I was sitting in the restaurant I had been having dinner in for all the days I was in Churchill ..that cold and strange town at the Arctic's edge..listening to the only two CD's I had..and reading the only magazine I had brought with me..(there is a lot of 'the only' to be said of this place)..the only store, the only school..the only road..
So, this only magazine happened to have an excerpt of a memoir called Man in The Moon, by Bill Capossere...and here is a little something from it:

"It is difficult to see the stars where we live"..."we are surrounded by convenience;"..."but we cannot see the stars"..."As the bright nighted cities expand daily"..."the stars, pressed by the light of a million artificial suns , recede more and more into the background, their appearance more remembered than experienced, more sung about than seen"..."and there is something in me that sighs at such an empty sky".

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I read that piece a few times over dinner, it became a little prayer. A thank you to my experience, because I had seen a sky full of stars every night in this place. Stars so large and so crowded it was like someone had thrown hundreds of diamonds across the dark blue night.

His city, filled with convenience was something in my memory. It was something I didn't even miss. I had forgotten about baqalas, supermarkets, every single kind of cuisine in restaurants scattered all over town...I had forgotten the weekly shipments from Amazon that keep me alive in Kuwait, or the daily strolls through bookstores and cafes and cinemas in cities I have visited..

My life had become one filled with the cold, with good food I got in two places, walks, work and wonder..those huge stars in that clean sky.

There are these beautiful final frontiers where the world is still as it was before we began to ignore it, before we began to hide from it in big houses with high walls..before we began to pave it over...and that world is so very beautiful it makes you forget that you thought you couldn't survive without the latest season of 24, or without your car or your ipod...I had nothing but my few clothes and a warm bed to rest in at the end of the day and I couldn't have been happier..

A couple of more photos from the Arctic's edge. The camera had to be taken out very quickly and then stuffed back into my jacket so that it wouldn't freeze most of the time.

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The Tundra..it reminded me a lot of the Kuwaiti desert..except that it was white and freezing.

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This is what you look like going out..