traveling in the north

Flying up North sometimes seems like a magical adventure, to people who have never done it.  But the reality is flying in the North isn't glamourous. It isn't fun. It's tedious at best and terrifying at its worst. But even the terrifying moments happen so often that you get used to it: when the pilot announces that there's a mechanical problem in the engine and we're going to have to "try" to land unexpectedly, or that the weather's really bad and we're going to have to "try" to go back, you get used to thinking, "So this is it. I might die.  But really, this is no excuse for the flight attendant to take so long to bring me my lemon-scented napkins."

 

Baffin Island from the air

 

We laugh when we read newspaper articles excitedly reporting about airplanes forced to make emergency landings. That's not news. That's just an average Monday afternoon.

In Nunavut, because most communities are so remote, you have to fly to get from one community to another.  Also, all of our stuff - mail, groceries, booze - are brought in by plane. That's a lot of flying. That's a lot of airlines, too.  You've probably heard of First Air. Have you heard of Canadian North? Buffalo Airways? Calm Air? Arctic Air? One of those airlines is a fictional one featured on CBC, and I bet you don't even know which one.  There are a bunch of Canadian airlines that most Canadians have never heard of, and they all fly in the north.

Let me take you through my Monday afternoon.  I was supposed to fly from Iqaluit to Cambridge Bay. There are no direct flights, despite the fact that these are two of the largest communities in Nunavut. Instead I've got to fly to Rankin Inlet, fly out of the territory into the Yellowknife inNorthwest Territories, and then back into Nunavut to Cambridge Bay. It's a two-day trip.  It's almost always a two-day trip, if not three.

The brightly coloured Iqaluit airport

I was flying either Canadian North or First Air. It's usually one of those two. I never remember which because honestly I can't tell the difference except that I think Canadian North doesn't serve V8 drinks. Both serve you meals, even if your flight is only an hour long, even if they already served you a meal an hour ago (much unlike Air Canada). Both give you free newspapers and breakfasts that I don't recognize but functionally taste like eggs and some sort of meat despite taking the shape of soft bread. By the way, you always eat the meal, because you don't know when your last meal will be. Not because you're poor, but because at any moment you might get stranded for hours in the middle of a freak snowstorm.

So there I was flying Canadian North (I think it was Canadian North).  We stopped in Rankin Inlet. It's just supposed to be a stop, one that will be "as brief as possible" the flight attendant assures me, as passengers get off and others get on. It's not brief at all. I'm chatting with people in the airport, because in the north, you always see someone you know at the airport, no matter where you are. Then I hear an announcement. There's a mechanical problem with our plane, so we can't get back on the plane.  In fact, my flight's been cancelled, just like that. My laptop is still on the plane.  I make a mad scramble to get it.

Back at the airport, all of the passengers on my flight are being rescheduled to travel with the other airline. First Air (I think it was First Air). We're told to stand in line at the desk, but they don't actually serve us in the order of the line. They seem to kind of randomly pick who they want to serve. All I care about is that I can see my luggage being transferred to the next plane. Also, I'm immensely thankful that the rowdy high school sports team that had been traveling on the plane had gotten off in Rankin Inlet.

We get on the plane. We don't go through security. We never, ever go through security when we fly up north, by the way. Nobody checks my ID. Nobody looks at my luggage.

I arrive in Yellowknife, only a half hour delayed, which is actually pretty good.  I have a drink. I sleep at the Explorer Hotel, which costs $200 a night.

The next morning, I go back to the airport.  Again, we don't go through security. I see that we are going to be getting into a propeller airplane. I hate propeller airplanes. It's not that I question the safety of the small aircraft. It's probably safe. Propeller planes can clearly fly. What I'm worried about - and I know this is silly, but it happens - is how easy it is for a stupid bird to fly into one of those propellers. And I'm not really all the concerned about the well-being of the bird, but that one bird is all it takes to bring this plane down.

 

look at those propellers, like a beckoning hand inviting birds to come close to check it out

In this case, I also had a front row seat to view the mechanical problems of the airplane. We've only been flying for about twenty minutes, when the pilot announces that we're dealing with mechanical problems and we're going to have to fly back to Yellowknife.  I feel like I'm experiencing a deja vu. I look out my window, and the passenger next to me points it out. There it is, the mechanical problem, right outside my window.  The landing gear won't retract properly.  I see a metal flap hanging out, and I can clearly read the warning on it. Something about how this flap should be closed when in flight.

So the plane turns around. I read my book. The airports here have this great system where they leave out paperbacks for travelers to pick up for free and leave as they wish.  Unfortunately, a lot of the novels are awful. I play a game of trying to pick the least awful novel.   This novel is about an elderly man who likes to play detective, with the help of his psychic cats.  Most of the book is spent describing what the cats like to eat, rather than on the mystery the protagonist is trying to solve. It's pretty awful.

We've been flying for a while now. The plane is still turning.  The pilot makes another announcement. We can't land.  The plane is too heavy to land. We're going to have to fly for a while longer to burn off fuel until we're light enough to land.

The pilot is actually speaking a kind of doublespeak. It's not that we're too heavy too land; it's that, with the problem we're having with our landing gear, if we don't land properly and our tank is full of fuel, he's kind of afraid that things will go all explodey and erupt full of flames. So we're going to use some a bunch of that fuel. In fact, we're going to fly around with the landing gear down to burn more fuel with the drag. So we circle around Yellowknife about fifty times, very, very slowly. I have memorized the landscape now.

the lake filled landscape of Yellowknife

 

Ice road

I am feeling this incredible feeling of being afraid of death and yet incredibly bored, all at the same time.
 
By the time the plane  has burn to land, the pilot gives us more cheerful news. Fire trucks Tthe are going to escort the plane to the gate once we land. But don't worry. This is all perfectly normal and part of the routine. Doublespeak.

With that said, death and boredom aside, the view is magnificent and cannot be rivaled with any other experience, not even on Blu-ray with David Attenborough calmly narrating the scenery.  I'm always surprised to see how different the landscapes look, from Baffin Island to Rankin Inlet to the Northwest Territories to the Kitikmeot region where Cambridge Bay is. It really is something, and once you look past the mechanical problems, the delays, and all the other frustrations that come with flying in the North, it's amazing to think that you are seeing a view that not many Canadians will ever get to see.

permanent daylight

Last night was the last night that the sun went down.  The sun set, and then the sun rose less than an hour later.  Now we will have permanent daylight for the next two months.  Good-bye night sky, I will miss you.



  as a side note, "permanent daylight" is my favourite song by Radiohead, my favourite band. I love it not only for its quintessentially Radiohead-esque lyrics, but also because the musical style is a tribute to Sonic Youth, my other favourite band, only Radiohead somehow does Sonic Youth better than Sonic Youth, in a manner that is succinct and refined.

charity fridays: organizations worth supporting

Apologies for not posting much this week. Between my crazy work schedule and my laptop dying unexpectedly (eep...) I haven't been able to post much. Now I'm slowly painstakingly typing this out on my husband's Galaxy tab.

Anyway, enough about my tech woes. For this week's Charity Friday, here are some organizations advocating for great causes that I think are worth supporting.

• Jer's Vision: I met Jeremy at a birthday dinner once, but I'd heard of him long before. As a teenager, while the rest of us were angsty about homework, parents, and our prom date, Jeremy was fighting with his high school about the right to start up a LGBT-postive club at school, resulting in a human rights complaint, and one of the largest human rights settlements in Canadian history. What did he do with the money? He started up Jer's Vision, a non-profit organiztaion to eliminate bullying, homophobia, transphobia, and other forms of discrimination in schools and the community. It's an inspiring story - but then,  Jeremy himself is quite inspiring. Donation page here.
• (Ottawa) Hollaback!: This is a very creative initiative to raise awareness about street harassment. People post their stories about being harassed - intimidated, cat-called, called a racial slur, groped - in the safety of a supportive community, thanks to the availability of mobile technology. It's a really interesting project, with local bases in each city.  Donation page here.
• Leave Out Violence: My friend Leila let me know about this project. She's on the board of directors for this organization, as if she wasn't busy enough being a lawyer. This organization is based in Toronto and is devoted to fighting youth violence. Check it out! Just keep im mind that the website is http://leaveoutviolence.org/ and NOT love.org like I originally tried...that is a completely different website.

I'm still participating in the 30×30 challenge to spend 30 minutes outside every day for 30 days! Which isn't always easy, considering sometimes we have snowstorms. In May.

Day 3: On your next walk, stop to smell the flowers

what flowers

Day 4: Outdoor picnic in -30°C weather at the ruins of the old stone church

Nunavut dog drama

There is some mad dog drama going on in town.  Cambridge Bay apparently has a problem with packs of dogs that run loose through town. Some of the dogs are really friendly, like the three-legged Malamute that I've nicknamed Lefty, who joins me spontaneously on my running route sometimes.

Some of them are not so well-trained.  People have complained that the dogs running wild steal their own dogs' food, or worse, attack their puppies. These fights that occur are often unfair, because domestic dogs are chained up to the yard, while the loose dogs are not. There's a certain sense of helplessness and resentment on the part of the owners too, who have been following the rules by keeping their dogs on a leash, and yet feel like they can't defend their dogs when attacked because it's only the by-law officer who is allowed to put down dangerous dogs.  People grumble about how they're going to start to need guard dogs for their guard dogs.  You can bet in the old days it wasn't like this.

Even worse, there have been cases of rabies reported recently in some dogs. They've had to put down the dogs and remove their brains to examine the disease.  This is how it all ends, my friends. The zombie apocalypse starts with a few seemingly innocent reports of rabies outbreaks in stray dogs.  Soon enough it becomes undead people, hungry for brains. I always thought Cambridge Bay Nunavut would be the last haven from the hordes of zombies, not that catalyst.  You heard it from here first.

And then there's baby-making that goes on. That's a whole different kind of drama.  It seems like all the dogs in town go into heat all at the same time. I don't know if you've ever heard a dozen dogs all howl the same lovesick song at high noon, but it's a creepy sound.

I've seen this pair of dogs in particular running all over town, causing a scandal with their PDA

There's one dog that I always pass on my way to work: I call him Circle Dog because he always runs excitedly in a circle around the metal pole that he's tied to.  He always seems so confused, the way he runs around in circles but apparently Circle Dog is not so naive, because he's the baby daddy of a bunch of new litters in town. Keep in mind that this guy is chained to a pole all day long. The lonely girl-dogs come to him to get pregnant. What a life.

Meet Circle Dog, the top dog in town.

life in the goldfish bowl

carrying a bag of chips, pretending this is my ride

The sun's been coming up at 3:30AM these days. It's pretty early. And it's not like it's really ever getting dark either. Night time has been replaced by a permanent daylight, as though the world is stuck in that time where the sun has just gone down or is just about to come up.  

permanent twilight: Cambridge Bay at midnight

As you can imagine, it makes it a little be difficult to sleep. With the sun rising so early, your body feels like it should be waking up at 4AM. We've got these blackout curtains that keep out most of the sunlight, but you'd be amazed at how the smallest crack of sunlight shining through will keep you awake at night. For now, this is the solution that we've worked out:

maybe not the classiest solution, but it works.

It means we end up waking up in total darkness. This can be pretty disorienting in the opposite way, so right now we're working on training a monkey robot to come in and open the cutains at 7AM.

With the gloriously long days of sunshine, the weather has gotten warmer - at min, and the kids have all been playing outside, in the most uniquely Arctic way possible.  Little boys pushing their BMX bicycles through the snow-covered ice roads.  Kids playing street hockey on the streets outside - on ice skates. Children riding their sleds down the hill - a hill that happens to also be a road. Because the roads are completely covered in ice here, they also make for excellent toboggan hills for the kids, who seem to have no fear for the drivers backing their trucks out of the driveway. Come to think of it, the kids like to play in traffic a lot. They are completely oblivious to the oncoming trucks and snowmobiles. The world is their playground, dammit.

We've been slowly getting used to the other quirky aspects of living in the Arctic. Have I told you about the hair drier yet? As you know, one of my first adventures in the Arctic was having to use a hair dryer on my colleague's front door lock to unfreeze the damn thing enough for my key to fit in.  For some reason probably related to the weather changes, this has become a regular part of our life now for our own house, and we often have to leave a hair drier outside on the porch whenever we go out.

classic Nunavut front porch tools

We're also becoming better at grocery shopping in the North. As I've mentioned before, I am constantly surprised by the food items that do make it all the way here. Like eggs. Eggs aren't particularly exotic, but if you think of the long trip that has to be taken to bring fragile, delicate eggs over several planes to get here, it's pretty amazing to realize I can eat eggs here.  Even if everything isn't available all the time, we've learned to enjoy the stuff that we do get as a treat. The produce available at the store guides what our menu for the day will be. When the store has beets, we make borscht. When the store has zucchinis, Rob makes hobak-jeon, Korean zucchini pancakes. Sometimes the store even has bok choy, and then Casa Glob has a Chinese food night.  

and then sometimes, the grocery store looks like this.

These are the things that make life in Cambridge Bay the unique experience it is. Sometimes it feels a bit like living inside a goldfish bowl, or maybe that scene from the Matrix movies when Neo is stuck at that subway station to nowhere. But there's a lot going on inside that goldfish bowl, and I'm slowly getting used to the typical sights of the town, the little ladies riding ATVS with babies strapped to their backs, the giant ravens circling above my head (I am just waiting for them to develop the evolutionary ability to take me down), hunting culture. This weekend, we played poker at a house that was the site of a triple murder five years ago, followed an outdoor picnic in -30°C weather, finished with a dance party in a beautiful house that was equipped with a sound system, smoke machines, and midnight sun. We're getting used to the peculiarities of the community, but it's never dull. 

hunter culture

hunter culture: I love this ad selling a harpoon set

little lady with a baby in her hood, filling up her ATV

giant, Hitchcock-style ravens, ready to eat my face as soon as they figure out how to

Canadian North

charity fridays: run baby run

It's Charity Friday again! Which, if I had an alliterative mind at all, I would have originally named Fundraiser Friday.  Either way, consider offering your monetary support to my colleagues, who all apparently love to run:

•  My friend Erin is running her very first marathon this month for the Ottawa Race Weekend. I always laugh at the phrase "first marathon" because once I hit my first, I'll be happy and quit. Anyway, not only is she running her first marathon, she's also raising money to fund scholarships for the Afghan School Project.  $25 will fund one month of English and computing courses for students in Kandahar. Only $25 will make such a big difference in a Afghan students life! That's how much I spend on muskox earrings! Donate here.


• Over on the other side of the river, my friend Geneviève is also running for charity. She'll be running for cancer research on Team Sylvia Reiter as part of Montreal's Defi Canderel. This event involves participants running through the streets of Montreal. I would personally find it difficult to run through the streets of Montreal without stopping at every other shop to eat the delicious dishes Montreal has to offer...so power to the runners of the Defi Canderel for exercising their will power not to do so.


• Over on the other side of the ocean, my friend Leigh is running the 5K race for the Race For Life London in the UK, where she currently lives. I am suggesting that she run her 5K race "Gloria-style", which means, with snow pants and spikes on the bottom of her shoes. Regardless, give her your support. Proceeds go to funding cancer research.

Meanwhile, some of you know that I've signed up for the 30X30 Challenge, by CBC and the David Suzuki Foundation. The goal is to spend 30 minutes outside, every day, for 30 days. You'd think it won't be too hard for me, since I tend to go for jogs outside and I walk to work.  But we'll see when a spring blizzard hits.   Anyway, I'll be posting some photos from my challenge on a weekly basis.

Day 1: The first challenge was to drink your daily coffee under a tree instead of at your desk. However, we have no trees above the treeline, so I decided to drink my tea on a frozen beach instead. Reading comics. In my snow pants.

Day 2: Beautiful sun dogs in the sky

posters for court

Court is in town next week! Here in Nunavut, the court travels on circuit to each community, so that people can experience the justice system in their own community.  In Cambridge Bay, court comes every couple of months.  In preparation for court, the Law Centre puts up posters like this to remind people who have been arrested and charged to speak to a lawyer before their court appearance.