or you’re gonna wind up a day late and a dollar short.”