Blown From Polar Fur

by Civil Winters

BLOWN FROM POLAR FUR

It’s midnight at solstice. The supple contralto of Kate Bush floats from the record where she sings and reaches softly into the corners of my bedroom. I sit at the window, watching as the tempo entwines itself perfectly with the pace of falling snowflakes. Never one for carols, no album rings the winter season more tenderly for me than 50 Words for Snow. Steeped in the sounds of ethereal jazz piano and featherweight percussion, I will my meandering mind to slow to the fragmentary narratives.

“The world is so loud. Keep falling, I’ll find you.”

This time of the year is defined by its noise. It is a chorus of ongoing bustle, an eternal brimming of schedules with merriment and an endless twist and shout. For all the prescribed calm, there is an overflowing of chaos. Although I haven’t made space for a pause, the pull grows within me to dim the lights and to settle into the starry evening.

As the title track rolls in, the tone changes to a steady pulse of spoken words. These are the names for snow. Through years of faithful listening, I have learned each of them intimately. Tonight, there is one phrase I savor. Gravity leads my lashes toward the softest creases of my face, and I drift to a place washed entirely in white.

“Forty-seven,” Kate Bush entices as I await the reply. “Blown from polar fur.”

I blink once, then again slowly and open my eyes. Shaking the weight of sleepiness, I realize I am no longer sitting under a wide window on the starlit prairie. I am seventeen again, standing in the midst of the frigid Canadian Arctic in late October. Hudson Bay is rippling wildly to the North under the hazy ribbons of an afternoon sun. A Tundra Buggy waddles generously, ten feet above low-lying, rolling shale plain sprinkled with lichens and reindeer moss. Repeated exposure to glaciers has strewn the charcoal-colored boulders with rusty sediments and filled the hollows among them with rivers and streams. Freeze has begun to take its toll, adding chalky frosting to every crevice. The landscape is nothing short of a rugged outcropping strewn with layers of frozen milk.

I am studying polar bears and their interactions with the environment. I am one of sixteen students, in a sea of leaders and scientists, challenged to make observations and to determine solutions for continuing impacts on arctic ecosystems. From dawn until dusk, I move from Buggy window to Buggy window to join conferences or lectures on changing climates. Between learning, camera in hand, I capture evidence of hares burrowing and ptarmigans nestling low in the cold. In the evenings, foxes bound between banks, their grey-tipped tails the final remanent of autumn’s warmth. My notes are ever-increasing as late-night presentations continue beneath the crackle and shuffle of the neon borealis.

The schedule overflows, and the enormity of the challenges surrounding this uniquely untamed place compound. While the long-term damage appears invisible to the layman, its effects are far-reaching. Between melting ice, dwindling food supply, and disappearing shelter, I begin to bear witness to the hand of death that grips this community. “The penalty of an ecological education,” Aldo Leopold pens, “is that we will live alone in a wounded world.” Either we willingly ignore potential consequences and decide it is not our business or we harden ourselves to reality. The heaviness of wanting to preserve this space unsettles me. I am paralyzed without solutions to prevent destruction or to reverse my unfolding footprint. My internal disquiet mirrors the seasonal scramble I was caught in earlier, and I fall into it fully.

“The world is so loud. The world is so loud. The world is so loud.”

Unable to gain traction or clarity, I quickly grab the Canon I’ve borrowed, don my winter parka and move toward the observation deck of the Tundra Buggy. I open the door to a bitter chill. The viewing platform is largely empty, and with good reason. It is fifteen degrees below zero. Pulling my scarf taut around the back of my neck and tucking my hands deep into the fleece-lined pockets of my jacket, I amble to the corner where Dr. Stirling is standing. He is alone and entirely captivated by something on the horizon.

In the near distance two adult male bears are sparring. There have been record-breaking individual bear sightings this year, but a play fight this early is a rare occurrence. As I reach for my lens, Dr. Stirling turns himself toward me with a bright smile. “It’s a beautiful day,” he begins, “and it’s nice, at times, to put the camera down.” His all-too-knowing eyes pierce me like the wind, and I feel as if my inward wrestle is being read aloud to the multitudes. “Resist the urge to shrink life to a box,” he continues. “Be.”

We stand side-by-each, suspended in silence, the atmosphere biting into the honey-crisp rosettes of our cheeks. The bears rise and fall, tackling or checking one another with their enormous bodies. They bow and skip, leap and swat, stirring a whirlissimo of powder-dust upward. It billows and tumbles across the terrain, picking up speed as it scatters. Each rushed dodge or clasp against the permafrost threatens to topple the creatures forward or spin them sideways in ankle-breaking icyskidski. Occasionally one or both drop to the ground and kick all four paws in the air in faux surrender, only to stealthily launch a counterattack. The air hoovers densely, and nothing dares to enter or exit or interrupt. Every inhale or exhale is locked in frame; the misty breaths as viewable as a red-winged-black-bird’s first wispy spring trills. Except for the sound of the bears, the scene is enchantingly anechoic. Time quietly steadies and tethers us, and awe returns.

“The world is so loud. Look up, and you’ll see me.”

The first sensations of wake pull me from memory. I think again of Aldo Leopold, who believed that humans would never strike an absolute harmony with the land. “The important thing,” he says, “is not to achieve, but to strive.” As drowsiness fades and I reflect on the tundra, I recognize Leopold’s struggle to rest as my own. It is difficult to carry the weight of despair while safeguarding solace. Peace is not the challenger of possibility, but its giver. As Mary Oliver writes, “Stillness. One of the doors into the temple.”

The world will never cease its turning. When it becomes too loud to withstand, I want to remember where its beauty is enough. This is not to say that it cannot be painted, photographed, or written into song. There are moments when it is deserving of my whole and undivided attention. There are spaces that ask me to yield and be present. There is a sovereignty in choosing stillness that allows me to resist narrowing my life to a box, to fit into only what is square and sheltered. Whenever the noise of the world threatens to overwhelm, I want to dive beneath the limber lower register of Kate Bush. “Forty-seven. Blown from polar fur” can usher me home to the arctic, where polar bears first encouraged me to look up and to look out and to be.

I blink once, then again slowly and open my eyes. I am sitting under a wide window on the starlit prairie. It’s half past midnight at solstice. 50 Words for Snow plays softly, landing poignantly with the fresh, falling flakes. The clock has not stopped and the busyness of the season ticks on, but I have chosen to pause the hands of time. With a warm linen blanket wrapped loosely around my shoulders, I stand to fully appreciate the view. Still, Kate Bush is singing.

“The world is so loud. Keep falling, I’ll find you.”

I see ice and dust and light and sky, and I am here.

CIVIL WINTERS

Civil Winters lives in the heart of the Canadian prairies where she designs regenerative landscapes. When her hands aren’t full of earth or earl grey tea, she runs, writes, paints, chases her niece, and entertains an ark-load of critters.