On an idea of north

I bought Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights (aka, The Golden Compass) at the Village Voice bookshop in Paris, in 1999.

The book had been out for a few years at the time, but as it was young adult fiction and I was in my late twenties, I had overlooked it until that point. I was staying with family at an apartment near Saint Sulpice, and the Village Voice was more or less around the corner. The shop no longer exists, but for a few years while visiting that neighborhood in the 6th arrondissement, it felt like a home away from home. I often got into conversations with a British guy who worked there, and he assured me that the first volume of His Dark Materials would be up my alley. The instant my eye scanned the first page at a nearby café, I was riveted—not so much by the fleshing out of the Many Worlds hypothesis, nor the alternate reality centered around a different Oxford University, but the book’s idea of The North. It presented the era of polar exploration as current and vivid and of immense yet secret import, and I bought into that aspect of Lyra Belacqua’s world as wholly as possible. I remember a tingle running up my arms, communicated from the page to my fingertips to the rest of me, at it became clear that Lyra was going to follow her uncle north, to save her friend. The icebound bit could not come fast enough.

The feeling was so intense that I wondered later where it could possibly have come from. Did it date from a childhood interest in the Snow Queen or some other fairytale? The frozen introduction to Narnia? The world of snow and wolves conjured up by Joan Aiken? All the nineteenth century Russian novels I read as a teenager, in which characters draped in furs were always being carried around in troikas?

These days I live relatively far north, in Vermont, about forty minutes away from the Canadian border, but I am not the most outdoorsy winter-loving person. One of my children was an avid ice skater for a while, but that was about the extent of our participation in the real Vermont winter. I generally prefer getting hot cocoa at the Von Trapp family lodge while looking out the window at the snow-capped mountains to being out on the surrounding Nordic trails. Still, there was something satisfying about watching one early winter as my car got buried under a foot and a half of snow. Enough that I will feel bereft if climate change robs us of the snowfalls I have known—as it is already starting to.

The car:

Our front stairs in the same storm:

I was born in New York City, at 40.7° latitude. I now live at 44.5° or so. My father was born in Northern Ireland, at 54°, thought of course because of the Gulf Stream where he grew up was more temperate than Vermont. He was, however, very affected by the light at that latitude and often told me how spooky he found it in the winter when the sky was already darkening as he walked home from school. I would think of this when students of mine from Somalia or Kenya would stand staring at the sunset on the day after the clocks fell back, as though mourning the more reliable sun they once knew.

I don’t know how my father being from “the North,” as we always called it, connects to this other polar or arctic sense of the word. I may associate what Seamus Heaney called the “northern reticence”—the wariness people have before determining which religious community a new acquaintance belongs to—with the bleakness of that light, which is similar to although not quite as bleak as it in Scandinavian countries. My cousins and I used to talk about how our relatives from Northern Ireland were more like characters out of a Bergman film than they were like the merry stereotype of southern Irish people.

My great-grandfather, who had the extremely original name of Paddy Reilly, was a fisherman. His fishing career lasted from the turn of the twentieth century into the 1930s. He mostly caught herring and mackerel. He worked out of the port at Kilkeel on the Irish Sea, and used to fish off the Isle of Man and around the top of Scotland, into the North Sea. When he was off in the North Sea, he would go away for weeks or months at a time. So he spent a fair amount of his life at about 60° latitude, which I would say is properly north.

These days, County Down hosts a Viking festival every year, complete with longboat display. The Vikings used to come around the top of Scotland from the other direction and raid along coastal areas in the Irish Sea. Apparently the names for both Strangford Lough, in North Down, and Carlingford Lough in the south, derive from Norse words for the geographic features—the inlets being described as fjords or fords. A Norwegian king, Magnus III, also known as Magnus Barelegs, who raided the Scottish islands and coast as well as up and down the Irish Sea, got ambushed in 1103 by the Ulaid (i.e., soldiers loyal to the northern Irish king) and was buried in Downpatrick, about twenty-five miles from where my dad was born.

I used to travel to Northern Ireland in the summers, many of my dad’s brothers and sisters making it back to the farm, where my cousins and I could play in the fields. My dad and I took a memorable trip to Scotland in the summer of 1982, when we went as far north as Inverness—my father indulging my interest in the Loch Ness monster.

I went to Helsinki on a school trip in March of 1986, which is still the furthest north I’ve ever been, at 60.19°. We visited Saint Petersburg on the same trip (Leningrad, at the time). That city fit my romantic notions of the north more than other places. I loved the way the colorful buildings stood out against the snow.

I could definitely picture the fur-laden characters in troikas!

Probably the most magical northern trip I ever took was a jaunt to Québec City with the French club at my college. In my imagination, the drive was six hours due north. I would date that trip to November or December of 1988, when I was at the height of my crush on the French T.A., whose name was Laura (emphasis on the second syllable). She was beautiful and bewilderingly fond of me and had endearingly eccentric notions, such as the idea that one should always sleep an odd number of hours. We went on the trip in a full car with at least three other members of the club, but I have no recollection of who any of them were. I only had eyes for Laura.

Laura and I shared a room, and ate fabulous wintry things like raclette, and wandered around the snow-covered city together, sometimes arm in arm. In Québec, I encountered a kind of light that I had never seen before, where the blue of the sky darkened toward the end of the day to be reflected by the snow, creating an enveloping blue world. Sometimes this twilight snow effect made the world glow almost green. I would stand in the middle of a snow-covered square breathing in the cold air and trying to capture the effect of the light in my memory.

I remember Laura and I went to an exhibit at the Musée de la civilization called “Il faut souffrir pour être belle” about how women’s fashions have involved pain and suffering over the centuries. It felt glorious to attend a feminist exhibit with Laura—especially one which happened to address the specific distance between us, since she was someone much far more invested in beauty standards than I was. Walking out of the museum and into the snow, discussing all the ideas the exhibit provoked—in French, no less—was among the happiest moments of my life.

So maybe the fact that I was in Paris when I was revisiting my idea of the north had something to do with the current of excitement I felt. Maybe I pictured the ice floes in the Saint Lawrence, and remembered the intensity of those few days with my old friend, long after we had parted ways.