With due respect to H. Melville...
Call me Frostbite. Some years ago – never mind how long precisely – having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me in the states, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery, colder parts of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen, and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off – then, I account it high time to get to the sea, and the frostbitten north, as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship and lodestar. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me, the pull of the pole.
There now is your insular abode of the Northwest Passage, belted round by ice floes as Indian isles by coral reefs – solitude surrounds it with her surf and snows. Right and left, the slipshod trek takes you but waterward, and icebound. Its extreme down-town is Halifax, where that noble mole is washed by waves, and cooled by breezes, which a few hours previous were out of sight of land. Look at the crowds of water-creatures there, right underfoot.
Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon. What do you see? – Posted like silent sentinels all around the town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries. Some leaning against the spiles; some seated upon the pier-heads; some looking over the bulwarks of ships from penguined south seas; some high aloft in the rigging, as if striving to get a still better peep to colder climes. But these are all landsmen, southmen; of week days pent up in air conditioned comfort – tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks. How then is this? Are the green fields gone, the snows melted? What do they here?
But look! here come more crowds, pacing straight for the snow-strewn shore, and seemingly bound for Nunavut. Strange! Nothing will content them but the extremest limit of the lands; loitering under the shady lee of yonder warehouses will not suffice. No. They must get just as nigh that sun without rising as they possibly can. And there they stand – miles of them – leagues. Southerners all, they come from lanes and alleys, plains and plantations – south, central, east, and west. Yet here they all unite. Tell me, does the magnetic virtue of the needles of all the compasses of boyhood attract them thither?
Once more. Say, you are, after much, in that country; in some high land of frozen lakes. Take almost any path you please, hopscotch across avenues of ice, and ten to one it carries you down in a drink, and leaves you there an iceman in the stream, a frostbitten delicacy for the bears. There is brutal magic in it. Let the most absent-minded of men be plunged in his deepest reveries – stand that man on his legs, set his feet a-going with snapping crabs and oysters on his heels, foul fowls at his breast, and he will infallibly lead you to ice, if any ice suitable for home and hearth there be in all that region. Should you ever be without shelter in the great Canadian desert, try this experiment, if your sledge happen to be supplied with a metaphysical professor. Yes, as every one knows, meditation and the ice are wedded forever.
But here is an architect. He desires to build you the dreamiest, warmest, quietest, most enchanting bit of arctic housing in all the valley of the Beaufort sea. What is the chief element he employs? There stand his snowshoes, each of a hollow trunk, as if a hermit and a crucifix were within the weave; and here sleeps his augur, and there sleep his fish meals; and up from yonder igloo goes a sleepy smoke. Deep into distant seas drifts his mazy way, reaching to overlapping glaciers bathed in their hill-side blue. But though the picture lies thus tranced, and though this northern light shakes down its sighs like snowflakes upon this fisher's head, yet all were vain, unless the fisher's eye were fixed upon the magic floes before him. Go visit the States in June, when for scores on scores of miles you wade knee deep among sunbathers – what is the one charm wanting? – Ice – there is not a crystal of ice there! Were the mighty Polar bear but a docile panda, wouldn't you be content to see it in captivity, and spare that thousand mile travel? Why did the poor poet of Tennessee, upon suddenly receiving two handfuls of silver, deliberate whether to invest his money in a pedestrian trip to the beach, or buy him a coat which he sadly needed for that Boreal call? Why is almost every robust healthy boy with a robust healthy soul in him, at some time or other crazy to frolic in the snows? Why upon your first voyage as a passenger, did you yourself feel such a mystical vibration, when first told that the Titanic was struck down by an iceberg on the very same seas. Why did the old Norsemen hold the ice holy, and elements of creation? Surely all this is not without meaning. And still deeper the meaning of this story of Bailey, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into the Northwest Territories and in the reflections of the ice found himself, a man of men, undaunted by bear or bird. But that same image, we ourselves see in all frozen rivers and seas. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this adventure is the key to it all.
[yeah, I just did that]
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