"It is a land almost too vast to contemplate, unimaginably vast, a country the size of a world afloat with three of the Earth's great oceans, broad-shouldered, granite-muscled, open-hearted..." "A march of endless horizons revealed one upon the next in relentless breathtaking magnificence." "Celebrate a journey of the heart, a journey over Canada." "Perhaps it is the rhythm of the constant Atlantic drumming the hard rock maritime shore." "Perhaps it's the high key of the wind playing the bare stone cliffs," "or the melodious throats of eroded sea stacks." "Or perhaps it is an echo of a distant land in a distant time in the vague, vestigial memory." "If this place can be many things:" "majestic, wild, subtle, primitive, honest... what it cannot be is silent." "Music is its soul." "Music whistles out of its reedy deciduous forests, chugs over its harbours and bays," "rings down its valleys, and leaks from the cracked bricks of peg-leg buildings like sweet pitch from beach timber holes" "or lies from ancient sailors." "Here beats the Canadian heart." "Here Canada punches its muscles, and clenches its fists in toil." "Industry is its habit, born on the back of the mighty waterway labouring from the lake eddies to the sea." "And yet this heart has a warm side." "Gentle, like the fresh water lap of the squirts of distant lakes, like the ache of the loon's only cry." "Like the moon through fragrant pine smoke on the August evening's gentle drift." "It is a table at which to feed an entire world, rolling flat-topped west smooth and sleekly on its fertile journey." "Here beneath the billowing cumulus climb of thunderheads reposes the prairie," "the open-hearted nurturing mother prairie, bustling off and away in such single-mindedness that its tiniest undulations appear as mountains, and its unflappable distances seem only to bring souls cross it together." "Upon much of this vastness no human foot has ever stepped, upon some no eye has ever rested." "The awesome swing of this frozen arch dwarfs dreams and turns thoughts inward." "It tricks the senses with its frozen silence, and its distorted distances." "So hostile is it to human life that survival here becomes a matter of honor," "honor shared among those chosen souls to its timeless terrible beauty drawn, to its hollow aching emptiness that can both fill a heart and break it with equal cold indifference." "Some say this is a haunted place, that the misty rainforest fogs cloak each in spirits - the raven, the bear, the frog, the killer whale." "The earliest peoples knew these eerie spirits." "They cut them into totems and painted them on houseboards." "So perhaps this deeply ingrained otherworldliness explains the unique sensibility of life on this coast, the land of the lotus eaters, a mile of translucent land lying carelessly on its Pacific bed, dreaming its own dreams, speaking in the tongues of ghosts only it can see," "bewitched by the echoes of its mystical past." "No one soul can hope to see this country." "no lifetime is long enough." "No heart sufficiently restless, no spirit a match for this indominable domain." "By mankind's hand this ceaseless reach has been barely touched, never tamed." "Still today it stretches aloof and unhindered, in serene beauty and majesty, unseen, unknown, unconcerned." "So in the end the true measure of this eternal and glorious Canada exists not in rock and race, not in mountain and prairie, not in coast or shield or ice." "It exists in the imaginations it fires and dreams it nurtures, the hopes to which it gives birth." "Translation by Ray and Kresho."