"It is as though the land slowly works its way into the man…The land becomes large, alive like an animal; it humbles him in a way he cannot pronounce. It is not that the land is simply beautiful but that it is powerful." -- Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams

Slowly, one point in the glowing band increases in intensity. At first it is only noticeable if you believe that it's there, but soon, gradually, it will shine so bright that even the skeptics will be compelled to shift their gaze. Head tilted, neck craned, you focus on the glowing orb until your eyes sting and you remember to blink. At some point - wait for it - the light will begin to glide. Like liquid cream, it will pour and pool. Swirling now, the intensity takes over the sky. This is when your eyes leave your body; they fly up and up until they too are dancing through the dark. Your feet, miles below, lose feeling, not only because you've been sitting in the same position for hours, but because your eyes don't want to come back home.

Heather and I sit, perfectly still, with only a clear dome of plastic between the vast subarctic sky, alive with aurora, and our upturned faces. Everyone else has drifted off to sleep, but we remain, perched in the observation dome of the Churchill Northern Studies Centre, waiting for that next wave of calming light to pour across the Northern Manitoban sky.

"You like it here." Heather's remark is more of a statement than anything else, putting into words what I have known since I arrived in Churchill, a small town at the end of the railroad, up on the coast of the Hudson Bay, where the trees fade into tundra.

"I do. I love it here. I don't know what it is about it, though. The vast spaces, the white, the flat - flatter than anything I've seen before. The cold."

We sit in silence again, my inarticulate thoughts still echoing. A small grin grows on Heather's round face. We are a strange pair, perhaps. I am a junior in high school, a week or so into my first trip to Churchill, only just starting to feel the pull of the land. Heather is in her thirties, a full-time employee of the Studies Centre. She is a woman with an infectious laugh and a protective hug. She might absentmindedly pour sugar into her juice instead of her coffee, but she can start the ancient Suburban no problem and drives it like she owns the roads. Heather's known for a while now that she can't stay away from the North very long; something keeps pulling her back to make the 36-hour train ride up to Churchill, land of polar bears, belugas, birds, and - well, not much else. Heather grins because she can hear it in my voice, the beginnings of that inescapable drive to keep heading north, time after time. The first symptom of what Farley Mowat calls the "arctic fever."

"It changes you, eh? You'll see; you'll go home and realize that you're not quite the same. It does that, you know, this place. I can tell; you'll be back, won't you?"

I nod. Yes, I think, I'll be back. Time after time.

Heather was right: that trip did change me, but in a way that I find impossible to articulate perfectly. The most obvious difference, perhaps, is that ever since, I've been doing whatever I can to go back North. I went to Churchill initially as part of an Earthwatch program, at the suggestion of my high school advisor. That February I stood in the one-room Churchill airport, surrounded by families speaking Inuktitut and scruffy men in huge winter boots, wondering what I was getting myself into. I was back in that airport the summer after my senior year of high school, now comfortable with the characters around me, recognizing familiar faces. Last summer I was in Alaska as a student on the Juneau Icefield Research Program (JIRP). I lived on and traversed glaciers whose names still ring in my head: the Taku, the Mathes, the Demorest, and the Llewellyn. This summer I'll be back in Alaska, heading farther north to the true arctic, where the sun will never set. I am counting the days.

I asked fellow JIRP participants over email what drew them to the icefield and what they liked about that landscape. Part of their responses were concrete - the glaciers, the mountains, the aurora, the colors. These physical qualities are crucial to the character of the north. Allen, a senior at Harvard majoring in Earth and Planetary Sciences, writes about the colors in the North. Even through the colors are few (white, blue, gray, maybe some green), each color comes in so many hues. The blue of the sky can change from a deep almost-indigo to a pale baby blue that blends into the blue of the glacier. The blue at the bottom of moulins, holes where streams of water suddenly plunge into the depths of the glacier, is bright, almost neon. Although Allen describes his experience in Alaska, the lack of obvious color variation is evident in Churchill as well. During the winter, white swallows the land, animals included. If you look more carefully, however, you'll see the orange lichen, which shines out like fireworks on the dull gray rock. Sunsets in the North defy the rule of few colors. I stood on the Taku one night with Kevin, a sophomore at Montana State University who's been to the icefield three times, looking up at a sky that contained more colors than I can name. Kevin writes, the "explosion of contrast between white earth and ferocious sky drew the air from my lungs and left me feeling entirely insignificant. Tufts of cotton painted purple, with reds, yellows, and oranges, raced from one edge of my vision to the other." The physical beauty of the North, its power to take our breath away, is definitely part of the pull of the land.

But there is something more that draws us back, something beyond the concrete. This is apparent in the words that other JIRP participants use to describe the icefield. It is "vast," "wild," "inspiring and majestic," "dynamic," "pure," and "raw." It is one of the only places left on the face of this earth where we can look for "miles without evidence of human occupation." Confronted with the absence of our own species, we are connected to our "primitive past;" we feel what Farley Mowat describes as a "restless longing to find affinity with primordial things." The land around us is "untamed," "bleak, borderless," "nature's domain," a place where "raw elements," rather than humans, reign. Surrounded by such large volumes of snow and ice, such large expanses of sky, such a feeling of endless wilderness, we lose a sense of time; we lose control. We are rendered "small and insignificant." These are the elements of the North that change us.

Gernot Dick is, to me, a man who embodies the power of the North. Gernot is in his sixties, tall and lean with a weathered look, as though nothing could faze him. He speaks, eloquently, in a thick Austrian accent. A permanent resident of Atlin, he lives on the outskirts of the town of 400, on the edge of the largest lake in British Columbia. The town has one bar, one general store, and a bank that seconds as the "town office." A retired art professor from Toronto, Gernot first came to Atlin in the 1970s and was inspired to found an artists' retreat, where, according to his website, people can go to "discover resources inside them they have never known exist." Just one view out the window of the Altin Centre makes it clear why any artist would be drawn here - Atlin Lake stretches out below, glaciered mountains reaching up on all sides.

Gernot's house sits next to the art centre, its walls a testament to Gernot's own profession and the work of his students. The pieces that predominate are simple photographs of rock cliffs. Each rock face has a length of climbing rope strung around it in geometric patterns that seem to mimic the character of the rock. Gernot creates these works by climbing, with no harness, holding the rope in one hand. Carefully, he hooks the rope over a small knob in the rock, and then scrambles over to the next corner. Often, as he tugs the rope taut, it will fall to the ground, undoing a day's work and forcing him to retrace his movements. Undeterred, he picks up the rope and starts again. It will take him many tries to get the image perfect. For days, he lives on the rock face, eating little food and sleeping in the open.

"I let the rock tell me what to do," Gernot says. "I have to keep the integrity of the rock face intact. The rope is meant to show what the rock is already telling me; the angles mirror those of the rock.

"It's all about the perspective of the camera," he continues, "I study the rock face from the angle of the camera before I even start climbing. Ultimately, this perspective is all that matters. When I am up close on the rock face, things look completely different. A point where the rope intersects in the picture may not be an intersection at all when you're climbing the rock. As I work, I must keep the large image in mind, or the rope will not fall into place."

It may be hard to understand what Gernot finds rewarding about this work. And yet, listening to him talk, it all makes perfect sense. There is such a sense of contentment and peace that Gernot carries with him, that no one can doubt for a moment that his life is rewarding.

Gernot is always eager to tell stories, and there is much in his house to warrant explanation, like the large rock that sits in the middle of the living room. It is a perfect gray sphere the size of a small beach-ball but infinitely heavier. Gernot found the rock near the end of the Llewellyn Glacier, which flows off the north edge of the Juneau Icefield. The rock is so large that no one human can lift it, and so to move it North towards his home, Gernot rolled the sphere like a wheel. Each year, on his annual hike to the Llewellyn Glacier and back, he would roll the rock a little bit farther. For seven years he did this, returning to the place where he left the rock previously and moving it as far as he could, roll by roll. Eventually the rock arrived at the edge of Atlin Lake, where it had to be transported by boat. Gernot, helped by some of his art students, heaved the rock into a canoe and carefully paddled the weighted boat back across the lake. For Gernot, the rock is not just a decoration for his living room. It does not only represent the seven years that it took him to bring the rock home. It is, for him, a reminder of the power of the glacier that shaped it and brought it, relatively speaking, to his door. As Gernot has said, "Nothing gives us so much reference into history as the glaciers…there is no bigger force in the way they have changed the landscape." They enable us to "look back thousands of years." What is seven years of rolling when the rock itself was formed millions of years ago, somehow brought to the earth's surface, and then carried by ice and water for miles upon miles?

When I heard Gernot tell the story of the great sphere, I had just come off the Juneau Icefield and knew how glaciers could change our perspective on time. Just three weeks earlier, I was at Camp-9. The camp is just one building, tall and narrow, that sits on a small ledge of rocks at the top of a hill. Facing northwest, you look out across the Mathes Glacier, one of the tributaries of the mighty Taku to the south. Today, though, we haven't seen much of the Mathes; the clouds block it from view. Up on our perch, we've been in and out of the clouds all day. Just as I take my jacket off, ready to bask in the hot August sun, I am forced to put it on again as the misting clouds circle back, enveloping us in white.

After dinner, full of stovetop stuffing and canned chicken, I take a seat on the gray rock and look across to the peaks on the other side of the Mathes, where the sun is beginning to turn orange. Trevor and Rich scrub the pots behind me. Jason is fiddling with an ancient alarm clock that he found somewhere in the building amidst the rusted metal cups and the outdoor magazines from the 1970s. Every once and awhile he succeeds in making it sound, sending a piercing buzz through the silence and disrupting my thoughts. I don't know where Kevin, Mali, and Ali are; for now I'm alone. The clouds are white below me, indistinguishable from the ice. It looks, if I block out the sounds behind me, like I have just traveled back thousands of years, to when the ice completely filled the valley. I have never before been able to visualize what these valleys really looked like when they were brimming with ice, but suddenly now I'm there, right at the time of the glacial maximum.

Breathlessly, I watch the clouds slowly sink; I see thousands of years progress in front of me as the ice shrinks and the glaciers melt. The Earth continues warming until the clouds disappear into the ice and I'm back in the present. In my mind, I continue the glacial retreat, melting and melting the ice until the valleys are bare ground and the sea snakes up a new fjord. This is what Barry Lopez was talking about when he said that "you can sit for a long time with the history of man like a stone in your hand." Not just the history of man, but the history of the earth.

Gernot says that one of his mentors is the tree: "The tree impresses me because of endurance. Especially nowadays, we hardly have minutes where an individual consciously knows what the core is of one's being. And the tree stands there for two, three, four hundred years and every given second he wants to be the tree. Imagine that a jack pine, a pine tree, for one season wants to be a willow. That's how we live; we don't accept what we are. We always want to be different."

In describing the natives of Admiralty Inlet (Baffin Island), Barry Lopez says, "These Tununiarusirmiut men…knew beyond a shadow of a doubt, beyond any hesitation, what made them happy, what gave them a sense of satisfaction." Not only were they content being themselves, but they also had an unshakable sense of their identity, of what it meant to be themselves. Lopez uses this same language in describing muskoxen: "They were so intensely good at being precisely what they were. The longer you watched, the more intricately they seemed a part of where they were living, of what they were doing."

More than anyone else I've met, Gernot lives like the jack pine, like the Tununiarusirmiut and the muskoxen. This comes, I believe, from living in the North. Each day he is confronted with the vast glaciers and open skies, with rounded rocks reminding him of time before man. He lives with the raw elements that define the North, forced to follow their patterns rather than create his own. Like all of the native circumpolar people, he stands in awe of the power around him, of the force of crushing glacier ice. Gernot is humble, yes, but he retains a sense of purpose; he knows exactly how he fits into the land around him.

As a visitor to the North, I have caught glimpses of this simplicity. I have felt, fleetingly, this purity of mind. Other visitors have as well. Kevin's description of the sunset over the Taku doesn't end with the colors; he goes on to say how he felt: "Life in that moment, in that hour was so simple; there was the snow below us, the sky above us, and then just us standing together. Strangely, in that single moment of simplicity, I felt more alive than I may ever feel again."

Katy, an eighth-grade teacher who spent last summer traveling in the Yukon, says that up North, her mind quiets down.

"My mind, normally, is really loud; there's lots going on," she says, gesturing emphatically with her hands. "Last summer, it was the quietest it's ever been. It wasn't completely gone, but it was much quieter."

The simplicity, for Katy, wasn't permanent. Immediately when she returned south, the noise started again, just as loud. Kevin, in remembering the sunset, knows that he can never regain that one moment of pure simplicity. For those of us who, unlike Gernot, are not permanent residents of the North, this is the problem. We may, while wandering the tundra or skiing across a glacier, be urged by the land, as Lopez says, to "come around to an understanding of ourselves." We may find the peace of mind and purpose of being that Gernot finds in the jack pine. And yet, when we leave the North behind, when we reenter the chaotic world of partitioned and segmented time, it's almost impossible to retain what we have learned. Returning to Brown after a summer on the icefield, I was overwhelmed by the fast pace. I didn't want to deal with buying textbooks, shopping for classes, scheduling meetings. My mind was still in the North, contemplating the sky, imagining the movement of ice under the surface of the glacier. It is, of course, absurd to think that I could go through a semester of college with my mind elsewhere, and so soon, I, too, was running about the campus with too much to do.

Perhaps this, then, is why we must continue to return to the North, like the thousands of migratory birds that nest and rear their young in Churchill every year. We are trying to regain what we know is possible, what we caught sight of up North but lost when we came home. Each time we travel to the North we find more of that simplicity and learn more about ourselves. And so, over time, trip after trip, the pull grows stronger. Some, like Gernot, will give in to this pull and move permanently. Most of us, however, are trapped in a migratory cycle. Like Gernot as he strings his rope along the rock face, we must move between two perspectives, forced to return to the camera's view when the up-close details cease to make sense. As I said, I'm counting the days.