Well, my last trip to the Canadian Arctic was in August of 2025 and I have spent a considerable amount of time since then thinking about the experiences that led me to writing about Mars.
I have many hundreds of images of the land around Inuvik NWT, Iqaluit and Resolute Bay in Nunavut. Resolute Bay (to me) is barren/dry Mars now. Iqaluit with it’s vegetation is after terraforming starts and Inuvik with it’s trees and tundra is when terraforming is finished.
I was looking at a string of photos of Resolute a few days ago and felt something that I could not fathom. I have been going to the north since 1968 and been there hundreds of times. I felt that I had an attachment to it, the way tourists can become attached to places like Paris, Athens and London. But I could not understand it - this ‘attachment’.
Understanding my own feelings about the North has been difficult. I have no family there. Just a few friends. I never experienced anything traumatic. Sure, it’s cold and windy, and sometimes dark 24 hours, but other than a couple of close calls while being flown about commercially and setting the record for a rental being stuck the most times in one hour in Resolute Bay (6!), - nothing traumatic ever happened to me. But the potential for things to go bad always exists in High Arctic places like Resolute Bay. If no fuel is brought in; then there will soon be no flights out for any reason, no heat for the winter, no lighting and eventually too, no food. Count down the days.
Today, I was again looking at my images on this website while listening (innocently) to Pink Floyd. The song “Sorrow” came up. As I listened and looked, I linked the words of the song to the images. I then remembered that I had done this in Res before and had written a portion of these lyrics into TCOM1 Chapter 47 - Life or Something Like It and Sorrow as a subtitle while I was there. It finally got to me. I was feeling what the soul in Sorrow felt about his land; a land he could never go back to.
These arctic places, though they are inhabited by people to which they are home, with their family and family history, invoked what I would feel if I was stuck on Mars. And would fear too.
I want to understand this better; but I don’t want it to ever go away.