The Midnight Sun-Times

The End.

2009-07-01T05:45:00.000-07:00

What Happened?

We left. In January, a job came up back east. I applied. I got it. We left. Those last six months after my last post were great. We drove to Dawson city. The summer flew by. We flew back east in August and got married. In the end, opportunity knocked and we answered.

I could've written more post those last months but I was busy writing for the paper. The north was no longer foregin to me. I was begining to see it as normal. It was harder to pick out things worth writing about from a southerner's perspective. So I stopped, and focused on writing for the paper.

I've been thinking about the North a lot lately. I especially miss it in the summer months. Sometimes I find myself craving a drive on the Dempster. Sometimes I miss the view of the river from Tulita. I miss how the north was at once vast in size and small in community. Mostly I miss the people.

I thought I should sign on and let any readers out there know the end. Thank you, good night.

A Very Large Day

2008-06-07T08:43:00.000-07:00

My friend's dad used to have a saying. Whenever I was sleeping over at their house and we woke to a bright sunny Saturday he would look out the window and say, "Well. It's a rather large day out there."

He always put emphasis on the "large." I can still remember the first time he said it because I had never heard the saying before and yet I knew exactly what he meant. There were no clouds that day. The sky seemed so big and at the same time the day was full of potential. It was Large.

The other day I checked the "sunwatch" for the paper. It's a listing of sunrise and sunset times. The sun is now up. And it won't be setting until late in July. Yesterday was also one of the first warm days of the year. The first real t-shirt day. As I was walking the dog around boot lake it hit me that this is the largest day I've ever experienced. Summer is finally here, and the potential seems unlimited. We're going camping.

Two views of the north

2008-05-18T09:09:00.000-07:00

A few weeks after I got to Inuvik, a British journalist named Oliver Burkeman dropped by our office. He was there writing about northern sovereignty, oil and gas, etc, etc...

His article was more negative than positive, in my view, portraying the north through the eyes of an outsider.

"It isn't hard, visiting the Canadian Arctic, to feel as though you have reached the back of beyond: a place at the edge of the map, empty except for the caribou and a few improbably hardy humans, who journey for miles to shop at Inuvik's solitary supermarket, which sells overpriced groceries shipped from "down south" - meaning the northern Canadian city of Edmonton - along with a small selection of snowmobiles."

Inuvik has three supermarkets, not one. It was the first of several errors in his article, "A very cold war indeed."

I duly reported them to the editor of the guardian, but I didn't receive a response.

Today I read an excellent article about another northern country, Iceland. It was called, No wonder Iceland and the happiest people on earth. (Also by a reporter from The Guardian.) I saw many similarities between what Iceland did during World War Two, and what is currently happening in the North as it embraces industry on its own terms. There is a similar view here of family, and of welcoming children. It's not, as reporters in the south might have you believe, a epidemic of unwanted teenage pregnancy.

Perhaps it is because my job is to seek out the good news, but I see such potential here. And when I read article's like Oliver Burkeman's, portraying the north as a backwoods and its people as pawns in the geopolitical game currently being played out, I can't help but get a bit mad.

Night and Day

2008-05-03T16:56:00.001-07:00

Spring in Inuvik is not like spring back East. Yesterday we got 10 centimeters of snow. The roads are now rivers of dirty slush. We have had some warm days. But warm up here is anything near 0C. Anything above 0C is downright hot.

Every day I have the trouble of deciding whether or not I’ll wear my light spring jacket, or my heavy parka. It comes down to whether I’d rather be a bit too warm, or a bit too cold.

At least the pussywillows are out. That has to count for something.

Last time I checked we’re nearing 18 hours of sunlight a day. We gain about 10 minutes every day, or over an hour every week. The strangest thing of all is that the sun now sets before it rises in the run of a day. Technically, a day begins at 12:00am. Lately sunset has been around 12:15am. And sunrise is around 5:00am. So technically, the sun sets before it rises. “Night” as most people know it is for a few short hours in the morning. The mind boggles.

If you enjoy this blog...

2008-04-29T20:27:00.000-07:00

There are quite a few other bloggers writing about the north. Another blogger recently created some awards for the best NWT blogs. Quite frankly, I don't see how this can be for the "best" blogs since mine wasn't in the running for any of the awards. I've learned my lesson. It's nothing but shameless self-promotion for me from here on in.

If you are online tonight, you still have time to vote. Lots of good reading to be found.

http://bestnwtblogs.blogspot.com/

Paulatuk

2008-04-29T19:45:00.000-07:00

I woke up just before my alarm, around 6am on a Saturday morning, to catch my flight to Paulatuk. I was offered a seat on a charter by a resources start-up called Darnley Bay Resources. Myself along with two reps from the company arrived at the airport a bit after 8. Of course the plane was nowhere near ready to take off. The pilots had rolled in just before us.

Although they did their best to get the plane going, the pilots were at first unable to find someone qualified to drive the fuel truck. Welcome to a small town on a Saturday morning.

The mining guys shuffled impatiently and checked their watches. Representatives from the community corporation who were there to help the community did the same. This was funny because they were actually the owners of the airline, and they had no more power to speed things up than anyone else.

We took off about 45 minutes late. But then again lateness is just an idea created by people with watches. In the North, you’ll get there when you get there.

I was able to see the tree line once we got in the air. An hour later we came down through the clouds above the frozen Arctic Ocean. A string of dots lay on the treeless coastline. Welcome to Paulatuk.

They picked us up in a big shiny 15-passenger van and drove us three minutes to the school gym. From there I bid my friends adieu and set out on foot to see the town. The sun was out and it was just a bit below zero. At 10:30 on a Saturday morning, everything was quiet. There were no real signs of life except for the sled dogs tied out on their leashes.

I was drawn to one old building overlooking the water and spent a few minutes taking shots from different angles. Just about every other building in town was standard government housing. A hundred years ago, Paulatuk had whalers passing through. This one building may have seen wooden sailing ships docked out in the bay.

One old man I spoke to that morning by the name of Charlie Thrasher said he himself was a descendant of the whalers that came north to make their fortunes.

As soon as I told him I was from the paper, he asked me if I was getting it right. He didn’t specify what “it” was. He also told me that global warming is “bullsh*t” and pointed out all the snow around town to prove it. He said this is the latest spring he has ever seen, and he was most certainly well past 60.

Paulatuk has suffered through a lot of unusual blizzards this past April. It is usually to cold and dry to snow very much this far north. Although Mr. Thrasher might see more snow as evidence against global warming, it is more likely proof of climate change: more moisture moving in from the south and temperatures warm enough to allow it to snow.

The mining guys were in town to ask the community’s permission to drill on their land. Paulatuk is home to one of the great mysteries of the geological world. The Darnley bay anomaly was discovered in the 1950s by INCO Mining Corporation. The Geological Survey of Canada also knew of the anomaly. Although they never bothered to mention it until the 1990s, when Darnley Bay Resources staked the mineral rights.

It sounds like something from a Stephen king novel. The anomaly is a “blip” in the earth’s magnetic and gravitational field. It means there is a large, dense body somewhere below Paulatuk. The mining company is betting that it is mostly nickel and other metals.

82-year-old Leon La Prairie, the company president, is determined to get a drill bit down there to see what the heck it is. He was working for INCO back in the 50s when the anomaly was discovered. La Prairie chatted with residents and shuffled around the gym, leaning on his cane. At the end of it all, he got approval to do the test drilling.

Before the community voted, we were treated to a meal of caribou stew, caribou soup, and straight-up boiled caribou. It was good. At least the stew was. I wasn’t in the mood for soup, and the boiled caribou was more for the elders.

The mining company also brought Tim Horton’s donuts, which are a real treat up here, even if they are a day old. In the North, most communities make “traditional” or “Eskimo” donuts. These are a sweet, light, fried bread. There was a plate of these sitting next to the caribou stew. I ate three. Tim’s could take a page from Paulatuk’s recipe book.

The other thing the mining company brought was oranges. Two whole cases, to be exact. This was probably at the suggestion of an elder, or someone who occasionally travels to remote northern communities once every few years. People traveling to the North seem to think that kids are going to go wild for fresh fruit, or that they only get it at certain times of the year. I’ve read stories about barges coming up the Mackenzie at the turn of the last century. They would bring oranges and give one to every child in every town. I hate to break this to everyone, but it’s not 1942. They’ve got papaya and mangoes down at the northern store. Give the kids their donuts.

After the meeting there was a lot of hustling to get back on the plane and back to Inuvik. We had to go track down the pilots, who were sleeping off Friday night at the hotel. I was a bit concerned with the water they were guzzling on they flight back, but the landing was flawless. I slept most of the way. I wish I had more time to talk to the elders, and round up a few more stories, but you’ve got to take what you can get up here. I just hope next time I can get up there in the summer.

Ice Road to Tuktoyaktuk

2008-04-19T15:41:00.000-07:00

Note: A slideshow of pictures from the trip is available at the bottom of the post (or by clicking here). I suggest opening the link and viewing the pics full sized.

The road to Tuktoyaktuk mostly follows the path of the Mackenzie River. It took us three hours to get there. For the first half hour we were stuck behind a large dump truck, presumably hauling a load of gravel to Aklavik.

For the first hour there wasn’t much to see. The road was solid ice covered with drifted snow. It was very clean. I recall flying past an empty can of red bull, and the elbow of a stove pipe. There was no other litter.

There were hills to the left of us, trees and low shrub to the right. About an hour in, I saw something that seemed to stand out against the plains. Nicole dismissed it as small tress or shrubs at first, but as we got closer we realized it was a herd of reindeer.

Reindeer are domesticated caribou. There is little difference except in temperament and color. Reindeer are much more docile than caribou. A man on a snowmobile was leading the herd.

As I was standing up on a snow bank, snapping pictures of the reindeer, I turned and noticed an animal running on the other side of the road. At first I thought it might be a fox but after Nicole saw the pictures, she told me it was a wolverine.

Note: Correction. On closer inspection of the phots, it was a fox.

When you look at a map that shows the tree line, Inuvik is right on the edge. In fact we had to go about an hour and a half north before we realized we were above the tree line.

One might think that thee tree line is just an idea, or that the end of the trees is a much more gradual process. It was, from what I can see, almost an invisible line. There is literally a point where the trees suddenly peter out to nothing. I was in a hurry to get home when I noticed this, so I didn’t stop for a picture. Maybe next time.

It wasn’t easy to tell when we left the delta and drove out on the Beaufort Sea. We kept checking our GPS. The frozen shoreline became apparent after a while. It was different that the hills in the delta. The road is build offshore, on the ice. The road is bright blue when it is not covered with ice. It is a strange, frostless ice full of cracks. Driving on the ice was smoother than driving on the gravel of the Dempster, with very few “potholes.” But it was wavy in places. When a truck was driving towards us with its headlights on, it bounced up and down ever so slightly so that it looked as if he was flashing his high beams at us. Occasionally you would hit a crack in the ice.

Tuktoyaktuk was visible long before we reached it. Near the edge of town you can see two “pingos,” which are distinct hills that are formed through the thawing of permafrost. I had seen at least a couple on the way up. They are impossible to miss on an otherwise snow covered tundra. I would love to see the tundra in the summer. In the winter, it is not much to look at. Perhaps that is why pingos are so loved among the people of tuk. They provide natural scenery. The area just outside of the town has been set aside as “pingo national park.”

Tuk looks like so many other northern towns, with a lot of the same government housing. I’m sure it would be pretty in the summer, and it does have its scenic parts. I ran into Sister Faye, someone I had only known as a voice on the phone. Nicole and I were up exploring the old churches in town. Sister Faye was going into “Our Lady of Grace” Catholic church to start up the furnace. She said that they now only use this church for Christmas, Easter, and confirmation. On this day she was getting ready for confirmation.

Sister told me to walk right into the church, and to check out the Anglican church as well, which was a small log building near the Catholic church. She said they always keep them unlocked.

I walked into both. The Catholic church was beautiful on the inside, with ornate woodwork and painting. The Anglican Church, true to its protestant roots, was more humble. It was all I could do to stop myself from pulling the rope in the porch that led to the bell.

There was a tiny, fold up pump organ near the altar of the Anglican church. It was the size of a large suitcase, and it hand a handle on the top. It looked old. I suspect it might have come up on a whaling ship. It looked as if it were designed to be used on a ship, brought out for Sunday mass no matter where the crew might be. Then again, it might have been ordered out of the sears catalogue in the 1940s.

I think I became fixated on the ship idea because there is a large wooden sailing ship not far from the church. It too is owned by the church, and Sister Faye told me that they will be having the ship and Our Lady of Grace painted this summer. The Anglican church is mostly bare logs, and except for the window trip it looks as if it has never seen a drop of paint.

Macro and Mac-Crow Photography

2008-03-11T19:12:00.000-07:00

Macro photography is when you take pictures of objects on a very small scale, or get your camera lens in very close to the subject. (Yes, I took these).

Mac-Crow Photography is when I take pictures of my dog, Mac, fighting with a crow.

It was about 50 below with wind chill when I took these. The colour is off and the pictures are a bit out of focus. The worst part was when the crow (raven, to be more accurate) hovered on the breeze about five feet above Mac, as if taunting her. Just as I went to snap the picture, my camera was locked up, processing the ten other pictures I had already taken.

Place of Man

2008-02-24T17:19:00.000-08:00

Inuvik is a town that I described as “ugly” in a post last September. Back then I was just passing through, and I had only spent about an hour on the main drag of town. It was hard to see past its industrial exterior. I am officially withdrawing that remark. After having lived here for almost a full week, I can say that Inuvik is beginning to grow on me.

Maybe it is the rusted ships that dot the edge of the river. Old tugs that may yet be seaworthy and have found shelter from the ice on shore. I have started walking the dog on a route that takes me past three of them- five if it’s warm and I have the energy to go a bit farther. I can almost convince my self I’m back in Newfoundland or some seaside town in Nova Scotia.

Out on the frozen river you can see the headlights of trucks heading to and from Aklavik and Tuktoyaktuk. You can also hear the whine of skidoo engines being wound out and pushed to their limits. They are always in pairs and they seem to be drag racing on that long, straight, flat expanse.

I think part of my newfound love for Inuvik is the landscape. Tulita had nice mountains and rivers, but I felt landlocked there. Here I know that the ocean is just a hundred clicks up river. It is difficult to explain that feeling of being landlocked unless you’ve lived your whole life by the ocean. I remember the first time I went to Ontario when I was 17. The thought would occur to me several times every day that I was so far from the ocean.

Along with the comfort of the ocean is the peace of mind that the road brings. Inuvik is the end of the Dempster Highway. If I was so inclined, I could purchase a beat up car and just hit the road straight down to Dawson, Whitehorse, and BC.

Although I consider myself a pretty cheap guy, and I’m not one to shop for the sake of shopping, it is great to know that there are two hardware stores here in Inuvik. Three if you count the industrial supplies shop. Being a male, I have a gene that predisposes me to love hardware stores. There is no retail outlet more beautiful than one that specializes in practical things. The one possible exception is a bookstore, which Inuvik also has, along with a nice little library, and the Northwest Territories largest magazine stand. You would think that Yellowknife, with 20,000 people, would have the largest magazine stand. But no, it is here in Inuvik, with a population of about 3,000.

Inuvik celebrates its fiftieth birthday this summer. It was founded as a place to resettle the people of Aklavik because that town was - and is - prone to floods. Of course some people refused to move, and Aklavik survives to this day. I hope to travel there in the coming weeks, although our company vehicle does not have four wheel drive at the moment. Inuvik simply means “Place of Man” in the local language. It is the northernmost town in Canada. There are other communities at higher latitudes, but not incorporated towns.

I am loving my job. I can’t put into words how good it feels to go into an office and write every day. I love going out to meet and interview people, but at the end of the day I have to sit down and carve out a story of just 300 to 500 words. It is challenging, but at the same time I know that I can do it. Working at the store became this insurmountable challenge. I knew that no matter how many hours I put in, and no matter how hard I tried, there would always be more to do. I could never be satisfied with the results I received from my efforts. Here I might file a poorly written story, but when it is filed it is done and I can go home knowing I learned from my mistakes and strive for something better next time.

One thing I’ve learned is that people have short attention spans. We try to say more in fewer words. So if you’re still reading this, I’ve already taken you further that the average newspaper article. I will be trying to post more regularly now that I have an abundance of time. This was one of my first real weekends in years. A weekend has to be long enough so you can afford to waste some time without feeling guilty. A weekend isn’t a weekend unless you get to have it on Saturday and Sunday. There is a vibe you get on those days that you just can’t get on a Tuesday.

Chapter Two

2008-01-06T08:14:00.000-08:00

December was long and eventful here in our now-packed-up house. It started with a job offer from Northern News Services, a company based in Yellowknife that publishes weekly and bi-weekly papers all over the Northwest Territories and Nunavut. I had been sending them photos for a while and they had my resume on file, so when a job in Inuvik opened up, they called to ask me if I was interested.

These decisions are not easy to make, especially over the Christmas season, but after talking it over, Nicole and I decided to go for it. It wasn't easy telling everyone at the store that I was leaving, but they were supportive to say the least.

On the 23rd, Nicole started having pains in her stomach. There is no doctor in Tulita, but the nurse called the hospital in Yellowknife and described the symptoms. We were told it was nothing too serious. The pain subsided a bit over Christmas, but by the 29th it was back and we decided that she couldn't wait any longer to go see a doctor. It meant paying several thousand out of our own pocket for a last minute flight to Yellowknife. It is true that health care is free in Canada, but only once you're inside the hospital. How you get there is up to you.

Once inside, the doctors seemed fascinated by Nicole's conflicting symptoms. There was a steady stream of specialists called in from their Christmas holidays to perform test after test. I felt relieved knowing that so many doctors were putting their heads together on her case. I'm sure it was because of her unusual symptoms. We later learned that the patient in the bed next to us had languished for four full days before finding out her appendix had ruptured. They kept telling her no doctors were available to do an ultrasound, even though we knew one had come in the day before to perform an ultrasound on Nicole.

In the end, Nicole's illness wasn't too serious. It was an overreaction of her immune system that was painful more than anything else. It had a long name that even the doctors seemed unable to pronounce. After four nights and five days in Yellowknife, I jetted back to Tulita to begin packing our stuff.

And that brings me to today, my last day living in Tulita. It will be spent ferrying boxes and doing some last-minute packing. Tomorrow afternoon I'll arrive in Yellowknife and begin my career as a journalist. I set out in 2001 with the dream of making a living as a writer. Seven years later I've finally made it a reality. We will see how long it lasts, but at least now I can say I've tried.

By the sounds of things, one of my first tasks as a reporter will be a 10-day road trip through most of the communities in the southern part of the Northwest Territories. I don't want to say too much yet except that if it goes ahead, it will be the trip of a lifetime for me. I can't wait. Not sure when my next posting will be because my computer will be shipped to Inuvik. I'm scheduled to go there sometime in mid-February. Stay tuned.

On Coldness

2007-12-02T18:06:00.000-08:00

The day I arrived back in Tulita From Fort McPherson in early October, the ground was already blanketed with snow. I was told that it had just fallen the day before I arrived. It hasn’t been above zero degrees Celsius here in Tulita since that day. We have had several heavy snowfalls since. The river is now a frozen mass of ice chunks, and workers are already venturing out on Skidoos to prepare the ice bridge for the winter road.

Last week the temperature dipped to below minus thirty for a few days, before shooting up to minus ten overnight. It struck me how nice minus ten felt after the extreme cold. Most of you living down south rarely feel temperatures as cold as minus thirty on a regular basis. You might think that anything below freezing is cold, but once you become acclimatized to the cold, and as long as you dress properly, you begin to become a connoisseur of the cold. You can judge the difference between zero and minus thirty in the same way you might judge a spring or summer day on the opposite end of the thermometer.

Zero Degrees Celsius to minus 10 - Great weather for walking, even if there is a bit of a breeze. In temperatures down to about minus seven you can comfortably go out without a hat or mitts for 15 minutes or more. It is in this temperature zone that snow is most likely to fall. Snow tends to be wetter and heavier. The sky is usually overcast when it is this warm, the clouds being the cause of the warmer weather.

Minus ten to minus twenty - This is an acceptable cold as long as there is no wind. I enjoy going out on still nights such as this because the air is crisp and the sky is usually clear. It is the best weather for northern lights viewing. Gloves and a hat are a must, but you can take them off for a few minutes without any problems in order to unlock a door or fiddle with the settings on your camera. The snow is dryer and more powdery.

Minus twenty to minus twenty five - This is the threshold between a nice day and a not so nice day. Minus twenty is still bearable. Once it dips below minus twenty, you think twice about going out. If it is minus twenty-five and the air is stilll, it isn’t too bad. But if there is any wind, you feel it. Regardless of the wind, this is the temperature where the air begins to shock your lungs. When I step outside at this temperature, I always let out a short involuntary cough. Although wind makes this temperature feel much worse, the colder it gets, the less likely it is to be windy.

Minus twenty five to minus thirty five - This is where it gets really cold. Gloves are ineffective at this temperature. You need mittens, and you will often put your thumb in with the rest of your fingers. The air is almost always completely still once it gets this cold. Because the air is still, it can be deceiving. You might think you can run outside for just a minute, and at first you might not even feel the cold the way you might on a damp fall day. But within a minute, any exposed skin will begin to ache. Touching anything made of metal can be dangerous and your skin will register a burning sensation. I find that when I’m out in this weather and my face or hands begin to ache, I will begin to feel a slight panic. I think it is a fight or flight mechanism, as if my body knows that I’m in danger. If I’m five minutes away from the house, I will pick up the pace and do anything to cover up exposed skin.

Thirty five and below - Nobody goes outside if they can help it. Even skidoo riders, who insist on joyriding at twenty below and beyond, stay inside. Your truck will not start unless it is plugged in. The air becomes remarkably still. Breathing can be painful. Frostbite can begin within minutes. Even when you are inside, the floor can feel cold and there is a chill that you cannot shake. Keys will break off inside locks at this temperature (or so I have been told). School is cancelled.

All of this assumes you are wearing a down filled parka, long johns, and properly insulated boots. Cotton long johns are only good down to ten below, after that, fleece long johns are a must if you want to feel comfortable.

Hell Hounds and Little Green Men

2007-11-06T21:05:00.000-08:00

People around town have been reporting a wolf on the loose for the past week or so. On Monday, our neighbor’s dog was killed and eaten by a wolf. On Tuesday morning, around 4 a.m., our neighbor Jimmy shot this wolf in his yard.

The picture doesn't really do justice to the size of this dog. It is too bad this big guy couldn’t have stayed out in the wild, but I guess he was tempted by all the snacks tied out in everyone’s yard. We bring our dog in at night.

In other news, people in the town just east of us (only about 100km as the crow flies) spotted a UFO the other morning. It would be easy to pass this off as a star, except the footage was shot in the daytime. Nicole knows the folks who shot this footage. They aren’t they type to go about perpetrating hoaxes. Some reported seeing red lights shooting out of the object. I'm sure there is a rational explanation. My boss thinks it's a drop of water on the camera lens. You be the judge.

South to Old Fort Point

2007-10-29T16:30:00.000-07:00

Captain Ron showed up in Tulita the week after he took me four wheeling in Norman Wells. He came by boat on a Saturday, and on Sunday morning he called Nicole and I, asking us if we wanted to go for a little tour south on the Mackenzie.

This was the last weekend in August. It was still summer and it was a sunny, warm day, but we put on sweaters because it can get surprisingly cold out on the water.

Ron’s wife Wendy was along for the ride too. Ron had one of his trademark captain black cigars clutched between his teeth as we drove past flocks of geese and ducks already gathering for their flight south.

We traveled for about an hour and a half past endless trees and rocks. Occasionally we passed groups of cabins and with blue-tarp teepees outside. Ron seemed to know who owned each one.

The scenery grew a bit monotonous after a while, but every so often you would round a bend to see a mountain off in the distance. In the exposed cliffs of the riverbank we could see coal seams and once, a layers of kimberlite, the rock geologists look for when they are looking for diamonds.

We stopped at “Old Fort Point,” where a family from Tulita has a group of log cabins. No one was home, but we got out to admire the cabins. They were beautifully constructed, but small and humble at the same time. Some were barely twenty feet by twenty feet, but they had all one could ask for.

Old Fort Point was once the site of a fort, possibly the original “Fort Norman” and Ron said you can find the ruins of the fort if you look, but we were starting to run short on time, and he said there wasn’t much to see. No Parks Canada interpretation plaques here. Just the name passed down for several hundred years by the locals.

I was getting cold as we traveled back, but I tried to ignore the discomfort and take in the scenery. About halfway back, someone spotted a black bear on the eastern bank, and Ron spun the boat around so we could go in for a closer look. It of course took off into the woods before we could get really close.

Four miles south of Tulita is a spot known locally as “The Smokes.” It is where an exposed coal seam has been smoldering for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years. Alexander Mackenzie, the explorer for whom the river is named, noted the smoke rolling from the ground when he first paddled up the river in 1789. Although it was getting late in the day, Ron’s wife Wendy insisted that we stop in for a look. They had mentioned something about fossils, but I was unprepared for what we were about to find.

There was a bit of smoke coming from the cliffs up the river. You could smell it in the air. The beach was littered with pink colored rocks, and on closer inspection we found that each pink rock was covered in leaf imprints. It was literally impossible to pick up a rock that didn’t have an imprint of some kind. The challenge wasn’t finding a fossil, but finding a good, clear imprint that stood out from the tens of thousands of mediocre fossils.

Ron started a small fire to roast some wieners. Nicole, Wendy and I clambered over the banks, collecting some of the better specimens we could find. Ron is an evangelical Christian and he was unimpressed by the fossils. Earlier in the day I had told him about some petrified wood I had found on the banks of Great Bear River, and he told me how wood actually petrifies over decades instead of thousands of years. He said there is a museum in the states has a petrified tennis shoe. Instead of looking for fossils, he filled a Rubbermaid tub with the rocks to use as gravel on his walkway.

With our boat heavily laden with a few hundred extra ponds of rocks, it was difficult to get back up to speed. We arrived back in Tulita around six and unloaded our fossils. Ron still had an hours trip ahead of him north to Norman Wells. We thanked them for another memorable trip.

Owl

2007-10-22T11:35:00.000-07:00

We don’t have as many brushes with wildlife as you might expect here in the north. I’ve seen some wolves from a distance, bears, one moose, and dead caribou, but on Sunday I saw my first owl. I was on the phone with my folks when I saw a brown bird swoop past the warehouses in our front yard. I waved Nicole over. At first we thought it was a Peregrine falcon from the colouring of the wings.

I got bundled up and trudged outside through a foot of snow to get some pictures. As soon as I approached the edge of blueberry hill, I saw the bird take off for the beach. I slowly pursued it but it flew about a kilometers down the beach and perched on a log.

When I got back to the house and downloaded the first pictures, they were blurry at best, but when I zoomed in on pictures of the bird perched on a log, I noticed that it had the shape of a owl.

In the afternoon it returned, so I headed out again and this time the pictures were much better. It was, as I had suspected, an owl.

Buttermilk

2007-10-18T19:11:00.000-07:00

Fort McPherson’s store shares its trucks with the North Mart in Inuvik, which is the end of the line for the Dempster highway. The delivery truck usually stop in McPherson first to unload their freight, and then continues on to Inuvik.
One night, while we were unloading the truck, Mike the grocery manager noticed something funny.
“It looks like they’ve got a pallet of buttermilk in there! Someone must have really screwed up the order.”
Buttermilk is something I’ve never ordered. Mike once ran the dairy section in the Inuvik store, and he said he usually ordered 12 1 litre cartons. That was for a population of 6000 people.

Today I found out what happened to the buttermilk:

Inuvik inundated with free buttermilk bounty

A Slideshow

2007-09-29T21:28:00.000-07:00

You want pictures? You got 'em.

Ft. McPherson Journal - Part Three

2007-09-29T21:11:00.000-07:00

The other day I was speaking with Sarah, an employee at the store as she was putting out toys. The toys were action figure that included men in fluorescent furs, space-aged snowmobiles, and wooly mammoths. Sarah motioned towards the toy wooly mammoth and told me her father had once found "a...a...whatchacallit....mammoth trunk" up in the mountains. She was pointing to the toy's nose and tusks.

"You mean the tusk? The bone?"

"No. It was the trunk. It was dried out."

She held up her hands about thee feet apart to indicate the size.

I can only assume that it was freeze dried somehow. She said it didn't stink at all and that someone in the family might still have it. She also told me that her father and some others once came across "a whole bunch" of mammoths when they were snowmobiling in the mountains but that "they never went back to that place." Her father is long gone.

Sarah is a wealth of interesting and sometimes disturbing stores. The other day I got off the phone with an elder from town while Sarah was in the office with me, doing some paperwork.

"Who was that?" she asked.

"Oh it was so and so (I don't remember the name) and she's sending her grandson up to charge on her account."

"She doesn't really come around any more, ever since she got shot."

"Shot?"

"Yeah, her brother-in-law. He shot her and four other people in the family."

"Jesus! Was he drunk or what?"

"No. They say when they found him he was still holding the gun and he just kept saying 'why do they always make fun of me? Why do they always make fun of me' over and over again."

One Crow For Sorrow

2007-09-22T23:15:00.001-07:00

Death seems more common here in the north. Not death itself, which is a part of life, but tragic death. The death of young people. Last year it was the plane crash. On my first day here in McPherson there was a funeral for a girl who had commited suicide. Today, the husband of an employee at the store was killed in an accident out on the Dempster.

Last night she was excited because he was coming home from working away. She hadn't seen him in a while. He made it home ok, but this morning I learned that he had been killed on his way back to work. I had just delivered them a new washer the other day. I had just ordered them a new king size bed. It hasn't even arrived yet. I wanted to drive down and see her. But I didn't have to because she came in to the store with her kids. You could tell she was crying. Her kids were crying openly, but they bravely marched through the store, picking up some odds and ends, and then renting some movies. I approached her and told her if she needed anything to call. An empty gesture, but one I felt I had to do. I couldn't just look away.

Last week, a bootleger from town rolled her car and walked away unharmed. You can't help but wonder why a hard-working family man could be taken in the same way a week later. I know it's wrong, but I can't help wishing it had been the other way around.

Ft. McPherson Journal - Part Two

2007-09-13T06:44:00.000-07:00

Days 5 through 10

WORK

Day 11
It's finally my day off. I was going to take Monday off, but the office lady ended up taking it off instead, which was fine because it rained all day Monday. Today it is warm and dry. I'm planning to drive about 200km south on the Dempster to Eagle Plains, a mid-way truck stop. All week I've been psyching myself up for this trip. Whenever tourists have stopped into the store on their way to Inuvik, I've asked them what the drive is like between Eagle Plains and McPherson. Everyone I asked said it was the most scenic part of the highway. That works for me because I won't be able to drive the next leg of the highway (400+km to Dawson).

Of course as I'm getting ready to go, a truck shows up with freight for the store. They never come when you need them, but always arrive when you're in the middle of something important (like a day off). I go in to help but Mike, the grocery manager, chases me off.

My truck is loaded with junk food, camera gear and fishing gear. I'm thinking about eating lunch at Eagle Plains, but I've brought a sandwich just in case the food there is crappy and/or expensive.

It's a five minute drive from McPherson to the cable ferry which crosses the Peel River. It looks like I'm the first truck of the day. The sign says that the ferry runs 9:30 a.m. to 12:45p.m. There is an old guy directing traffic onto the ferry. The trip across takes less than five minutes, but he comes over and asks me where I'm headed. I tell him and he tells me that I might see some Caribou. There are several herds that migrate across the highway. I pray that I'll see some wildlife. One lady who works at the store warned me not to get out of my truck if I see any grizzlies. Good advice if I ever heard it.
The highway rolls between some small hills and lakes before rising onto a plateau. Right away I stop at a look off and snap a few pictures of the mist filled Mackenzie Valley below. The sun is still quite low in the sky and I hope that it will be that way when I get to the Richardson Mountains. Any photographer will tell you that early morning and late evening are the golden hours for photography. It's that time when everything has a golden hue and shadows are more dramatic.

I think that the leaves are just a few days past their prime, but the colors are still wonderful. There aren't many trees here on the plateau and the low bushes are varying shades of yellow and red. Down below I can see some mountains, but nothing too spectacular yet. The road is in good shape; very smooth for a gravel road.

Up ahead I see a sign that says "Emergency Airstrip 1km." It takes a minute for me to realize that this runway isn't beside the highway. It is the highway. The road widens for a few hundred yards and then narrows again. There are orange and red markers on the side of the road. I wonder how often this runway is used.

Past the runway I see what I've been waiting for: Mountains. And the road appears to be headed straight for them. I can't help but stop every few kilometers to take a few more pictures of them. IT makes me wonder if I'll ever get to Eagle Plains. Especially when I stop to try fishing at a small nameless creek. As usual I don't have any luck.

Close to the mountain pass they are grading the road. Dump trucks loaded with gravel are barreling up and down the road. It is intimidating to come upon one of these things as they head at you at nearly 100km/h. I move as close to the shoulder as possible. I picture these monster trucks jack-knifing and sliding into me. I picture myself loosing control on the loose gravel and sliding into them. But each time they pass without incident.

Down through the mountain pass is a flat section and then another smaller pass. In the middle of this second pass, I cross over into the Yukon. I stop for the obligatory picture at the border. Some of my earliest memories are of my dad reading Robert Service to me. Now I am finally in Service's home territory.

Passing in to a different jurisdiction, I instantly notice a difference in the quality of the roads. I'd say they are slightly better than on the Territories' side. The mountains aren't quite as impressive, but beautiful in their own way nonetheless.

It is noon when I cross the border. It has taken me two and a half hours to go 100 km with my frequent stops. I try to push ahead while the road is good and the scenery is mundane. Before long I come to the Arctic Circle rest stop. More obligatory photos, then back on the road.

Eagle Plains, as a destination, is a bit of a let down. I almost knew this would be the case. It is an ugly hotel, restaurant, and gas bar. It was built in 1978 because there was no natural stopping point between Dawson and McPherson. It obviously hasn't been renovated since. It's like walking into a time capsule. A plaque on the wall explains how the site is completely self sufficient as far as power, water, and sewer go. The plaque even brags that TV signals in the rooms come from an "ANIK 2 satellite dish." Wow, the future is here.

There's an old hound dog asleep on the floor in the hotel lobby. I take one look at the restaurant and decide to eat my sandwich instead of eating here. It's cafeteria style, complete with orange plastic trays and coffee mugs straight out of the 70s. The carpet and walls are ugly earth tones. I get the heck out of there and go eat my lunch by the Eagle River. At least the earth tones there are real.

Then it's back the way I came. Nothing much happens until I get close to the border again. I come around a bend and there up ahead is a bull moose, facing towards me and not moving.

Like I said before, delivery trucks are never there when you need them, and always appear at the most inopportune times. As I pull over, I know that about three minutes behind me is an 18 wheeler with a load of vehicles for Inuvik. Somehow I manage to steer the truck over with one hand while reaching for my camera with the other. For some unknown reason I happen to have my zoom lens on my camera. I can't even remember putting it on, but I'm glad it's there now. I manage to rip the lens cap off and snap a few pictures before the 18 wheeler flys past me, scaring the moose into the bushes. I pull ahead to where he was, but there is no sign of him. There's no sign of my lens cap either. I must have tossed it out the window in my mad rush to get my camera out.

Even though I make better time on the way back because I'm not stopping every five minutes, the trip seems longer. I've got my Ipod to keep me company. I arrive back in McPherson right around five o'clock. The trip has taken seven and a half hours. I've burned just over half a tank of gas. At McPherson's prices (1.36/L) that's about $70.00. I don't think I'll be topping that trip any time soon.

Ft. McPherson Journal - Part One

2007-09-05T18:34:00.000-07:00

Day 1,
The company has sent me to Ft. McPherson to do a five week relief for a store manager who is on vacation. In honor of my first trip above the Arctic Circle, I've decided to stop shaving until I return south again. I haven't told Nicole this yet. I'm not sure how she'll take the news.
I arrived at the Inuvik airport around 1pm on Friday. Shane, the Ft. McPherson store manager was there to meet me. I came equipped with one bag full of clothes, my camera, and fishing pole.

We drove into Inuvik. It is an ugly town in otherwise beautiful surroundings. Shane had to pick up a part for his water pump, and we went to the North-Mart for some dirty bird (KFC). While waiting for our food, we went down to check out the electronics. I found the fishing section and on an impulse, bought myself a new fishing lure. I'm fairly sure most lures are designed to catch the eyes of fisherman rather than fish. This one was matte black with fluorescent red spots. It's called "the black fury." Even as I was forking over the cash, I wondered what the hell I was doing. It probably won't work anyway.

After picking up a day-old copy of the Globe and Mail (half price!) we got on the Dempster Highway, heading for ft. McPherson. The Dempster highway stretches from just outside of Dawson City to Inuvik, passing mostly through the Yukon before crossing into the territories just above the arctic circle. The highway is only about twenty six years old. To even call it a highway is misleading. It is a well built gravel road with a speed limit of 90km/h. In the winter it becomes an ice road.

The Dempster attracts scores of tree-huggers,weekend warriors, RV-ers, and tour buses. We passed all of the above on our way down. I felt bad for them knowing that their goal was the uninspiring town of Inuvik. Once there, they would have to turn around and drive back. You could see the cloud of dust raised by oncoming trucks a mile away. Slowly but surely they would approach. Both vehicles would slow a bit and move to the side. Some trucks didn't seem to slow at all, and our windshield would be pelted with tiny bits of gravel.

The view was mostly monotonous but strangely beautiful. The trees are in the prime of their fall colors up here. We drove past mile after mile of skinny fir trees and stunted birch with bright yellow leaves.
The Dempster crosses the Mackenzie river at the town of Tsiigehtchic(pronounced sig-a-chick, formerly called Arctic Red River). The M.V. Louis Cardinal ferries vehicles between the eastern side of the river, the Dempster highway on the western side, and the town of Tsiigehtchic, which is separated from the highway by the Arctic red river. We arrived at the river just as the ferry was pulling away with only one vehicle aboard. First it went over to the highway. Then it picked up someone there who had to go to Tsiigehtchic. finally, after about half an hour, it came back for us. Everyone I've spoken to curses the ferry, probably because they have all arrived, as I did, just to see it pull away. However, waiting half an hour is a small price to pay for mobility.

Day 2

You can judge the size of a town in the north by how many RCMP officers it has. Tulita has two. The Wells has four. McPherson qualifies for five.
McPherson (pronounced either Mick-FUR-sun or Mick-FEAR-sun) has about twice the population of Tulita at 800 people. It looks like so many northern towns, with dirt roads and standard northern housing. But there's something about it I like, although I cannot yet tell you exactly what it is.

Day 3

I drive Shane and his wife Alyssa into Inuvik so they can catch their plane. It is Labour Day, but the news stand is still open. I pop in for a Globe and Mail but the rack is empty.

"Do you have any copies of Saturday's Globe in the back?"

"Sorry, all sold out."

I drive around Inuvik for a bit, but there is nothing to see. Ugly residential sections and even uglier industrial sections. The speed limit in town is thirty five. My truck won't even go that slow. I have to accelerate and then coast. I decide to get the hell out of there and back on the highway. I never would have thought that driving one-ten on a dirt road would be so easy. About and hour and a half into the trip, I feel the rear end skidding out as I go around a turn. It is enough to make me back off to ninety.

Day 4

My first full day running the store on my own. The day seems to be going well until I go to put on my glasses after my shower. When I pick them up from the table, the right arm stays behind. I find the screw, but no amount of fiddling can get the damn thing to stay in. So I improvise. I use a bent staple in place of the screw and tape to hold it together.
After work, I get in the company truck, determined to get a line in the water. Out on the highway, the sun is low in the sky. CBC is on the radio.

"I'm Paul Kennedy. This is Ideas."

I cruise just over that next hill for several minutes, certain that I spotted a good fishing spot last week. Finally I stop at a lake that looks as good as any other. There is a small space on the side of the road, just large enough to park a truck without impeding traffic.

To get to the water, I soon realize that I'm not walking on ground at all. I'm walking on thick underbrush: dense and springy shrubs that grow out of marshy bog. It's ok for walking, as long as I look where I'm going, but as soon as I stop, the shrubs slowly give way. I cast twice before I start to feel the bog water seeping through my Adidas.

"To hell with it," I say.

However, my fishing is soon interrupted. It is silent out here, even though I'm less than a hundred yards from the so-called highway. But coming from the other side of the lake, I can hear someone calling "Hello!."
It is most definitely human. Of this, I am at first sure. I'm taken aback because it is out of place. I would have been less surprised to see a bear.
There is no sense of panic in the voice. Not much friendliness either. After two hellos, I yell back. There is another hello back, exactly the same as the last. It must be some lost hiker, I think to myself. Or someone fishing on the other side. There it is again.

"Hello!"

"Are you alright?" I yell.

"Hello!"

"Hello?"

"Hello!"

Then I see it. A loon swims into sight. I feel so stupid. luckily there is no one for miles who might have heard me. I guess he spotted a wet footed boobie and he wanted to move in for a closer look. Later his partner appears and they watch me fight with my lure, which is caught on a bush at the water's edge.

I don't stay long. About half an hour. But when I get back in the truck, Paul Kennedy is gone. The local radio station has taken over the frequency. With Buck Owens singing in the background, a woman is reading messages in that slow, monotone northern accent.

"This message is for Andrew Snowshoe. please Go down to the end of miller creek tomorrow to meet Judith and Dan. This message is for Ira Koe. If your listening, call home on channel 22 for an important message..."

Buck Owens comes through the AM radio loud and tinny. They call it country music for a reason. It's enough to drive you insane in the city, but I don't think I could handle anything post nineteen-eighty while driving into a dirt-road town with clapboard sidewalks. A kid is walking up the road and firing stones at a light pole, just to see if he can hit it. The sun is setting on my left, and there's a cloud of dust rising behind that truck that is driving this way.

The Wells

2007-08-26T20:03:00.001-07:00

I’ve had a lot of people say that life here in the north must be exciting. The truth is that life in the north can be weeks or months on end of boredom, followed by a few hours that make up for those boring stretches. I had one of those experiences last week. The company sent me to Norman Wells, the next town up on the Mackenzie River, to work for a week at the Northern Store there.

As I mentioned in a previous post, Norman Wells takes it’s name from the oil wells that Imperial Oil tapped into during World War Two. They are still pumping oil and natural gas today. Most of the houses in town are hooked up to cheap natural gas for their heat and hot water. They pave the main roads using oil (possibly mixed with some other chemicals) to stick the top layer of dirt together. One person told me that biologists have found fish downstream in the Mackenzie are dying from oil poisoning, although skeptics say that there has always been oil seeping from the ground into the Mackenzie.

Norman Wells is the hub of the Sahtu region, thanks to it’s airport. Most people consider it the place to be amongst the five Sahtu communities. It has several restaurants (four by my count), two stores, several gift shops, and a museum. It also has a liquor store and at least three bars. I’ve often heard it described as the “whitest” of the five communities. The population is predominately made up of energy sector workers brought in from the south.

The Northern Store in The Wells (nobody calls it “Norman Wells,” in day-to-day conversation) is a sight to be seen. I’m used to working in a big bright new building with high ceilings and tiled floors. In the Wells, the store was constructed by connecting seven ATCO rental trailers together. There are metal seams in the floor that become insurmountable speed bumps for your shopping cart. The shelving is old and dented, the aisles are narrow, and the fridges and coolers break down on a regular basis. The ceiling leaks all over the place. Midway through my stay, the power in the bathroom stopped without warning. No breakers were blown. Before I left, it came back on for no reason, but when I turned on the ceiling fan it started spraying water that had pooled in the fan’s plastic casing.

Despite its deficiencies, The store has some of the highest sales among similar sized stores in the company. They carry high end items that wouldn’t sell in most other Northern communities. Want crab legs, lobster tails, or premium steaks? They have them at the Northern. The store also has one section of shelving devoted entirely to “Newfie” items such as purity cookies, hardbread, and Lee’s Snowballs. They also sell buckets of salt beef. There are a lot of Newfoundlanders working in the oil business.

The week was uneventful. Work is work, and keeping shelves locked is rarely exciting. The best part of my job is meeting the characters who come in the store. One day, a Newfoundlander named Dudley introduced himself and started haggling over the price of a frozen turkey. He told me that he worked for Aurora college, but he was also the justice of the peace and the coroner. He was often in the store throughout the week. Once he came in to return a defective cordless phone.

“We’ll have to order another one in,” said the manager. “That was our last one.”

“But what do I do in the meantime. I got no phone.”

I couldn’t help interrupting.

“Here’s what you do, Dudley. Get yourself two tin cans and a piece of string…”

“Oh, yiss b’y. Where’d you say you came from?”

The housing there was nice. The Northern Store owns a duplex for it’s employees. I had a three bedroom house all to myself for a week. Around six thirty on Sunday morning, , I awoke to the sound of wood crunching. It was my only day to sleep in, but the sound was urgent enough that I managed to pull myself out of bed and look out the window. I could see that our front fence had been flattened and a white truck was pulling away. He had been backing out of the driveway across the street and had gone a bit too far. I cursed, got out of bed, and called the RCMP. Later that week I had to go give a statement. Apparently there was a second witness and the Mounties told me they had their man.

While all of this was fun, it was my last night in The Wells that made it all worth while. My friend Ron Oe, who took me fishing up on Great Bear Lake last year dropped by the store. I had run into his wife earlier in the week.

“How would you like to take the quads up to the mountains?”

I couldn’t say no to that one. I didn’t get out of work until eight thirty. Ron has two Honda four-wheelers which he bought for a song and then fixed up. It helps that he is a trained mechanic. We topped of the gas tanks and then roared off up towards the dump.

It was a beautiful night. After a week of rain and overcast skies, the air was warm and the sun was low in the sky, giving the landscape a golden glow.

I had never seen the appeal in four-wheeling before. My only experience on one had been bombing up and down a short logging road at my friend’s house when we were teens. Now Ron and I were flying through a maze of narrow trails, sometimes cutting back down the hill, other times launching up steep gravel banks. Before I was usually perched on the luggage racks while someone else drove. Now I was in control, and the feeling was exhilarating.

Finally we got up to the ridge above Jackfish Lake. Without warning, I looked to my right and saw nothing but some tiny trees four hundred feet or so below. But the path was solid and well maintained. I at no time felt as if I was in any danger. We stopped the quads and took in the view. Ron lit up one of his trademark captain black cigars, and I crawled on my belly to the edge of the cliff, sticking my nose out over the edge. Across the valley were even taller mountains. Ron told me that a local helicopter company takes people up there on the twenty first of June. From that height , you can watch the sun swing around the entire horizon without setting. However, tonight the sun was settling low at the end of the valley. Fortunately, sunsets last for hours this time of year, so we decided to head down to Jackfish Lake.

The town has developed the lake beautifully. Ant the end of the road they have a few campsites with fire pits. There is an unobtrusive path leading down to a well maintained dock. A battered canoe and a small zodiac were tied up, free for anyone to borrow. There were also two observation decks built into the side of the hill, where parents could sit and watch their kids swim. The water was crystal clear. A school of minnows was swimming below the dock, and two loons were out on the lake.

Climbing back on the quads, we roared up out of the valley and stopped to take in the view of the town before heading home. Lights were coming on in the twilight. The Mackenzie river snaked southward and northward as far as the eye could see, and the silhouette of the Mackenzie mountains loomed above the river, their jagged peaks finally free from cloud cover that had obscured them all week. I didn’t bother to bring my camera, and at the time I wished I had. Now I know it would have only slowed me down. The most expensive camera available would not have done the views justice. We were gone only two and a half hours, but I would gladly toil for another six months in the store for a few more hours such as those.

A trip to the outside

2007-08-12T13:02:00.000-07:00

When Pierre Burton lived in Dawson city as a child, he said that people referred to anywhere south as the “outside.” If you weren’t cooped up in Dawson for six months of winter, you were “outside” in the rest of the civilized world. While it is not quite that bad here in Tulita, I can say that seven months in the same small town can get to you. I have felt the first hints of cabin fever, and although I could always get on the internet or turn on the TV, after seven months you need a change of scenery.

We left for vacation of July 7th. 07/07/07. The luckiest day of the year. And I was inclined to agree. I had just spent six weeks running the store, shorthanded. I was burnt out to say the least, and in the last few days before we left, I started to not care that things were less than perfect at the store. My one useless stock boy had buggered off, and the cashiers were showing up late and leaving early. But none of that mattered. I couldn’t even sleep the last few nights. I had finally recaptured that feeling one gets in the run-up to Christmas when one is six. But this was going to be better than Christmas. Christmas is a mere day. I was looking forward to three weeks in the civilized world.

Leaving Tulita is no small feat. One must first board a plane at the airport and fly twenty minutes north to Norman Wells, Imperial Oil’s bastion of the north. Unlike every other nearby community, Norman Wells is a fairly new town. It was founded in the 1940s because of its oil reserves. The Americans built a pipeline to help the war effort. From there you catch a Canadian North flight to Edmonton, with a half hour stopover in Yellowknife to go through proper security. It is clear that the Canadian government doesn’t care what you bring north of sixty on a flight, but god help you if you try to bring anything back.

We got a ride from the Norman Wells airport with Larry, owner and proprietor of one of the local hotels. As we were driving into town, I noticed that the van wasn’t kicking up a cloud of dust.

“What do they use on the roads around here?” I asked Larry.

“Oil.”

“Oil?! Like, crude oil?”

“Oil. It’s better than dust.”

Anywhere else in Canada, if your furnace tank leaks, Environment Canada will come dig up your front lawn and leave you with a $20,000 bill. In Norman Wells, they spray it on the roads.

It was so strange to be somewhere other than Tulita and to know I would be without responsibilities or deadlines for the next three weeks. I picked up a copy of the Globe and Mail. It was the first time I had seen a newspaper that wasn’t at least a day old in seven months. Nicole often brings me back newspapers when she travels to Yellowknife. I hoard them like gold and often read every column and section. Even papers that are a month old have interesting stories. Our store gets only one paper a week. It’s a northern publication called News North, and even that arrives a day late. Sure we have the internet, but it’s not the same as seeing the news in black and white.

We ate at Larry’s hotel (which also has a small restaurant). It was the first of too many meals out. Our flight to Edmonton left at three. We boarded a 737 without even going through a metal detector. It’s still a strange feeling in this day and age.

I thought that my return to civilization would be a bit of a shock. More than one person had warned me that the pace is often too much for people who have spent a lot of time in the North. To me, it was as if I had never left. But it was strange to see a group of people and not know the names of any of them. Working at the store, I know the names of almost everyone in town.

With our luggage checked, we wandered around the airport, waiting for our flight to St. John’s. At one point, a businessman who was walking in front of us suddenly stopped and spun around.

“Hey Michael! How’s it going?”

Nicole and I jumped back and stopped. It was only then that I noticed the tiny Bluetooth headset resting on his ear. We both kept walking and laughed to ourselves. Later, a security guard whizzed past on a segway scooter. The future arrived while I was away.

Our flight to St. John’s was hellish. We somehow ended up in the emergency exit seats. They don’t recline, and since we were in the aisle and middle seats, sleep was all but impossible. There were seventeen empty seats in first class by my count, but the stewardess would not let us sit there.

“I’m sorry sir. I can’t upgrade you to first class.”

I wasn’t asking to be “upgraded” to first class. I just wanted to sit there and sleep for a few hours. But I let it go.

We arrived in St. John’s on Sunday the 8th at ten thirty local time. Nicole’s dad and sister were there to meet us at the airport. Her mom was home cooking up a massive “sunday dinner.” Besides a turkey and glazed ham, we had potatoes, turnips, carrots and cabbage boiled up with salt beef, and too many other sides to mention.

The next morning, five of us climbed into a new Daewoo car for an 11 hour drive across the entire island of Newfoundland. Our destination was Rose Blanche, a small fishing village on the south west coast, near Port-aux-Basques. It is the ancestral home of the Light’s Family, and it is where Nicole and I bought a small house with some of our savings from our first year in the north.

The drive was eventful to say the least, but I promised not to record any of it. These are my future in-laws, after all.

We arrived at our house at nine-thirty that night, just as it was getting dark. Having never seen the house in person, it exceeded all of our expectations. Nicole’s cousins came over and we had beer and pizza. Then we spent the night talking and checking out the features of the house.

The next day was mostly spent visiting relatives. First cousins Dave and Dianne. Then Aunt Marie and Uncle Willie, then cousin Tanya and Aunt Geraldine. And finally, Aunt Rose, who is actually Aunt to nobody. As Farley Mowat wrote in his book, Bay of Spirits, “Aunt” is a title bestowed on respected women all along the southwest coast of Newfoundland. She welcomed us into her house, which was lined with pictures of her children (one of whom is now a doctor). She offered us a drink of whiskey, noting that the doctor had told her a small drink was good for her now and then, as long as it was mixed with water.

“I like to mix mine with ginger ale though,” she said with a false whisper and a big grin.

Although seeing old friends was fun, by the end of the day that feeling of Christmas returned. I had been out visiting relatives when I really wanted to be home, playing with my toys. Only this time, the toy was my home.

The next morning we left for the east coast again. We stopped for a night in Corner Brook to look up old friends, most of whom were not home or had moved on.

The next week in St. John’s was uneventful. We spent our time visiting tourist attractions and going to the mall. I bought a few shirts, but even flush with cash I was unable to bring myself to spend 25 bucks on a shirt or 50 for a sweater. Fashion in the north tends towards the practical rather than the stylish. What I did buy was books. About 15 by the end of three weeks. I walked through Chapters, grabbing anything that looked interesting. It was the one pleasure I refused to deny myself. At one point, while carrying about seven books, a customer stopped me and asked me if I worked at the store. I guess he needed some help.

On Monday the 16th we went downtown to see the White Stripes concert. Although we had floor tickets, and although we started out very close to the stage, the notion of standing for two hours amongst a bunch of pierced and colorful teenagers didn’t appeal to us fogies. Luckily, Mile One Stadium has a restaurant up among the private boxes. We got two seats with a prime view of the stage. Jack White looked kind of small, but we could hear him fine and the beer tasted good.

The next day we flew to Nova Scotia. We spent a lot of time visiting family and friends, and there was more shopping. It was over all too quick. On the way back to the north, we stopped for a night in Edmonton and spent an afternoon at the West Edmonton Mall, once again buying almost nothing.

I will admit, it felt good to get back to Tulita. That really surprised me because I couldn’t wait to get the hell out of here when we left. Too much of anything (or anyplace) is a bad thing. Now I’m ready for another year.

After having spent a year in relative isolation, I’ve compiled a list of things you should not take for granted:

1. Family and friends
2. Bookstores
3. Cold beer with family and friends
4. Long drives to nowhere in particular
5. Fresh meat and vegetables
6. Newspapers (especially the weekend edition)

Everything else you can probably live without.

Flash Happy

2007-08-10T08:06:00.000-07:00

When we went on vacation in July, Nicole and I were in an unusual position. For the first time in our lives we had cash, but we didn't need anything. In the past year we had learned that living in the north wasn't exactly roughing it when it comes to getting day-to-day needs, meaning we didn't need to stock up on any items. We could only bring back what we could fit in our suitcases. I didn't want to spend money on expensive clothes that would only be ruined by days at the store. My one major purchase (besides a suitcase full of books) was a new digital SLR camera.

Tulita means "where the waters meet" in the local language. Here you can see the cold and crystal clear waters of the Bear River merging with the muddy waters of the Mackenzie. There is probably a 10 to 15 degree temperature difference between the waters. There is supposedly good fishing on the border of these two waters, although you need a boat to fish there.

The slopes of Great bear rock as seen from the air.

Another part of the rock. The swath cut through the trees in the center of the picture is the winter road.

Bear rock from the airport.

This picture was taken at the dump. This doesn't show how incredibly big these ravens are.

The Mackay Range mountains are a dominant feature of the landscape around Tulita. The first picture was taken from my yard. The second from the airport above town. I'm beginning to wonder when I'll get tired of taking pictures of this scene.

Bears in their natural habitat. (I wish).

Ursus aviation is the local charter company. Their motto is: "Don't be fooled by the orange and brown paint job or the orange shag carpeting in our planes. We do regular engine maintenance!"

Believe it or not, Mac the dog can fly. I have proof in these two pictures.

A chance picture I took one Sunday morning. That's the old Hudson's Bay warehouse where we keep our furniture.

Images of the Norwetta heading south on the Mackenzie. Customers pay upwards of $5000 for a week-long one-way trip up the Mackenzie.

Dangerous Creatures

2007-08-06T11:35:00.000-07:00

Last Thursday night I took the dog for a walk on the beach. It was getting late, and I had already driven up to the dump to get some pics of the bears with my new camera. But when I returned, Mackey was jumping around at the door, which is her way of asking to go out for a walk. So I took her down to the beach.

It was an uneventful walk, as far as I could tell. But when I got her back to the house, Nicole noticed something.

“Mackey has a splinter in her tongue!”

Mackey was sitting on the floor, looking up at us. Her tail was wagging and her tongue was hanging out. Sure enough, I could see a bi-colored splinter stuck in her lolling tongue.

“That’s not a splinter. That’s a porcupine quill.”

She was still looking up at us, apparently unaware that she had a huge spike in her tongue. I coaxed her onto the coach,. Then I tried to pry open her mouth and grab the quill. Her happy demeanor was quickly replaced by the scrunched up face of a resisting little child. As soon as I stopped she would resume panting and tail-wagging, her tongue hanging out as if to show off the quill.

The quill looked smaller than most I had seen. It didn’t seem to be in her tongue too deep, and she did not appear to be in pain. Yet I was beginning to worry. I had heard that quills slowly work their way into the skin. I had also heard that they have barbs like fishhooks that make them difficult to remove Throughout this whole ordeal, Nicole was very helpful. She mostly held Mackey’s head still and said things like, “Just grab it! Just yank it out!” Of course dog drool isn’t exactly sticky. It has what you might call lubricating properties. Any time I did manage to grab the quill, it slipped out of my fingers.

At this point, I did what any college educated person is bound to do when action isn’t working. I switched to research. A quick Google search of “porcupine quill in dog mouth” brought up all sorts of helpful links. They all showed disturbing pictures of dogs covered in quills and said things like:

“A few porcupine quills in a dogs face can usually be removed by the owner, but quills in the mouth will probably require a trip to the vet so that the dog can be sedated.”

I got up form the computer in disgust. A trip to the vet would probably cost us at least five hundred dollars. We would have to borrow a kennel, make arrangements to get her on the plane, make arrangements to pick her up. All because the damn dog had decided to see how a porcupine tastes.. I felt like an American parent who has learned their child has done something stupid and will need an expensive trip to the hospital.

The problem, I decided, was that Mac kept pulling her tongue into her mouth whenever I tried to grab the quill. If only there was some way to make her stick her tongue out.

I went to the cupboard and grabbed the extra large jar of peanut butter we had mailed to ourselves last year. I spooned some into a bowl, and then jammed my fingers into the mess.

“Here Mackey!”

Now instead of pulling her head away, her little tongue was darting in and out like a piston. This didn’t make grabbing the quill any easier. Neither did the great globs of peanut butter stuck to my fingers. At eleven o’clock, we gave up and went to bed.

In the morning, the quill was still there. Because she didn’t appear to be in any pain, we decided that there was no rush. Nicole made plans to call the vet for advice. We thought that maybe they could send up a mild sedative that would allow us to get the quill out.

As we were getting ready for work, Mac came in the bedroom and jumped up on the bed. She was lying on her back with her mouth open. Nicole and I looked at each other, and within seconds, she had grabbed the dog and I had grabbed the quill. It came out very easily, and Mac didn’t even flinch.

For Crown and Country

2007-06-22T20:54:00.000-07:00

It’s been a long time since I felt like writing. Today is the 21st of June, the longest day of the year. It’s a statutory holiday in the Northwest Territories because it is National Aboriginal Day. The Dene Band here in town held celebrations just across the road from our house. There were barbequed steaks, smoked grayling (a type of fish), an archery competition, and a drum dance. As I barbequed supper out on my deck, I could hear the steady thumping of ten or more drums pounding in unison.

Earlier in the day, as Nicole and I got ready to take the dog for a walk on the beach, we spotted the unmistakable sight of tourists. You can distinguish them a mile away in their shorts, windbreakers, and Gilligan style wide brimmed white hats. As soon as I saw them, I knew that the Norweta was in dock. Sure enough, when we walked out to blueberry hill, we could see the ship tied up at the point, along with a few more white hatted tourists ambling along the dirt road towards town.

The Norweta was built in 1971 as a passenger ship according to the ship’s website. It is now used as a tour boat that makes regular trips up and down the Mackenzie all summer long. Passengers pay upwards of $6000 each for an eight day tour (10 days if you’re going south against the current) between Hay River and Inuvik. From what I’ve seen, the passengers are usually retirees spending their kids inheritance. These rich, polite old folks are always friendly and a pleasure to talk to. We met one nice lady at the foot of Blueberry hill. She asked if the store was open because she wanted to buy another notepad for her travel log. I informed her the store was closed, but invited her to take advantage of the free steaks cooking up the hill.

Nicole and I went down to the beach, let the dog off the leash, and started walking towards the ship. Just a few short weeks ago, the beach was littered with massive chunks of ice after the breakup. I wanted to go down and get my picture taken next to some, but for some reason I never got around to it. Today they are gone and we made our way around and over the dead trees that now litter the beach. When we got to the Norweta, a crew member was swabbing the deck with a broom. He greeted us and we made some polite casual conversation about the weather, but he didn’t invite us aboard. We walked a bit further down the beach and then started back.

On our way back, an older gentleman in a beard was preparing to mount a bicycle to peddle into town. Mackie approached him and we struck up a conversation. He told us he was the historian and tour guide on the cruise. He told us that he had worked as an archeologist for the government, and was based out of the museum in Yellowknife. He had researched and suggested the name change for the town from Fort Norman to Tulita. He said he had just finish telling passengers on the ship the story of how one of Canada’s Governor Generals, Lord Tweedsmuir, had climbed Great Bear Rock with two bodygurads and then drank some whiskey atop the plateau while his two bodyguards were rescued by a team of locals.

As we were talking, we had to get out of the way of a huge yellow grader that was scraping the road. All day today, the town worked through the holiday leveling the dirt roads around town, and spraying them with a chemical that is supposed to reduce dust. We learned they are doing this because Prince Andrew will be in town next weekend (or possibly the weekend after) to set out on a canoe trip. First Leslie Neilson, and now Prince Andrew. We are forever being besiged by our social superiors here in Tulita. I think I will make an effort to get the Prince’s photo if he does show up in town. Oh, and apparently this is supposed to be a secret. And here I am posting it on the internet. Oh bother.

Dog's in the Cradle

2007-05-19T06:40:00.000-07:00

Mac the dog turned one on the 13 (last Sunday). I was at work that day, preparing for yet another visit from the bigwigs.

My dog turned one just the other day.
She said "Thanks for the ball Dad,
C'mon lets play!
Can you teach me to fetch?"
I said "Not today,
I got a lot to do."
She said, "Thats ok."

But I swear I heard her say As I walked away,
she said, "I'm gonna eat your shoe
Dad, you know I'm gonna eat your shoe..."

With apologies to Harry Chapin.

Breakup

2007-05-06T19:35:00.000-07:00

Friday, May 4

There are different signs of spring in the north than what we are used to in the south. We still look for the familiar “v” of geese in the sky, but instead of robins, we look for the first seagull at the dump. The first day the temperature rose above minus twenty was a big milestone. That was back near the end of march. The days are now much longer than they are short. We go to bed with light peaking in from behind the blinds. The snow is all gone, here in the first of may, except in the shaded areas on the edge of the woods. But until today, the river was still a solid mass of ice.

Last Monday I took the dog for our first walk down on the beach in a year. The ice along the banks of the river was breaking up. Mac was wading into the water for drinks, and she was trying to get up onto the unbroken sheet of ice that covered the river. There were several skidoos parked on the edge of this ice. People who were camping on the far side of the river had traveled home to Tulita, only to find the edge of the ice gone. Danny, one of the fellows I work with, saw people racing their skidoos across this open stretch of water and up onto the rocky beach. If you get a skidoo moving fast enough, it will stay on top of the water for a while. I guess it’s better to run your skidoo on to the shore than have it carried away on an ice floe.

Today, Nicole and I ate our lunch, unaware that the frozen river outside our window was about to break free. As soon as I went in the store after lunch, the boss and his wife took the truck down to “the point” to see the ice breaking. The Point is at the southern end of town. It is where most people launch their boats, and where the barge lands to unload. They came back a half hour later, saying that the ice was cracking and the water rising a bit.

By two o’clock, there was open water in front of our hose. Big pans of ice were slowly drifting past. Everyone came down to blueberry hill, at the corner of our company’s property, to watch the ice drifting. Trucks were roaring back and forth towards the point, and teachers led screaming kids down for the show. We watched as the remnants of the ice road drifted past on a single pan of ice, like some tiny tectonic plate.

I didn’t get off work until eight thirty, but as soon as we finished supper, Nicole and I took the dog for a walk down by the river. It was a very different scene from what we had seen at lunch. The river was flowing much faster, and the large pans of ice had been replaced by a mishmash of smaller (although still large) chunks. The water had risen again to the point where the beach was covered in ice and tree trunks.

We stood by the edge of the ice and watched the river rise and fall in quick spurts. Jams miles downriver were causing the water level to rise and fall, sometimes as much as a foot or more. I've uploaded an AVI file to show how fast the ice was flowing. (7mb, 21 seconds)

Sunday, May 6
The elders are right. Within three days of the river breaking, there is always a snowstorm. Ours came . Fat wet flakes. It piled up fast. We got about five centimeters. By suppertime the sun was out and water was dripping off the roof. At times the ice was flowing by amazingly fast. Other times, it slowed to a crawl.

Today we took another walk down to the point. Even more ice had been pushed up onto the shore. Places where we had stood on Friday night were now covered in massive chunks of ice. There had been a large piece of scrap metal down at the point on Friday night. It probably weighed more than a ton. Today it lay twisted among the burgs.

Each piece of ice was unique. most were dirty. Other pieces were bright blue, and stood out among the white and brown. Still other piece were almost crystal clear, with tiny flaws littered throughout.

Now, as I get ready for bed, I can say that there is more water than ice visible in the Mackenzie. In a few days there will be boats in the water where skidoos traveled only a week before.

Salvatore and Giovanni

2007-04-01T17:11:00.000-07:00

On Thursday night I was paged to the front of the store just after closing time. Two men were standing by the till and talking to Lina. One of them was wearing a brightly colored ski jacket, the other was in a coat much too thin for this weather. Lina looked at me and mouthed the words “say no” as I approached the counter. I greeted them and Lina said that they wanted to exchange euros for Canadian dollars. I told the men that there was no way for us to do that. I could smell the faint hint of an expensive cologne.
“No bank here?”
“No. There is a bank in Norman Wells. I‘m sure they could do it.”
“How far away is it?”
“About an hour away.”
“One hour?”
“An hour or an hour and a half.”
“One hour?”
“One hundred kilometers.”
This registered with the man.
“Okay. There is bus there?”
“No, no buses. You can fly or drive. Rent a truck.”
“Fly? Too expensive.”

I wondered how two men could get to Tulita from somewhere in Europe (I couldn’t place the accent) without stopping to exchange their money. And if they had come this far, why wouldn’t they pay a few hundred extra dollars to get to the next town? A town with finer hotels and a few restaurants.
Meanwhile, the man’s friend noticed our bank machine in the corner. He called out to him. The man looked at me.
“Your machine work?”
“It may work for you,” I said, not knowing if our humble little cash machine could exchange euros in some European account for Canadian dollars.
They consulted with the machine and seemed satisfied after a while. They then left the store. I would have struck up a conversation with them and asked them what brought them to Tulita, but they seemed fairly mad and unfriendly, so I just let them go.

On Friday morning there was a truck waiting for us outside the store. It was only half a load, but we spilled a pallet of pepsi as it was coming off the truck. It turned a one hour job into a two hour job. A can of pepsi will freeze fairly quickly when it is 20 below.
Nicole called me around 11:00. She was laughing.
“There’s these two guys at the hotel. You’ll never believe this. They’re from Italy and their spiritual advisor told them they have to be in Tulita on Monday morning to receive some good luck!”

If ever there was a story for CBC radio, this was it. I asked Nicole to invite them over for dinner if she saw them. But she didn’t have to, because I saw them first. As soon as I waked out into the store, there were the Italians in their ugly ski-suit glory. I ran over to introduce myself. The man said his name was Giovanni.
“How about you come to our house tonight for supper? Chicken?”
“Yes, chicken? Good. Come here,” he gestured towards the front door. We went over and he pointed at a snowmobile.
“We want to rent one of these?”
I knew locals would rent their snowmobiles to oil companies. I asked a few people, and I got a few names, but after a few phone calls I had no luck in locating a skidoo for them. I told them I would try later.

Nicole, being the saint that she is, cooked dinner for four that night. I left work a bit early, and a few minutes before eight, I walked over to the hotel to get them. Giovanni introduced me to his friend, Salvatore. Salvatore spoke almost no English, Giovanni later explained to us. Giovanni had traveled throughout Europe when he was younger, and had spent several months in England. So his English was ok. Giovanni had asked him along on this trip for that very reason.
Cooking dinner for Italians is probably difficult enough when you have access to fresh vegetables and meat. We apologized for the quality of our humble salad, with its wilted lettuce and mushy tomatoes. The two men puzzled over the Kraft Italian dressing on our table. Salvatore eventually came up with a name for it that Giovanni agreed with. In broken English Salvatore spoke about the high quality of food and fashion that all Italians enjoy.
We learned that the two men work at a car dealership on the island of Sicily. Salvatore was the owner. Giovanni a salesman. He produced a business card that showed logos of everything from Ford to Jaguar and Porsche.
At times, the two men would argue for five minutes at a time in Italian. Nicole and I sat in awkward silence as they gestured and spoke over each other, only to calm down. Sometimes there was an explanation of what they were arguing about, other times, the subject was changed.
Eventually the subject changed to what had brought the meant here. Salvatore spoke while Giovanni translated, sentence by sentence. Salvatore had been consulting an astrologer for many years now. This particular astrologer was highly regarded, and even consulted with Prime Minister Berlusconi himself. His method was different from most. He was able to pinpoint the exact location on earth one should be on their Birthday in order to achieve the best influence from the stars and planets. In past years, Salvatore had traveled to New Orleans, Africa, and Australia to celebrate his birthday. This year, the Astronomer had told him Tulita, Northwest Territories, Canada.
It was clear that Salvatore believed this without a doubt. He was not embarrassed or shy to share this information with us. He had just dropped thousands of dollars to jump on a plane and fly to the middle of nowhere in order to have good luck. This made perfect sense to him.
The two never did get to go for a skidoo ride. I tired calling a few more people over the next few days, but without any luck. Salvatore mostly stayed in his warm hotel room. I dropped by to see them on Sunday. He had managed to find a soccer game on Fox Sports. One of the teams was Italian.
Giovanni ventured out throughout the weekend in his conspicuous snowsuit, but found the -40 windchill too much for his face and hands. The locals were more or less ambivalent to these strange visitors. I would have thought that someone else would have taken an interest in their story and invited them out for some traditional northern food.
Because of their broken English and my own lack of time, I decided not to bother with a radio piece and instead submitted a story about the men to the News North. Apparently they didn’t like my story because they never replied.
They flew out on Monday morning: Salvatore’s 53rd birthday. He only needed to be present in the very early morning, the time which corresponded with his birth in Italy in order to receive good luck. I soon have to write them a letter and let them know that their story didn’t make the cut. They promised Nicole and I that if we ever come to Sicily, we are welcome to stay at their homes. I told them I’d be happy with a test drive in a Porsche.

Bulletin Board

2007-02-25T20:53:00.000-08:00

Stop calling me Shirley!

2007-02-22T21:21:00.000-08:00

Last Thursday, a plane carrying Leslie Nielsen landed at Tulita’s humble airport. I wasn’t there to greet him because I had to work. Even with the day off, I probably wouldn’t have walked up to the airport to greet him. It’s a long way to go at thirty below.

My boss came up to me just before lunch. He had just been talking to the RCMP officer, who was on his way to the airport to pick up Mr. Neilsen and escort him around town. Neilsen’s father had been an RCMP officer stationed in the town when Leslie was a baby. He was transferred out of Tulita (then called Ft. Norman) when Neilsen was three years old, so the actor has no memories of Tulita. The afternoon radio host on CKLB Yellowknife (your First Nation radio station) interviewed Neilsen days before he arrived in Yellowknife.

“Surely you must have some memories of Tulita.”

“No I don’t! And stop calling me Shirley!”

Keeping that in mind, it was all the more nice of him to come. I made a point of hanging around the front of the store that afternoon, just in case he came in to buy a coffee. But there was no sign of him.

Darren the produce guy came in to start work around five.

“I saw him getting off the plane. He was just shuffling like an old man! I almost called out to him and told him it’s time to retire.”

“You went up to the airport to see him arrive?” I asked. This seemed out of character with Darren.

“No way! I was seeing my kids off. They’re going to Fort Simpson. His plane just happened to get in at the same time.”

About half an hour before closing, my boss and his wife grabbed their camera and ran over to the School. People coming in the store said he had given a speech and was sticking around for the feast. They returned within fifteen minutes, digital camera in hand.

“You saw him?”

He turned on his camera and showed me the picture. The two of them were posing on either side of that familiar face. Although Leslie Neilsen has always looked old, he looked REALLY old in this picture.

“What did you say to him?”

“Not much really. We just waited in line to get our picture taken with him.”

I waited all the next day for him to come in the store. He didn’t.

He didn’t come in the store on Saturday either. Rob, one of the employees at the store, left work a half hour early to go play in the “Neilsen Invitational Hockey Tournament.” Leslie was scheduled to drop the puck at the game (that’s like throwing out the first pitch at a baseball game for all you American readers).

In a way, I’m glad I didn’t meet him. Meeting a celebrity is almost always a let down. I could have gone over to the feast if I had really wanted, and had my picture taken with some movie star. But it would have been weird. It would have been as if I was treating him like a movie prop rather than a person. He wouldn’t want to talk to me, so why would I want to talk to him.

Still, I would have settled for missing him on my lunch break. Then I could have at least said “I almost met Leslie Neilson except I was on my lunch break when he came in the store.”

Leslie Nielson is Coming to Tulita!

2007-01-11T06:27:00.000-08:00

Leslie Nielson is coming to Tulita!

What more needs to be said?

(Okay, he used to live here when he was a kid and his father was in the RCMP)

Ice Caps

2007-01-07T11:31:00.000-08:00

I will admit that at many times I have been an ignorant country bumpkin when it comes to matters of food and culture. I’m still not sure which fork I should use first when I’m given the choice of more than one. But there are times when I am reminded just how far away from civilization I really am up here.

We have, at the entrance to our store, a counter that offers coffee, cappuccino, and kool-aid slushies. Of course it isn’t real cappuccino. It’s the same stuff you get at Tim Hortons: a form of glorified hot chocolate that is 98% sugar and 2% water. The slushies are even worse. They are so sweet that the kids in town complain if we don’t water down the mix.

Just before Christmas, the company sent us iced cappuccino mix. Once again, coffee flavored sugar, only this one was designed to go in our slushie machine. Now here is a tip for all you future entrepreneurs reading this blog. There is no worse time to launch an iced drink product than when the temperature is 20 below. Sales were sluggish to say the least.

One night, just before close, a woman approached me while I was working at the till.

“How much are your ice caps?”

I told her the price and she paid for a large. Five minutes later she came back to the till with two large paper coffee cups in hand.

“I wanted to get one for my husband too. I’ll pay for another.”

“Are we out of slushie cups?” I asked. Most people get slushies in clear plastic cups. The woman looked confused.

“No, I just want to pay for another large.”

I smiled politely and reached for her paper cup. It was warm.

“Those are cappuccinos,” I said. “They’re cheaper.”

“Yes, Ice cappuccinos. That’s another large.”

“No, what I mean is… ice caps are cold. Ice. They come from that machine over there. These are hot cappuccinos.”

I was trying to be polite as possible. Ice caps cost twice as much as regular cappuccinos, and she had already paid for one. But the woman was loosing her patience.

“Oh whatever!” She snapped. “Just ring it in.”

So I bit my tongue and rang in her drink.

The next day she came in again with some other people. I was on till again. I watched as she dispensed two “hot” cappuccinos from the machine. She came to the till. I smiled and said hello. She smiled back.

“Two hot ice caps please.”

“Anything else with that?”

“No, that’s everything.”

I wish I could say I took this one, but it was taken by Nicole through our living room window. Those are trucks driving southward along the winter road on the Mackenzie.

Do Bears....?

2007-01-01T09:37:00.000-08:00

This story took place in July, although I’m only now getting around to writing about it. It was when Nicole was home in St. John’s, and I was living the messy life of a bachelor. I left work for lunch that day, and as I went out the loading doors at the back of the store, I noticed some tracks in the mud. Tracks I hadn't noticed when I had been out these doors earlier in the morning.

They were huge, and I instantly assumed they were bear tracks. I studied them more closely, trying to make sure they weren’t wolf tracks. Certain prints almost looked like the paw pads of a large dog, but there were too many toes. Some of the prints were a different shape, suggesting front and hind tracks. I made a note to myself to show these to the boss when I got back to work.

I don’t remember what I ate for lunch that day, but I definitely put Mackey out on her leash, as I always do when I’m home for lunch. After about a half hour, I brought the dog in and headed down my front steps and back towards work.

There have been a few select times in my life when, upon seeing something for the first time, I have instantly known what it was. The first time I saw a Picasso painting in Montreal, for instance. I had never seen that particular painting, but I knew from the style that it had to be Picasso.

What I saw that day was, in a word, breathtaking. I was filled with curiosity, amazement, and, in the more primal reaches of my brain, a sense of fear. It was a pile of S#!^ unlike any I had ever seen before. And as soon as I saw it, my brain told me in no uncertain terms, “That could only have come from a bear.”

The logic of this thought followed behind it, like the passenger cars of a train slamming into the derailed engine. You’ve just seen bear tracks over there. It's too big to have come from anywhere else. It's not from a moose. It's not from a wolf.

As I stood there, lost in all these thoughts and emotions, a possibly more profound thought came over me. “How did I miss this on the way home for lunch?” The pile was so huge, it had stopped me dead in my tracks. It was nearly as wide as the two tire ruts from our company’s half-ton. For that question, I had no immediate answer.

I went in the store and found my boss, who was putting something the shelf at the time.

“Do you know what bear s#!^ looks like?”

He grinned in a knowing sort of way (dare I say a s#!^-eating grin?) and confirmed that he did know of the subject. I took him outside to show him the tracks and the pile of feces between the houses. He confirmed what I already knew. He was so impressed that he got his wife and brought her outside to see the tracks as well. I don’t think he showed her the poop.

For the next few days, I was still at a loss to explain how I had passed “the pile” on my way home for lunch. Every time I passed it (I left it there for a few days until Macky tried to eat the remnants of the bear's undigested lunch), I knew it was too big to have been missed on my way home. My answer came one night as I was getting ready to go home. I was in the staff room talking to Darren, our produce guy. He works days for the town and evenings at our store. Occasionally he also works night in the drunk tank. He’s also the only justice of the peace in town. In other words, the man never stops.

“Did you hear about the bear that was in town the other day?” he asked me.

“No, but I think I saw its tracks.”

“Yeah, Ron (the RCMP officer) called me from work to help him chase it out of town.”

“Where was it?”

“Right here by the store. We chased it down by the river. Didn’t have to shoot it thought.”

“What time was this?”

“Right around lunchtime”

And Bingo was his Name-O

2006-12-17T18:58:00.000-08:00

Bingo is King in Tulita. It is always played at least once a week, and most weeks they play it twice. Almost every woman in town plays. The men aren’t shy about playing either. The Hamlet (our “town hall“) has a small radio station used for emergencies, and for Bingo. Don’t ask me who puts on most of the weekly bingos or where the proceeds go. It’s a mystery to me.

At least three times a year, a big-ticket prize bingo is held. One around Father’s day, one during the Tulita hand games, and one at Christmas. The Hamlet comes to our store and buys about ten prizes. For the last father’s day Bingo they bought a Skidoo, a TV, and a digital camera among other things.

Last Friday they bought another slew of prizes, along with turkeys and hams. When we went to deliver the prizes at 6pm, half the town was in the Hamlet parking lot. They were lining up to buy their cards. Nicole had already bought her cards at five. $30 for an entrance fee, $40 for a book of ten cards, and $6 for the jackpot card. She knew I would be working late (as usual), so she went down to her boss’s house to play.

I got home around 9:30. At 10:30 I turned on the radio to hear if he bingo was nearing the end. It wasn’t.

In a community of 500 people, I already know most of the adults through work at the store. I could put a face to the name of almost every winner they announced as they drew numbers for turkeys. Nicole’s name was not amongst the winners. At 11:00 I went to bed.

Around 11:45, the phone rang. It was Nicole.

“I won a chainsaw. Can you meet me at the hamlet and carry it home?”

I sort of knew as soon as she told me she was going to play bingo that she would win something useless. I suspected it would be the karaoke machine. Don’t get me wrong. A chainsaw is a pretty useful thing if you have a woodstove or a property with trees. I have neither. So now we have a $500 chainsaw, still in the box, sitting in our porch. It’s a Poulan Pro, in case you’re wondering which brand it is. Technically, I can’t sell it. I’m not supposed to sell anything that the store sells, because that would put me in competition with the store. I’d be stealing sales from the store. But it ain’t my chainsaw. It’s Nicole‘s, and she can do whatever she wants with it. I have washed my hands of the matter.

She has already had a few offers, but none have met the asking price of $400. “I might give you $250 for it,” is a common offer. But it’s a $500 chainsaw. She isn’t about to just give it away. And to get one at a cheaper price in Yellowknife would cost you hundreds in transportation expenses.

Nicole says she’s not going to play any more bingos until the next big prize bingo, probably next June.

In other news, we're dogsitting for a couple who are going home for Christmas. They adopted one of Mackey's brothers, but only after he had been abandoned by his first owners. The kids in town gave him the unfortunate name of "Pizza," and that is what his new owners still call him.

This is a picture of the two, playing nicely. That's mackey on the right.

One of the perks of living in the north is that Santa is always close by. In fact, he lives just up the road. Here is a pic of me and the big guy at his house.

The Winter Road

2006-12-03T15:31:00.000-08:00

Last night as my boss and I went to the warehouse to deliver some furniture, we saw the eerie sight of lights out on the Mackenzie ice. It was a clear night and the moon was out, so you could make out McKay Range mountains on the opposite shore. Three sets of headlights were crawling along the ice about a kilometer away. Earlier in the day, plumes of steam or fog were rising from open holes in the ice.

My boss said they go out at night to drill holes in the ice to allow water to come to the surface and freeze. The ice alone is not thick enough to safely support vehicles, so they repeatedly flood the surface to make it thicker. There is always the danger that too much water will come up and melt all the way through. This past week, a man in a town further south was killed when his bobcat broke through the surface of the Mackenzie. He was helping clear ice for construction of the road.

Tulita is a key junction on the winter road. Because of the pocket of dangerously thin ice created by the shallow and swift-moving Great Bear River, the road must reach out over the Mackenzie to detour the thin ice. The road from Tulita south is relatively easy to build. We’ve heard it will be open on December 15th. But to travel further north, the small detour over the Mackenzie must be deemed safe. It won’t be ready until January.

When we arrived in the spring, construction was supposed to begin on a bridge over the Great Bear River. But the twenty-five million dollars earmarked by the territorial government was not enough for any construction companies to make a profit. Now that money is being spent on upgrading the path that is the winter road. I suspect that in twenty years time, one will be able to drive in the summer through the territories all the way the Beaufort sea . One can already go overland through the Yukon.

The sun has just set behind the mountains across the river. It is only 3pm. This morning I slept in, and watched the sun rise as I ate my breakfast at eleven.

One note on the temperature. This past week, it dropped down to thirty five below. It was painfully cold. Today it is only twenty below, with no wind. Believe it or not, it is noticeably warmer. Think of the difference between five and twenty degrees. Now transpose that to the other end of the thermometer. I just took Mackey for a walk, and I worked up a sweat. Sure, I was wearing a parka and long underwear, but I passed locals with jackets and baseball caps. When I was in Yellowknife, it was only seven below on the first night. I didn’t even bother wearing gloves.A pic of mackey with the old Hudson's Bay Warehouse and the Mackenzie River in the background. Until this summer, the warehouse was used for dry goods such as sugar and flour. Now we use it for furniture.

A Ridiculously Long Post

2006-11-24T20:56:00.000-08:00

Last May, when my folks were away on holiday, and Nicole was in St. John’s, I went to a jewelry store in Halifax and bought a ring for Nicole. I knew that I wanted to propose to her, and I was reasonably sure she would accept. What I didn’t know was how long it would be before I would have another opportunity to buy a ring. So in a single frenzied afternoon when I was supposed to be running other errands, I ran from store to store looking for the right ring.

The woman who sold me the ring found out that we were moving north, and warned me not to trust the postal system or even the airlines with the ring. Do not mail it to yourself. Do not put it in your checked baggage. Carry it with you at all times.

My first plan was to just carry the ring in my coat pocket. But in the days leading up to our departure, I started to become paranoid that customs officials would see the ring in their x-ray machine, and they would want to inspect it, thus spoiling the surprise and forcing me to propose in an airport customs line (which would have made for a good story, but not one I wanted to tell if I could help it). Then I thought that I could hide the ring in my sock or tape it to my leg. But then I worried it might set off the metal detectors. In the end, I decided to take the ring out of the box and hide it in a pair of (clean) socks in my carry-on bag.

Going through customs in Halifax was a breeze. They didn’t question anything in my overloaded book bag. It’s a wonder because the tangle of electronics, wires, and my battery charger must have looked like a small bomb waiting to go off.

Edmonton, however, was a different story. You are advised to arrive at the Edmonton airport two hours early in order to get through the long inspection lines in time for your flight. There were so many officials, I was hoping that Nicole and I would be directed to two separate lines. But of course we ended up in the same line, with her going first.

I could tell long before it was our turn that the short-haired woman doing the inspections took her job seriously. She stared long and hard at the x-ray of every bag that was going through her machine, and she consulted with her partner on several items, asking more than one person to open their bag.

Of course, Nicole got through without any problems. I hinted that she should run ahead to find our gate, and that I would catch up.

“No, I’ll just wait here for you.”

“Why don’t you go wait over there. I think you’re blocking traffic.”

“No I’m not. I’ll just be right here.”

Meanwhile, short-haired lady was staring at her computer screen with a frown.

“Sir, what sorts of electronics do you have in this bag?”

Our last minute packing was so frenzied, I couldn’t quite remember all that I had put in there. Already I was getting nervous because Nicole wouldn’t leave.

“Ummm, I’ve got an mp3 player and a digital camera. Oh, and a battery charger. Hey Nicole, seriously, why don’t you go wait over there.”

“Any radios, sir?”

“Oh yeah! I forgot. My radio too.”

She stared at her screen a moment longer, and consulted with her partner.

“I cant figure out what this is here? What does it look like to you?”

“C’mon Nicole, you don’t need to hang around here. Just run ahead and find our gate.

“No, Brodie, I want to wait here with you.”

“Sir, would you mind opening your bag?”

I was breaking out in a sweat now, I could tell my face was turning red.

“Sure, no problem.”

Then I turned to Nicole and spoke to her though my teeth.

“Nicole. Go. Wait. Over. There.”

She furrowed her brow and stormed off out of earshot, but watching from a distance. As soon as I was sure Nicole couldn’t hear, I spoke with the woman.

“Is it small and round? Is what you want to see small and round?”

I could feel my heart racing at this point. I knew I looked visibly distressed, and I knew that the short-haired woman was very aware of my distress.

“No. I see that, but I want to know that this bundle of wires is.”

The bundle of wires was a set of headphones. I started to calm down as she rummaged through my bag. I told her why I was so nervous, and the tension was instantly lifted. She smiled for the first time, and once she located the bundle of wires at the bottom of my book bag, I walked on to meet up with a somewhat pissed-off Nicole.

Proposing is a difficult proposition. I wanted it to be special and memorable. At first I thought about proposing at midnight, with the summer sun still out. At that time we were still living in the log hovel down by the water. It wasn’t the most romantic place. As the summer dragged on, I began to think about proposing under the northern lights.

When the lights finally started coming out, I learned that they are unpredictable. I’d have to wait for the right showing, preferably on a night when I didn’t have to work the next day, and then I’d have to get the ring from the bottom of my sock drawer and drag Nicole outside. The logistics were too messy, especially after she sprained her ankle.

So our trip to Yellowknife seemed to be the best option. We were going to get Mackey spayed. We could have just sent her out on the plane, but Nicole wanted to get out of town for a few days. She timed the trip to coincide with our fifth anniversary. What better opportunity?

We almost didn’t make it out. It is slightly cheaper to charter a flight with the local charter company than to fly with the local airline. I suspect it is cheaper because the charter planes are older, smaller, and have uglier paint jobs than the airline. But on the morning we were supposed to leave, it was snowing, and visibility was poor. Our pilot said he didn’t feel comfortable flying. Luckily, the local airline was flying because they have better navigational equipment. We made it to Norman Wells, and then boarded a 737 for Yellowknife.

On Friday morning, we dropped Mackey off at the vet. We planned to spend the rest of the day Christmas shopping. All day, Nicole dragged me into every jewelry store she could find, dropping hints about engagement rings. Little did she know, I already had her ring in my coat pocket (and it was MUCH more expensive than the ones she was pointing out).

That night we went to a restaurant in Old Town Yellowknife. Old Town is what Yellowknife was before urban sprawl set in. It is down on the edge of Great Slave Lake, and it reminds me of any small Newfoundland town. The roads wind between giant granite boulders, and houses are perched on rocky hills. The restaurant we chose was called Oldtown Landing. Somewhat swanky, but not too stuffy either. The sort of place where you can order a bottle of wine with supper, which we did.

We started with the crab dip. Then I had a buffalo steak (yes, real buffalo) and Nicole had the stuffed whitefish. We were making short work of the bottle of wine. I didn’t know you were supposed to wait for the waitress to come top off your glass.

I wasn’t sure when it would be appropriate to pop the question. Perhaps proposing in a restaurant is just a movie cliché. I chose to propose during dessert, for no other reason than to delay the inevitable for as long as possible. Finally, after Nicole was three bites into her cheese cake, I got up from my side of the table, got down on one knee and took out the ring. I don’t remember exactly what she said, but it included “oh, Brodie, not here” and “did I pressure you into buying a ring today?” To which I replied “No I bought the ring in May. I bought it before we came up here. Now will you marry me?” And she relented and said yes and then we went back to our dessert, except neither one of us could eat at that point.

Oh, I forgot the best part. On our flight from Tulita to Norman Wells, Mackey threw up in her kennel. I took the dog and the kennel outside the Norman Wells airport to clean up the mess, but by the time I got some paper towel from the bathroom, the puke was already starting to freeze solid. You know it’s cold when…

“Talk of your cold! Through the parka’s fold it stabbed like a driven nail”

2006-11-12T19:40:00.000-08:00

It is hellish cold. Winter is here. It started around thanksgiving with the first dusting of snow. At first it would go above freezing in the day. But then it stayed below zero. Pans of ice began flowing down the river. They moved past much more slowly than the logs in the spring. The water level in the Mackenzie dropped significantly as well. The edge of the river retreated twenty feet or more. Now there is more ice than water in the river, although it is weeks away from being solid. Remember that in two month’s time, eighteen wheelers will be driving across the Mackenzie.

It doesn’t really snow here. I miss the big fat flakes of the east coast. Instead it just gets so wickedly cold that any moisture in the air freezes and clings to the trees or falls to the ground in small particles. You don’t need a shovel to clean off the steps. A broom is much more efficient at brushing away the dust. And the powder that forms has yet to pack down. You can’t make a snowman with the snow that is in my yard.

I broke down and bought gloves the other day. God knows we brought fifty pairs with us, but I’ll be damned if I can find any of them now. I bought them after a quick trip to the warehouse to grab a few boxes of Christmas decorations. My fingers got painfully cold very quickly. It was -20 after all. The gloves I bought have a rawhide outside and a fur pile inside. My boss warned me that the fur would get crushed and inefficient before long. He recommended wearing gloves inside mittens. Mittens are a must, because individually wrapped fingers can’t keep themselves warm. But when you do need those fingers, you can take off the mittens and still have the protection of the gloves.

Everyone talks about the “dry cold” of the north. Living by a river that has yet to freeze, I can’t say I know what a “dry cold” feels like. Apparently, once the river freezes, it won’t feel as cold, although it will technically be colder. I don’t care what the humidity is: minus twenty is cold.
The days are getting noticeably shorter now. Even with daylight savings, the sun doesn’t rise until twenty to ten. It seems to come out of the south-west, instead of the east. It then does a slow, shallow arc through the western sky, hanging over the river. It never rises above 45 degrees from the ground. Go outside at twelve noon and it feels like late afternoon. The frost in the air causes sun dogs to form on either side. It then sets in the north-west before five.

At night there is usually a white ring around the moon. The stars don’t simply twinkle; they seem to change color, with flashes of red and blue so noticeable that Nicole and I spent five minutes one morning trying to decide if it was a star or a plane we were watching in the western sky.

While these atmospheric displays are amazing, they are forgotten when the northern lights come out to play. Tonight the lights are a still, green glow stretching towards the north. Two long trails of light merged into one directly over my head. On other nights they look like a shimmering curtain. There’s a line from a song that rings true whenever I see the lights.

“the northern lights give a ghostly glow
It’s hard to tell if they’re really there”

The only adjective for this light is ghostly. Any other light you see at night either comes from the moon, or from man made lights. The northern lights are not tied to either of these. They are visible without illuminating anything else. They don’t rely on the moon or stars for their light. The stars are still visible behind them. You can’t say for certain where they begin or end because they are always moving. All you can say for sure is that they are there. They are indescribable, so I’ll stop trying to describe them. But I will say this: no picture will do them justice.

Twenty-Four Hours on the Bear

2006-10-15T08:39:00.000-07:00

This is the first fish I caught on my September trip to Great Bear Lake. We hadn’t been on the water for an hour when Ron Oe (pronounced exactly as it’s spelled: ohh-eee) stopped his boat. We were about halfway to our destination for that night. The sun was getting low but Ron just had to try for a few grayling. This, he assured me, was the best spot on the river. Ron got a bite on his second cast. My line got tangled on my second cast. Within minutes, Ron had two small grayling in the boat (each about two pounds). He took my crappy fishing rod from me and gave me one of his spares. Within a few more minutes, we each had a fish on our lines. But while Ron was having little trouble reeling his in, my rod was doubled over.

“I must have a snag!” I said. And then I felt the fish pull away. The brake on the reel allows line to come off rather than snapping. The fish was pulling the line off almost as fast as I could wind it on. Ron got his grayling in the boat and then came to assist me. We had no dip net, so I maneuvered the fish to the side of the boat, and Ron hooked his fingers under the gills and pulled it into the boat. I was swearing like a sailor and Ron, through his laughter, mumbled “language.” I later found out Ron is a Christian. So I felt a bit guilty after that. But it was still an amazing experience. I was later told that it is very, very unusual to catch a bull trout on the river. It weighed in at 13 pounds, in case you were wondering.

Later that night we went to stay at Ron's friend's cabin. During World War Two, the Americans mined uranium for one of the atomic bombs from the far eastern side of Great Bear Lake. They used a barge to carry the ore across the lake, down Great Bear River, and down the Mackenzie. But one section of Great Bear River is too shallow for a barge. So the Americans built a road around that section. Bennie’s cabin is on the western end of that road. You can still see a couple of run-down buildings from the camp. Bennie has written “Jesus Loves You” on the roof of one of them. Bennie’s cabin is where the mess-hall used to be. Ron and I stayed in his guest cabin: a small building I assume was left by the Americans which Bennie has fixed up.

Bennie was our guide through the rapids the next day. It wasn’t really rapids per say. Just water that is about three and four feet deep on average, with the occasional rock jutting above the surface. The water is crystal clear, and sometimes the bottom seemed dangerously close.
When we came to the lake, it was like glass. The wake from our boat was no match for the stillness. I thought we would stir up the whole area, but the wake just petered out to be replaced by stillness that stretched to the horizon.
Bennie and Ron warned me it would be cold on the lake. I had been expecting huge swells. Eventually I had to take off my coat. The sky was completely clear, as was the water. I could easily see bottom ten feet eblow us. We would see schools of five and six trout swimming past us as we were trolling. A minute later, all three of our rods would double over with ten pound trout. I caught four all together that day, but lost many, many more.

Peace on Earth

2006-10-09T08:47:00.000-07:00

There was a light dusting of snow on the ground when I got up this morning. More than frost. The knid of snow that completely covers dirt roads and roofs, but still looks patchy on grass. It made the whole world seem peaceful, dispite the fact that:

a. North Korea now has the bomb.

b. All the pepsi, water, and milk in our last two barge containers may already be frozen solid.

c. I have to be at work in 15 minutes to finish counting all the general merchandise (anything that isn't food) in the store.

d. The boss and his wife are coming over for Thanksgiving dinner and our carpet is polka-dotted with pee-stains from the dog (who I swear is now housebroken).

Happy Thanksgiving!

Nicole's Sprained Ankle

2006-10-01T09:03:00.000-07:00

It has been far too long since I have posted. I think I've had writer's block since my fishing trip to Great Bear Lake. Recording the story is too monumental a task, but expect an abridged version soon.

Last Sunday, Nicole, Macky and I set out for our weekly walk. When I brought Macky home, I invisioned taking her for a walk every night. At that time, I was getting off work around seven, and the puppy could barely walk across the room without falling asleep. Now Nicole takes her for a walk every night. I'm the one who can't walk across the room without falling asleep. Sunday is about the only day I get to take her out for a walk

The Northern Store's property, once the property of the Hudson's Bay Company since God knows when, is at the top of a hill looking out over the river. There is a steep bank with a well worn path that runs down to the road. We usually run down this path to get to the beach. Only last Sunday, as Nicole was going down the hill, she rolled her ankle at the bottom.

It was clear within a few mninutes that she had sprained her anke. I got her shoe off and we sood there by the side of the road debating what to do. I was going to get the truck when someone passed by and offered us a lift.

We didn't get to the health center until the next morning. We could have gone and got the nurses to look at it, but there wasn't much they could do anyway. Monday morning they took a few x-rays (which didn't turn out), gave Nicole some crutches and something to wrap her ankle with, and sent her home. Now, a week later, she can still barely get around. A nasty green coloured bruise is forming on her still-swolen ankle. There is no word from Yellowknife on the second set of x-rays taken on Wednesday.

The nurses have been good. They said if there was a problem, someone from Yellowknife would have contacted them immediately. Unfortunately, a sprained ankle is worse than a break or a fracture. It takes longer to heal, and because there is no cast, it is easier to bump or reinjure the ankle.

So the house is a state right now. I've been doing my best to get meals and keep things clean, but it isn't easy. Mackey finally chewed into the stuffing of her favorite toy: a stuffed bone with a smiley face I have dubbed "boner." So right now there's a sink full of dirty dishes, and the living room floor is covered with balls of fluff.

Work isn't much better. The new guy the company sent to work with us quit after a month, and the part-time produce guy is off work for a month because of surgery to his wrist. But life goes on. We're plodding along, and still meeting all our budgeted sales figures. I have to go over for a few minutes today to get the freezers ready for Thanksgiving turkeys. MMMMMM. Turkeys.

But it's all worth it becuase tomorrow I'm ready to pay off my line of credit in one fell swoop, and possibly a large chunk of my student loan as well. Once we're out of debt, we can tell the whole world to kiss our aaa....ankles.

Hand Games

2006-09-03T21:18:00.000-07:00

Labour Day Weekend is the biggest weekend of the year in Tulita. Every year the town hosts the National Hand Games Championship. It’s a three-day tournament with teams from all over the Northwest Territories and Northern Alberta competing for a 25,000 prize. It’s also a weekend of gambling and drunkenness for those who attend.

Hand Games is a misleading name. It’s a single game played by two teams of eight. It’s sort of a variation of Three-Card Monte. The basic premise is for one player to hide a stick in one of his hands, and for the other team to guess which hand it is in. It sounds like a two-player game. But at first, all eight pretend to have the stick, and the other team narrows it down one by one.

I first saw this played when we were living in our old house. I heard traditional drumming and singing coming from the community hall one Sunday night, so I went over to take a look. The players were seated in two semi circles, facing each other. Two young boys, about ten years old, were kneeling at the center, facing each other, bouncing up and down to the rhythm of the drumming. One would hide his hands behind his back, under his shirt, and under his arm-pits. Finally, after much writhing and twisting, he would present his two fists to the other team. The other ten-year-old would point to one fist or the other. When he was right, he would win the stick. Games go to a predetermined score, generally about fifteen points.

I’m sure you can see the potential for gambling here. Spectators can bet on individual hands in the game, on the outcome of each game, or the championship of the tournament. And with the tournament comes other events. Endless cookouts, house parties, and a big bingo for the ladies, which took place yesterday.

Of course, like any other time something is happening in town, I’m stuck in the store. I went in Saturday morning at 8:30, as usual. We open at ten. Before long we were hit with a rush of women trying to withdraw cash from the ATM. They also bought coffee, gum, Hawkins Cheesies and bingo dabbers. Those still in line near the top of the hour urged me to hurry, told me to keep the change, and then sprinted for the arena.

Men and women from out of town made all sorts of requests for odd and obscure brands of cigarettes. I had no idea there were so many name brands of smokes, each in 20 or 25 packs, king size, and various degrees of mildness and flavours.

“DO you have lucky 7’s extra mild king size?”

“Ahhhh, no. What’s the closest thing to that in DuMaurier or Players?”

“Just give me DuMaurier king size.”

At one slow point in the afternoon, I went to get a coffee. Some out-of-towner was filling up several cups of coffee.

“Will ten bucks pay for all of this?”

I did the math in my head (no small task for me).

“Yeah, you’ll be fine. Are you in the tournament?”

“Not really. I’m here with our team. Trying to sober them up a bit before they play. We got three thousand bucks on the line and all they care about is dumping more booze down their throats.”

Each community that sends a team sponsors them. There is an entrance fee of a thousand dollars or more. I’m not sure why some communities paid more than others.

At seven on Saturday night I had to make a delivery of pop to the arena. There were trucks all over the parking lot. Several women were cooking moose and fish over three smoking barrels. Folding tables protected by blue tarps were covered with freshly butchered moose. The head of a cow moose lay next to unrecognizable cuts of flesh, waiting to be cooked.

I could hear the drumming and chanting as soon as I got out of the truck. People were streaming in and out of the arena. As I walked inside, the vibrations of the drums started to reverberate in my chest. You have seen and heard drumming and chanting on TV, but until you are in the same room you will never understand the energy that comes with this. The only thing I can compare it to is a rock concert. Everyone’s attention is focused on the game. It is hypnotizing. I wanted to stay and watch, but instead I was carting loads of pop to the canteen. I briefly saw the two teams staring each other down. The fellow hiding the stick looked as if he were in a state of either pain or ecstasy. His eyes were rolling back in his head and his neck was twisting at odd angles. His arms were flailing about in rhythm to the drumming as he tried to hide the stick.

On Saturday night they had a talent show. This wasn’t your usual talent show. First they had a love song contest, where men and women got up and sang traditional love songs in native languages. Some of the songs were jokes, although the punch line was beyond me. Then they had an animal calling contest. Each participant stood up, announced the animal they would be calling, and then did their performance. Again, many were jokes, although I didn’t get the jokes. Nevertheless, it was great to get out into a carnival atmosphere.

The store has been unbelievably busy. We were supposed to close for the holiday Monday. There is no such thing as a long weekend when you work with this company, because it is against store policy to close two days in a row (the one exception being Christmas and Boxing Day). So we opened this afternoon for a “half-day.” Although the store was only open four hours, we came in an hour early, and stayed two hours after close. I guess when you work fourteen-hour days, only working seven hours is technically a half-day. Now the boss has decided to open the store tomorrow afternoon because so many people will be leaving town. It will again be a “half-day,” so at least I get to sleep in. Oh well. I’ll appreciate my weekends and evenings even more in a few years time when I get a nine to five job.

Sad Week

2006-08-27T21:29:00.000-07:00

It was a bad week in Tulita. It was a bad couple of weeks. There was a plane crash last week. All six on board were killed. One of the people was a fellow from Tulita. It all started the week before that, when several people from Fort Good Hope were killed in a boating accident. Some guy who just got out of jail thought it would be a good idea to go drinking and boating on the Mackenzie. He killed himself and two others. One made it to shore alive.

When there’s a funeral in this area, a lot of people go. So planeloads of people from the surrounding communities showed up in Good Hope for the funeral. The plane that crashed was full of people leaving Good Hope after the funeral.

So on Thursday they held a funeral for the fellow from Tulita who was killed. He had a wife and three young kids. I recognized him from the store as soon as I saw pictures. He worked for the phone company. He had even been in our old house to hook up our phone.

I also had seen the pilot around. He was one of the young kids who fly for the local airline. I think he was the guy who flew us into Tulita. Chances are it was even the plane we had flown in, because they only have one six-seater, and they only use it when the other planes are full or unavailable.

I waited on the phone guy’s daughter in the days after the accident. She came into the store, like she does almost every day, to buy candy. I used to tease her. I’d ask her for ID if she were buying Popeye candy cigarettes. You get to know certain kids (the nice ones at least) and joke with them. But I wasn’t sure what to say to her this time. So I just tried to smile and ring in her hot chocolate.

One day after the store had closed, they brought his body back to town. I saw a truck go by with the casket on back. There were about eight guys sitting on back with it, as if they were helping move furniture or lumber. That truck was followed by almost every other truck in town.

On the day of the funeral, we closed the store in the afternoon out of respect for the family. Now people from all the other communities were coming to Tulita for this funeral. I served dozens of strangers. They bought a lot of junk food and magazines for the plane ride back.

Things are slowly returning to normal for most of the town now. It’s my day off. I don’t know where the day went. I tried to get up at a decent hour so I could savour my free time. But here it is, nine o’clock. All we really did was take the dog for a long walk to Great Bear River. She is getting a lot bigger, and she is starting to behave. She was bad for biting, but rolled up newspapers have broken her of that habit.

This may be my last Sunday off for a while. Next Sunday, the store is supposed to open for the afternoon. At least I’ll get to sleep in one day a week. Legally, I think I’m entitled to 24 continuous hours of rest per week. I may have to contact a lawyer. If I was getting paid hourly and making my overtime hours, I’d already be rich. But you’ll be surprised what you’ll put up with when your employer is also your landlord. Don’t get me wrong: I enjoy my job. But free time is nice too.

I’m thinking about getting dial up. I have no other expenses, and I’d like to get back in touch with the world. Maybe this week I’ll call and get an account.

Brew

2006-08-13T19:22:00.000-07:00

I am the only employee in the front of the store. This means I’m manning till and office. The store is almost dead. Jim shuffles in. He comes to the office counter, and his shaking hands produce a government cheque.

“I’d like to cash this.”

His voice is raspy and hoarse. He is wearing a dirty white shirt that has the top three buttons undone. He smells of B.O and rot

“Sure thing. Would you like to make a payment on your account?”

“I can’t. I’m heading out this afternoon on medical.”

“Ok. No Problem.”

We’re always supposed to ask people cashing government cheques if they’re going to put money on their grocery accounts. They usually do.

As I start to fiddle at the computer, Linda comes back from her break. I allow her to do the cheque cashing. She asks Jim the same question. He gives the same excuse.

I move back to the till. Jim takes his money and shuffles off down an aisle with a blue basket. He returns a few minutes later with his groceries. A bag of sugar, a carton of Crosby’s molasses, a bag of raisins, and five packets of yeast.

When anyone has liquor in town, they call it shot. The homemade beer they drink is simply called brew. It’s basically made in uncovered buckets. The ingredients are simple: water, yeast, sugar, and maybe raisins or molasses. Let it sit for a few days or a week, and drink it down. You can tell when someone has been drinking brew rather than booze because, as my boss put it, they smell like stale bathwater.

The other day we had a call to the store. It was a well-spoken woman on the other line.

“Hey, My plane isn’t flying out today because of the weather. Do you have any mouthwash or hairspray for sale at your store?”

In other words, she was stuck in town for another night and wanted to get drunk.

We only stock a non-alcoholic type of mouthwash. We only sell artificial vanilla extract. And we do not sell hairspray or Lysol in aerosol cans. That is just the way we operate up here.

Summer Hiatus

2006-08-13T19:16:00.000-07:00

Nicole printed off some e-mails for me the other day. I must say it is nice to know people are thinking about me. There is no excuse for not writing in so long. Ok, there is. I’m in the freaking Northwest Territories. I work 12-hour days six days a week. I no longer have internet. I have a puppy to take care of. Pick one. But it is good to be back. I’ll try and make this a weekly event. Lord knows I have enough stories to relay.

What a long strange month it has been. Shortly after my last post, the store offered me the company house where Nick and Anna had been living. That same morning, Nicole was flying home to be with her grandmother, who was sick. For the fifth time in ten months, I packed up our stuff and moved it up the road.

Our new house is great. Our oil, electricity, water and basic phone are all paid for. What this house lacks in character, it more than makes up for in things like insulation, a working fridge, and a dryer to go with the washer. And the pool table in the basement is a nice addition as well.

I was on my own with Mackey the dog for three weeks. With the real manager back from his vacation, the hours suddenly got a lot longer. We worked a lot of fourteen hour days. A twelve hour day suddenly became a luxury.

One Saturday, I started work at 8. Around two o’clock, the freight plane came with about 200 cases of frozen food for the freezer. This shipment included everything from ice cream to frozen pizzas and TV dinners. We put most of it to bed by the store’s closing time of six. Then we worked another two hours trying to put more from our walk-in freezer out on the floor. At 8, I was loading up on groceries to come home. While grabbing some potato salad from the meat cooler, I noticed it was unusually warm. The digital thermometer read 22 degrees. I yelled for the boss. Two coolers had given out. We spent another hour and a half throwing meat and milk into carts and parking them in our walk-in coolers. Then we took a load of cardboard to the dump. Then we had to deliver a couch. As we were driving home from the delivery, the 10pm curfew siren sounded.

After a day like that, most people would go to bed with dollar signs dancing in their head. An emergency came up at work and suddenly you’re making time and a half. Not so for me. I’m on salary. You can’t just say “to hell with this” and go home when your employer is also your landlord. Yet I am strangely smitten with the grocery business. As my boss put it, “I never come into work and say ‘gee, I’ve got nothing to do today.’” There are always at least three things that need to be done. Customers are constantly asking you for one thing or another. If I get bored of paperwork, I can grab a cart and load it up with anything you can imagine to go out on the shelf. If it gets busy around supper, I go out on the till and talk with the customers. And at the end of the day, when I feel run off my feet, I can sit down and do some more paperwork.

I am already the acting grocery manager. It is my job to place most of the orders. If we run out of milk or bread, it is now my fault. There are a million little details to remember. When half the town left for vacation, I had to cut back orders. School will be starting soon, so I’ll have to increase my bread order, as well as snack foods. As the weather turns colder, I can start to change my produce order: less salads and berries, more apples, oranges, and things like squash and sweet potatoes. There are always prices to consider, and deals offered by suppliers.

There is a strange satisfaction that comes from keeping the shelves full. There is a secure feeling when you’re in the warehouse with seven feet of flour and sugar towering over either side of you. It reminds me of the fall, when the firewood is stacked. And fall is coming. They say it comes early here. Last night was the darkest I’d seen it in months. I had to stay up until midnight to see it, but it was pitch black, and cold too. We came to Tulita after the ice had broken in the river. We’ll soon see how idyllic this town is when it’s forty below.

Parenting

2006-07-10T06:06:00.000-07:00

I've heard that becoming a parent changes a lot of things in a relationship. If having children is anything remotely like getting a puppy, I can tell you that the biggest change comes in your topics of conversation.

(yawn, stretching)

"Good morning."

"Mornin'"

"Did Mackey poop yet this morning?"

"Yep."

"Indoors or out?"

"Out."

"Good doggie! Good Mackey! She's mummie's girl. Yes she is! How was it?"

"Runny."

Pictures

2006-07-02T20:55:00.000-07:00

It's pretty bad when you're too lazy to sit at a computer and upload some pictures. I've finally gotten around to uploading some. More will follow.

http://brodiet.googlepages.com/home

Say! Who's up for a drive to the dump?

2006-07-01T11:38:00.000-07:00

So I'm sitting in my pajama pants, watching TV and drinking some whiskey at 11:30 on a Friday night. There's a knock at the door. I scramble for a shirt. It's Nick from work. He and his girlfriend, Anna, just went for a drive to the dump. Yes, that's about the only thing to do around midnight on a Friday night in Tulita. Anyway. Ever since I got here, all I've heard about is how you can see bears at the dump. Any time I've gone, it's been garbage. So I grab my camera and off we go.

There were actually three black bears, but the other two had just been scared off by the RCMP.

Here you can see the bear in his natural habitat, probably chowing down on the expired bologna I threw out the other day.

Speaking of food, Yesterday I had my first taste of takeout since leaving civilization. The town north of us, Norman Wells, has a Chinese restaurant. And yes, they deliver to Tulita. It's $40 to have your order sent down on North Wright Air. Yesterday was Anna's birthday, so she and Nick ordered out as a treat. And they invited us up for supper. As luck would have it, someone we know from town was also in The Wells (that's the local term for Norman Wells) and saw Nick's order on the counter. She offered to carry it down with her, and saved them the $40. It was still $120 for a diner for six. There were two kinds of stir fry,shrimp fried rice, chicken balls, ribs, and spring rolls. The food was cold by the time we finished work. We reheated it in the microwave.

One of the stirfries was a "seafood" stirfry. In amongst the broccoli and bok choi, we noticed a strange item. It was shaped like asparagus: long with diamond shaped marks.

"It's chewy. Like scallops."

"It's definitely seafood."

"Maybe some sort of sushi?"

Then Nicole, being a Newfoundlander, spoke up.

"I'm pretty sure it's squid."

I've never tried fresh squid, but I can tell you that reheated squid has a texture not unlike rubber.

On the way back from the dump, I snapped a picture of the sun setting up on the barrens. It was around midnight when I took this picture. The mountain on the left is Great Bear Rock.

Who says three's a crowd?

2006-06-29T07:45:00.000-07:00

Ladies and Gentlemen!

Introducing, the newest member of our family:

Mackenzie (a.k.a. Macky or Mac) the dog.

Coming soon: the story of the first (sleepless) night.
But right now I have to go to work.

Helen, the Cleaning Lady

2006-06-27T22:49:00.000-07:00

Helen is the cleaning lady at the store. She has lived in Tulita her entire life, and she speaks Slavey, the language of the locals. If her writing skills were better, Helen could make hundreds of dollars an hour as an interpreter. Instead she cleans toilets. She doesn't feel comfortable on the tills. The pace is a bit too fast for her. She mostly cleans, but also interprets for some of the elders. I'm often sent to bargain with her on the price of produce.

One of the elders is there beside Helen. The old woman is wearing a shawl and inspecting a cellophane box of raspberries. They're mouldy. Helen speaks up for her.

"She says these raspberries. They're no good."

"Yeah, I think they're past due. I should take them off the shelf. I'll go see if there's any new ones in the fridge."

I turn and start off at a fast pace. Although most of the locals aren't in a rush, they don't like to wait around for stockboys either.

"Nooooooo."

I stop. Helen's no's are long and slow. They go up in the middle and back down, like a kid protesting his bedtime. "NooOOO000OOOoooo."

Helen and the woman speak in Slavey for a moment.

"She says she'll pay you half price."

I look at the elder, and then at the berries. They're mouldy. The box is no bigger than the palm of your hand, and it costs $8 at full price. Even at $4, the store is ripping this poor woman off.

"Are you sure they're still good to eat Helen? I'll go find some better ones."

"NoooOOO0000OOOoooo."

This is the no of a mother with several kids. It's a scolding no. The look on her face says, "stand still for a moment and listen." She talks to the elder in Slavey again for a moment.

"Make it three dollars a box and she'll buy two."

"Ok. Deal."

The stony face of the old lady breaks into a smile. She says something to Helen in Slavey, and they both laugh. I stand by with the stupid grin of someone who doesn't get the joke. Helen refuses to translate for me. I go back to work. Customer service is my first priority. It says so on my vest.

Return of the One-Eyed Brain Eater

2006-06-22T06:36:00.000-07:00

Astronomically speaking, June 21st is the longest day of the year. But in our household, June 20th will go down in history as the longest day of 2006. That was the day I attempted to assemble and install a satellite dish.

This endeavor actually began on the 19th, when the dish arrived, and continued until the afternoon of the 21st, when it was finally up and running.

We picked the damn thing up from the airport on the 19th. It came from a store in Yellowknife. Because they decided to ship it on Canadian North rather than North-Wright Air, the supposedly free dish and cheap receiver cost us an extra $160 in shipping fees. I can only hope the dish enjoyed one of Canadian North's delicious in-flight meals and a beer on its way here.

I brought a rickety aluminum ladder home from work with me that night. Nicole already had the dish and receiver out of the box, the TV tuned to a bright blue screen, and she was doing a little dance around the rather large pile of nuts and bolts in the middle of our living room floor.

The dish wasn't one of those snazzy dinner-plate sized "bell express-vu" dishes. It was a metre in diameter, which is pretty big when you only have a rickety aluminum ladder. The dish had the red lightning bolt symbol you often see on big, abandoned, obsolete dishes. I was beginning to see why the company had only charged us for the receiver and not the dish itself.

The assembly instructions for the dish were unlike any I've ever seen. Most instructions painstakingly list each piece, including the nuts and bolts. There is a diagram showing you how a bolt goes in a hole, and a disclaimer warning you to put the washer on BEFORE the nut. This was not the case with our dish. Instead there was a list of the nuts and bolts, and a few tiny pictures of the assembled dish. It was one sheet of paper. Finally! Assembly instructions that understand and respect a man's God-given ability to assemble anything without the instructions.

There was only one problem. From the pictures, it was clear that we were missing an unnamed, unnumbered triangular piece of metal. There would be no TV that night.

The next morning, I called the customer support number for the dish. It was made by a company called Andrew Corporation. What a great name for a company! Andrew Corporation. It almost exudes manliness. The first picture on their website was of a US soldier talking on a walkie-talkie while crouching in the desert. No wonder they've obtained military contracts with the US army. Their website listed separate numbers for "customer support" and "technical support." I forget which one I called, but I was immediately informed of my error (how stupid of me), and transferred to the other.

The fellow on the customer support line spoke not with a middle-eastern accent, but with a southern drawl. The fellow, being a man, understood my predicament. From the pictures in the instructions, it was clear I was missing a triangular piece of metal. But, being a man, he couldn't admit that he didn't know for sure what that piece of metal was, or if it was necessary. He also couldn't ask any of the other men there, because that would be paramount to admitting that he "didn't know." To make a long story short, he promised to get back to me but I never did hear from him again.

That night I attempted to assemble the dish without the mysterious triangular piece of metal. Everything seemed to hold. But now came the task of mounting it.

The locals were out in full force on the evening of the twentieth. The twenty-first is National Aboriginal Day, a holiday in these parts. I too had the day off, and had therefore already indulged in a small drink from a bottle of half-expensive scotch that I had brought with me. Around Tulita, holidays are taken very seriously, despite the high unemployment rate. It seems that even if you don't have a job, Fridays and holidays are designated drinking times. On this night, half the town had piled onto the backs of five or six trucks, and they were cruising around, yelling and hooting drunkenly. I could hear rap music coming from a house across the way. I witnessed this scene perched on top of an aluminum ladder, often while clutching a heavy and awkward satellite dish. However, whenever a truckload of locals drove past our house, they grew silent. Everyone watched in anticipation, waiting for this lone white boy to fall, bringing his dish with him.

I scrounged up a few nails and a couple of pieces of two-by-four from around the house. The log exterior of our house doesn't lend itself to the mounting of satellite dishes. Nicole tried to hold the ladder, except she tended to let go every three of four seconds to swat at a mosquito, or run from a dragonfly or horse fly. Being a biologist, Nicole KNOWS for a fact that dragonflies DO NOT BITE. But this doesn't stop her from crouching or flailing her arms each time one comes within ten feet of her. As for the horse flies (which are simply called bulldogs up here), I can't blame her for running from those. They are big suckers: fast and aggressive. It's difficult to distinguish them from hornets.

In case you're wondering, No, I didn't fall. It took about an hour, and there were times when the dish was the only thing keeping me form falling, but I got it installed. Then came the fun part: trying to find the signal. I'd like to show you an excerpt from the Bell Express-view instruction booklet which explains how one should go about this task.

Your partner at the TV set should inform you at each step if there is an indication on the meter. The conversation usually goes something like this:

"Ok I moved it."
"No Change"
"Ok, I moved it some more"
"Hold it, I see something on the meter....Move it some more"
"Ok, Moved it some more. Any change?"
"Yes, It's getting better."

....And so it goes.

As you can clearly see, the Bell instruction booklet was written by a woman and/or a group of women. It is the size of a novel.

Our conversation went more like this:

"See anything?"
"Nope."
(a minute of silence, while I move the dish in micrometer increments)
"Anything yet?"
"NO! I'll yell when something happens."
"I can hardly hear you!"
"Just keep going!"
(another minute of silence)
"Ok! Stop! Stop! Stop! Stop! Stop! No! Go back and do what you did before!"
"I'm trying!"
"You had it!"
"I ____ing know I ___ing had it!"
"Well you don't have to yell at me like that!"
"Well I'm ______ing sorry but this is ____ing hard to do when you're not holding the ladder!"
"Woah! Stop!!!"

And just like that, I had it. I tightened the last few nuts and bolts, and ran inside. It was one a.m. by this point. We couldn't get through to the help line to activate the channels, so we went to bed.

We were to discover the next day that I had tuned in the wrong dish. Another hour of dish tapping brought in the correct satellite. Nicole did another dance. I mourned the loss of my quiet evenings.

We had gone an entire month without television. Each of us had read a couple of books in that time. Nicole, whose excuse for not reading is, "I read all day at work," said she had forgotten how enjoyable it can be. We also spent hours playing crib and Trivial Pursuit together. On the night of the twenty-first, I found myself half comatose, staring at the TV watching something called "America's Got Talent." Hosted by Regis Philbin, and with David Hasselhoff as one of three judges, it is a modern day cross between the Gong Show and American Idol. And to think I almost missed it. Thank God we are once again in touch with the outside world.

How Brodie got his Fridge Back.

2006-06-16T12:48:00.000-07:00

I woke up Thursday morning with a certain spring in my step. It was the 15th. Rent day. Or, in our case, Fridge day. I had been trying to contact Jerry, our landlord, for 5 days now. He had been conveniently "away" that whole time. I knew that he would come knocking today, and I knew the lease was on our side.

On my way to work, a truck pulled up beside me. It was Ben, Jerry's father. He rolled down the window and offered me a drive to work. I was already more than halfway into my five minute walk, but I accepted.

"How are you today?" he asked.

"Good, thanks."

"You going to pay Jerry the rent money today?"

Ben exhaled a puff of his cigarette out the window. This had the makings of a mob movie scene, except I was in a giant chev truck instead of a big black car.

"Yeah, we told him to come by today."

"I think he's up to no good. I want you to give the rent money to me. I'll budget it for him."

I wanted to believe that Ben was doing this for the good of Jerry, in the same way that any father would try and help a wayward son. I knew Ben was a prominent member of the church. But I had also found out, as one does in a small town, that he had recently fallen off the wagon, and that he had his own problems with booze. Of course none of that really mattered, because there wasn't going to be much rent money left over after we got our new fridge.

"Well, I don't have a problem with doing that, except our Fridge broke down on Saturday. I checked at the Northern store, and the cheapest is just over $1000. But I think I get a discount, so there might be $100 left."

"Ok, well I'll come by your house at lunch, check the fridge, and get the money."

Nicole and I walk home for lunch every day. Ben's house is just across the street from ours. Jerry was sitting on his doorstep, and he waved to us as we came into view. He knocked and came in.

"I was just wondering if I could get the rent money."

"Yeah, well, we've been trying to get a hold of you to tell you the fridge is broken."

"Really. I heard you'd been looking for me. Let me take a look at it."

He inspected our very warm fridge. We told him how we'd been carrying our perishables to and from the store. He fiddled with the dials. Then he assured us this happened all the time when he rented the house out before. Did I mention he was loaded drunk as all this was happening?

We agreed that we would give the fridge the afternoon to come back on. If it wasn't working by five, we would have to buy a new one with the rent money.

"Do they have payment plans at the store? Like, can you pay so much per month?"

"Um, I don't know. I don't think so," I lied.

"Alright. Well, this afternoon then."

And we thought it was over. But it wasn't. He was starting to wrap up the conversation when he finally worked up the nerve to say something.

"Do you think I could get some money this afternoon? Like at 3:30. Maybe two-hundred and fifty so I can buy my lil' brother a bike. He's always going on about how he wants a BMX bike. He sees me on mine, right? I promised I buy him one."

"Well, as far as I know, the store is out of bikes, except for really small ones," I said. This was the God's honest truth.

"Oh yeah, well, I'm buying this one from a friend."

Then Nicole, who swore up and down that we would not be paying an advance on next month's rent, spoke up.

"OK, if you agree to take less next month, we can give you some now as long as we get the fridge."

"Yeah, that's cool, that's cool. So mebbe I'll come by your office at 3:30 or so."

"Sure, that works," said Nicole.

Jerry left and only came back once in the next half hour. As we were getting ready to go back to work, he knocked on the door again. He stuck his hand in the fridge and see if it was getting any colder, which it was not.

That afternoon I went out to the store's warehouse to look for more fridges. I'm sure that sounds absurd. Fridges are pretty big, and one would assume that a store could keep track of how many fridges it has. Not so at the Northern Store. There are really three warehouses: remnants of the Hudson's Bay Company. One is the old Hudson Bay Store. I'll write about this another time. The other two are basically log shacks with plywood floors and locked doors and boarded up windows. One is full of food. The other holds a pile of couches, loveseats, chairs and mattresses. When I say pile, I mean it literally. They are piled in there, and I am often sent out to climb through the pile, ripping at the industrial plastic to see what colour upholstery is underneath.

It was in this warehouse that I found our fridge. It was sitting just inside the door. A beautiful brown box about four feet high. The label said, "Bar Fridge - Black."

When I came back in the store, both Ben and Jerry were waiting with Nicole. I told them the good news: I had found a cheaper fridge. Now everyone would be satisfied. I led everyone over to the cash register at the customer service desk. I punched in the SKU (rhymes with spew) number, and the total came up on the cash register. $479.99. Ben, being the caring father he is, decided to do the talking for his inebriated son.

"How does that look?" I asked Ben.

"Good. Now can you do a payment plan? Half this month and half next?"

Anna, the girl who works the office was standing next to me. She pulled up Ben's account. She told him he couldn't.

"What about Jerry, he asked?"

More typing. Furrowed brow. Young Jerry didn't have an account at the store.

"What about you?" He asked me.

"If you put it on my account, we're paying it off right now," I told him.

I charged the fridge. Nicole counted out the difference from $1000 and took Ben and Jerry outside the store to pay them. She told me that they had split the money evenly. No budgeting. She also told me that Jerry never came by the office at 3:30. But he had been more frank with her after work, before He and his dad came up to see the bar fridge.

"I was wondering if I could get that two-fifty. I could pay you back Monday or Tuesday. I just gotta do a money transfer to Yellowknife. And my dad has to do one to the liquor store in Norman Wells. Once I get my package I'd be able to pay you back.".

"I wish I was a bank but I'm not. Sorry," said Nicole.

Our really cool black bar fridge now sits far from the kitchen in our living room next to the TV. That was the only place left with a plug.

We've left the old fridge where it was for a few reasons: the primary reason being we don't want to clean underneath it. The freezer still works fine, and the fridge side has become a storage space for things that probably should be refrigerated: ketchup, cheeze whiz, jam, carnation milk.

Bar fridges are cool when you have a small bachelor apartment, or when it is your "other fridge." The one you keep in your rec room only for pop and beer. Their "coolness" fades quickly when you have to choose between having cold beer after work, and keeping you mayonnaise from spoiling. And everyone knows there is really no choice there.

Just like a Vacation.

2006-06-13T20:16:00.000-07:00

As soon as I woke up this morning, I thought to myself "God I feel well rested." This feeling of well-being lasted for about two seconds, and then I lunged across the bed to check the time.

8:55 a.m.

We usually get up at seven. I'm supposed to be to work at nine, and Nicole is supposed to be to work at 8:30. Granted, both of our places of employment are only 5 minutes away, but still, sleeping in is sleeping in.

Our coffee maker, which has a timer to turn on and off, had turned off only two minutes before we got up. That sweet nectar of the morn was still warm. I gulped down a few mouthfuls, cleaned myself up, and went on my way. I was about 20 minutes late. Nobody seemed to care or need an explanation.

Nicole told me the same sort of story when she arrived. Her boss is away on vacation. The other two people in the office were sitting around, drinking coffee.

I don't know how I will ever cope with the stress of real life when we move back south in a few years. People don't get mad around here. I see it every day at the store.

"Got any bread?"

"No sorry. We're sold out of bread. And the plane won't be in until tomorrow."

Now imagine how mad you might get if every store in town (ok, the only store in town) was out of bread. The basic staple of any diet. Perhaps you might not get mad, but there are people out there who would.

"Oh ok. Got any lettuce?"

"No, we're out of that too."

Big smile

"Ok, thanks anyway."

And then they head for the frozen pizza section.

I thought the North was cold.

2006-06-12T22:06:00.000-07:00

It hasn't rained in over a week now. It's been nothing but bright blue sunny days. Because the sun is almost always up, it gets much hotter than what we're used to. I'm talking stinking hot. I'm talking, I-want-to-throw-up hot.

Another one of the local characters came into the store today. Walter comes in every day, sometimes two or three times a day. He stops to talk with just about everyone he meets, wearing his ever-present smile and his ever-present navy blue ballcap. It's not really a ballcap. It's more like one of those trucker hats that were in style for about three days a few years back.

Walter only goes at one speed: slow. He walks slow, talks slow, and drives his truck (which is the same color as his hat) slow. I always greet Walter by name. I don't think he knows my name yet.

"Hello Walter."

His ever-present grin gets a bit wider.

"Feels like we're under siege out there."

"Yeah. it's pretty hot. Supposed to be like this for the rest of the week."

"Like the movie, Steven Segal. Under Siege. That's a joke."

"Ah, haha. Yeah. Good movie."

Maybe you had to be there for that one.

We discovered on Saturday that our fridge is dead. I wasn't sure until after I ran into J, our landlord, on the road. Luckily we still have a deep freeze, and the freezer on the fridge still works. Because there is so little fresh produce in town, the only thing at risk of rotting was our milk. I'm fairly sure it has rotted by now, but I'm afraid to check.

Nicole and I have to pay our first month's rent on Thursday. We decided to go to J and offer to take care of buying and setting up the fridge. The cheapest fridge at the store is just over $1000, which coincidentally is what we will owe in rent.

You would think that tracking down one person in a town of four hundred would be easy. Not so. At lunch, J was "uptown." We live "downtown" in Tulita. Uptown is anything south of the store. His mom said he had broken some ribs on the weekend while doing stunts on his bike. I am not making this up. I don't think she was making that story up either. It would explain why J was rubbing his ribs while hanging of his girlfriend on Saturday.

She told me he would be home soon. I left my number. After supper (chicken that we took out to thaw yesterday and was starting to smell funky), I went over to his place again. His mom still hadn't seen him. She thought he was uptown.

"Any idea where 'uptown' he might be?"

"No. Not sure. He'll be home soon."

I think she's covering for him.

Be it ever so humble..

2006-06-11T14:08:00.000-07:00

Tulita is starting to feel less like a town and more like our home every day. In a town of 500 people, it doesn't take long to meet the major characters. The people who want to keep to themselves do so, and the friendly folk waste no time in introducing themselves. I'll introduce them to you. One of the first I met was Nellie, the elder. Picture the quintessential grandmother in a brown coat, long skirt, and shawl on her head. She comes in the store with her cane and her limp, although she usually walks off without her cane, leaving the store employees scrambling to find it. I don't think she remembers my name, but I always say hello to her, and she replies with her own sing-song "hello."

One day, myself and another employee gave her a lift to the store. She complained about the doctor in her broken English. Slavey is her first language.

"I want to go out in bush. Doctor says, 'no, have go Yellowknife. Get x-rays.' Get x-rays no good! Take x-rays, do nothing. Leg still hurt. I rather go in bush."

Then she said something, although neither of us could make out what she was saying. It sounded like, "you got eats?"

"Eats?"

"Yeah. Eats. Eats in can. For bread."

"Oh, yeast! Yes, we've got yeast. Jars or packets."

"Good. Need to make bannock. For bush."

Going "in the bush" is what locals do when they want to escape the hustle and bustle of Tulita. Most have cabins accessible by boat or skidoo. This is a world not yet open to myself or Nicole, mainly because our jobs do not permit us to take a week off work to escape into the woods.

Walking home from work yesterday my five minute walk turned into fifteen. I stopped twice to talk, first with Tim the foreman, and second with my landlord.

Tim and his wife moved here around the same time as Nicole and myself. He looks a bit intimidating with his bald head, broad biceps, biker shirts, and tattoos. But he is great guy to talk with. He was sitting on his deck, reading a book when I walked by. He said this was his first job where he always gets an hour for lunch, and every Saturday and Sunday off. I think he's starting to like Tulita as well.

I had hardly taken twenty steps down the road when I ran into our landlord and his girlfriend. I'll call him J. He is younger than me. His father gave him this house, and he agreed to rent it and live with his brother. J was standing there in the road, his arm around his girlfriend, who was smiling. J kept rubbing his side and wincing, but he talked with a smile. I told him we're happy with the house, although talk soon turned to how cold it would be in the winter. I mentioned I would probably buy some firewood.

"Oh, I can get you firewood. We can go out. I got the gear. I mean a chainsaw. We could go right now with dad's truck except I've been drinking a bit."

It was getting onto seven o'clock, and the sun was beating down as we stood there. I had just gotten off work, and had no intentions of cutting wood, today or tomorrow. I hope he doesn't just show up on the doorstep some Sunday and announce that we're going to go cut some wood. I'd rather snag some of the driftwood that floats up the Mackenzie all day. You can't look out in the river without seeing a tree, it's roots sticking up like a sea-serpent's head, floating close to shore. I'm sure I could spend a hot Sunday like today dragging this wood to shore. I asked J if anyone burns the driftwood.

"Well, only her crazy uncle," he said, nudging his girlfriend. "But he's the only one. Everyone else cuts theirs."

I don't see what would be wrong with driftwood, as long as you left it to dry. Perhaps they know something I don't.

Nicole and I watched a movie last night. After that was over around midnight, we went out to sit on the deck. It was an eerie atmosphere outside. The sun had sunk lower in the sky than I had seen in days. It was finally a bearable temperature. The wind had picked up, and was gusting close to thirty out of the south. It seemed to be pushing the swift-moving Mackenzie along at a faster than normal rate. The town was silent, except for the occasional cry from a party down the street, the wind, and the sound of the river passing by. Across the river, the setting sun lit up the snow-capped peaks of the Mackenzie mountains, giving them a golden glow. I realized it was past midnight, and therefore my birthday. It is one I doubt I'll ever forget.

Say hello to my little friend...

2006-06-08T08:12:00.000-07:00

The night before last, Nicole and I woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of small feet scurrying around the house.

"Did you hear that?"
"Yes."
"Is it in the house?"
"No way," I assured her, knowing damn well the rodent was probably in our room. "Sounds like its underneath the house."

Our house isn't on a foundation. Like just about every other house in town, it is propped up in the corners on a stack of 4x4 boards stacked log cabin style.

My empty promise was enough to get me a good night's sleep, but I would pay dearly for it later.

Yesterday evening I set the two mouse traps that the landlord had left in the house. I placed one in the furnace room. I wanted to put the other in the porch, but Nicole insisted on placing it in our bedroom. For some strange reason I didn't protest. I set the trap in one corner of the room.

We went to bed around eleven. The trap was sitting less than five feet from our slumbering heads. I was just at the point of dozing off when the crack of the trap woke us both. Nicole jumped about two feet straight up and then latched onto me, not entirely sure what the noise was at first.

"Relax, relax, it's just the mouse trap."

"What?! Brodie check it! Turn on the light!"

For someone who spent four years working as a biologist, Nicole is an absolute wimp when it comes to bugs or rodents. I grabbed our alarm clock off the bed and tried to aim the indiglo light in the corner. It was too dark.
So I got up, barefoot, and turned on the light.

The trap was empty. It took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the light before I spotted him. He was cowering against the wall, next to Nicole's hair dryer and curling iron; a little ball of fluff looking up at me with the smallest set of puppy dog eyes.

"I see him! Don't worry, he's just little."

"What? Where is he? Kill him Brodie! Here."

From her perch on the bed she handed me one for her fuzzy green slippers. Both the slipper and my heart were too soft to kill the little thing in front of me.

I took the slipper and moved in closer. I could see that the trap had wounded our little friend. A small trickle of blood was running down one side of his face, as if he were crying tears of blood. I think my own heart started to bleed a little at this point. How in the hell was I going to bash this little thing to death?

"This will never work Nicole. I'm going to get a pot."

The little bugger decided to make his move. Before I could get to the kitchen, he ran along the wall, past our closed bedroom door, and into the closet. Nicole was flipping out. I went to grab a pot, and she ran for the safety of the living room.

Now, you know, and I know, that a mouse can't really hurt you. It can get into your food and shit on your silverware, but the mouse itself is harmless. That's why I went for a pot and not a frying pan. I would at least be able to trap him.

Our closet doesn't have a door. It's filled with packing tubs full of clothes which act as makeshift dressers. I started to pull these out, one by one, hoping that our little friend would be hiding behind one of them.

I found him at the very back behind a pair of my boots. He was running from one side to the other, peeking out each time as if I couldn't see him. If this were a sitcom, you would hear the "awwwww" from the studio audience right about now.

I pulled away one boot and then the other, ready to strike, when he took off again, this time for the door.

"He'll never fit under that," I thought to myself. But sure enough, he squeezed under the door.

"Here he comes!"

From the other side I could hear Nicole yelling. You have to remember that it was still as bright as anything in our living room. She saw him coming. When I came out, she was standing on top of the kitchen table.

"Under the couch! He went under the couch!"

I retrieved the mousetrap from the room and placed it in the middle of our living room floor. Then I somehow coaxed Nicole back to bed. This morning it was still empty. Part of me was glad he had escaped.

Nicole is now asking me if the Northern store sells rat poison. I'm not sure, but if it does I'll have to break the pellets into tiny pieces for our little friend and hope to God the poison kills him after he's outside the house. I couldn't stand to look at that thing after he's dead.

Synopsis continued

2006-06-01T22:19:00.000-07:00

That morning we awoke to a freezing house. Well, it wasn't frozen, but the thermostat said 10 degrees. Still pretending that we were camping, we managed to get ready for the day. Nicole went to work and I went to the Northern Store.

The Northern Store is the only store in town. It's like any other grocery store trying to branch out beyond food. There are about four aisles of food, but like Superstore on the east coast, they also sell hardware, camping gear, electronics and clothing. It almost has the feel of a general store. It is geographically and sometimes socially the center of the community.

As far as food goes you can get almost anything, as long as it comes in a package or is frozen. But it's basic stuff. They don't stock any cheese beyond cheddar or mozzarella. You can't get sun dried tomatoes, or even black olives. There is NO fresh meat. The produce section is one small fridge display, paired with a table for potatoes, bananas, and onions. About the most exotic thing I've seen is cantaloupe.

What they lack in fresh and exotic food, they make up with processed goods.

I suppose you can get lots of processed food back home, but I rarely pay attention to it because I avoid it like the plague. It's my own personal theory that the mono- sodium-hydroxoid-glucomate type ingredients are what will lead you to an early grave. But after a week in Tulita, those frozen chicken meals, fish sticks, and TV dinners are starting to look pretty tasty.

Ten A.M. Tuesday Morning. The store opens. I walk in and meet Nick, my soon-to-be boss. I ask him if he's still looking for an employee, and he says yes. We go to his office. He tells me about the company and it's benefits. They dangle the carrot of cheap housing and cheaper food to east coasters and Saskatchewanians looking for work. I bite. By that afternoon I'm shelving Pepsi and loading mr.noodles from a warehouse onto a truck.

It's not as bad as it sounds. I haven't sold my soul to some mindless job. First: I enjoy the work. It's more than just stocking shelves. I haven't been near a cash register yet. Instead they're grooming me for a supervisor position. I'm already doing orders and paperwork. Nick went from stockboy to store manager in two years. There's no reason why I can't do the same.

Second: it's this, or sit at home, do the occasional freelance story, and read. If I'm here, I might as well make a bit of money.

It is only "a bit" of money. I started at ten an hour. After the first week, I spoke with some higher-ups and negotiated a salary. Still not great money, but I'll be able to pay rent and eat well while Nicole banks most of her very large cheque. We've done the math. In six months we will be out of debt. In two years we will have enough for a significant down payment on a house. If we stick around for three or five years, we will be able to buy a house with cash.

We still don't have the housing or food benefits yet. But they should be coming along in a few months time. Until then I'll be spending six days a week busting my hump at the store.

Sunday Morning: An Interlude

2006-05-31T23:01:00.000-07:00

We've been wrestling with the problem of a toilet that won't flush since we moved in. On Sunday morning, I finally found the time to call Dad and ask him for advice.

"Well, it may just need a good plunging, but you should go check to see if it's properly vented. There should be a small black pipe sticking out of your roof above the bathroom. It's called a hore pipe"

So out I went, clad in pajama pants and rubber boots. As I stepped onto the doorstep, I saw one of the town elders slowly shuffling along the road. First I went around the side of the house, but I was in no position to see the roof. So I went up to the road. As I was craning my neck, looking for the hore pipe, the elder stopped and watched me for a moment.

"You need a hand with somthin'?"

"Oh, no thanks. It's just that our toilet's plugged up. So I'm looking for a hore...I'm looking to see if it's vented properly because..."

The old man looked a bit confused. My embarrassed babbling was too fast for him.

"Your Teee-Vee not working?"

(awkward silence)

"No no. Ha ha, my TOY-let. It needs a vent or.. nevermind. No, I'm fine.

Suddenly I realized how stupid I must look: inspecting the roof, from the road, in my pajamas, when there was a problem with the toilet.

A Synopsis so far...

2006-05-28T01:39:00.000-07:00

As I write this, it is 1:37 on a Sunday morning. It is the first time I've seen darkness since this time last week, when I woke up in the middle of the night. Even now, I can see across the Mackenzie river, which is several kilometers wide. It's like after dusk. Just dark enough for streetlights to come on.
It's been a long week. We're now settled into our house, but it took every evening this week to get it into a livable state. Let me take you back to Monday night.

Nicole's boss picked us up at about 2 in the afternoon. She had warned us that the hot water heater might be out of commission. So together we agreed that we would ask to stay in the hotel one extra night, until they got it working. But when she arrived at 2 and told us everything was in order except for heating oil, we decided to move in.

As you walk in the house, you first go through a crowded, cluttered, and dirty porch. From the porch you step into the living room. The walls are painted that shade of light green that was invented in the 1970s. The molding is a slightly darker version of the same cheap and nasty green. Our carpet is a blend of reds, oranges, and browns. The tile in the kitchen and bedrooms is white. There is no attic in the house, so the ceiling rises to a ten-foot peak in the middle of the living room. This high ceiling is one of the house's saving graces. It's other saving grace is the woodstove that is in the center of everything. Although, like everything else in the house, the woodstove has seen better days. It once had a glass window in the door. That has been replaced with a piece of steel.

When we first came in, the walls were adorned with scary pictures of Jesus. The kind you often see in the homes of old people. There is one that changes from Jesus to Mary depending on the angle at which you look at it. We also found a set of rosary beads hanging in every room, including the bathroom and two porches. But the best pieces of Catholic paraphernalia are the two statues that sit atop our kitchen cupboards: one of Jesus, the other of Mary, forever looking down their noses at us, reminding us that we are sinners. We took every bit of this down (with the exception of the statues) and hid it in a back room.

The kitchen is off the back of the living room. It was filthy on the day we moved in. Even today, after hours of scrubbing, soaking, and javexing, I wouldn't feel comfortable using the word clean. There was a wonderful layer of chocolate syrup (I'm assuming it was chocolate) that spilled down the back of the fridge and settled on the bottom. The cupboards have now been scrubbed and lined with cardboard.

Our first night in the house was cold. I lit a fire in the woodstove to keep us warm in the evening, but with only seven sticks of wood in the porch, it was out long before we went to bed. Nicole refused to sleep on the one mattress that was in the house, so she took the couch. I braved the mattress. At about 3 in the morning, I woke up. The house was freezing. I was frozen. But I knew it was still above zero, because I could hear the drip, drip, drip of what I thought was a leaky faucet. I tried to ignore it, but between the cold and the noise, I couldn't take it. When I checked the tap, I realized it was actually a slow leak in a valve under the bathroom sink.

It's still not entirely dark outside. Time for bed. I'll finish this in the morning.

The Sun Never Sets on Tulita

2006-05-22T07:41:00.000-07:00

The sun set at 11:59pm last night, according to Environment Canada. That means tonight will be the first official Midnight Sun of this year. Not that anyone except me is marking this significant occasion. I won't even be staying up for it. I have to report to work in the morning, and so does Nicole.

Before we moved up here, several people warned us about the long days. You would think that days of darkness would get depressing, and they might. But the body will wake up when it has had enough sleep, regardless of the light outside. However, getting to sleep when daylight is still leaking though your blinds at 11:30 at night is another story. When you wake up at 5:00 in the morning, it could just as easily be 5:00 in the evening. The only way to know for sure is to look at a clock.

The idea of 24 hour daylight has always held a certain place in my imagination. One of my earliest memories is my father reading Robert Service poems to me. For someone who is skeptical of any work of fiction beyond a Clint Eastwood movie or an episode of CSI, Robert Service has always been unusually high on Dad's list of favorite writers.

Service went to the Yukon for the gold rush of 1898, but he made his fortune writing thousands of poems about the men of the gold rush. All of his poems rhyme and most have the same sing-song rhythm. For that reason, they are dismissed as doggerel by the literary snobs of today. Still, I've been known to read Service now and then. I brought two volumes of his collected works with me. They're somewhere downstairs in a rubbermaid tub sealed with packing tape.

When Dad read to me about the "strange things done in the midnight sun by the men who moil for gold," I never dreamed that I would find myself here under a midnight sun, moiling for a paycheque from the grocery store.

Today we move into our house. This will be then end of my easy access to the internet. You might not hear from me for a few days.

Two Incomes are Better Than One

2006-05-20T16:52:00.000-07:00

We made it in one piece! There were times during our final plane ride into Tulita when I thought we might not make it. Have you ever driven in an old clunker of a car where the driver has to open your door from the inside because the outside handle doesn't work? Yeah, imagine that, only on a plane. The pilot looked to be about 14, and the plane about 40. It was a 5 seater (counting the pilot and co-pilot seats).

As the guys at the airport were checking the list of passengers, they recognized Nicole's name. No surprise after flying in 11 or so tubs of our junk. This airline also delivers the mail to Tulita.

We landed on a dirt runway. The snow is gone, and the weather is now warm. It's almost stuffy here in our hotel room. Nicole's new boss greeted us at the airport. Perhaps airport is a bit of a stretch. It would be more accurate to say she greeted us in the small building on the edge of the clearing where planes land. We saw our house, but we won't be moving in until Monday. It's a freaking log cabin! This makes the romantic in me want to start writing poetry. How many people can say they live in a log cabin by the Mackenzie River?

And finally, to add insult to injury, I was offered a job within my first four hours on the ground. We went to buy groceries (which is a post in itself), and the guy in charge told me to come in on Tuesday if I want work. I was just getting used to the idea of unemployment: I'd brought so many books. I was planning on getting our house in order, doing some writing and maybe attempting a radio documentary. But the offer of steady work and something to keep me busy eight hours a day is almost too good to pass up. Two incomes are better than one. I guess, if I do start work, Nicole and I will officially be DINKS (Dual Incomes, No Kids).

Time is Money

2006-05-16T09:36:00.000-07:00

Lately I feel as if we’re getting ready to go camping on a very long, very expensive camping trip. Money has begun to loose its meaning, at least for a cheapskate such as myself. If we think we’ll need it and we don’t have it, we buy it. New TV? Done. BBQ? I don’t care how short the summers are, we’re not going two years without a BBQ. Fishing pole? Fishing is the new Internet: hours of mindless entertainment while attached to a long piece of wire.

Today is Tuesday morning. We leave on Friday morning. Although money doesn’t mean much anymore, time is in short supply. We have today and tomorrow to get the last minute stuff shipped up. My parents’ lawn needs to be mowed. Tomorrow night I pick up my parents and grandparents from the airport. We’ll have one day with them, and the next morning they’ll be taking us to the airport. There’s so much we need to do before we leave, but also so much we want to do too. Sunday night was spent with friends at a BBQ. Last night we went to see a movie. Tomorrow I hope to drive out to the Minas Basin one more time and smell the salt water.

The pressure is getting to me a bit, at least in my dreams. The other night I dreamt I was perched on top of a stack of boxes that were ready to fall at any moment. Another dream had Nicole and I in jail. It wasn’t that bad. I tried to make the most of incarceration by writing a tell-all book about what it’s like on the inside. But last night I slept more soundly.

We will see what the next few days bring. My next post may be from Tulita. Who knows when that will be? We arrive Saturday afternoon, but I’ll need to use Nicole’s work computer to post. Monday is a holiday. We’ll be getting settled in as well. But I plan on writing a longhand journal on the way up, and I will transcribe bits and pieces and post them as time permits. So stay tuned.

Drifting Home?

2006-05-11T07:38:00.000-07:00

I’ve been too busy to write much. Nicole is back from Newfoundland. We’ve been packing and shipping, packing and shipping, buying and packing and shipping.

Last night, even though we had a truckload of stuff from Wal-mart (mostly cleaning supplies), we decided to take the night off. Nicole googled the Food Mail Program. It’s the government’s subtle way of influencing what people in the north eat. Basically, they make it relatively cheap to have perishables and healthy food shipped in. Chips, pop, alcohol, and wieners, however, still cost about $2.50 a kilo, on top of the already inflated price. When Nicole heard this, she immediately wanted to go out and buy some pop. We’re going to need mix for the boatload of liquor we bought yesterday. I’m going to miss beer.

As we were going to bed, I found some reading material on my grandfather’s bookshelf (we’re house-sitting for my grandparents). Drifting Home, by Pierre Berton, is his account of a 13 day journey up the Yukon river to his hometown of Dawson. Burton also writes about his own father, who came to the Yukon during the Gold Rush of 1898. As I read the first chapter aloud to Nicole, I changed the names and dates to reflect our own journey.

“I know we’ve left something out [Nicole] would say in her cheerful manner. “I just know it.”

I skipped the part about their boxes being “bruised” after three thousand miles of travel.

Then I came to a passage about Berton’s grandfather.

"Words, he said, could not describe the beauty and magnificence of it. He had almost half a century left to live, and it would be spent among mountains like these, far from the Atlantic’s shore… He believed he was going to the Yukon for a two-year stay but those two years lengthened into forty. The decision to join the stampede changed the current of his life, as it changed that of so many others."

Nicole and I both saw the parallels to ourselves in this. We are, after all, only going for two years. She started pummeling me as I read this.

“Stop it Brodie! Turn out the light and come to bed!”

But hey. He’s writing about the Yukon. We’re going to the Northwest Territories.

"The Art of Packing" or "Why Tetris isn't a waste of time"

2006-05-04T09:45:00.000-07:00

Packing sucks. When I start repacking all our stuff (tomorrow, I swear I will start tomorrow!), it will be the third time since February. I spent my spring break packing all of our stuff in Newfoundland. Nicole and I had tossed about the idea of renting a van or a trailer for that move, but both were too expensive. We ended up selling or giving away our furniture and packing what was left into Nicole’s Ford Focus.

I like to approach packing as if it were a puzzle. It involves fitting odd shaped objects into square boxes. Every time there is more stuff and stranger rules. In February, the challenge was to fit an entire apartment into a Ford Focus. Last week, when I moved out of my apartment in Halifax, I had to pack everything in 24 hours, and all I had was garbage bags and about six small cardboard boxes.

Now I’m at level three. Because we’re mailing our stuff up, the rules have again changed. Boxes must be no larger than two meters squared, and must weigh no more than 66 lbs. And no, I don’t have a scale to weigh anything.

We agreed that I will take care of the packing, while Nicole will take care of the worrying. She does this by making lists: To-do lists, and lists of things we don’t have and will never need.

Nicole: I was thinking of picking up some bungee cords from Princess Auto. They’re on sale this week. And skidoo saddlebags are on sale too. We might need one if we get a skidoo.

Me: Are you planning on getting a skidoo?

Nicole: Probably not. But you never know.

Me: Well, it’s your money, but I think we can live without a saddlebag. It’s just more junk for me to pack.

Nicole: OK. But what about the bungee cords?

Me: What are we going to use those for? We don’t have a vehicle. There are no roads. Remember?

Nicole: Yeah, but if we get a skidoo, we might want to strap stuff down on it.

Me: (sound of hair follicles ripping)

Her philosophy is “buy it, and if we ever need it we’ll be glad we have it.” After living in one too many small apartments, I’m a practitioner of the “do without” school of living. Why buy a whisk when a fork will do? Who needs a flathead screwdriver when there is a drawer full of butter knives in the kitchen? Do you REALLY need a magnetic hook to hang oven mitts on the fridge?

That may be the greatest thing about living in Tulita. With luck, our house will not mysteriously fill up with junk we don’t need, and empty boxes we can’t throw away.

Possible Work

2006-04-27T08:46:00.000-07:00

As you may or may not already know, I've just graduated with a journalism degree. Journalism is a strange beast. Jobs are at once plentiful and scarce. If you're willing to take a job in some backwater town, you'll probably find steady work. The turnover rate for jobs like these is huge because people start at small papers and work their way up.

If you have the talent, the drive, and the equipment, there is always a market for freelance stories. Yesterday I got in contact with a Certain Broadcasting Corporation based in Yellowknife. This "Certain Broadcasting Corporation" (I'll call it the "CBC" for short) does radio and TV broadcasting all over Canada. I wanted to let them know that I would be living in Tulita, and that I have the equipment to do radio stories. The woman I spoke with was great. She told me there would almost definitely be some money in her budget for freelance stories, as long as I could find some stories to cover.

Although the subject of work was positive, some of her general comments were not as positive. She was a bit surprised that anyone would choose to live in Tulita, mostly because of the isolation. She did say it was a great town with an interesting culture, as long as we weren't too "stuck up."

"If you're friendly, you'll be fine. But if you don't make friends you'll have a long, lonely winter."

I assured her that Nicole had already been to Tulita, and she loved the town. This person at the CBC was surprised at the price of water, and she warned us that electricity would be expensive. Someone from her office had just flown to Colville Lake to do a story on high electricity costs. People there are paying upwards of $800 a month.

Her best advice?

"Just make sure that girlfriend of yours negotiates a good salary."

To get in touch with the right person at this CBC, I got the name of a King's alumni who is now working in Yellowknife. I sent her an e-mail to thank her. This was her reply:

Hey Brodie, Good for you for getting a hold of [a certain person at the CBC]... We never get stories out of Tulita so I'm sure you could get lots of stuff aired. If you don't mind me asking, what on earth are you moving there for? Have you ever been North before? Let me know if you need anything else, or if you stop in Yellowknife! Good luck.

There was something in the tone of her reply that was ominous. "What on earth are you moving there for? Have you ever been North before?"

She might as well have written, " Are you F---ing crazy?!"

Tinfoil Hats

2006-04-26T09:02:00.000-07:00

I woke up at eight this morning with sunlight trying to leak through the curtains. It got me to thinking: how the hell are we going to keep our bedroom dark up there? On the day we're due to arrive (May 20th), the sun will rise at quarter to five in the morning , and set at five minutes to midnight. On the week of June 18-24, there will only be about two and a half hours every day when the sun is below the horizon.

When I was a kid they used to show a short piece on Sesame Street (the Canadian version) about a girl who lived in the north. I remember her opening tinfoil-covered windows to let light in.

This subject came up when I was home on the weekend. My dad warned me not to try putting tinfoil on the windows, becuase the heat from the sun might crack the window pane.

So I googled "tinfoil on windows." I got a surprising number of hits advocating the use of tinfoil on windows to keep aliens out. The rest of the posts were by computer geeks talking about Microsoft Windows and making lame jokes about tinfoil hats.

So now I'm thinking dark towels, or else a night mask. I'm sure this is one of the many problems that will be easily solved once we get there. It's also one of those little things that will weigh on my mind for the next month.

Toilet Economics 101

2006-04-25T13:57:00.000-07:00

Nicole e-mailed a list of questions to her soon-to-be boss, and we received the answers yesterday. Most of the answer were predictable, except for this one:

What is the tap water like there? Water is trucked to your home ... comes from the Great Bear River and goes through a filtration system. Some of the cleanest water in Canada. Delivery service is $0.89/L (minimum charge $20). Sewer is pumped and trucked to lagoon.

After four years of living in Newfoundland, water is something we've come to take for granted. Our shower in Corner Brook had enough pressure to blow you against the wall. It was heavenly. The shower we have here in Halifax is almost as powerful, and the hot water NEVER runs out.

Now I'll have to think twice before even brushing my teeth. Well, I'll still brush them, but I'll probably get a cup full of water rather than running the tap.

I really started to think about the cost of this when I considered how much water a toilet uses. Consider this:

Before the 1950s, toilets typically used 7 gallons or more for each flush. By the end of the 1960s, toilets were designed to flush with only 5.5 gallons, and in the 1980s the new toilets being installed were using only 3.5 gallons. Today, a new toilet uses no more than 1.6 gallons of water.
- www.toiletology.com

Assuming our house has a new, 1.6 gallon toilet, it will still cost us about $5.40 for every flush. If we have a 3.5 gallon tank, that cost will jump to $11.70. And if we are unlucky enough to get a 5.5 gallon tank, a flush will cost $18.70!

Of course we'll be saving money too. No vehicle. No take-out or coffee shops. No trips to the mall on Saturday. But still, at five dollars a flush, it's going to hurt. My roommate suggested putting a 2-litre ice cream container filled with rocks in the tank to take up space. Then we would be down to $3.40 a flush: an almost reasonable price. Then again, I may look into outhouse options.

The Essentials

2006-04-24T23:37:00.000-07:00

I hate shopping at Wal-Mart, for personal as well as moral reasons. But sometimes, when you're as frugal (read cheap) as I am, it can't be helped. Like when you're moving north, and you need a crap-load of toiletries and personal hygiene products.

We went in with fifty bucks. Our intention was to grab the necessities. I was thinking razors, aspirin, maybe a couple of bottles of shampoo. But as we walked up and down the aisles, we kept throwing more and more into our cart.

After doing the math aloud (with several people standing within earshot), Nicole announced that she would need four extra large boxes of tampons to get her through a year.

I bought three toothbrushes, three sticks of deodorant, two packs of floss, six tubes of toothpaste. The list goes on.

It's not that it's impossible to get any of this stuff in Tulita. We've just decided that it'll be easier to have piles of this stuff on hand so that we don't run out. There is a small store in Tulita, but it's more like a convenience store. You go there if you're out of bbq sauce on a Sunday afternoon, and you pay for it. Most people get their groceries flown in from Norman Wells. The plane comes once a week. It normally charges $2.55 per kilogram of cargo, but there is something called the Food Mail program that lowers that price to $0.80/kg.

And the price when it was all said and done?

Shopping Spree

2006-04-24T15:54:00.000-07:00

It's been five days since we found out about the job, and the reality of it is now sinking in. Mom and Dad seem to be handling the news a bit better. Yesterday Dad gave me a new toolbag full of tools we might need. A new screwdriver set, a ratchet set, and some pliers. He said it was going to be a birthday present, but this will save on shipping.

On Saturday morning, Mom took Nicole and I to Halifax. It's been a long time since I bought a lot of new clothes at once. Generally I shop at frenchy's (used clothing). People say I'm cheap. I prefer the term frugal. Why should I pay more than $10 for a good shirt? Anything beyond that, and you're paying for the label.

The first store we stopped at was Mark's Work Warehouse. They were having a spring sale, which was perfect for two people headed to a much colder climate. First I raided the sales racks just outside the door. Four $5 t-shirts. Then I found a table at the back with $10 jeans. I used to always buy Levi's. It was the one label I was a sucker for, and then only because they make good quality jeans. But $30 later, I had myself 3 new pairs of jeans.

Finally, I found some good button-up work shirts and fleece sweaters on for $10. I bought two sweaters and a shirt from that rack.

If I had been paying full price, I would have probably spent close to $300. Instead I spent less than $100. Normally, spending even that much on clothes still would have bothered me. Come to think of it, I would never spend $100 on clothes in a single day. But now I have this little voice in the back of my head saying "What the hell! You won't be doing any shopping where you're going."

The Call

2006-04-20T12:29:00.000-07:00

Nicole got the call yesterday afternoon. They wanted to know if she was still interested in the job: A permanent position in Tulita, in the Northwest Territories. She said yes. We're scheduled to leave on May 19th.

Tulita is a small community located where the Mackenzie and Great Bear Rivers meet. The population is about 500. You can only get there by boat, plane, or ice road. Nicole flew up a few weeks ago for the interview. Even flying there isn't easy. She went from Halifax to Edmonton on the first day. Then From Edmonton to Norman Wells via Yellowknife. Finally, on the next day she flew south from Norman Wells in a six seater plane to Tulita.

The job interview went well. There was only one other candidate for the job. After the interview, someone drove them both back to Norman Wells on the ice road. The drive only takes about an hour an a half, but that's if you drive like a maniac.

We both sort of expected the other guy to get the job. He spoke the language. He was already from the North. But we agreed that if she got the offer we would take it.

Agreeing in principle and signing a contract are two very different things. When she did get the call, I felt a bit sick to my stomach for the first few minutes. I mean, this place is isolated. Part of that appeals to me. But if we go, we'll be staying for a while. At least a year, probably two. I e-mailed mom to let her know. She was very supportive, or at least, she put on a brave face when she called back. Mom is always an optimist. Dad found it a bit harder to hide his disappointment. It doesn't help that my parents and grandparents will be in B.C. for the two weeks before we leave. They'll basically have one day with us before we go.

Dad called when I was on the phone with my grandparents. The message was pretty bleak.

"Yeah. It's just dad calling. I'll try calling back later."

His voice was hoarse. Even Nicole thought he sounded bad.

Our family is close. Nicole and I go home to visit the folks almost every weekend. This will mean no summer BBQ's. No weekend visits. This will be our first Christmas away from home.

Nicole's mom was even more vocal about us not going, although her dad was supportive.

"Oh Nicole, I didn't think you'd actually get the job. You can't go up there. Why don't you stay in Halifax for the summer? Wait for something better to come along."

But when I can get the leaving part out of my mind, I'm excited. I woke up at five this morning, and it all came rushing back to me.