THE JULY SUN is heavy and warm. This, despite a steady northwest breeze rolling off the Mackenzie River Delta and, just beyond, the Arctic Ocean. I am among a procession of heavy-duty RVs and truck campers and motorcycles and diehard cyclists—all of them coated in a thick layer of orange-brown road dirt—edging north on a new gravel highway nicknamed the road to the top of the world. Its terminus is the hamlet of Tuktoyaktuk, an Inuvialuit community once primarily accessible by air or, during the winter at least, the frozen sea.
Moving north of the town of Inuvik, whose population of thirty-two hundred is almost four times that of Tuktoyaktuk, the highway enters a borderland of ever shrinking boreal forest. Eventually, the trees give in to the press of increasing latitude, unable to take root in the fragile peat blanketing the permafrost thereafter. The vista before me expands, as large as that of an ocean’s. The green and yellow tundra is splashed with yawning expanses of cotton grass, fooling me into thinking that winter’s snow and ice remain. A peregrine falcon glides overhead, and a red fox, carrying some kind of avian lunch tight in its jaws, bounds parallel to the highway. Small lakes are scattered everywhere, like blue marbles thrown across shag carpeting. “The wealth of biological detail on the tundra dispels any feeling that the land is empty,” Barry Lopez wrote in Arctic Dreams, “and its likeness to a stage suggests impending events.”
Here and there, just beyond the shoulder, are the snowmobiles of hunters and trappers whose winter camps lie hours away into the wilderness. The machines are overgrown with purple saxifrage, made impotent by the early spring melt. More tourists pass by, on their way back from Tuktoyaktuk. Dense, conical tendrils of dust mark their presence long after they’ve disappeared.
Entranced by the warmth of summer sun and the open space sprawled before me, I allow my imagination to zoom out to a satellite’s
