some photos

The local scenery


Looking out across the sea ice to the other side of the bay.

View from the twin otter as we descend to my community

Not a good day to forget my hat: -44 with the wind chill.


"No, you guys go ahead. I'll just stay here and take pictures."

View from my living room window

Either it's a wolf track, or Digby lives.

The Definition of Success

My last year of McGill was very much a challenge. I would come home every day after class and collapse on my bed, and wonder if all my efforts at getting a degree in social work would lead anywhere. I was very dissatisfied with school and my stage placement at a clinic in downtown Montreal was reinforcing my view that I was not being adequately equipped to do this work.
But miracle of miracles, I somehow completed all the required courses. At the same time I encountered a prof who, when she spoke of her experience as a social worker in the North, inspired me to see my degree not as an end in itself but as a door to a world I may not have previously considered. From that time on, I began to look at what I could do as opposed to what I could not do. I took it one step at a time: making the phone calls, getting an interview, reading about the Inuit and their history, completing the interview. Of course, when I was offered a job up here, I fretted. A lot. Should I go? Should I not go? My housemate, who probably said it more to ensure I would be moving out rather than for my own good, gave me gave me some excellent feedback. When he could no longer tolerate my whining, he said, " If you refuse this job you may as well rip up your diploma. What is the point of working so hard to chicken out now?" (or words to that effect. He is not known for his diplomacy.)
So now I am up here living and working in an Inuit community and I love it.
When things are bad, they are so bad I just want to inject myself in the eye with ammonia. But when things go well, and I am able to assist someone to come to a more positive realisation about their circumstances, then the pay-off is very big indeed. That I leave the office and walk home under a night sky in which the northern lights bloom irridescently only makes the pay-off even greater.
I have been reflecting on this past year because my supervisor has asked me to go to McGill and talk about life as a northern social worker at their annual career fair. Even though I will be trapped in an airless room trying to be heard above the din of other agencies also talking about how great they are to neurotic 3rd year students, I will relish this day. To go back to McGill, the place I always think of as Mount Doom, as an employed professional and not as a stressed-out, embittered student will be very sweet indeed. It will almost be like revenge.

Moonwalk

After I had suggested a perambulation beside the sea, my walking buddy convinced me, on this gloriously sunny and -27 Sunday morning, that I have not experienced the north until I walk across the frozen ocean. As a person who always ruminates about worst-case scenarios, particularly when it comes to my personal health and wellbeing, I was not in agreement with her, but I decided to go for it rather than be assaulted by the jeers of my siblings if I chickened out.
We set off across the frozen expanse of sea-ice, every Farley Mowat story I ever read popping into my head, and after the first couple of metres, I gradually began to relax. Ice sculptures created when one slab was pushed above another dotted the surface , and our shadows at high noon were as long as if it were early evening. I figured as long as skidoo tracks were visible on the ice, we were not in danger of falling in. We crossed the ocean at its narrowest point, taking about a half hour to reach the other side of the bay. I was quite aware that , being exposed on the ice in our contrasting clothing, we might as well have had neon signs directing the local carnivores lurking on the surrounding tundra to a Sunday buffet. It truly gives new meaning to the term 'vulnerable'.
When we got to the other side, we turned around and stared at the village, clinging like a limpet to the last bit of Quebec. I felt like an astronaut taking a spacewalk, happy enough for the experience, but eager to get home.

I think I am falling for the north, and I am not sure when it started. It could have been when I noticed people saying hello to me in the COOP. It could have been the night I was out walking with the nurses, and we stumbled across an Arctic fox in a leg trap. One wrestled with the trap while trying to evade the fox's piranha-like teeth, and the other nurse and I tried to restrain the husky who had joined us and keep a look out for the returning trapper. In theory I have always agreed with the notion of not interfering with another culture's ways of living, but that was until the fox looked me in the eyes.
Two days later, under a brilliant blue sky, the nurse drove me up to the crest of a hill overlooking the sea and the town, to point out wolf tracks in the snow. We then turned and faced south across the tundra, and he pointed out "polar bear alley", where the cuddly killers walk from one fishing place to another. This alley runs behind the town airport, where in the summer time I frequently walked alone. Not now.

I May Be Some Time...

My sister Meaghan gave me a brilliant book for Christmas: Pierre Berton’s “Prisoners of the North.” I sort of sneered at the title, assuming she was making a jab at my present working conditions, but that soon vanished when I started to read it.
Mr. Berton focuses on some southern individuals who truly went to heroic and, some would say, foolhardy attempts to explore this part of Canada. I think some of them were certifiably unwell, but whatever their motivations and reasoning, as I look north across a vast expanse of blue-white sea ice , my hat goes off to them. If the weather up here is inclement, I sit in my heated, furnished, well-stocked little house and whine if my espresso supply gets low. My worst hardship is having to boil my drinking water. The men in the book endured, by eating pelts, and, you guessed it, each other.
The argument has always been that people, if they want to survive up here, need to imitate and heed the Inuit. I believe this credo to be true. But even the Inuit died of starvation, and fell through the ice, and froze to death. That they continue to thrive against constant hardship makes them the real heroes.

A is for Alcohol

This part of Nunavik is dry, so bootlegging is rife up here. A bottle of vodka (any brand) goes for $300.00. A mickey of vodka goes for $150.00. There is never a shortage of buyers. The Inuit binge drink, so life can be cheery and humdrum for 30 days of the month, until the booze comes into town and the whole place erupts. It's better not to be on-call at those times.

Gone Away is the Bluebird

This is not a cheery Currier and Ives' winter landscape. I have woken up to find myself in the Discovery channel's "Extreme Weather" program. It is cold and dark and the wind is raging, blowing snow everywhere. I have to dig out my doorway before the snow piled up there freezes and I will not be able to close the door. Feeling huffy at my pampered friends (you know who you are !) in Montreal who hire people to do this for them.
I lay in bed last night listening to dogs howling. At least I told myself that's what it was, because it also sounded like a woman screaming.

Advent 1

Yaël, my good friend in Montreal who doubles as my cat's godmother, has sent me Christmas decorations from Dollarama and a chocolate Advent calendar that I have begun to pillage in recent days. It doesn't seem to occur to her that she is Jewish and it would not be in my favour to remind her of this fact right now. Part of her traditions show through, however, as the Christmas lights she sent are blue and the tree ornaments are silver. She has introduced me over the years to the edible joys of Hannakuh and this season she and I have both vowed to forgo an evening of latkes and beer, our unique holiday tradition, until I get back south in February. This means sparing hapless Pharmaprix employees our drunken tampering with their holiday merchandise. We ended up there one overly festive night a couple of years ago, and spent an hour relentlessly pawing at a musical santa and sleigh to tinnily warble 'Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer', drunkenly guffawing into our scarves.

The short days of the north, and the heavy social conditions here, lead me to yearn for a glimpse of light to guide my way, both when I am negotiating the weather and when I am sitting with a family and listening to a litany of abuse and sadness that spans generations. I love the materialism of December, the chocolate and the tinsel and the buying and wrapping of gifts. Under my present living and working conditions, though, Advent is more real to me than it has ever been. I am a lacklustre christian, prone to the inertia of doubt, but I still believe the Christmas story, and how it all comes together at Easter, and this year especially, I need to believe it. It's what warms and comforts and guides me.