Squeak, Rattle, Howl and Bang

Remember those gum soled shoes we wore as kids? You know the ones. Mine were Sparx brand, my family could not afford NorthStar or Adidas. I remember when these types of sneakers were new they would squeak on the floors of the gymnasium or in the hallways of the school. If I walked with the weight of my 11 year old 60lb (soakin’wet) frame on the outside of my foot I could stop them squeaking. I looked awfully funny walking that way I’m sure but that didn’t cross my mind. Being stealthy was the thing. Hide and seek: was there anything more fun?

I was reminded of those shoes and in particular the sound that they make recently. A man I am getting to know here in Délįne made the comment that he is waiting on the wind and getting tired of waiting. He was referring to caribou hunting. These impressive beasts are known to have exceptional hearing and spook easily. As a consequence hunters need wind to cover the sound of their boots on the snow which is powdery and dry AND guess what? Sounds like my Sparx on the gymnasium floor. I was going to advise the man, who is known for his hunting ability that surely if he just transferred the weight to the outsides of his feet… I thought better of it.

There can be wind and then there can be too much wind. This past weekend the hunters got wind but it was the wrong type. This wind was clocked at about 40 km/hr (or 21 kn for my buddy Captain John C.). This fiend bashed against the the house bawling out an unearthly guttural moaning noise and during the night there were a few times when it felt as though the house would slide right off it’s wooden pilings. The wood siding on the house I am staying in is rounded and sudden gusts of wind would sound off like an old washboard each time it pummeled the town.

I feel pretty... oh so pretty... I feel pretty
and witty and bright

The temperature on the weekend was around -30°c.  According to Environment Canada, at these temperatures, skin freezes in minutes and hypothermia sets in just as quickly. Add the wind chill and suddenly that freezing takes place much faster. How fast? The wind chill dropped the temperature to about -40°c. I don’t know that anyone round here wants to find out. Needless to say I broke out my parka for the first time. My neighbors will now believe that I have regained a smidgen of sanity as just last week they had expressed their concern about me wearing my cold weather field jacket in -20 weather.  "My wife, eh, she's worried about you, ha. She says you aren't dressed for the cold. You got a parka?" 

As you can well imagine the hunters did not go out on the land this past weekend.  It would matter little if they did because most animals take shelter in these conditions and become very difficult to find as tracks are hidden by fresh and blowing snow. Animals ain’t stupid. I saw nary a track in the snow; not a hare, fox or martin or wolf. Most often there are tracks everywhere you look.

The lake is frozen over quite solidly in vast swaths many kilometers wide. I went gliding over the surface on my snowmobile for the first time this week. Ptarmigan flocks scattered in front on occasion. I’d been told these birds were not skittish and people ‘round here joke about being able to lean off your snowmobile as you pass them and grab handfuls of the birds which are the size of grouse.  It’s only a joke of course but one can easily see why it’s said. I had a flock appear on the backside of a drift. I startled them but instead of taking flight they attempted to outrun the snowmobile. I slowed and they continued for some 50 meters before scattering and a few taking to wing.

White on white on white. I sailed past hummocks of ice encircled by eddies of airborne snow the texture of dust. I gave full throttle on a straight of snow covered glass as flat as new asphalt and felt the bite of cold poke it’s needles at even the smallest uncovered skin on my face. The sound from the snowmobile drowned behind the machine in the death howls of the wind. Trees thinned to almost tundra with undisturbed snows. Such beauty and fearful calm was everywhere. White is the colour of purity but this white is a distillation of purity into its antithesis. An alchemy of its own. It is beautiful in its danger, stark and bleak and enticing.

To contrast these images imagine columns of rainbows. There are still areas of open water which when it meets with the cold creates streams of fog. The sun when it shines brightly, which lately has been a rarity, refracts like a prism over the water and creates columns of striated colours.  I see these most frequently through my office windows during the zenith of the sun on its 4 hr. journey across the sky. The days grow shorter even as I type.

Bang! I woke to the sound of a crack like a gunshot one morning recently. After wiping away the sleep from my eyes I heard the sound again and then again. I got up and bundled myself up to walk through the early morning cold of the house to stand at the kitchen windows. I could see nothing but heard the shot again. It dawned on me that the ice had cracked and was shifting. With each shift the of the ice a sharp report.  Just as suddenly as it began the sounds ceased and the early morning returned to dead quiet as is the norm.

It’s funny how much sound we are exposed to in our lives. I have often commented on this when camping. After a day of paddling, finally relaxed by the fire with a comfortable sleeping bag awaiting my grateful body there is that moment when you realize that there is no noise. The frogs have not begun their night time chorus, the loons have discontinued their sunset hauntings and the crickets are friction-less. In these moments we are surrounded by ominous quiet: no telephones, no chatter, no electrical wires humming, no tires on pavement, no radio squawk, an absence.

 I don’t know what god is to you. I don’t honestly know what it is for me either.  The end of earth people believe that Yamoria set the world of the North in order and brought it out of darkness but they say nothing of his voice. If there is a voice of god I don’t think that it is a thunderous boom that shakes the heavens. In a moment of stillness I know that if some spirit inhabits this earth, or some essence deep within, that Voice is found in that moment. It is quiet and still and can only be heard when we, for one brilliant moment, filter out the background.  In not speaking of the voice of their creators the Dene may have captured this notion in the best of ways: in silence.  

Feeding Body and Soul

A ham and processed cheese sandwich is not what I would consider appetizing; sustaining yes, mouthwatering, no. I grew up in Stratford where the culinary scene has been developing since the 1970’s thanks to the innovations of folks like Joe Mandel, Eleanor Kane and Jim Morris. As the years have gone by the choices of not just good, but amazing dining experiences, has grown exponentially. It’s not that there was anything wrong with the likes of The Drama, The Pickwick or Ellam’s in its day but by the end of the 70’s dining and food in Stratford was “becoming”. So, being left processed cheese and ham sandwiches as my mainstay meals for the first weekend that I was in Délįne and staying in the Lodge was a bit of an awakening. Food culture as I know it does not exist here.

Don’t get me wrong. There are things to rave about when it comes to food here “where the water flows”. Dried fish like grayling and trout and meats from muskox, caribou and moose are well refined arts and traditional dietary staples “from the land”. Walking through the taiga, pockmarked with ponds and edged with mosses and stunted spruce and birch you can find juniper, and at the beginning of October evidence of picked over wild berry patches. Mushrooms are at the end of season at this time of year but evidence remains of bolets and and a few other types. The Northwest Territories is known for morels in late spring and summer. Sweet Woodruff and mountain sorrel were plentiful. For a forager there is a bounty. What has not developed in the community is the concept of a cuisine. Yes there are traditional dishes but in a land of a bounty of food, creativity seems limited. This is a bit of surprise to me given that tourism is a focus of governments at all levels here and if it’s one thing we from Stratford know about tourism is that there is a large bulk of dollars spent on eating out.

During the first few weeks of my time here in Délįne I have been “out on the land” as much as possible hiking and exploring. The weather is beginning to turn colder with nights dropping below zero and the days hovering around freezing. I woke one day to a winter scene that rivaled most Christmas cards but this quickly past. What was most prevalent even with the cold temperatures was mud. I had been advised to bring insulated rubber boots and warned about the mud. Roads, countryside, and out of the land every inch of ground is wet at this late part of the autumn such that it is. Walking along a trail one would expect to occasion a puddle. Here they are ubiquitous underfoot and anywhere your foot is. As the weather gets colder and they begin to freeze over and become layered with ice and dirt and debris hiking can become hazardous as the puddles camouflage themselves and wait for you like Robert

Munsch warned all children. These ones here have less sense of humour. Pretty quickly I found myself stranded in town as it simply became too treacherous to hike out on the land.

Photo: Robert Mugford

People here have been curious to know how long I am staying. A typical greeting goes something like this: “You’re the counsellor ha? How long are you here?” White folk come and go and no one expects them to stay long. There are stories of a few teachers who have arrived and left within days. There is generally no additional information given in these stories. For example we have no idea if they didn’t like to weather, the people or the job or their boss. It is enough to know that they did not stay. Some have tried to prepare me: “You got a parka ha? It gets REALLY cold”. However, for the first month of my residency most folks didn’t bother to acknowledge me. I can’t help but compare this to my other experiences in new places. Travelling in India on various trains and in the street people were quite social and curious about me, my travel, and my home to the point of almost being too forward for my comfort at times. If seeking social interaction one simply could find a chai walla and there find a safe haven from touts and hucksters that joust for your money in public spaces and conversation. On the East coast of Canada people are famously friendly and approach you readily and with interest in your story. In a village with about half the number of people as Délįne, I don’t think we were there an hour and we were invited to stay for tea and some dinner. With new friends Robert and Linda in Glace Bay our hearts were warmed by the stove, fed good meat pie and conversation.

Here in the North it’s a different story.

Yes, a different story and a difficult one. It is not just the fact that I may simply pack up and leave any time but a long history of attempts by people who look a whole lot like me trying to eradicate the Dene culture in the North. Of that I am continually aware. The history of the residential schools runs deep in this place and as I begin my term of work here I am continually confronted with its effects.

Like the trees here at the edge of the taiga there is a slow growth of social comfort for me here in this place. Now, 8 weeks in, people are beginning to greet me and seek out my company when they meet me in “The Northern” grocery store which serves the same purpose here as the coffee shops in my hometown. Here business is done and social invitations extended and every community event is posted on the bulletin board at the front of the store. Jean and Dennis, the couple who run the place always have a story to tell and I inevitably will run into Ken (not his real name) who will usually be half in the bag but friendly as a puppy. He makes me smile. I have a few folks to sit with at community events and I feel a ease settling in over the social anxiety that always comes with new places, faces, and names.

There’s been plenty of activity in my short time here. I’ve gotten to see a Hand Games tournament and I am assured by folks ‘round here that this was just a small taste of the Hand Games that are run later in the winter months where teams of player travel to a Sahtu region town and play for “big money”. Last year I hear tell the winning team took home a 250 grand.. A “family fun night” of party games proved to be a riotous affair and reminded me what fun such games were when I last played them as a child. I think my friends in the south would be stunned at the amount of prizes including cash that gets handed out at these events.

What stands out above any experience so far for me was attending my first Fire-Feeding. This is a Dene tradition where a large central fire is built and people gather round the fire. Drummers keep a steady rhythm and songs are sung. These songs have been passed down through innumerable generations around many such fires. They connect every person in attendance to the medicine and healing they channel. Prayers to honour relatives who have passed on and to the Great Creator are offered and connect for a moment the spiritual and the natural world. The fire is then fed. People bring food from their tables and tobacco and salt and these gifts are added to the fire to nourish the spirits and show gratitude for the sustenance provided by the land. I brought sage sent lovingly to me in a package from home and was honoured to share some with others ‘round the fire.

Standing in the bitter cold, one elder softly measuring time on his drum, a low and whispered song emanating from a place deep inside him, lost to time and place, the smells of the food rising from the fire, smoke in my face and tears on my cheeks I found nourishment of a different kind.

Mahsi.

Six Boxes

I love to fly. There is that moment when the world slides out from underneath you and you tilt to the sky while objects below take on strange, ephemeral proportions.  Then you are punching through mist and cloud, settling in while the billows make a floor over which a primordial sun glares.  The world is there, below, ready to explore.  No matter where you are going, no matter how many pictures you have studied, the maps you poured over in anticipation, the landing jerks you into the reality that everything is strange to you and new.

Flying into Edmonton was odd. There was little sign of the population of 1,363,300 and the boom of the petroleum industry. The decent over barren, harvested fields caught me off guard. I anticipated the skyline of a modern city replete with glass and concrete but this was not visible from the airport some 40km from the city center.  The day was over by the time I landed and retrieved the six cardboard boxes holding the accouterments of my life for the immediate future.

Determining what to fit inside 6 50lb boxes to establish yourself across the continent is not an easy task. Confounding the exercise further is the reality that your destination does not have an easy means to fill a need created by managing this task badly. Further that complication with the recognition that the weather where you will make your life is a frozen landscape formed by extreme temperatures for  9 months of the year.  Packing was an exercise in coping with anxiety, pretending to have far more skill in organization than I have, a million different lists and notes to self and asterisks galore.

Boxes stowed after several airport workers told me that there was no overnight baggage stores and a mild panic in the back of my head I headed to my hotel which was conveniently attached to the airport terminal. Through the disco like lobby past the shi-shi lounge and safely checked in and stowed like my boxes it was time for a beer, or two. 

Back at the Halo lounge I slid onto a stool  and gulped back a Yellowhead Brewery Lager and picked away at a sampling from the tasting menu. I’ve decided that “yorkies” are a sin that can only be washed away by ordering a second beer. Yorkshire pudding filled with pan gravy and pulled roast of beef, yummy. A Boss Hog Oatmeal IPA sounded like a fun second choice. Edmonton has a number of craft brewers and I think a longer stopover might be needed at a later date to explore some. The trick is to explore then make it back to the airport without incident after the sampling of such fine brewing.  I’m sure Edmonton would be a fascinating place to visit and do the tourist thing however it’s never been high on my list of places to visit. Perhaps that will change.

My flight to Yellowknife was to leave at 0710hrs and baggage checked an hour prior to departure and then there’s security to contend with. So 0600 found me back down the hall and in the terminal with a helpful  airport staffer helping me navigate carts built to hold 2 suitcases now stacked with my 6 boxes through the airport to the check in counter of Canada North Airlines then through the luggage check watching my boxes once again drift away via conveyor belt and become someone else’s problem and my anxiety.

I was sweaty and already tired and it felt like the terminal was gaining degrees with each new body lining up for early morning security hassles. I decided to step outside and headed for the exit. Once outside and a few steps away from the inevitable John Player and Sons fog  I felt the rain. It was then that it hit me. I had been hermetically sealed for almost 24hrs in: a van, Pearson International Terminal, Edmonton International Terminal, The Renaissance Hotel, Edmonton International Terminal again and was about to board a plane. How often do we find ourselves in this situation? And how easily? We wake, we coffee up for the day, grumble about the heat, the rain, the cold, the weather (we are Canadians after all), we get into our car, we drive to our paycheck producing building, clock in, work through break and lunch thinking we’ll make up for it later, finish the day, grumble some more about the weather  and get back into our car and drive to our homes where we shut the door behind us and seal ourselves in for the rest of the day. It’s too easy.  The rain felt better than my morning shower and left a chill on my skin as I re-entered the terminal and got in line for security clearance.

I’d had the same pocket knife for a while now. A Gerber dime. It’s a multi-tool really and my ownership of it is a testament to the validity of a lifetime warrantee but that’s another story. It had made it past security at Pearson despite my corkscrew being disallowed because of the blade you use to remove the foil capsule from the wine bottle. Yes that is what it’s called by the way: a foil capsule is a piece of history. It was intended originally to keep rodents and other pests from chewing the corks out of racked bottles. Betcha ya’ didn’t know that. Why I do I don’t know. Anyway, I lost the corkscrew to security and I hope they put it to good use after work. My pocketknife on the other hand I am less generous about. This piece of gear has been camping and canoeing, opened innumerable amounts of packaging (you know the kind – that tough plastic shell that companies seal their goods in making one question if you were meant to use the item enclosed in this keep or simply hang it by the convenient hole in the top and hang it as an art piece.) and even trimmed my toenails, although that might be giving you too much information. I never thought about it being in my luggage. Apparently the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority thought about it. They scanned and rescanned my carry-on bag. They moved everyone back from the x-ray machine and with me present methodically searched the bag and found that dangerous 3.5 cm blade. A few years back the airlines began again allowing blades under 6 cm but then they changed their minds. With a bit of frustration I said goodbye to the knife and I hope that some nice security staffer is paring an apple and laughing about the whole incident as I write this. Drat.

I was so excited to be heading to Yellowknife. I knew that I was only scheduled for a ¾ hr stopover but had hoped to at least take a cab ride through the city and back to the airport. That was a good thought. The plane landed later than expected and a cab tour was not to be. The airport overlooks Long Lake and a short walk along the Mackenzie highway and a peek at the SAREX 2016 equipment like a Hercules and Cormorant was pretty cool. Let’s hope I never need to use those services, or that I’m in Gander, NL when I need them.

 http://www.ganderbeacon.ca/news/local/2016/10/7/top-squad-4658828.html

Getting off the plane onto the tarmac I was entertained by a bird that seems to dominate the landscape here in the North. There was a plane next to the Canada North plane I exited which was unloading items including garbage.  A raven perched itself on the handle of the trolley cart bearing the garbage and delicately picked through the contents emerging with an empty tart tin. The bird then hopped off the cart onto the tarmac and placed the tin on the ground. It went back to the trolley again and removed another and again placed this on the ground. The raven repeated this task about a half dozen times and then again hopped off the trolley and began stacking the tins together. Once done he picked them up and was off.  At least as clever as a toddler by developmental standards.

I landed in Norman Wells and here again I needed to collect my 6 boxes. Things are undeniably more expensive in the remote North and in preparing for the journey I elected to bring along pantry staples such as flour, To Bean or Not to Bean 33 1/3 roast coffee (and yes that is a staple and if you haven’t tried it you must), sugar, spices and herbs. Despite careful packing including bagging anything that could spill, the 2kg bag of sugar took a hit somewhere on the journey and when I retrieved it from the carousel at the Norman Wells airport it was running freely. This is a small community airport and limited staffing is present. There was no one to tell I was having a difficulty. There was no one to clean up. There was nowhere to stow my baggage. Like Hansel I left a trail of sugar, and I mean a solid white line, across the arrivals area floor, to the elevator, across the departures area to the check in counter of NorthWright airlines where a hand written sign indicated that staff would not arrive until one hour before a scheduled flight. I took liberties and left my baggage behind their service counter where a large pile of sugar formed in the course of my three hour layover. How sweet of me.

Norman Wells has a degree of notoriety.  It has a long and troubling history connected to the oil industry and during WWII was a supplier of oil to the U.S. and Canadian military staged in Alaska and the Yukon. A project called the Canol Pipeline was started here pushed by American interests and money. It was short lived andit was never able to satisfactorily operate as intended. I blame the mosquitoes. The Conol Heritage Trail which was Canol Road and was built as part of the pipeline infrastructure is part of the Trans Canada Trail.  The trail made for some good hiking on the layover.  Alexander Mackenzie had explored this area and felt that the surrounding mountains needed English names instead of the Dene names that came with them.  From Norman Wells you can see a panorama of the Mackenzie Mountains and the Mackenzie River. No one ever said the guy had a great imagination when it came to names but then the Dene place name DehCho (big river) wasn’t so creative either.

The last leg of the journey was the flight from Norman Wells to Délįne on a Cessna 208 with NorthWright airlines with an Aussie pilot who looked about 12. Looking down over the rust colored taiga pockmarked like a moonscape with lakes and ponds and bunched up trees gives on the first real sense of isolation. There is nothing familiar about this landscape from the air. No landmarks for the layman save for the Great Bear River that snakes along the last 110km of the flight. A few weeks later in the season and this stark land seen from the air is much prettier as it is dusted with snow and the small lakes beginning to reflect light and clouds off of the first ice forming on them. After a short stopover in Tulita, population 478 at the airport where wrecks,  abandoned planes and trailers line the edge of the airport and the Cessna banked toward Délįne my final destination.

A dirt and gravel runway and a terminal building about the size of a mobile home and without a tower greet the traveler. I was glad to be rid of my instant friend who latched onto me during the flight and smelled of stale beer and John Players and Sons. I had no idea where I was. I had little idea how far the town was from the airport. I needed a ride and a quick conversation with some guys in reflective work jackets resulted in my boxes stowed in the back of a truck and a seat in the back of the cab heading toward Grey Goose Lodge. I found out later that the lodge had a staff member who was to have met me but arrived after I arrived, that a co-worker had been assigned to pick me up and had also arrived late and a relative of my Délįne landlord had also been arranged to transport me. Evidently we passed all three of these people on the short 3km drive to the lodge.

Boxes unloaded and stowed in what appeared to be a gift shop of sorts and the key for my room at the Lodge secured I was informed by the young woman working the front desk that it was 5pm and the end of the workweek (Saturday) so she was leaving and that I would be the only guest staying over the weekend and no hotel staff was scheduled so the kitchen and front desk would be closed. They had left sandwiches in the cooler in the dining room and I was to help myself and write down anything I ate and we would settle up later. She then left the building at a canter.

My boxes and I had arrived.