The blog
When the pale light fades
62.45°N
It isn’t as far north as I would love to live, but it is still an environment I love a lot. The days are short by any normal standard of living, but I wish they were shorter.
Waking up after 9 and getting a cup of hot coffee in my hands to stand at the window and watch magnificent winter sunrises that last forever is something I will always cherish of this place.
Finally some centimetres of snow fell over the weekend, likely burying any last remaining clear lake ice. It feels so wrong that we reach winter solstice in under one month already. Like the short days of always golden sunlight, orange clouds, and midday twilight just don’t last long enough.
How can you make sense of this overwhelming love of winter? The deprivation of sunlight giving deeper meaning to the presence of it maybe. Feeling the sunlight hit my face this time of year is magical. Just like all of winter, those little moments slow me down to absorb more. Molasses, ginger, cardamom and allspice bring this comforting warmth inside, and I am sure coffee never tastes better. Warmth of a candle or a car vent mean so much. I crave to sleep a lot, and to be wrapped up in soft and cosy fabrics.
So for this feeling of home which the depth of winter brings me? Maybe it is the sharp contrasts leading to greater recognition. More conscious recognition and loving-on. The dark and the light, the warm and cold, like drinking a hot coffee sitting in -33°. Maybe it is something more innate, something in my bones or my soul, or something picked up somewhere along my way.
But for right now with tired eyes in dim lighting, I tuck away in my linen bedding, pushing aside half a mountain of pillows, and in 7 hours maybe I’ll be awake for sunrise, but maybe I’ll sleep right through it. Either way it’s okay, because winter is for slowing down and staying cosy. So let the winter winds blow, the snow drifts grow, and the dim window lights continue to glow.
The aurora, moonlight, and singing ice
"I really think that is the most calming sounds I've ever heard in my life."
There was nothing in the world that could have made me more happy for these hours. I could hardly sleep this night after.
Listening to such beautiful sounds from the ice the whole night, and to feel this beautiful moonlight all around while the northern lights are dancing so slowly. Like life was passing in slow motion, in this surreal, perfect calm. I just wanted to lay there forever. I could not have been happier if I had just won the lottery. Truly not.
The ice was only ever silent for seconds at a time. Sounds would come whistling from the other side of the lake. The loudest ones echoing after. I wondered how the people in their cabins on the shore could ever sleep. It may have been negative 20 something, but how could you resist leaving your window open just the smallest crack to listen all night.
I thought the whole world needed to be in on this. The aurora and the moon — they hold their own beauty, and it is one that is extraordinary. It was the slowness of the aurora for so much of the night that added a further calming rather than overwhelment. And despite my unwavering love of darkness, the moon gave life to all of this. It would not have been possible, not in this way, without it. So as much as I love the new moon phase, the hour by hour of pitch black outside, and the darkness of winter as a whole, the moonlight was indeed perfect. With my face resting down on the ice, I move my head ever so slightly and in that second, dozens of snowflakes just in front of my nose would catch my eye with a twinkle by moonlight.
Beautiful moments on beautiful moments.
The calling
The almost u-turn
As I crossed the Yellowknife River a few minutes from town, I just about pulled into the snowy shoulder of the highway to make an immediate u-turn.
The sunlight was bright on my face, catching all the beautiful ice crystals on the passenger side windows — the obviously shady side of the car in my driveway.
The temperature was around -15°C, but despite that, the ice build up on the side of the river appeared paper thin at most. I could get home, get my kayak and paddles in my car, trade my mukluks for hiking boots, my parka for a couple layers of wool, and be scooting out into the river in my kayak in less than an hour.
I resisted though, and carried on driving further out, hoping I was making the right decision.
"Driving soothes me."
The ice calling out
As I drove over Yellowknife River, I actually didn’t know where I was going yet. Somewhere far out from town, but no where in particular. Of course this is just as well; driving soothes me. The entire countryside was covered in hoar frost, beautiful as ever. I caught myself many times slowed to below the speed limit, watching out in awe.
I found myself far out from town, alone on a lake that I have no idea just how far it stretches or behind how many corners it carries on.
Remember a few posts ago I asked you to ‘hold your thumbs’ for me, or cross your fingers for some luck, that I could make a small recording of the singing ice?
Well I really hope you will enjoy this short video. I don’t know the first thing about editing or cleaning up sound recordings, so you will need a quiet space and a high volume to be able to hear a little bit of my experience, and one that is far more surreal in person than through a camera without a proper microphone just resting on top of the ice, of course.
In all of these moments, it was like life had never been more perfect. The feeling of utter perfection in the sunlight, the delicate beauty in the fallen snowflakes and formed ice crystals, the cracks everywhere in the ice - I was really sure I had never lived a more beautiful experience.
All the singing of the ice, sometimes so loud I could easily hear it despite the crunch of the snow as I walked, and the insulation of my toque and hood. I really don’t think there is a more beautiful sound. It is soothing and calming in an overwhelming but completely natural and familiar way.
“This environment is my heaven, but it’s not free of struggle.”
The harshness of winter persists
Part of my love of winter is it’s unforgiving nature. The lightest breezes, which sound like category 5 hurricanes on camera, by the way, are numbingly uncomfortable. I repeatedly curl my fingers and thumbs into the palms of my hands inside my mittens in a desperate grasp for warmth, and sometimes even just a few seconds of contact with the metal barrel of a camera lens to set the focus can be incredibly painful.
Time standing still
Lying down on the ice, keeping a mostly exact stillness in my body, it seemed like I could stay there forever. Each sound of the ice as beautiful and interesting as the last. When I would lift my head and look in another direction, each time it struck me how much the light and the sky all around had changed. Time was passing so quickly while the whole world felt so still.
Toward the end, I was lying facing the sunset in the southwest, but back in the northeast, the earth’s shadow and the Belt of Venus were becoming more discernible. Darkness was falling and I needed to start back across the lake for my car, covered again in a light layer of ice crystals already.
Cautious steps out into a singing ice
For more than 24 hours, as I sit beginning to write this, the wind has been gusting strong. Definitely it is not relenting from last night in the centre of a lake. Specific edges and corners of this perfect little home allow through the most subtle drafts if you are sensitive enough. The wind audibly rumbles along the exterior walls, and the windows shake a bit in the strongest gusts. It wakes me in the middle of the night.
I don’t mind it at all. It’s the exact winter I love most, such harsh conditions outside and the cosiest safe place inside.
"I knew within seconds of stepping out of my car; I was severely underdressed."
That safe and cosy place sometimes is nestling right into my parka in an otherwise open and exposed, brutal environment. The fur trim of my hood wraps up and around my face, always catching my peripheral vision.
Despite tucking my chin right down into the top of my parka zipped all the way up, my poor little nose could not be spared. A balaclava would have been nice. There was little doubt I also should have had mittens instead of gloves, and my mukluks instead of hiking boots.
My fingers and toes froze, but I just couldn’t bring myself to tiptoe back across the ice to the car to properly warm them up. The aurora was too beautiful, and in that obsessed-with-the-power-of-nature kind of the way, the brutal wind was too special. It was raw. But even still, moments of turning away to shelter from the wind felt less of a conscious choice than pure instinctual reaction.
"Facing the wind head on was the only option if I wanted to watch her dance."
Like a cross between a wind tunnel and whales communicating
The ice sung all night, and it was even more beautiful than the few nights before. It was the most perfect company—an ultimate soothing in the chaos of the wind.
Usual high and low pitch bubbles of sound were consistent throughout the night. They were gentle and soothing, and as if you were listening in super slow motion. It’s comforting far more than it is unsettling.
Losing the forest for the trees
The sun was actively burning away the slow, few day accumulation of frost which had blanketed the forest. Anywhere the low sun could no longer reach remained covered in the most beautiful, minuscule ice crystals.
"There was really no choice but to go slowly."
I would often lose track of where I had walked. The subtle markers tied around trees became lost easily in the low sun at my face. The ice and frost covering the rock faces meant baby steps forward was the only way, but slowing down was exactly what I needed.
Five hours of the most still silence, and just one ptarmigan to send my heart into my throat
Like out of nowhere, an idling Dash-8 aircraft appears a metre from your ear. That’s what it is to be adjusting into a forest of silence, of just the light crunch of my footsteps on some hardened frost covered flora and the occasional sniffle, and to out of nowhere have a ptarmigan try to fly out of a tree I’ve walked under.
There is only one way down a rock face covered in frost and ice, and of course that is by a light bum slide.
