Northern flight

I flew over Greenland last November on the way to Seattle from Reykjavik. 

Despite a lifetime of staring at maps — okay, obsessing over maps — I didn’t understand the enormity of the Greenland ice sheet. It took nearly an hour to cross it at 800 km/h.

We flew towards the setting sun. On the left side of the plane was the sunset and on the right was twilight.

We began to catch up just beyond Baffin Island. A band of pink swept the horizon in a semicircle extending as far as I could see. It was a 360 degree sunset, flying on the edge of winter dark.

We crossed Baffin north of Frobisher Bay and Iqaluit. The landscape beneath the plane was my country but it felt like an alien land locked in ice. It was so far from the world I grew up in, but my home is part of this frozen enormity.

The light increased as we turned south, bringing us back to the world.

Looking down on the emptiness of Nunavut and the Northwest Territories for hour after hour, I wondered how anyone could govern it. It has so little in common with Ottawa and the life of our southern cities and towns, clustered along the American border.

How could such a modest nation possess the boldness to be lords of infinite space?