I huddled against Ray and Aaron and shivered. I looked around. “I’m going to die right here,” I thought, “cold and frozen for the ages.”
Landing in Yellowknife made me nostalgic. I conveyed this sentiment in my diary: I’m back in Yellowknife again, where I went with Andrew twenty-five years ago. This is all really heartbreaking. It brought back old memories again, and he was no longer there. It’s all too much.
Yellowknife is an icebound, gravel-strewn outpost. Twenty thousand people live there—about half the population of the Northwest Territories. Many of them make their living in the diamond mines. The region is known as the Diamond Capital of North America.
Historically, the first residents of the Yellowknife area were the Dogrib and the Yellowknifes, a band of Chipewyans who moved into the area in the early 1800s and were the city’s namesake. After the decline of the Yellowknifes, the land was occupied by the Dogrib and other Chipewyans.
From 1789 to the 1920s, Yellowknife was active in the European fur trade and was the site of a trading post. In 1896, miners on their way to Klondike in the Yukon Territory discovered gold at Yellowknife Bay, but there was no great “gold rush” at the time because the area was difficult to get to. White settlement did not begin until 1934, when more gold deposits were discovered. By this time, the advent of air travel made getting to the area easier, and present-day Yellowknife was born. By the late 1930s, Yellowknife was a boomtown, home to three gold mines.
Gold was the lifeblood of the Yellowknife economy for more than forty years, but the gold claims eventually petered out—the last gold mine was shuttered in 2004—and, in 1991, diamonds were discovered. That set off the largest staking rush in Canada’s history.
In 2003, Environment Canada ranked Yellowknife number one in the following categories: coldest winter, coldest spring, coldest year-round, most days at –20 degrees Celsius or less, longest snow-cover season, most high wind-chill days, and most extreme wind chill. Perhaps surprisingly, it also ranked number one in sunniest summer and sunniest spring!
It’s no coincidence that Yellowknife is one of the world’s best places to see the northern lights. Just north of the sixty-second parallel, Yellowknife sits in the auroral oval, a narrow area that circles the North Pole. The region within this band has the highest occurrence of aurora on the planet.
In the past, some indigenous people believed celestial spirits created the ghostly lights. It’s only been one hundred years since scientists even vaguely understood what causes the auroras. They occur when high-speed particles from the sun stream toward the upper atmosphere above Earth’s two magnetic poles and collide with oxygen and nitrogen. The resulting electric jolts emit bursts of color, which are magnificent.
Ray began sorting out what would go in our sleds: ice ax, ice screws, shovel for all the snow I’d be shoveling, backup navigation, lots of batteries, fishing line, pee bottle, and dehydrated meals. I was overwhelmed and frightened as he loaded this gear onto our forty-pound sleds. I began to doubt whether I could take on this challenge and survive.
So here I was on the Great Slave Lake in a beautiful part of Canada, so far north that hardly anybody lives there. The frozen lake seemed solid enough, and the ice stretched on forever.
This freshwater sea is named after the Slave or “Slavee” tribe of Natives who peopled its southern shore (no slavery practiced) and is the fifth largest lake in North America. Yellowknife lies on its northern shore.
It’s a forbidding location. In summer, surprising heat is accompanied by hordes of hungry mosquitoes—something I knew about from my honeymoon trip. Winter turns the region into a frozen wilderness of slashing storms and bitter cold.
The next several days were packed with new adventures, and I still don’t know if I have synthesized everything I experienced on the trip. One thing I can tell you is that not every moment was wonderful. My legs got very tired, and of course I was chilled to the bone, but I pushed on.
I missed my habitual morning shower and afternoon tea. If you’ve never gone without mirrors or baths or makeup, you probably don’t realize how much time you spend primping. Maybe being without these luxuries would help me appreciate my inner beauty. I could also eat as much as I wanted with no guilt, even if it was high-calorie dehydrated food.
Ray reminded me: “You didn’t come here to be comfortable. You came here to be uncomfortable and challenge yourself.”
However, most of the expedition was fulfilling—physically, emotionally, and mentally; and at times it was exhilarating, even spiritual. The first night there was a fiery red sky. “You know that old saying: ‘Red sky at night, a sailor’s delight. Red sky in the morning, sailors take warning’?” Ray said. “The sky makes me wonder if the weather is going to turn against us.”
A film crew was there, too, and in a funny way, I found their presence comforting. The sound of their voices in the vast, silent wilderness assured me I was still connected to other people. I had a sense of how marvelously and frighteningly dependent we are on human relationships. One member of the crew, Terry Woolf, seemed inspired by my willingness to make the trek. He told me, “I’d go to war with you, because I know you would get me out.” His words touched me and warm tears rolled down my frozen cheeks.
During the day we hiked across the ice, pulling our sleds and gear. I’d look around at the bleak landscape—ice, ice, and more ice, no vistas—and sometimes I felt despondent and scared. After the first moment of terror, I forced myself to look around, to ground myself in the physical details of my surroundings, which were certainly devoid of the distractions of society.
As the expedition progressed, my terror gave way to a feeling of competitiveness. I felt taxed physically yet I wanted to make it successfully back to Yellowknife. I went on this adventure course to force myself to break through personal barriers, as if this, somehow, would transform me or crack the shell I imagined was imprisoning the real me. The ice trek was my opportunity.
Of course, survival was uppermost in my mind, too. I had to use my strength, flexibility, and balance, and stay utterly focused. Ice conditions could change hourly. There might be ten inches of ice in one place, and thirty-six inches in another.
Think about it. How many moments do you have in your life where the next second is all that counts?
“Isn’t it a good feeling to realize that you’re great at something you’ve never done before?” Ray asked me one day. “Doesn’t it make you wonder how many other things you’re really good at that you don’t even know about yet?” His words had a huge impact. From that small expression of optimism and hope, I recognized that there is a whole world out there to discover and explore.
As the sky grew dark, we pitched our tents—no easy task. If you didn’t set them up right, they’d get wet, and so would you. Setting up my tent made me realize that I was responsible for my life for the first time.
I propped up pictures of my girls and Andrew, and I burrowed deep into my sleeping bag, put a blanket over my face, and closed my eyes. I kept waking up to the sound of the tent moving. And I realized the wind was kicking up. I was desperate to go to the bathroom, and I had to go. I ventured out—it was freezing cold—and managed to go to the loo. I snuck back into the tent without waking up Ray. I felt like I’d racked up another achievement.
As I tried to go back to sleep, I heard wolves howl in the distance. What if a grizzly destroyed all our gear and food the first night out? I ruminated along those lines for a while, until finally I put the thoughts out of my mind, blithely proceeding on the premise that my training, stubbornness, and, mostly, good luck would see me through.
I felt small and alone and insignificant, and the cold night seemed as if it might swallow me up without a trace. And then, for a brief, unforgettable moment, instead of feeling lost, I felt all my barriers and limitations—my body, my mind, my sense of individuality—dissolve, and I was suddenly part of the great sky and everything present; part of the past and all the people who roamed here before me; par
t of the animals and landscape; and part of everything that was yet to be. It was a spiritual experience and totally unexpected.
The weather grew heavy and a muffling snow began to fall. When we got up in the morning it was a complete whiteout, and blistering cold. Ray left it up to me as to whether we should wait out the weather or forge ahead.
I didn’t think it was a good idea to spend another night in the tent. My sheer Sarah redhead stubbornness prevailed, and we pressed on.
We were walking into the wind, so to prevent the chance of frostbite, we had to wear goggles with a face mask. As we walked, the snow came at us in big waves of white. We couldn’t even tell where we were.
Then, as if the finger of God had parted the skies, light from above streamed through the clouds. It was a miracle and a divine message assuring us that we’d be fine.
Ray is a master at reading the conditions and hazards in treacherous terrain. “Up ahead is a pressure ridge.”
This couldn’t be good. “What on earth is a pressure ridge?” I wanted to know.
“It’s a long crack in the ice caused by the thawing and refreezing of ice, and it creates a pocket of water under the ice. If we step on it, we might break through and of course get wet—which for us would be catastrophic right now in these temperatures. So this could be dangerous.”
I was terrified. If I took one wrong step, I could fall through the ice into the water and die. No matter what anybody says about ice conditions, it’s no fun to find out that you’ve made a mistake.
Ray skillfully maneuvered us around the pressure ridge and told me exactly where to put my feet. We made it.
My face turned extremely cold. Ray tried to lift my face mask but it had frozen against my nose. He noticed a huge patch of frostbite starting. “Sarah, it doesn’t look good, and with frostbite, you don’t take any chances.”
Frostbite is the poetic name for a serious health issue: frozen skin. The cold wind whipping across my face had caused it. I required medical attention, so Ray called a Dr. Affleck, who rode out on a snowmobile to help me. The frostbite wasn’t severe, and he made an adjustment to my face mask that would help it. I wasn’t going to let frostbite, fatigue, or anything else stop me from finishing.
At long last, up ahead was Dettah—the “ice road” back. When the mercury plummets to –50 and peaks; when these lakes and rivers are frozen solid; when steel takes on the structural properties of glass and shatters like crystal—this is when navigable ice roads are formed. Currently, there are about 750 miles of ice or winter roads in the Territories. Ice roads are temporary, cross-country routes carved out of tundra, frozen rivers, lakes, and even the ocean to move heavy supplies and equipment into remote areas. Depending on the terrain, specially equipped semitrucks, bulldozers, or loaders driven by ice truckers are used to haul trailers on wheels or sleds. While building, maintaining, and operating on ice roads is difficult, dangerous, and time-consuming, it is cheaper than moving goods by air. And traveling on them is like a journey back to a time before the railroad came, when the one way to move anything of any size, other than by river, was cross-country over rugged trails with a bullwhacker and a team of oxen. The Dettah ice road took us straight into Yellowknife.
I had made it, and no worse for the wear. I threw my hands in the air and shouted, “I dedicate all my achievements to Andrew and the girls. They’re the blood in my veins, and I’m the blood in theirs!”
While I achieved my objective—to transverse the Great Slave Lake—I realized there is no end to journeys like these, no fixed point of completion. More important, I still carry with me those transcendent moments on the Great Slave Lake, and I know now not just that I do exist, somewhere beneath all the clutter and clatter of life, but that I am an integral part of the whole grand picture. And when I want to, I can call up those moments and experience that connection again. It comforts me and puts my life in context.
NUGGETS:
• Make the effort to stretch and grow, to conquer your fear, and you can reach phenomenal heights. When you do, you will surprise yourself. You’ll achieve something far greater than you could have imagined.
• Expand your belief about what’s possible for you. You have been gifted with strength, courage, and capability that you might not yet have fully tapped.
• Dream big. You are capable of more than you ever dreamed is possible for you.
• Explore something new that feels positive.
• Every now and then, step out of your comfort zone. This will help you live the life you are meant to live.
From: Martha Beck
To: Sarah
I think you’ve probably burned through a lot of adrenaline, which can make you crash and go into your darkest thought patterns. Remember that “depressed” sounds just like “deep rest.” That’s what your body and brain are trying to do—deep rest. Lie down whenever you can, and think about all the moments of sweetness in your past. Wrap them around you like a blanket. Rewiring your brain can be that gentle, and right now it must be.
Lots of love,
M
27 Kamalaya
Serenity is not freedom from the storm, but peace amid the storm.
FROM THE HARSH subzero conditions of the Arctic, I journeyed to the warmth of Thailand, where I would spend time at Kamalaya Wellness Sanctuary and Holistic Spa on the south coast of Koh Samui, an island in the Gulf of Thailand. Koh Samui, also known as “the island of the coconuts,” is the third-largest Thai island. Before the 1970s, when backpackers discovered Koh Samui, it was a tranquil home mainly to coconut farmers and fishermen. Buddhist monks have long favored Koh Samui as a sanctuary for spiritual retreat. The island, they say, has a special energy that enriches and enlightens their spiritual path and helps them connect more profoundly with the universal energies.
Kamalaya’s facilities and accommodations encircle a centuries-old cave, once used by Buddhist monks as a place for meditation and spiritual retreat. The tradition of these monks continues at Kamalaya and adds an aura of spiritual and sacred energy to the physical beauty of the land.
The Monks’ Cave is always open, and guests are welcome to enter this sacred space for quiet contemplation and meditation. For everyone at Kamalaya, the cave provides spiritual nourishment and a peaceful break to lighten and brighten the day.
What lured me to this magical place was Dr. Prudence Hall’s recommendation that I take some time out for meditation and inner work. I signed up for a ten-day retreat. My sister Jane went along.
Kamalaya’s promotional literature promises solutions for detox, stress and burnout, fitness, and weight control. The spa’s team of international naturopaths can personalize health programs from an extensive range of holistic medicine, spa, and healing therapies.
No one checked our baggage for M&M’s and other contraband, but once we registered, it was good-bye to processed food of any kind until the day we left. Nor could we sneak off to the nearest Thai food restaurant. I was envious that Jane was there to tough out the spa’s detoxification program, whereas I was there to eat (healthily) and rest.
I protested that I wanted to go on detox, too. I was informed that detox was out of the question because I had exhausted my body and it would be unable to cope with such a stringent regimen. I wasn’t allowed to do much exercise either. All I was supposed to do was rest, sleep, and eat a bit of protein each day. Any weight I lost would not be due to a low-calorie diet, but to balancing myself through rest, nutrition, and the proper treatments. I stopped arguing and relented.
Jane would enjoy meals that were far more appetizing than what you would expect to encounter in a detox program. A four-course à la carte detox dinner, for example, featured baby spinach and arugula salad with pumpkin seeds and watermelon vinaigrette, clear hot-and-sour mushroom soup, zucchini spaghetti with curried pumpkin sauce and cauliflower rosettes, and fresh papaya with lime. She drank various detox beverages. They were made from ingredients believed to cleanse the liver: pineapple, strawberries, vegetable
s, herbs, and wheatgrass—all of which are said to cleanse the liver and kidneys.
I looked over the spa menu, and I started to sweat. There were more options than I could count. Did I want to relieve tension … open up the energy channels of my body … balance my emotions … or unveil my true self? I wasn’t sure. Would I want to be calm but also energized? Or perhaps I needed to be energized and balanced? Should I train hard in the gym, swim, or run along a beach? What about just lying in the sun? Or have manicures and pedicures? I settled on massage therapy for calm and acupuncture for energy and balance.
My massage therapist was a pretty Indian lady called Asha, and she knew exactly how to relieve tension in my body. Some people are perfectly quiet during massage sessions, but I am a talker.
“Do you have children?” I inquired.
“I have a little girl named Amala.”
“Where is she?”
“She is home in India.”
“How often do you get to see her?”
“Only about one month a year.”
I immediately thought of my friend Salli, who always looks so sad. I asked her one day, “Why are you so sad?”
“I want to be home with my children, but I can’t give up work to be a full-time mum.”
Out of the blue I wrote a note to Salli and told her about Asha and Amala. I wrote, “Salli, please be grateful that you have your children with you every day.” There are lessons everywhere in life, and I just wanted Salli to put things in perspective, because the experience of motherhood can vary so greatly from woman to woman.
My acupuncturist was a kind, loving Chinese gentleman named Andre. As we chatted, I learned that he and his wife, Gon, were about to become parents.
I’ve had acupuncture before, which means I’ve spent some time lying around like a fleshy pink pincushion. Andre inserted needles painlessly into my skin to stimulate my liver and kidney functions and to detoxify and strengthen my blood.
Finding Sarah Page 20