All Canada Photos - The Colour of Canada

Where am I?

It was the strangest feeling of all one of complete and utter insignificance, of being so small that one was no longer matter in any sense of the word. A pinhole in a clean sheet of paper would have seemed colossal by comparison. It was like slipping into another world where nothing whatsoever is the same as the world just left and yet both worlds were stillCanada.

W e were in a de Havilland Twin Otter, an aircraft that had been built before Captain Dominique Lassonde, the National Defence pilot at the controls, was even born. It was the middle of June 2005, and Captain Lassonde was flying the then governor general, Adrienne Clarkson, her husband, John Ralston Saul, two aides, a photographer, and a journalist between Base Alert, on the northern tip of Ellesmere Island, and the Eureka weather station, located several hours by air to the south and west but still very much in the High Arctic.

It would be this governor generals final trip to the Far North before her time in office came to an end, and she intended the visit as a political statement on sovereignty her countrys claim on distant extremities of the national body that most Canadians dont even know are there.

There is nothing condescending in such a statement, for I stand with those Canadians. At one point during this long journey through the North we had passed over a massive string of mountains I had neither seen nor heard of the United States Range. Immediately to the west of these behemoths that would rival the Rockies stood the vast British Empire Range, another curiously named mountain range of which I was blissfully unaware.

Where did they come from?

The noisy, cramped Twin Otter slowly worked its way south along the east coast of Ellesmere Island before turning inland. Here the plane would follow Archer Fiord as it plunged deep into the huge island. From the end of the fjord we would catch the path of the Dodge River, following its twisting course inland until eventually reaching one of the great ice fields of the High Arctic.

It was a perfect, sunny day in this brief season of twenty-four-hour light. Every so often the plane would pass over melting ice sitting in pools of water, the reflection the magnificent polar azure that, on a fine sunny summer day, turns the Arctic landscape into one of the most beautiful places on earth.

Captain Lassonde chose the lowest flight path the Twin Otter could safely navigate, flying along the fjord as if the plane were floating between the towering black-shadowed cliffs on both sides. We were all hooked up by intercom a necessary safety feature in the noisy aircraft so we could not only hear flight information coming from the cockpit but also exchange comments among ourselves. The expressions of incredulity simply steamrolled over each other as the plane rose and turned and twisted through the fjord and then along the river path, mountains rising sharply on both sides.