Arctic Stream

He passed his old caribou hunting campsite — now hemmed in by oil pipelines — and drove over the concrete bridge built by the energy giant ConocoPhillips, where he used to set nets for salmon in an Arctic stream.

Blazing moments light the way: an eyeful of eagle over a Scottish road, sockeye salmon in an Arctic stream “like silk slashes in a Tudor sleeve”.

Accidents provide many examples of people miraculously saved by cold: an Austrian toddler revived after half an hour at the bottom of a frozen fishpond; a seventy-year-old man in Muskegon, Michigan, who spent forty minutes underwater and made a complete recovery; a twenty-nine-year-old woman who fell into an Arctic stream while skiing, and was pulled out after eighty minutes, limp and ashen, only for her heart to start beating again more than an hour later.

It was quite transformed in its appearance and resembled more some frozen arctic stream than the old Thames which I knew so well.

"The man you drove from Eden's grove Was I, my Lord, was I, And I shall be there when the earth and the air Are rent from sea to sky; For it is my world, my gorgeous world, The world of my dear delight, From the brightest gleam of the Arctic stream To the dusk of my own love-night."