News From the Arctic Circle

By Claudia Hinz

It is one my favorite emails in my inbox even though I can’t bring myself to read the whole letter: News from the Arctic Circle.  The subject line alone sends a chill up my spine. The frozen nostril zing of a wild adventure on the top of the world. A place I will never see. Not because I don’t dream of visiting but because it is clear from the photos that a ship, in this case, a rickety old vessel, is involved in reaching the Arctic Circle. I get seasick. Even the gentle sway of a boat on a calm lake turns my stomach upside down. So, it is with a mix of thrill and sadness that I open this email and think of people heading off on this once-in-a-lifetime adventure and think, never.

I could unsubscribe. Never have to see the images of glaciers calving from blue-tinged crags, the Fur Seals with cartoony eyes, a polar bear stalking snowy plains, his ferocious claws hooked into a shelf of ice. The people on board the ship are artists and scientists sharing their work on climate change. I look at their profiles the same way I look at the ship tilting into wicked waves and think, I wish I could be one of them.

I am drawn to wild adventures and extremes. When I visited Iceland in February, it was only at night, bundled under duvets with a heating pad in our tent, that I felt something akin to warm. Even in layers of wool, parka and wind-resistant shell, dressed in everything I’d packed, I was cold. Day barely dawned before light eked out of the sky. For five days, it was night with patches of day light. I came home to the high desert mountain town where I live and promptly started researching trips to Svalbard. But alas, ships involved. 

There are the other limitations on adventure travel. The most significant of those being time. Or time left. I am almost 57 years old. For a long time, I thought I would suddenly arrive at a point in my life when all these wild adventures would begin. Like a chapter devoted to wild experiences. Ones that wrenched me out of the familiar and slingshot me onto another planet of sensations and sights, places that lack the familiar conveniences of our daily life, like a Starbucks on every corner. Even language barriers are exciting, if often frustrating, but still there is the excitement of an encounter with someone from a very different place, a very different background. Through smiles and head nodding, and my feeble repetition of learned foreign words and short phrases, please, thank you, goodbye, or may peace be with you, there is the possibility of a connection over a vast divide, a sense of sharing a place with a person you will never cross paths with again. Maybe that is what I am seeking: the singularity of a new experience, even one that is a little perilous.

In our daily lives, we trace the same circles in distinctly unadventurous, unexotic commutes to work, school, daycare, the grocery store, a doctor’s office, the gyms, or dog park. My little course around town feels like the very opposite of adventure. In its sameness and repetition, I am aware of how it is harder and harder to pay attention when the view out the car window is largely unchanged. 

I walk and run with ear pods. I listen to music to fuel my runs. Sometimes I turn to foreign language podcasts or my favorite show Downton Abbey, which I’ve seen so many times I don’t need to look at the screen. Often, I put my ear pods in my ears and forgot to hit play. The other day, just as I was realizing I was thirty minutes out on the trail and hadn’t started listening to anything, I heard a loud pecking. I looked up expecting to see one of the common woodpeckers in our area. Likely a Lewis or a Northern Flicker. Right above me, visible even without the magnifying aspect of my phone’s camera, was a woodpecker I’d never seen before. Later, I would find out it was a white-headed woodpecker. I had been so close to flipping on a show or listening to music that I would have missed this rare sighting. A woodpecker not native to our high desert, mountainous landscape. A visitor passing through, exploring new trees, sampling bugs different from the ones back home.

There is a minute of watching this new bird, taking pictures to share with bird lovers in my family, and then, out of habit, without thinking or even realizing this is a decision I am making, I hit play on my phone and silence the forest.

I drive to yoga, hurrying to get there early so I can get a parking spot. My brain is racing with the to do list, groceries, a dreaded post office stop, prescription pick up, and also, the fun of planning the next trip: a hike from the North Rim to the South Rim of the Grand Canyon in one day. 26 miles and 10,000 vertical feet. There are so many details: water filtration kits in case some water stations along the trails aren’t open. Blister packs, anti-chafing sticks (because it might hit 100 degrees Fahrenheit), hiking poles, extra socks, salty snacks for hydration, red licorice for quick sugar. Tylenol and prescription anti-inflammatory medicine for our aching joints and muscles. Today, right now, my husband and I are healthy and active. But things hurt. Not every day and not all the time. It used to be that pain was episodic. Something hurt and then it got better, and it was hard to remember how long it hurt or when it stopped hurting. It just didn’t any longer. My husband, a former professional football player, has nagging injuries. For years, he has talked about an eventual hip replacement, and now that surgery is scheduled for this year. There is a risk in postponing adventures. Will we still be able to do this hike or that expedition in five years? What will modified semi-adventurous adventures look like in ten years? Already I am on the lookout for a new definition of adventure. 

Next to the yoga studio is a small daycare with a fenced-in playground. Every day at the same time, the kids burst out, followed by a teacher. I watch a boy in a Batman cape and mask race up the ladder to the fort. Below him, the teacher paces to stay warm in the spitting rain, her hood cinched tight around her face. Batman leaps around at the top of the fort, cape whipping in the wind. He hollers at his friends to hurry, and they scramble up, eager to join the new game. They are surrounded! They need swords and courage and loud voices. I see the teacher check her phone: how much time left until she can lead them back inside where it’s warm? The frenzy at the top of the fort is at a fever pitch. Help! Batman screams. They’re gonna eat us! The teacher stomps her feet and continues in her tight circle, eyes down. She doesn’t know it yet, but she is surrounded by crocodiles.

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Claudia Hinz lives in Bend, Oregon. Her work has appeared in Women Writers, Women’s Books, The Christian Science Monitor, Story Magazine, The Wrath-Bearing Tree, The Manifest-Station, Brevity, The Boston Globe, 1859 Oregon’s Magazine, Flash Fiction Magazine, and Bend Lifestyle Magazine.

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Category: Contemporary Women Writers