Arctic Adventure
I’m in Canada right now. That’s why I haven’t been updating so much. Our wifi connection in this igloo is pretty tenuous. It’s beamed in from a retrofitted Soviet spy satellite.
It was a fairly pleasant journey, though the final four hundred miles by dogsled were a bit arduous. We lashed our animals cruelly, though necessarily, over the frigid peaks where the iron bones of the earth protrude darkly from their icy blankets of death. We passed the frozen skeletons of less fortunate travelers, the foolish yet brave trailblazers whose deaths made our own passage across that forsaken hellscape possible. The wind howled and tore at us as if it would rip the skin from our bones. Then a short bus ride, and we were in Vancouver.
Vancouver is a pleasant city of about two million, situated on the Frozen Hellgulf, where icebergs crowd the black barely-liquid water. Every day is a struggle against the encroaching ice, a Sisyphean war fought by flameships, battleprows, and, rudimentary yet effective and above all necessary, mere men and women armed with pickaxes. The price of failure is apparent in the frozen towers of old Vancouver, trapped in the invincible continent-wide Mother Glacier; the dead poised there still, caught in endless surprise at the advance of this life-hating behemoth.
Yesterday we swam in Deep Cove, where the pine-covered mountains roll down to the blue sea. The water was bracing, remaining liquid somehow at a few degrees above absolute zero, the temperature of a black hole. I swam out to an iceberg and climbed the pellucid peaks of that majestic mountain, and there confronted and slew the wendigo of Canadian lore, cutting its throat with the only weapon capable of piercing its wooly white hide: its own claw. Too tired to swim back to shore, I fashioned a harness of moose leather and tamed a walrus for my mount.
Now, the aurora borealis dance in ethereal ballet above the snow-heaped lawn, a stunning yet inadequate compensation for the perpetual night with which Canadians are punished for their hubris, their fatal pride in settling where humans were not meant to tread. Soon we will eat a sumptuous and welcome dinner of the remains of the crew of the HMS Terror, whose yeti-mauled corpses the Mother Glacier preserved in perpetuity. Randi fumbles with her last match, her numbed fingers frozen into hooks; she considers removing her sealskin mittens to grasp the match better, but at what cost, payable in the cold currency of frostbite?