Day: 159

Peaceful Day in Pond Inlet

Temperature: 50F

Location: Pond Inlet, Nunavut

Latitude: 72deg 42’ 01’’ N

Longitude: 77deg 58’ 54” W

Distance Traveled: 0 Miles – Pond Inlet

Again, another really clear day, warm day. To picture the scene here, it is 24 hour light. In other words, at midnight, the sun is way up high, there is no discoloration in the sky whatsoever. So there is no variation in light. Pond Inlet is kind of on a hillside, facing north. Across the way is Bylot Island, a glaciated island, which looks a little like the Antarctic peninsula. Very alpine glaciation, with glaciers flowing down right to the ocean. These glaciers, by the way, are receding very quickly because of global warming.

The scene here at midnight, with the bright sky, looking out towards these fjords, is beautiful. The streets are just flooded with kids. Young children here are given a tremendous amount of freedom, unlike what you would see in the United States. They are allowed to stay up virtually as long as they want. In the summer they usually go to be around 2 or 3 a.m., because they don’t get up until around 11 in the morning. A lot of them skip school, or at least the first half of school.

So the streets are just filled with kids, biking, little gangs of boys and girls, playing, running around chasing each other. The children are extremely social, very loved and very well taken care of. The babies are always taken care of by many people, and passed around and kissed and loved.

A couple of things you notice on the streets: These kids are used to 40-50 below Fahrenheit, and they’ve had snow for the last nine months. Now everything is thawing out, and one thing that is now available to little children is dirt and sand. There is a big run on the local store here for buckets and little shovels. You see a lot of kids in the streets building sand castles, filling up Coke bottles with sand, filling up their boots with sand. So sand is one of the new things in town now, a lot of barefoot kids running around. And also, little streams and creeks run right through town, and so now the kids have the chance to play in water, in puddles. The boys put together little model boats, and are damming up little streams and just having a lot of fun here.

It is Sunday today, and up until around 1 p.m. the town was totally quiet. Everyone was sleeping in, as Sunday is their day of rest. They got to church fairly late, around 11 a.m. A lot of people go to church. So it is very peaceful here. And it is June 6, the celebration of D-Day, and I think of my father, who was in World War II.