Sociality and survival

Apropos of my last post, I’m reminded of a Canadian film, “The Snow Walker,” about a pilot lost in the Arctic in a downed plane, and how he depends on human connections to survive. Back in “civilization”, where they think he’s been lost forever, Estelle (the barmaid) says to Shep (Walter Shepard, the pilot’s boss) “When you get right down to it, all of us are just alone in this world, and that’s just the way it is.” Not so! That is a culturally bound idea she has, not at all an indigenous idea, and I bet it’s not too common in traditional agricultural cultures either.

The movie shows so clearly that this is not true: the final moment is a perfect image of humans’ non-aloneness. Charlie, the downed pilot, has walked hundreds of miles through the Arctic, with Kanaalaq, the Inuit woman who died of tuberculosis in the last few days of their journey. Without her, he never would have survived, and he tried to save her life, dragging her on a sledge the last days. After she dies, he walks the last miles alone. The final moment of the film shows him as a tiny figure approaching an Inuit camp. Most of the screen is taken up with the vast whiteness of the Arctic, what seem to us as featureless snowfields stretching forever, the sky white with blowing snow, and he, a lone and tiny figure swamped by it all, approaching other people. He stops, and they come to him, and then he walks towards them. A clump of tiny human figures in the vastness of the Arctic, coming together, greeting, touching. People. Community. Survival. Life. A small knot of humans in the vastness of that environment, their community and togetherness what enables them to live there.

We cannot live alone and expect to survive.


The Snow Walker, 2003, Walk Well/ Snow Walker Productions, Inc.
Based on the book, The Snow Walker, by Farley Mowat, Toronto: Key Porter Books, 1975; Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 2003.