While out east for Thanksgiving I was rooting through all the old books on the shelves looking for a book to read. I saw a good one that I had left behind after finishing it years ago - Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. I kind of remember liking it - a raw, dark, and violent western, and so grabbed it off the shelf. When I looked inside the back cover I was surprised to find a note I had written to myself way back in 1993!
I spent the summer of 1993 on a remote archaeological excavation in outer Frobisher Bay, Canada. It was the summer I almost got eaten by a polar bear. If we had an on shore breeze the ice would push up onto the shore of the island where we were staying and the bears would walk off the ice and onto our island. We called such pan ice 'polar bear taxis' and on the nights when the ill wind blew someone would have to stay up to look out for marauding polar bears. A member of the Canadian team died of hypothermia when a boat tipped over. It was a summer spent living on the edge. And in a very real way it matched what I read in Cormac McCarthy's book.
Reading the note took me back to the summer of 1993. On windy days the water often stayed flat calm because of the pan ice. I washed my clothing in salt water and it was always slightly damp, and I probably smelled pretty bad. During our excavation we found really cool things carved out of wood and bone, and when things thawed out you could sometimes smell 2000 year old urine. I carried a gun around. All this was in my note.
When I was in my 20s I travelled a lot, and I would often write myself postcards. I'd mail them home. And then when I returned home I could relive a particular moment in time that had arrived in the post. I don't know if I still have any of those postcards, but I do know that I just found a note I sent by time machine almost 25 years into the future.
Now it is time to re read the book. 'A classic American novel of regeneration through violence.' (from the cover). Sounds like a Western to me. Patrick
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| The paw of the bear that tried to eat me |
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| On the way home at the end of the summer crammed into the Pitsulak (Inuit for Pidgeon Gillimont) |
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| I learned from the Inuit how to butcher and pack out caribou meat |
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| A Raw land in SUMMER! |
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| Getting eaten alive by mosquitoes - at one point we killed 74 with one hand slap |
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| That's a frozen ocean as far as you can sea - in 1992 it never did thaw |
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| Note the polar bear taxis |
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