Riddle of America, The - Waldorf Research Institute

“poured like seas” all the way to the Pacific coast. 3 Likewise, no river wasgiven status of a frontier to be crossed. The Mackenzie, the second-longestriver on the continent, empties unobtrusively into the Arctic Ocean. Havingborne something of Canada’s history upon its waters, it nonetheless givesevidence that Canada’s geography to a great extent stands apart from itshistory and even overshadows it:The Arctic shorereceives the vast flowa maze of ponds and dikesIn land so bleak and barea single plume of smokeis a scroll of history. 4From their earliest days, Canadians have experienced themselvesas a people few in number in an immense land. From this experience, thequestion has arisen, in varied forms: how do we enter into and live humanlywith this space? How do we form links with one another across it? How dowe prevent ourselves from being overwhelmed by it? Canadians had littlesense of having a “manifest destiny” to cross the continent, frontier by frontier,and subdue it. It was a matter of finding passages, often watery ones,into the continent and through it, and having the will to do that. 5It is significant that many of Canada’s artists have taken up thequestion of how one meets and comes to terms with an immense and oftendaunting landscape. Poet Al Purdy imagines the thoughts of two Gaels setashore along the north Atlantic Coast by the Viking explorer Karlsefni (ca.1000):Brother, the wind of this place is cold,and hills under our feet tremble,the forests are making magic against us–I think the land knows we are here,I think the land knows we are strangers. 6In his long poem, “Towards the Last Spike,” E. J. Pratt pictures theCanadian Shield as a great serpent whose tail “swished / Atlantic tides,whose body coiled itself / Around the Hudson Bay, then curled up north.”Asleep in her pre-Cambrian folds, the serpent is awakened, and annoyed,by the railroad builders busily driving spikes into her backside:57