Conrad Boyce is the editor and publisher of the Cosmos. He has a BA in English from the University of Alberta and a diploma in journalism from Grant Macewan Community College in Edmonton. He lived and worked in the Yukon and Vancouver Island before arriving in Ontario in 1995. Beyond these pages, he is the Artistic Director of OnStage Uxbridge, and the technical manager of the Uxbridge Music Hall.
Of fresh air and flyers
A couple of weeks back, I was taking my faithful canine companion for a stroll along Bell Street, heading towards the Pond, when I felt it on my face again, smelled it in the air. The Sam Lake breeze.
Once or twice a year, sometimes in the winter, sometimes in the spring or fall, sometimes climbing a hill in the Countryside Preserve, sometimes just going for the mail around the corner from the office, I am suddenly aware of a bracing freshness in the air, an incredible purity in the atmosphere that instantly transports me 20 years back in time, and several thousand miles to the north and west.
It was early August of 1989. I had just descended from a small float plane onto the shores of a tiny speck of water in the northern Yukon, in what’s known as the Old Crow Flats, a couple of hours walk across the spongy tundra from the southern slopes of the British Mountains.
The speck of water was called Sam Lake, one of thousands of puddles in that part of the world. My companions and I loaded up our packs and headed toward the mountains. As we walked, I almost immediately became aware of the air I was breathing. You don’t think of air as beautiful, but this was. It was so pure, so refreshing, you felt you could walk forever, because every bit of energy you expended, it gave you back twice as much.
In the Arctic, of course, and Sam Lake is well north of the Circle, early August is no longer summer, it’s well into autumn, with hints of winter in the morning on the treetops and in the crunch of the permafrost not far beneath your feet. So the air had the extra bracing quality that you feel with snow.
I must have tasted that air quality sometime before in my life, maybe in the Rocky Mountain foothills as a tree planter, maybe along a West Coast beach at sundown. But here, with no sign of life, no birds, no trees, no sound, the air was dominant.
So what was I doing on the Old Crow Flats, drinking in the incredible Arctic air? Thought you’d never ask. I’ve had a few fascinating jobs in my life (and a few interesting periods of enforced temporary retirement as well), but among my favourites, while the grant money held out, was a position as Communications Coordinator with the Yukon Science Institute.
The idea was to create ways to make the Yukon public more aware of the work of Yukon scientists specifically, and the important role that science played in their lives generally. Being a government town, Whitehorse had way more than its fair share of biologists, geologists and other -ologists among its citizens, but the rest of the population didn’t really know what they did for a living. Or much care. My job was to change that.
I organized a lecture series. I wrote a weekly newspaper column called “The Sourdough Scientist”, and a similarly-themed radio show. I helped bring the national science fair to town, the first time it had ever been held in such a small and remote community as Whitehorse. And in August of 1989, I got to go in search of Sigismund Levanevsky.
Fifty-two summers earlier, all the buzz had been about a female pilot named Amelia Earhart, who had disappeared in early July of 1937 while on a flight over the Pacific Ocean. But only six weeks later, another pioneering aviator also vanished, while flying over another ocean.
Levanevsky (known as “The Russian Lindbergh”), who had accomplished things no other European flyer dared to try, took off from Moscow on August 12 with a crew of six in a four-engine bomber, headed for Fairbanks, Alaska, attempting to become the first to make a non-stop flight over the North Pole. He almost made it.
The Russian plane was last heard from over Ellesmere Island on the morning of August 13. But it never arrived in Fairbanks. For two years, Levanevsky became the 20th-century equivalent of Sir John Franklin, as dozens of expeditions were mounted to try to find him and his crew somewhere in the Arctic wilderness.
As with Franklin, legends arose that some of the crew had survived, only to perish eventually with the onset of winter. But scientific opinion became that the bomber had crashed into the Arctic Ocean, which seldom gave up its secrets.
Then, in the summer of 1988, a Canadian government plane doing mapping in the Flats had photographed something in the scrub brush on the hills near Sam Lake, something that might have been a very old, very large airplane.
Since the site was in the Territory, the Science Institute got involved in the expedition which flew in to investigate. I got to tag along to tell the story.
And a fascinating story it was, which I may tell at length another time. But bottom line, although we found the remains of a plane on that mountainside, it was no bomber, and it hadn’t crashed in 1937. It wasn’t Sigismund Levanevsky.
But I found something else that week. An Arctic miracle that returns every now and again, here on the Oak Ridges Moraine, to haunt me.
