In a normal year, November is the month when frozen water reconnects friends and families on Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic. In the Inuktitut language, the word for November—Tusaqtuut—means “time to hear the news.” In the hamlet of Pond Inlet, each day the sun appears a bit heavier until it barely heaves itself above the horizon, and then it doesn’t appear at all. Through long hours of twilight and then night, the ice stretches, thickens, and hardens, sealing the ocean beneath. A glacial highway emerges, linking a handful of Arctic communities otherwise kept apart by the harsh terrain of mountains and fjords with no roads in between. Virtually every aspect of life—food, clothing, art, and language—exists because of the ice. But 2021 has been too wet […]