The Land Where The Polar Bears Roam

When I look back on my life of places I have seen the one that will always be my favorite travel story would be the time I crossed the Arctic Circle. It wasn’t a vacation so much as an adventure. At nineteen I wanted to be anywhere but in the city I grew up in which was Dartmouth, a small community that was across the Harbor from Halifax, the capital of Nova Scotia on Canada’s rugged East Coast. When the call went out for crews to serve on the Canadian Coast Guard Ships I promptly reported to manpower and before I knew it I was lugging an old battered suitcase  up the gangway to my new home for the next four months.

          It took me a while to get used to life aboard a huge icebreaking ship that was soon pounding a path through the frozen waters of the Northumberland Strait. I shared a closet of a room with another chap and once you got used to being rolled out of your bunk two or three times a night and the continuous smashing of the bow against the ice not to mention having to climb up and down three ladders to have go to the bathroom, it wasn’t too bad. The food was great and coming from a poor family of eleven being able to eat as many steaks as I wanted for supper as well as two or three deserts was a definite plus. I was hired as a “Stewart” which meant basically waiting on the officers hand and foot from serving them their meals  in the wardroom and doing housecleaning or should I say ship cleaning of their cabins. It did give me a lot of free time though most of which I spent on deck watching with fascination the beauty of white ice covering the ocean as far as the eye could see.

          Once out of sight of Newfoundland’s coast we followed the Labrador shoreline until we hit Greenland then headed into the Arctic waters where explorers for years hunted for a North West Passage to Asia. The wildlife was  amazing, a bald eagle spotted off our bow at four in the morning, a silver fox who did his business in a tin can rather then on the ice, polar bears, ah, now there is what wildlife is all about. These majestic animals would follow us at a distance all day long in a slow easy lope. When our diesels shut down for the night and our ship was still, there they would be a family of three of these beasts who stood seven to eight feet tall leaning against the side of our ship begging for handouts. Cold cuts, leftovers, bread anything that we had in our ship’s fridge we would offer to them and they never refused our generosity. I will never forget the magnitude of these animals beauty and intelligence, looking into their eyes was like looking into a window on civilization.

            After several days of steady sailing we reached the spot on the map where the line shows we are crossing the Arctic Circle. I found out I was in for another surprise. New initiates crossing this line are treated to a ritual that you soon do not forget. Neptune’s court was convened and one by one blindfolded we were led before the great King Neptune himself to be charged with a list of offences that were guaranteed to have us face his wrathful judgment. Our sentence,  hair cuts with a pair of tin snips, medicine to swallow that was a concoction of what looked like molasses, sawdust, Tabasco sauce and God knows what else and then still blindfolded led to be doused into the cold Canadian waters of the North. We would find out later it was actually a dory filled with water from the ship not the overboard water they had threatened us with. Afterwards a tot of rum from the skipper and a certificate proving our crossing, and once again all was well with the world especially that night when we passed some open water containing a pod of whales.

After another four months of sailing the waters of the North breaking paths for shipping that supplied the villages of the Arctic all that they required to survive their winter, we once more made our way back to Dartmouth. Although this may not have been most peoples idea of an ideal vacation but hey…it is a memory I have cherished for the past thirty years and will cherish forever till the day I die.