Students on Ice: How to Pack

These days, leading up to our expedition, are a lesson in how to pack. How to pack for a journey into the unknown. For many of us that means an unknown landscape, for all of us it means an unknown space inside ourselves and with each other. A space we will make by going there. Here in Ottawa, we’re learning how to go to this place called the Arctic together.
We are right now a swirl of faces and name badges. We are from everywhere – Memphis, Iqaluit, Pond Inlet, Portugal Cove, Nelson, Oakville, Shanghai. Each of us has had to sit in a room and think about what to bring with us, and what to leave at home. I asked a group of students today, what did you bring and why? Warm clothes – because, well, it will be cold. My iPod – it has photos of my family. Ambition – because I’ll need to work hard. What did we leave? My colleague shared that he could not bring pictures of his kids along, it’s too hard to look at them. Photos of my kids are glued on the inside of my journal. Some relish the idea of unplugging, of leaving their gadgets behind. Some, I can see, are quietly terrified of it.

When Packing for the Arctic, bring your seal-skin mitts, your rubber boots, and your sense of adventure. © Jessie Sitnick/ WWF-Canada

Today we had an amazing lecture by David Gray on the Canadian Arctic Expeditions that took place between 1913 and 1918. We find, in the landscape today, the evidence of what was brought. A broken teacup, a silver spoon, a pair of snow goggles carved from ivory. And those who did not plan well, those who did not adapt – those expeditions failed. Because it is about what you bring and what you leave, but perhaps it is also – or even more – about what you find. And what you do with what you find. “I want to take what is essential and find what is essential in the process” I wrote in my journal last night. Today, our director of education said something similar. He quoted Tennyson: I am a part of all that I have met, yet all experience is an arch where thro gleams that untravelled world whose margin fades for ever and forever when I move.
The space we will be creating together on this journey is a temporary space, a temporary space layered over an ancient and changing one. We will need to find what is essential there and hold on to it. And we need to leave enough room in our bags to bring that home.
To follow the 2013 Arctic Expedition, visit the Students on Ice site.