Ice Safety Chart: Fragments by Aldona Dziedziejko
The Polish Canadian writer has won the 2024 CBC Nonfiction Prize
Aldona Dziedziejko has won the 2024 CBC Nonfiction Prize for Ice Safety Chart: Fragments.
She will receive $6,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts, attend a two-week writing residency at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity and her work has been published on CBC Books.
If you're interested in the CBC Literary Prizes, the 2025 CBC Short Story Prize is open for submissions until Nov 1. The 2025 CBC Nonfiction Prize will open in January 2025 and the CBC Poetry Prize will open in April 2025.
This year's CBC Nonfiction Prize jury is composed of Michelle Good, Dan Werb and Christina Sharpe. The jury selects the shortlist and the eventual winner from the longlist, which is chosen by a committee of writers and editors from across the country. Works are judged anonymously on the basis of the participant's use of language, originality of subject and writing style.
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About Aldona Dziedziejko
Aldona Dziedziejko recently left her post as a guest and teacher in a Northern Canadian hamlet in the Tlicho region of the Dene. She has lived on Canada's West Coast, and before that, on the northern coast of Poland. She is now based in Clearwater Country, Alta., and delights in spotting wild horses and being a mom. Her poetry and creative nonfiction have appeared in CV2, subTerrain, The Capilano Review, Fiction Southeast, PRISM international and the Globe and Mail. She recently won the Room magazine's Short Forms Contest and the Arc Poetry magazine's Award of Awesomeness.
Dziedziejko told CBC Books about the inspiration behind Ice Safety Chart: Fragments: "I decided to leave the metropolis behind and live in a remote fishing village so that I could dream, write and escape. Transformations are hard-won and I didn't anticipate ancient wounds to move through me before I could experience life anew with the help of the unknowable, amazing and harsh arctic landscape. What shows up when you dig deep? Does the landscape speak? What secrets does it hold? Our topography, our environment connects us: and so do our ancestral experiences — for better or for worse. This is an ode to a place like no other on earth: where the ice and snow are blank pages awaiting our thoughts and where dogs howl songs into the wind.
Our topography, our environment connects us: and so do our ancestral experiences — for better or for worse.- Aldona Dziedziejko
"My family and I lived under the shadow of the Iron Curtain and the Canadian north represents both the epitome of freedom as well as shades of familiar socio-economic issues.
"I invite readers to visit inside my mind for a time, but also to take in this essential part of our country where people live so differently. Also, eco-anxiety drives my need to consider permafrost, the changing Indigenous communities and what it means to be a woman, a guest and a settler at this point in time."
You can read Ice Safety Chart: Fragments below.
WARNING: This piece contains a mention of suicide and self-harm.
Ice Quality Code 0 = Ice-free.
Atsumi, a woman close to my age, flew from Japan to Yellowknife and waded into the Arctic forest's deep snow drifts to die. She simply opened herself up to the elements: discarded her ear-flap hat, bulky ski overalls, and her long, pink, down jacket. I imagine auroras smudging the sky purple and blue reflected in her glassy eyes. Did Atsumi intend for her death to be an end, or a beginning?
From within the bird body of a small Cessna plane I watch the Arctic landscape beneath me splay out flat. The terrain looks wrinkled. Great Slave and Marten lakes are holding hands on the map, sky-blue dancing in the ripples of lake water that is graying over with light frost. Had it looked this way to Atsumi?
Perhaps, in those last moments, as her life drained into the permafrost, Atsumi glimpsed the coming spring ahead. She saw beyond snow, beyond winter, beyond death. Wilderness sojourns are a form of temporary suicide. We surrender to the agency of the elements. The point is the rebirth; the thawing that happens afterwards, and the promise of germination.
I wanted to see the ice grow deep on the tundra, melt, then begin again. I craved the whiteout of snow's soft cover.
Ice Quality Code 1 = New Ice. Brittle, Fragile, Can't Bear Human Weight.
After I separated from my husband and found a new apartment, I came across a withered, potted Philodendron on my street in front of a florist shop. Who's to say I could revive its tough stalk and heart shaped leaves, even though professionals had given up on it? I put it in the window and watered it into growing a few weak seedling shoots. News headlines told me how a seed found dozing in the Arctic ice for over 30,000 years had its soul split away from its body, revived in the rotor of a centrifuge, then it grew a stem topped with white petals. The delicate-as-snow Campion flower is the oldest living fossil. It belongs to the genus Silene, meaning, "I shall not forget you."
Geologists use an international chart of codes to identify the maturity and thickness of ice. The higher numbers designate the perennially frozen deep layer cradling its artifacts in a glacial grip. These depths of frozen ground are called permafrost. Permafrost has had the ability to either preserve or give up its stories, its secrets, since time immemorial.
I was busy failing at finishing my master's thesis in art history, a field without job prospects; I was in love with a tall man who had a wife and two kids. I was groveling for extensions.
Dear Professors, due to extenuating circumstances…
All it takes to form new ice is a few frigid nights.
Ice Quality Code 2 = Nilas, The Thin Glistening Sheets Less Than 10cm Thick.
Some time after I finally wrote that thesis, I went back to school, and graduated with an education degree. While I browsed remote teaching jobs online, hoping my education degree could be put to some use, the screen unfurled neat lines of offbeat location names. WhaTì caught my eye; the two dainty syllables bobbed and vaulted out of my lips. The sound evoked the last frontier caught in a snow globe: the erasure of anything familiar and the beginning of a different script. It was a tiny fishing village on Marten Lake 2500 kilometres from home. As far away from here as possible.
Below the Arctic circle and to the east is the Treaty 11 land of the Dene people: the Northwest Territories Denendeh belonging to the Tlicho Nation, among others. Nilas ice isn't often seen here, growing and shifting into undulating patterns that define the look of the Northern winter landscape. The ground here will not yield to excavations of more than a few feet, so houses sit on metal stilts, and silver trucks crawl the dirt roads to deliver water house-to-house into the bellies of giant water tanks.
Ice Quality Code 3 = Young Ice (10-30 cm), Heavy Load Bearing.
"WELCOME TO THE NORTH!" A man's voice booms as he leans across the table and shoots out his hand to shake mine. It is right at the top of midnight, the year finally clambering up over the rise to reach 2020. At this New Year's dance in WhaTí young men close their eyes and sing as the heat of bodies rises in the space of the community centre. The typically single-file snaking line of dancers expands into ripples of three, four human rings. Sneakers grind into the floor. Women lift their arms and tap their Mukluks, blue and yellow yarn laces fluttering. I think of how often and how easily now I recognize the gait of parka-swathed locals as they walk by the icy square of my cabin's window. They may be on their way to, or from, an excursion involving a family of snowmobiles, one-tonne pick up, or an ice fishing shack, the ice thick enough to hold them.
I'm hardly "new" here in this hamlet, but the man's words placed something bright and warm into my chest. The hardness melted.
Ice Quality Code 4 = Grey Ice (10-15 cm).
Did this land begin in the form of dream-songs repeated over the Denendeh, the snow's silence a perfect conduit for the short muscular syllables of the Tlicho language? Was it when Muskrat sculpted the earth for the Dene with tiny lumps of dirt scraped from the bottom of the sea? Or was the beginning a moment when Pangea cracked open and released the Arctic, sending it away to exist on its own amongst the kinder continents? Pangea: Greek for "whole motherland." A mother's sacrifice. I was a mother, once, briefly. When I remember that, I breathe the piercing cold air and turn to a different metaphor. Grey ice can be tricky. It might be thinner than young ice in places, but you don't always know until you step on it and it is too late.
As a young girl, I used to search the ground for soft spots: I liked breaking through the gauzy ice of spring soil, listening to it pop as it gave up its paunchy crocus bulbs. The bulbs were freshly planted, covered in tender topsoil.
Ice Quality Code 5 = Grey-White Ice (15-30 cm).
A dark shape bends towards me, curt and bowed over a snowmobile's insectile handlebars. Disapproval shifts his woolen facemask upwards as he stops to allow me to pass by on a narrow tundra trail. A thin tubing boat secured with an orange dock line drags behind his bundled silhouette. The boat contains garbage bags full of lake snow for tea and a large spruce tree felled for its medicinal boughs. I point at my dog and give a thumbs-up: Don't worry, I'll be fine. The man nods, pulls down his liner, and rolls his vehicle slowly back over the snowy shoulder filling the air with a metal hum. My balaclava fools me into feeling I am incognito , but I know I am conspicuous in this landscape of practical purposes: my bright green winter jacket and the brash self-indulgence of my puzzling desire to walk alone in the bush. As the man disappears into the distance, I trudge on.
Ice Quality Code 6 = First-year Ice (30-200 cm).
When I tell the elder at our school that I walk alone in the woods every day nearing sunset, the time of the wolf, she giggles and calls me "bush girl."
At the end of my Arctic forest trails, a frozen marsh empties into the mouth of a small lake. It leads to the freshwater bodies of Marten Lake and Great Slave Lake. I like to walk out to the crossroads where frozen marsh meets the thick ice of the lake as the cold sky brushes smoky blues and violets over the coverlet of ice and snow. The wear of elements shapes the snow and ice into sharp ridges that have always reminded me of the backs of Jurassic creatures jutting out of the ground. When I visualize my thoughts as the exposed bones of the earth, the pit of my anxiety melts: the white ripples calm me.
Ice Quality Code 7 = Old Ice (Polar Ice).
On my daily walks, my tracks do not last long. They are a momentary script that feral mammals will read only by smell. I maintain a tense hand around a bag of dog biscuits soaked in bacon grease that I am using to train my dog, but I fear the smell will attract wildlife. What would prevent a hungry bear from tumbling out of its den, led by the pull of reprieve from scarcity? I'd have to guess whether I need to play dead or throw my arms up to play a bigger animal.
Ice Quality Code 8⠂= Second Year Ice (Permafrost).
Up here, the geography is a foreign text. The winding snow paths are scrolls, glittering with the mythical tongues of ice. It leaves puzzles of crystals for us to decipher on the lake. Flattened chandeliers of frozen jewels topping glassy shores tell us which way the wind had whistled through. The irregular ridges of sastrugi are brushed by wind and snow until the land resembles the jaws of monster pike, the King of these inland seas. These land-texts were written millennia before my presence here, yet my footsteps are also now rewriting this text as their own. In response to my insignificance in the face of this land, I feel an inclination to exercise the control that accompanies the choice to flirt with death, with the elements. Each time, I emerge new. I grow new shoots.
I used to feel worry snagging at my insides like a Triassic beast, taking up too much space. But the harsh Arctic climate has proven to be a force powerful enough to crowd it out. I return to the duvet of icy silence on my walks again and again, shards of ancient memories floating up to the surface of my mind:
A young man heating up the skin of his drum over an electric stove. The silent fire softening the sinew for the music.
Tlicho women on the land, long ago, laying their bebìa in snow during times of scarcity. The wailing of hungry mouths, then nothing.
The hush-hush of a beige office at the Women's Clinic, and the cool ring of sedatives winding around my mind and body. The startling realization that I'm shedding tears, like an ice cube, melting.
My great-grandmother escaping in the freezing car of a cattle train, pressed against the warm belly of a calf. Soundless. Surviving.
Rubies made from cracked glass I kept in my desk drawer. A teenager's ritual: carving lines where the flesh is tender on the forearm.
The still of the morning when they took the shot bear away. Pools of blood pinkening the slush in my driveway.
My coworker's story of how her mother pressed her finger to her own mouth over and over to teach the little Tlicho girl quiet quiet quiet. Silence meaning safety from the roaring, child-swallowing bellies of RCMP airplanes; from nàhgą the bogeyman, lurking in the bush.
The irony of safe and sound being synonymous.
So, I take each memory, bring it closer to study its form, its outlines, and nestle it in an imaginary cabinet lined with muslin.
Ice Quality Code 9⠂= Multi-Year Ice.
I still walk daily and marvel at cloudberries — pearls stitched to leafless shrubs, like the altricial bud that I let slip out of my womb. In the early spring wild rose bushes spring up everywhere. Their ropey, thorny arms grab at my socks, and I wonder about the forms that ghosts can take. I imagine Atsumi, myself as the roots, the roses and the thorns.
Many troubled minds find a resting place up North. With each step, I don't turn away from ghosts. I walk among them.
If you or someone you know is struggling, here's where to get help:
- Canada's Suicide Crisis Helpline: Call or text 988.
- Kids Help Phone: 1-800-668-6868. Text 686868. Live chat counselling on the website.
- Canadian Association for Suicide Prevention: Find a 24-hour crisis centre.
- This guide from the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health outlines how to talk about suicide with someone you're worried about.
Read the other finalists
- On Not Knowing Cree by Ted Bishop (Edmonton)
- Not in Their Names by Alison Pick (Toronto)
- Is Life a Tossed Salad? by Evelyn N. Pollock (Coldwater, Ont.)
- Dad's the Word by Emi Sasagawa (Vancouver)
About the 2024 CBC Nonfiction Prize
The winner of the 2024 CBC Nonfiction Prize will receive $6,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts, have their work published on CBC Books and win a two-week writing residency at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. Four finalists will each receive $1,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts and have their work published on CBC Books.
The 2025 CBC Short Story Prize is currently open until Nov. 1, 2024 at 4:59 p.m. ET. The 2025 CBC Nonfiction Prize will open in January 2025 and the CBC Poetry Prize will open in April 2025.
