(HOST) It’s Midsummer, and commentator Willem Lange warns that if you travel this time of year in the far north, you’re likely to lose some sleep.
(LANGE)The Canadian town of Chibougamau sits by itself at fifty degrees north, 130 miles from Lac St.-Jean. Dawn doesn’t break there in midsummer. It gradually infuses the all-night twilight. Late in the evening the sun slides sideways across the sky into the tops of the spruces, like a great plane landing on an unseen field beyond the trees.
Professor Shewmaker and I one night got the last room at the Chibougamau Hotel. Exhausted by our fourteen-hour drive, we sank gratefully into our beds.
And discovered the phenomenon of “white nights.” The saloons closed about two; we heard motors starting and tires squealing. It was quiet. Then we heard a buzzing, like a swarm of bees approaching. Seconds later the street outside was filled with young Cree men and women on dirt bikes. They lined up at the stoplight; and when it clicked green, were off up the street in a screaming pack, headed for some destination at the other end of town.
In less than five minutes they came back, shifting down and backfiring. It went on all night. At five in the morning the street was quiet again. The kids had melted back into the bush, and the miners and loggers were in the restaurants.
White nights are a social and biological event that increases with latitude. We feel it somewhat here. And Chibougamau can’t hold a candle to St. Petersburg, which is almost sixty degrees north. Beliye Nochi they’re called there, and after a long, dark winter, they’re a celebration. Crowds swarm along the canals and walk through the vast gardens founded by Peter the Great.
Last summer our canoeing party reached the Inuit village of Kangiqsualujjuaq on Ungava Bay. The white nights of midsummer were past. The sky darkened at midnight, but the locals were still at it. Once again I had the corner room in the hotel, a doublewide with very few windows. Four-wheelers roared past, not six feet from my head, almost all night long.
In the hamlet of Kugluktuk north of the Arctic Circle at the mouth of the Coppermine River, you can play midnight golf on the nine-hole course on an offshore island. The streets are alive with three- and four-wheelers, kids on fat-tired bikes jumping off gravel piles, and wandering huskies.
A group I was with, was in the village of on the Lofoten Islands, off the west coast of Norway, on Midsummer Night. We’d heard tales of wild celebrations in the Scandinavian North, so we hiked to a rocky point where we could see a group of people doing something. We were ready for pagan revelry. What we got were a bunch of families having picnics and burning their trash – old mattresses, fish boxes, derelict furniture. Not quite the romance we had in mind. That came later: The courting seagulls on the fish houses screamed all night. Most of our group had eye patches for sleeping in the twilight. They didn’t know they’d need ear plugs, too.
This is Willem Lange in East Montpelier, and I gotta get back to work.