Ah, for just one time
I would take the Northwest Passage To find the hand of Franklin
Reaching for the Beaufort Sea Tracing one warm line Through a land so wild and savage And make a Northwest Passage to the sea
Westward from the Davis Strait 'tis there 'twas said to lie
The sea route to the Orient for which so many died
Seeking gold and glory, leaving weathered, broken bones
And a long-forgotten lonely cairn of stones

Three centuries thereafter, I take passage overland In the footsteps of brave Kelso, where his "sea of flowers" began Watching cities rise before me, then behind me sink again
This tardiest explorer, driving hard across the plain
And through the night, behind the wheel, the mileage clicking west I think upon Mackenzie, David Thompson and the rest Who cracked the mountain ramparts and did show a path for me
To race the roaring Fraser to the sea
How then am I so different from the first men through this way?
Like them, I left a settled life, I threw it all away
To seek a Northwest Passage at the call of many men
To find there but the road back home again   Stan Rogers

 
Saturday night at the movies for us translated into viewing The Snow Walker, a Canadian film of powerful impact on my husband and me. He has long read and been fascinated with stories of exploration of Canada's far north and the search for the Northwest Passage and the tragedy of one failed voyage of discovery after another launched by Great Britain's navy in its territory that was to become Canada, culminating with Sir John Franklin and his last voyage; the mysterious disappearance of his ships, his crew, his chronicled death and the discovery just in the year 2014 under the auspices of Parks Canada of one of his ships, HMS Erebus.

Parks Canada website

For me, the fascination with the polar regions and the many exploratory voyages of discovery that took place -- Arctic and Antarctic -- came much later, but I devoured many of the same books and more that my husband had once done. One of the most gripping to me was the book The Ice Master by Jenifer Niven, which focused on the 1913 voyage of the Karluk under its captain Robert Bartlett, who took charge of the expedition when Vilhjalmur Stefansson whose expedition this was to have been, abandoned it. The story of the Karluk and what occurred to its crew is one of dauntless courage, perseverance, and discovery.

The film we watched, The Snow Walker, was inspired by one of Farley Mowat's stories of the far north. Farley Mowat was an absorbed and absorbing lover of Canada's far north, who made it his life's work to educate Canadians through the medium of literature, about an astonishing part of the country that most people rarely thought of. He wrote of its people, their endurance, and ability to adapt themselves to the vast and alienating landscape they lived within. He wrote of the wildlife, of the terrain, of what it takes to live in such a landscape that seems to offer nothing helpful to human survival.

His story, "Walk Well My Brother", from which the film was made, displays the vast emptiness of the breathtakingly beautiful, but intimidating landscape of permafrost. The Arctic tundra is host to a wide variety of flowers flourishing when snow withdraws, where shrubs and trees are dwarf vegetation, stunted by the harsh climate and small lakes, bogs and ponds abound, of melted snow. The film is focused on an Arctic pilot whose light plane has crashed and he along with his passenger, a Tubercular young Inuit woman, forge their way in a search for rescue, across the landscape; she teaching him the fundamentals of Arctic survival. Her ancestral knowledge and resourcefulness enables him to discover just how survivable such adverse conditions can be for someone tutored in the Inuit manner of accepting what the environment has to offer. The film is a symphony of two wildly disparate civilizational representatives discovering one another; the cosmopolitan one taught by the 'primitive' one that life's values can be more qualitative than quantitative.

The conclusion of the film left us both deeply moved. The acting was masterful, the setting mesmerizing, the drama superb. A wonderfully good production.