Comic by Bill Rerick/ The Dakota Student

I saw a polar bear this week.

It lay in a streak of gravel half-heartedly licking its paws, glancing up occasionally at the stream of human faces chattering behind grey chains and dirty glass. It stood up. It laid back down. Later, it even dipped into the swimming pool.

I can’t say with certainty, but it seemed like a typical day at the “Journey to Churchill” exhibit at the Assiniboine Park Zoo in Winnipeg, Manitoba.

Churchill is where my biology professors study the interactions between polar bears and snow geese (turns out there’s a lot more to that than you might think). It’s a small community of about 800 permanent residents who live inseparably from the natural resources of the Hudson Bay.

The native Inuit and Canadian locals who live there do so intentionally, much like the great white predator that’s helped give Churchill its unofficial distinction as “Polar Bear Capital of the World.” To live any other way in Churchill — that is, to treat the land, sky, and water without the same respect one owes oneself — would conflict fundamentally with the spirit of being alive in the Arctic.

Though I have not yet experienced the real Churchill, I believe its spirit to be sincere. Like anywhere on Earth, it’s story cannot be told without the overwhelming treachery of man as both its antagonist and only vocal critic. But something about the playful intensity of the Arctic and its inhabitants — human, bear, or otherwise — puts it in one of the world’s last wild areas still operating under its own inner nature.

No zoo anywhere could possibly recreate those feelings, though the one in Winnipeg went so far as to park an ATV and an old train car outside the gift shop in an attempt to capture the character of Churchill.

To provide a point of reference, I flipped on the live-streaming “Polar Cam” at the San Diego Zoo and found an apparently miserable bear curled up underwater in the only shade available. I’d seen these SoCal polar bears in summer before and only now realize just how crazy that sounds.

Today, it’s 52 degrees warmer in San Diego than Churchill. Perhaps it’s not as much a difference as it could be, but I won’t assume to know what it’s like to sit outside covered in fur every day of my life. Till I experience that for myself, I’ll lean toward assuming they must feel pretty toasty.

The Churchill exhibit contains an underwater enclosure. Inside, I saw children gazing up over their shoulders in utter astonishment as a massive white bear swam over their heads. They cried out; they asked questions; they were insatiably curious.

Around the corner, the seal exhibit shared a glass wall with the polar bear enclosure. It blinked blindly at its own reflection, while a great bear clawed at the glass in complete confusion, undoubtedly struggling to understand why his greatest efforts to hunt left him stuck in one place.

The New York Times reports that the typical polar bear zoo enclosure is actually one-millionth the size of a polar bear’s natural home range. They can travel thousands of miles each year roaming the constantly shifting ice floes on the open ocean. Their nose alone can smell prey up to 20 miles away.

I made something like eye contact with this bear slashing against the glass. It was fleeting, and it was connected through a sensory barrier neither of us could ever fully comprehend.

In this moment, the words of a wise friend revealed themselves in my mind, as if placed there by our shared manic      recognition of our self in each other:

“I don’t know what I’m doing, but I’m doing it. I don’t know what I mean, but I mean it.”

This bear was trying its best; there was no arguing that. Even if it had caught the seal and pleased its innate ambitions, I’d imagine our recognition would feel the same — neither understanding either.

But the sun, whether seen through plexsi glass or clean Arctic air, loves and nourishes all things but never lords it over them.

After a while the bear went up for air, and I left to get French fries.

Billy Beaton is the video editor for The Dakota Student. He can be reached at [email protected]