Polar bear on ice in Arctic Circle : NPR

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Far-Flung Postcards is a weekly sequence through which NPR's worldwide crew shares moments from their lives and work all over the world.

Rising up in Canada, I all the time thought of the Arctic a part of my yard, part of the nation's identification and historical past. So I used to be overjoyed a number of years in the past once I acquired what I thought of a dream task: a week-long voyage by way of the fabled Northwest Passage, a sequence of waterways excessive above the Arctic Circle.

I used to be aboard the CCGS Louis S. St-Laurent, a hulking Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker affectionately identified by the crew as merely the Louis.

Forward of that tour, I had been doing month-long reporting rotations into Afghanistan and Pakistan, and was feeling floor down. All that evaporated as soon as I used to be aboard the Louis. I felt my soul replenish with pleasure as I breathed within the frigid, clear air and gazed out on the countless expanse of ice — there have been no buildings or boats, nor any trace of humankind for a whole lot of miles in any path. The ice twinkled with the sunshine of the solar, which shone 24 hours a day at the moment of yr.

My leisure was the polar bears like this one which day-after-day lumbered as much as the aspect of Louis, cocking their heads as if interested in who these interlopers had been.

It was breathtaking to be the place so few folks on Earth have traveled, to really feel the thick ice crack underneath the ship, to look at the polar bears method the ship, all of the whereas realizing this swiftly altering hinterland would by no means be the identical.

I believe usually of that magical time once I examine large cruise ships or oil tankers now recurrently making their manner by way of the Arctic. It breaks my coronary heart occupied with the impression on the pristine area. It is egocentric, however I am going to all the time treasure the time I needed to myself on the prime of the world — and the majestic creatures that decision it house.