Notes from north of the 68th parallel

Four and a half years ago, before I’d visited the Yukon and decided to move there, I traveled to New Orleans for the first time. Beer in hand, I told a friendly French Quarter bartender that I was dying to get up north. He laughed. “When you say ‘up north,’” he asked me, “what exactly do you mean by that? Because when I say it, I mean somewhere a long ways south of where you live.”

Here, two parallels north of the Arctic Circle, “north” gained a whole new meaning. It was a traveler’s lesson in relativity. All my life, “up north” had meant the territories, the Canadian hinterland north of the 60th parallel. I had never thought about what it might mean to a Mississippi boy in this steaming city. Tennessee? The Mason-Dixon Line? Upstate New York?

Gjoa Haven [in Nunavut, Canada] provided another demonstration of that same lesson. Here, two parallels north of the Arctic Circle, on an island north of the North American mainland, on the north shore of the Northwest Passage, “north” gained a whole new meaning. Here, the small sub-Arctic city I called home lay far, far to the south. The 60th parallel — itself sometimes seeming impossibly remote from modern urban existence — was a world away.

—excerpted from Notes from north of the 68th parallel

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