Free Sixty Degrees North by Malachy Tallack Page B

100,000 Canadians actually live above the sixtieth parallel – considerably fewer, in fact, than Americans.
    For most in Canada, then, the north remains alien, a neighbour but a stranger. Many dream of it, but few ever wake up there. It is a place read about in books, seen in films and on television, but rarely visited. Viewed from afar, the region is tangled in contradictions. North means danger and adventure, but it also means refuge. It offers possibility and fear, beauty and horror. It is almost empty of people and yet overflowing with their imaginings.
    But for those who do wish to know the north, and to see it for themselves, the first difficulty is getting there, for the north is nearly always beyond the horizon. I arrived in the country in Calgary, Alberta, and my destination was thetown of Fort Smith, just inside the Northwest Territories. It was a twenty-four hour coach ride away.
    A cluster of tall buildings raised like an exclamation in the flat prairie, Calgary was bathed in summer heat that afternoon. As always, my fear of flying had left me unable to sleep while in the air, and the time change had made things worse. By eight p.m., when the Greyhound bus pulled out of the depot into the clean sunlight of the streets, it had been a very long time since I had last been asleep. We drove north from the city and into the broad plains beyond. In the west, clouds were piled like rubble above the Rocky Mountains, haze-drawn on the horizon. The bus was filled with chatter, but outside the soft light of the evening lay like a blanket of quiet upon the fields.
    Our first stop was Red Deer, shortly before ten p.m., just as the sun was setting. My head was cluttered with half-formed, exhausted thoughts, but I held myself awake, staring dazedly through the window. As we continued towards Edmonton an hour passed, but the memory of the sun lingered. Colours washed out, leaving behind a muted light; and as the sky softened to golden grey in the northwest, farmhouses dissolved into silhouettes – fat, black stains on the disappearing land.
    At Edmonton we changed buses. It was midnight, but the depot was still full of people. Many of the passengers had brought pillows and blankets with them, and as we drove on into the darkness, voices settled into silence. I bundled up my jacket, then wedged it between the seatback and the window. Closing my eyes, I tried to sleep.
    By the time we reached the town of Slave Lake at three a.m., a smear of white was in the northeast sky. Soon after, darkness began to lift again. Trees emerged from the night, close against the road, blocking the view beyond. An hour or so later the prairie returned, with fields stretched out in every direction. The farms were tidy – all straight linesand well-kept gardens, quaint wooden houses and giant grain silos. Even the old cars had been abandoned in neat rows, lined up, perhaps, in the order in which they stopped working. A few white-tailed deer grazed here and there, and once the driver blew his horn at a pair that strayed into the road. The deer were forced into a quick decision, the right decision.
    The journey north – in history, in literature, in the imagination – is a journey away from the centres of civilisation and culture, towards the unknown and the other. Margaret Atwood has written that, ‘Turning to … face the north, we enter our own unconscious. Always, in retrospect, the journey north has the quality of a dream’. Looking out through the tinted windows of the coach, my own journey felt dreamlike. But it was not my own dream. Rather, it was as though someone else’s unconscious were being projected against the glass. The honeyed light of the early morning, the procession of fields, farms, trees and towns, all seemed remote and unreal somehow. I felt disorientated and disconnected from the place outside. I observed but couldn’t engage. I let the morning wash over me, hour after hour.
    In 1964, the