News from the busy Bay

Now we're back to our regular programming!

can you spot the two Newfoundlander fishermen in this photo?

Cambridge Bay has been busy busy busy busy these days.  The barge ships have made it in with everyone's yearly supplies of groceries. My friends are all busy unpacking their stuff like it's a weird grownup Christmas. ("I forgot I ordered these! YES. Toilet paper FOREVER!")

The cruise ships are in and tourists are wandering all over the roads with not a care in the world, and certainly not for their own roadside safety.  I would like to apologize to a particular group of tourists who probably came to get a tour of the meat plant and instead spent the whole time there watching me try to make my credit card work while I purchased more or less all of the smoked char in town. (I'm just kidding. there's some left.)

Other ships are coming in and out. I can't even keep track of them. I partied with a bunch of sailors from the Arctic research ship the Martin Berggman (and probably amused them when I later jumped into the Arctic Ocean right by their boat), soon after which they ran aground somewhere in the Arctic ocean.  It's okay, though. One of the Franklin ships that they were looking for has finally been found.

I keep meeting Norwegians in town, and every time I do, I ask them ARE YOU HERE TO TAKE AWAY THE MAUD. I suppose it's racist to assume that all Norwegians in Cambridge Bay are here to take away the Maud, but, like, I mean, a lot of them are.

They're taking away the Maud

even while you sleep: the Norwegians are waiting to take away the Maud

The old stone church ruins has a roof now. And no longer is in ruins. Wow! I was pretty impressed how quickly that went up. I went exploring around the place, and it was starting to look pretty sharp.  There was no explanation for the random tampon I found on the ground nearby though.

(For reference, here's what the old stone church ruins used to look like.)

And as I mentioned before, they 'sploded the LORAN tower and now it's not so much of a tower as it is a bunch of kind of sad metal on the ground.

sad face

Speaking of 'splosions, especially in that area, FIREWORKS EFF YEAH. I was going go to bed early one night but then I found out they were 'sploding fireworks across the Bay by the old stone church, so I put my pants back on and set up my lawnchair and watched the explosions in the sky while listening to Sigur Ros and drinking some kind of tea called Mother's Little Helper.

This Jeep, however, has seen better days

I kind of missed the night time darkness

hiking out on the tundra

the forest fires of Yellowknife

In the airplane seats in front of me, I listened to a young Cambridge Bay couple try to teach their toddler son about our destination.

“Yellowknife,” said the dad.

“Lellalie,” repeated the child.

“Yellowknife.”

“Lellalie.”

The child’s attention shifted as he looked out the airplane window.

“Those are trees,” the father explained, pointing at the forest below.

“Cheese?”

“Trees. Yellowknife has trees.”

“Tees?”

“Trees. They get in the way. The make you feel boxed in, like they’re all over you.”

We flew into Yellowknife over the forest fires that threatened to consume it.  That day, there were over 200 fires blazing in the Northwest Territories. The closest one was only 30 kilometres out of town and the residents near the highway had been evacuated for the night as a precaution.  More firefighters were being flown in from Ontario and other provinces to bring reinforcements; some firefighters were being sent out for medical treatment for smoke inhalation. On Wednesday, the sky had turned a sickly yellow, and then an eerie black, dark as night in the middle of the day.  It felt like the apocalypse.

On the airplane, I was struggling with a cold (possibly pneumonia), and I couldn’t taste a thing or hear very well or smell, but my husband told me that it smells like smoke, even inside the plane. This would normally be a little alarming, but it smells like campfire, the lovely, almost delicious smell of wood burning, just before you dangle your marshmallow on a stick over the flames.

I love the architecture of the buildings in Old Town

I had been looking forward to spending some time in Yellowknife with my husband, who hasn’t had a chance to explore the city.  Despite the smoky haze, we walked over to Old Town where we discovered Bullocks Bistro, a Yellowknife establishment famous for its fish and chips, the shockingly expensive price of said fish and chips, and its notoriously cranky owners who had no use for fools. Think of the soup nazi on Seinfeld, or the efficient but curt workers at Schwartz’s in Montreal.  The place is so well known and the food is so good that the owners don’t have to pretend to like you.

The walls were decorated with all sorts of souvenirs and signatures that previous diners had left behind. Real estate agents’ business cards, fond poems about the fish dish, international dollar bills a surprising amount of comments in Korean, and on one wall, a bright pink bra hung up with a pin on it that said “FALVO” (Side note: I happen to know Falvo). Even the ceiling fan was covered with writing.

walls

Ceiling

Arctic Air was here!

Our fish dish arrived, but by then my stomach had shut down, between the cold-possibly-pneumonia, my asthma being triggered by the cold-possibly-pneumonia and exacerbated by the forest fire smoke, and on top of everything, my allergies caused by the trees, which really do get in the way. Instead, my husband was forced to eat the entire meal on his own, although he did say he enjoyed it.

The next morning, the smoke was even thicker, and covered the whole city in a blanket of what looked like fog.  I could barely breathe, even in my hotel room.   Out on the streets, I overhead a cook muttering to himself while smoking in an alley, “This is the worst I’ve ever seen it.” He was wearing his apron like a mask to cover his face.

I covered my own face with a handkerchief, like a protester or a sun-fearing ajuma, and wondered how quickly I could leave Yellowknife.

When we returned to Yellowknife three weeks later on our way back, there was still the smell of wood fire in the air, but at least we couldn’t see the smoke.  It was getting better. Still, my entire stay was one long asthma attack.

Determined to try to enjoy my evening anyway, we wandered to the Wildcat Café in Old Town, because it was a beautiful sunny afternoon and the Wildcat has the best restaurant patio and the best restaurant patio view in town. The café is only open during the summer. Every couple of years, the contract for the restaurant is open to bids for tenders, and this year, the chef is the guy from Thornton’s, arguably the fanciest dining place in Yellowknife. This means you can enjoy fancy Thornton dishes for not-Thornton prices, while sipping mason jars of wine and watching sailboats drift by on the lake. 

We split my favourite pogo dish and my husband ate a bison burger while I ate a fancy dish of pulled duck confit with tomato, corn, zucchini, and jalopeno in a cream-based succotash with a sweet and sour fennel jam.  I still don’t know what a succotash is, and neither did my server, but I lapped it all up.  I have stopped eating vegetables on my vacation out of principle, but now as my vacation came to an end, I ate my stewy dish of veggies and it was delicious.

After dinner, we climbed up the stairs of the cliff to the Pilot’s Monument, because I insisted that the romantic view at the top was worth it.  The whole way up, we were huffing and puffing, I like to think because of the smoke-induced asthma, but I suspect actually because I’m out of shape and I was really full from dinner.

view from the Pilots' Monument

In the evening, we stayed at the Super 8, with the intention of doing some last minute shopping at Wal-Mart, but I ended up falling asleep with the TV on by 9PM. This meant, of course, that I was  wide awake by 5:30AM. Luckily, I was happy to discover that the hotel had a fitness centre, so I squeezed in an early morning workout before enjoying my continental breakfast of a croissant, yogurt, and tea.  And then I realized everything about this paragraph made me sound like an old person. Guys, I swear I am twenty-nine and three quarters.

Cambridge Bay's dump fires

In case you haven't been following the news, Iqaluit's dump has been on fire for weeks, even months, and nothing - absolutely nothing - has worked in putting it out.  It's gone out four times, but has managed to come back to life every time, like some horror movie zombie garbage monster that is born out of a giant volcano. It doesn't help that the water trucks that would be used to put the fire out also need to be used to deliver water to the homes of residents in Iqaluit.  It also doesn't help that there just is a lot of garbage to burn, since the city's population has tripled in fifteen years without the waste management plan necessarily catching up.

I can't help but be reminded of a few years back when there was a huge garbage strike in Toronto, and all of the trash piled up to the heights of basketball nets, forming mountains and mountains of human waste in the parks and yards and streets, culminating in that one day when it began to storm, and the rain washed the garbage down the streets of Toronto, like some modern-day eleventh plague sent down from the heavens to punish Toronto for whatever Toronto did to deserve a garbage river. Now we have Part II: the Dumpcano of Iqaluit (the Toronto of the north).

Dumpcano even has its own Twitter account:

Smoke is the new black.
— Iqaluit #Dumpcano (@yfbdumpcano) May 31, 2014

I'm distinguished because I cannot be extinguished.
— Iqaluit #Dumpcano (@yfbdumpcano) May 31, 2014

Let it burn. #DumpcanoProverbs
— Iqaluit #Dumpcano (@yfbdumpcano) May 31, 2014

At this point, Dumpcano has won and the fire crew has decided to quit fighting it, hoping that it will burn itself out in hopefully less than a few months.

the Cambridge Bay dump fire

Well, it's always sunny in Cambridge Bay.  Not just because we get 24 hours of sunlight compared to Iqaluit's measly 20, but also because all of our dump fires are generally intentionally started.



We had a number of boxes of paper to dispose of last week, so we brought them out to the dump to burn them. This was pretty much my favourite thing I've ever done as part of my job.

The dump fires here are carefully watched by the dump supervisor, who sits and watches you from his truck. If you have trouble lighting the fire, he'll come over to help you.  Which is kind of a cool job perk.

 

Luckily we had this to start our fire

 

There's something incredibly therapeutic about watching a fire burn. Especially a giant pile of paper. I guess it's why we like to sit around a camp fire and watch it like it's a television. It's just so immensely satisfying to watch the patterns and shapes that form in the fire, like art, but really, really, really destructive art.

 

 

I should note that I am wearing only a tank top in the photo, not because it's so warm outside, but because the fire was really hot. Yes, fire is hot.

 jaw bones

Burning things at the dump was pretty fun, like a campfire, except when I went home I smelled like garbage, rather than wood fires.  Also, I had a tan.

after the fire

I heard the town siren go off again last night.  The ten o'clock curfew siren had already sounded, but this second siren was different - it just kept going and going and going.  This wasn't the curfew siren; it was the fire alarm, alerting the town of an emergency.

I put on my Canada Goose jacket and stood outside on the street, trying to see if there was smoke in the sky.  It was still daylight at 10:30PM. The sun has been staying up longer and longer these days, and it does weird things to your mind.

The first night that I visited Cambridge Bay last October, there was a fire that killed a woman. Tragically, it seems like these things happen here way too often than you'd expect, and in a small close-knit community like this one, each death hits the community hard. I had heard the town siren sound, like a woman wailing for ten minutes straight, just like it was now.  I wondered if somebody would die tonight.

CBC News: :Woman dead in Cambridge Bay, Nunavut, house fire
Nunatsiaq News: CamBay house fire kills woman

In the days that follow, the world was swept up by the news of the Boston marathon bombing, followed by the shooting of a police officer at M.I.T., followed by the lockdown of all of Boston while the remaining suspect was tracked down in Watertown.  But Cambridge Bay, over two thousand miles away, was coping in its own tragedy after the fire.  Wasn't it just last week that there was a funeral?

The details about the house fire that claimed one life are still surfacing, but there is one thing I noticed: it seemed like everyone knew the woman who passed away; it was as though almost everyone was either close or related to her. The man in front of me in line at the post office. The person I talked to at the grocery store. Clients. Coworkers. In a small town, I guess it isn't all that hard to believe that everybody knew the victim.

It was also surprising to see the outpouring of support.  People took time off work to comfort the family. The planning committee meeting to prepare for the Frolics spring celebration was cancelled. People even sent messages on Facebook offering their help. That's the other side of things that comes with living in a small town. Everybody's right there with you, sharing the pain.  It was really something to observe.

this kimchi is on fire

what an adventurous night.

1. WE FINALLY ATE KOREAN FOOD LAST NIGHT. olivia and i decided we couldn't bear our cravings any longer, so we googled what was probably the only Korean restaurant in all of Amsterdam. our minds were made; we were not going to let anything stop us. it was a ridiculously far trek, almost all the way out to amstelveen; but we did not let this stop us. we got seriously lost at least three times (THANK YOU AMSTERDAM AND YOUR RELUCTANCE TO POST CLEAR VISIBLE STREET SIGNS, OR ANY SIGNS AT ALL); but we did not let this stop us. it was unbelievably expensive, 18 euros for chajangmyun when in toronto it's usually about $5-7; but we did not let this stop us. Olivia's bike tire broke in the midst of the journey, leaving her stranded in a sketchy tunnel; but we did not let this stop us (she rode on the back of my bike). and i swear, when they brought out our banquet of banchan with bean sprouts and gamja and kimchi and kkakdugee and korean pancakes and mandu and bulgogi and ukejang and manduguk, our hearts and our minds and our tummies were happy. our wallets, not so much, but who cares about that. it was as authentic a restaurant as you were going to get in Holland, and we rode back downtown (olivia on my back again), the warm smell of kimchi on my breath, i felt a peace of mind that only a feast of kimchi tofu could bestow on a tired world traveler...

2. we went for drinks at a fancy bar in a beautiful theatre building in leidesplein. i've been here before and i absolutely adore its classy interior, wide open concept rooms, chandeliers, grand staircases, two euro Heineken beers....then the bar caught on fire and everyone had to evacuate.



3. ...but the police would not let me leave the building with my beer, so in answer to your question, yes, i did stand inside a building on fire so i could chug my beer.

4. almost simultaneously, the politie (dutch police), in a not-so-polite move, were giving a serious beat down on some guy getting arrested outside the building. being the tourist minded folks we are, we took pictures.

5. at some point in the night, jake whipped out a wolf mask and chugged a glass of beer. i have no idea where this mask came from. he then pulled out a bottle of wine from nowhere and proceeded to fill some Heineken beer glasses.



and the night just went on from there.