The next night I sat in my small room in our house in Humboldt, Saskatchewan fingering an old ivory button. On one side was a carved crown and anchor and, scratched on the other, a broad arrow which identified it as having come from the uniform of a sailor in the British Navy. I often sat and looked at it. The button fascinated me. Who wore it? How had he lost it? An ancestor of my grandfather Jim’s had found it on an expedition to the Canadian Arctic years ago. He said the owner must have died long before I was even born, but it seemed now as if a part of that sailor were still alive. When I held his button in my hand he was not alone and neither was I.
As for being alone, I don’t have brothers or sisters, so I’m used to spending time in my room by myself, just thinking. When I was younger, I used to wish for a brother to play with, but now I can amuse myself for hours thinking about where I’ll go when I leave home. Often my mother interrupts my thoughts with her worried knocks at the door asking, “David Young, what can you be doing in there?” I usually reply, “Homework,” and then go back to my plans for the future.
In the meantime, I play hockey and hang out, and in the summer I canoe and fish, but that’s about all there is to do. Humboldt is definitely not a thriving city. It’s a small town about fifty kilometres east of Saskatoon and about as many years behind the rest of the world. As soon as I’m old enough, I’m gone. My friends are always talking about Toronto or Vancouver, but I’m heading north. As far north as I can get. Maybe I’ll get hired by a government survey or work on the rigs; I’d take any job in order to get up there. If I want to stay though, I suppose I’ll have to go to college first and learn a trade that will be useful in the North.
The Arctic has always fascinated me. I like the idea of the white wilderness, and of living on the edge of the world. Humboldt’s not quite the edge of the world, but I like the winters here too, especially the storms when the snow whips across the prairie with nothing to stop it but the occasional grain elevator. Nothing matters to the snow—cars, roads, houses—it covers everything in its path, smoothes it over. Even sound is trapped by the falling flakes. Then it gets cold, minus twenty, thirty, even forty degrees sometimes, but then the sun comes out and the air gets so clear you can see forever. When it’s that cold, your nose tingles when you breathe and the snow is crisp and dry under your feet. Mom says that when I was younger, I used to sit at the window and watch the snow fall for hours. I still like to watch those big flakes drift down, thousands and thousands of them blanketing the silent land.
When it’s snowing you feel as though you could be anywhere. They say no two snowflakes are the same, yet the ones that fall today are identical to those that fell on the huge ice sheet that once covered the prairie, or those that fell on the hairy backs of the mammoths in prehistoric times, or those that settled on bundles of beaver pelts the fur traders carried along the river ways. I love thinking about the past and, somehow, the snow is a link; it feels the same to everyone, regardless of when they lived or died.
All this I have learned from my grandpa Jim, Mom’s father, who lives on a farm about ten kilometres out of town. His story began when his parents came over from England at the turn of the century, before Saskatchewan was even a province. They didn’t know anything about farming, but I guess things were bad enough where they came from to make them want to leave and take a chance on Canada. Jim has a photograph of them, taken in their first year here, standing in front of a ramshackle sod cabin dressed in their city clothes with high, stiff collars and fancy hats. They did manage to make a go of it; the farm did surprisingly well, even through the depression years.
Jim was the second of two brothers. Both were born around the time of the First World War and both went off to fight in the Second. Jim was in a tank that was attacked in Holland at the end of the war. He was lucky; he was the only one who got out alive. He has limped ever since due to a piece of shrapnel embedded in his hip. His brother was not so lucky. He was a spitfire pilot who shot down dozens of enemy planes. One day he took off on a routine patrol and disappeared. No one ever found out what happened to him. He must have crashed into the sea.
After his wound healed, Jim came back to Saskatchewan and took over the farm. He married a local woman named Elly, and my Mom was their only child. I think they were a little disappointed when Mom married my father and moved to town. Dad’s not a farmer, so there is no one left to take over the farm. I suppose it will be sold when Jim dies. Elly died six years ago, but Jim is still there. He’s too old to do any of the work now so most of the land is rented out. Last fall, Jim found even working around the yard too much, so he hired a Hutterite boy named Jurgen who lives on a farm across the road. I’ve never met him, but Jim says he’s a hard worker and good company.
I imagine Jim tells Jurgen his stories. Jim has always been a great storyteller, and he even loves the Arctic as much as I do. His ancestor, the one who found the button, was a sailor on an expedition to the Arctic in the 1850’s. They went north to find out what had happened to Franklin and his men on an expedition to the area ten years earlier. Franklin was trying to find the Northwest Passage to China, but they never reached their destination and all the sailors and both their ships disappeared just as strangely as Jim’s brother had.
Jim’s ancestor didn’t unearth much except bones and Inuit stories, but he did bring back some relics: spoons, knives, bits of wood and rope. Most of them are in museums now, except for my button. But we still don’t know much about what happened to Franklin.
Jim also told me stories of other explorers: Charles Francis Hall, who lived with the Inuit for five years; Schwatka, the cavalry officer, who covered five thousand kilometres by sled; and De Long, who died on the coast of Russia because his men couldn’t make the locals understand that he was starving to death nearby. And, Jim said, at the other end of the world, there were Scott, Shackleton and Amundsen racing to reach the south pole. Jim tells great stories, so great that I often used to sit by the fire in his living room for hours, listening to him talk while the snow fell outside.
I don’t seem to have time for stories any more, but they have left me with a love of the North and the certainty that one day I will go there and see it for myself. But for now, I will have to be content with this button, Jim’s stories, and my dreams.