To Infinity And Backagain

On the eve of Canada’s 150th, Commander Chris Hadfield reminds us there’s no place like home.

- Courtney Shea

IF CHRIS HADFIELD could give every Canadian a gift to mark the country’s sesquicentennial, it would be the chance to see the nation from space, and not just because the view is fantastic. Having the opportunity to peer down at Canada—not all at once, but so that the whole view might fit on a panoramic screen—has given him a valuable perspective.

“It takes about eight minutes, not much longer than it does for me to describe it,” he says. And then he does describe it, tracing the route as he recalls it from the International Space Station, from just south of where the Fraser River flows into Vancouver all the way across to the western tip of Cape Breton Island.

He’s exaggerating slightly: Hadfield’s play-by-play lasts just under two minutes, and that’s including impromptu geography lessons (“The Manicouagan Crater is a bullet hole on the world from a couple million years ago”), poetic digression (“All those places where my great-grandfather dreamed, lost and won,” he says, describing how he feels gazing at the Prairies) and a sound effect (“Ploop!”) to highlight the spot where the St. Lawrence drops into the Atlantic. For Hadfield, seeing his homeland from this vantage point, “across distance and across time,” creates an intimacy (his word) that deepens with every orbit.