Canadians (48 page)

It would stand as a stake. Proof of ownership at a time when, increasingly, ownership is coming into some dispute.

This year, 2007, marks a full century since Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen found what had defeated so many others: the Northwest Passage. It was a storied search that had eluded Martin Frobisher himself, who once called the passage “the only thing left undone whereby a notable mind might be made famous and remarkable.”

Frobisher missed his Northwest Passage fame by reaching only Baffin Island, far to the south of this spot at the end of the Alert runway, but the charming former pirate didn't exactly vanish from history's record. He grabbed a few unthreatening Inuit and filled his hold with black, mica-flecked stone before heading back to England, where he put the poor Natives on display and somehow persuaded an alchemist to tell potential investors that the strange black rock held gold. It was the first Bre-X scandal, as historian Charlotte Gray has called Frobisher's scam, yet he still managed to inveigle a knighthood out of his good friend, the lonely Queen Elizabeth I.Frobisher led a charmed life. Not so another of the more famous explorers who came in search of the passage, Sir John Franklin. He too might have received a knighthood, but he's remembered only for leaving behind one of the North's greatest mysteries—the fate of his 1845 voyage in which 129 men, including Franklin himself, vanished and could not be found again despite some forty search expeditions launched in the following decade alone. It wasn't until 1986, more than two centuries on, that three bodies were discovered and found to have alarmingly high levels of lead. Franklin believed he'd found not only the secret to the passage, but also the secret to survival: food preserved in tin cans and sealed with solder. What killed them first? The cold they found? Or the poison they brought?

There is hardly a historical account of the North that doesn't leave the head spinning. Henry Hudson set out in 1611 convinced he'd discovered the secret passage, only to realize he was stuck fast in what would be called
Hudson Bay, his crew about to mutiny and send Captain Henry and his son John off in a lifeboat, never to be seen again. Samuel Hearne tried it overland in 1770, sure that if he didn't find the elusive passage he'd at least find copper. He found no mines. He lost his toenails. And so it goes— each story a fable in what might forever have remained a fantasy had Amundsen not finally figured it all out.

What brought the governor general north that day was a growing realization that, once again, Canada's sovereignty over isolated land was being challenged. The United States has never recognized Canada's claim to sovereignty over the Arctic archipelago of North America. In 1909 American explorer Robert Peary announced that he'd made it all the way to the North Pole and claimed “all adjacent lands” for the United States. Some people—and not all of them Canadians—say he was nowhere near the actual Pole. His “all adjacent lands,” for all anyone knows, could have been nothing more than a huge ice floe.

In 1969 the SS
Manhattan,
an American icebreaking tanker owned by Humble Oil, set out to plow through Amundsen's passage without bothering to ask Canada's permission. It was a deliberate omission, the unspoken a statement on the American disdain for the Canadian claim. As can happen only in the world of Canadian politics, the
Manhattan
then got stuck in heavy ice and had to have the Canadian icebreaker
Sir John A. Macdonald
come to its rescue. The
Manhattan
continued on through the passage, the United States thereby dramatically defying Canadian sovereignty with the helping hand of its good neighbour to the north.

For decades such incidents were held to be nothing more than mildly amusing. But as the twenty-first century got under way everything changed. The Arctic melt was moving so quickly that a number of nations, not just the United States, began looking at the Northwest Passage through the eyes of Frobisher and Franklin: a new, open, and workable transportation route to and from China, now the world's fastest-expanding economy.

Only months before Clarkson set out for Alert, little Denmark had raised its flag over Hans Island, a tiny, uninhabited barren rock that lies in Nares Strait between Ellesmere Island and northern Greenland. The
flag-raising was taken as a provocative act, though hardly worthy of anything but launching stiff words in Denmark's direction.

Canada rather naturally felt a proprietary interest, since Canadians alone make up what very little human presence there is on Ellesmere and points north. The most northern community in all North America is found here at Grise Fiord, Larry Audlaluk's home—though it might be advisable, under the circumstances, not to mention that Grise Fiord was created out of thin and very cold air back in the early 1950s by the Canadian government shipping in unsuspecting Inuit from farther south. Still, Grise Fiord had survived and now stood as a significant symbol in the vague, slightly throat-catching northern statement that all this empty white space at the top belongs to
us
.

Saying and showing are, however, quite different matters. Apart from the Alert base and a small weather station at Eureka, the only military presence in the area was the two-man Royal Canadian Mounted Police station at Grise Fiord and the Canadian Rangers, a charming but rather ragtag Inuit force composed of mostly older males wearing red tams and jackets and carrying worn .303 Lee Enfield rifles passed down from the armed forces, some of the rifles dating as far back as the First World War.

Clarkson had come north inspired by Vincent Massey, the first native-born of Canada's many governors general. Nearly a half century earlier, in 1956, Massey had made his own statement concerning who exactly owned exactly what when he flew on military transport over the North Pole and, on the way back to base, had the co-pilot pop the window a moment to drop out a metal canister containing his vice-regal flag.

Naturally, the canister instantly vanished from sight into the white reflection of permanent day—but at least the sentiment was there.

Massey's disappearing canister had given birth to Clarkson's dream, only she wanted something that could be found again, if necessary. Surely the most passionate about the North of any governor general—a passion largely fed by her husband's insatiable curiosity about Inuit life— Clarkson had decided to build a rock cairn similar to those built by past Inuit generations, many of which have withstood the elements for centuries.

Rather than a directional guide or a food cache, however, Clarkson's cairn would contain evidence of the country's head of state at this spot in mid-June of 2005. It would stand as a statement for all who might later challenge either Canada's right to the incredible riches that lie under the Beaufort Sea and Arctic Ocean or its control of the passage between Europe and Asia that might prove the single benefit of global warming.

With the sun shining and the afternoon wind picking up, volunteers from Base Alert had pitched in to help build the cairn. They carried boulders and small rocks and, under instructions from an army engineer who must have played with such material as a child, they built a solid cairn at the far end of the runway.

When it reached the height of John Ralston Saul, the tallest man in the group of a dozen or more workers, they paused before setting the large finishing rocks over the top. Then they took a small green ammunition case and opened it up to place within it their statements on Canadian sovereignty over the Far North.

No one remarked that a Canadian Armed Forces ammo case stamped “EMPTY” on the side was its own ironic statement.

Governor General Adrienne Clarkson placed her vice-regal flag in first, copying what Vincent Massey had done forty-nine years earlier with his canister. Clarkson and Saul then added their own personal notes, handwritten and folded to keep each message to itself. Everyone who worked on the cairn then signed another piece of paper and it was carefully folded and placed inside the small steel box.

But there was still room.

If people truly deplore a vacuum, this was proof. One man placed a business card inside. A woman put a small pin in. A Mountie took his badge, RCMP Nunavut, and dropped it in. Someone found an expired fishing licence to put in—causing another man to shout out: “I sure wish I had my wife's credit card here!”

They were about to seal the box when Julie Verner, a fair-haired, bespectacled soldier, stepped forward and asked them to wait a moment. The forty-five-year-old warrant officer had something to add.

She surprised herself by asking the others to wait, but there was something about the cairn that had her thinking. She'd hiked out to see another, older one, farther along the bay, and it had struck her that such constructions last forever in the Arctic.

It never occurred to Julie Verner that she might stand for something. But she did. She came from Sault Ste. Marie, pretty much the midpoint of the Trans-Canada Highway that runs from one side of the country to the other. She was the child of a francophone father and an anglophone mother and had married a man whose heritage was neither. She was also the mother of four young children, the elder two now able to talk freely to their Poirier grandmother in Rouyn-Noranda who spoke no English at all.

“I remember thinking,” she told me months later, “here we are on the top of the world and you could never put a flag up that would last very long. But this cairn could last forever—maybe even longer than Base Alert will be there. I thought about someone opening up this cairn hundreds of years from now and there not being a Canadian flag there saying this is
our
place.”

And so, very carefully, with her eyes beginning to sting, Julie Verner reached up and tore the small Canadian flag off the shoulder of her uniform. She rolled it over once in her hand and then dropped the tiny flag in and turned away, tears now freely flowing.

Taken one way, it looked like disrespect to the uniform. Taken the right way, it was merely a soldier serving her country.

Canada, a country that so often makes no sense at all.

Canada, a country that, every so often, makes total sense.

Roots and Rocks

THESE ARE MY ROOTS.

I can feel them with my bare feet; I can grab them with my hands; I can find them with my eyes shut; I can even swing from them along the rock cliffs that ride high over the pine-needled trail that runs out to the far point where they brought me to stay when I was all of three days old.

“Roots and Rocks,” we called it back then—so very long ago that the photographs are black and white and the magnificent two-storey log cabin that stood high on the point is long since gone. But if you know where to look, you can still find the trail in from the highway. And hints of what once was.

We played Roots and Rocks from the time we could walk. The rules were as simple as life itself seemed back then: you can step only on roots or rocks; miss a step and you're dead. Now some of the players really are dead. Now no one lives here any more but ghosts.

We ran races back then. Roots and Rocks up to the Big House, Roots and Rocks down to the kitchen cabin, Roots and Rocks all the way out along the cliffs to the highway, Roots and Rocks to the icehouse, to the spring, to the outhouse. There was a time when the four of us—three brothers and a sister—and a half dozen or more cousins could fly along these roots and rocks as if they held both a magnetic field to catch our bare feet and a spring to throw us to the next safe landing … and the next … and the next.

To a passing canoeist, we must have seemed a wilderness camp for children having to learn to walk all over again; to us, we were always one step away from death and, it seems looking back, never quite so alive again.

Apart from the disappearance of the log house and the three small cabins, the outhouse and the icehouse, this rocky point along the north shore of Lake of Two Rivers in Algonquin Park hasn't changed at all. Perhaps some trees are taller and some have fallen in the half century that separates those laughing children and today, but the roots and rocks are so much the same that it feels, to fifty-eight-year-old bare feet, as if some genetic code of their presence, distance, height, and feel still pulses through the soles.

It certainly does through the soul.

This is the landscape Tom Thomson came to paint and was never able to finish. His fiancée, Miss Winnifred Trainor, whose sister Marie married our Uncle Roy, used to sit in a lawn chair on this rocky point and stare out over the water that runs from the Algonquin highlands down through the Madawaska Valley and all the way to the Ottawa River. The teacoloured water ran then, and runs today, just as it did back in 1837 when the great mapmaker David Thompson—then sixty-seven years old, impoverished and all but blind—paddled by this rocky point and noted in his journal: “Current going with us, thank God.”

The current went against Winnie Trainor though. She was left with a honeymoon reservation at an area lodge she could never use; left, many believe, with a child she'd have to give up; left with a dozen or more Tom Thomson originals she'd keep wrapped in newspaper and stuffed in a six-quart basket in her small second-floor apartment in Huntsville. One of those tiny sketches broke through the million-dollar mark at a recent auction in Toronto. What would she think about that? Winnie Trainor had to rent out the better part of her house just to make ends meet. She couldn't even afford to put in hot water for herself.

This is my Canada. Come sit for a moment on the warm rocks.

The wind is in the pines. The waves are licking under a rock cut at the end of the point. David Thompson paddles by on his final great journey, the last assignment the great mapmaker would ever take on.

Winnie Trainor spins her eyeglasses in her right hand as she talks, growing ever louder and more animated. While we children cover our mouths and giggle, the glasses suddenly fly out of her hand and stick high
in the spruce tree standing over the handmade wooden chair she fills with her large, dark, imposing body.