From the Missiguash River to the Mackenzie Delta, breathtaking, raw beauty

This is a land bigger than the imagination – for all of us. In the Northwest Territories, the Akaitcho say, “‘Denech’anie,’ meaning ‘the path the people walk’ and that ‘we will live on the land as long as the sun shines, the river flows, and the grass grows.”

I’ve driven across the Western Arctic’s Mackenzie Delta; summer at 68 degrees latitude and the vast, open land at the top of the world, listening to Robin Mark’s “Revival In Belfast (Hope In The City)” and Susan Aglukark’s powerfully haunting song, “E186,” about what it meant to be an “Eskimo” with a number and no name, cranked up to full volume. With its raw power, it served as a defining moment in helping me to understand, if imperfectly and incompletely, the difference in what it meant to be Inuit rather than qallunaat (which, loosely translated from Inuktitut, is not terribly flattering, as it translates a bit closer to honky than white) North of 60 in the 1940s and 1950s.

Inuvik lives for me as a kaleidoscope of snapshots. One of the most vivid standing on the shore of the mighty Mackenzie River watching a flotilla of small boats head out in miserable weather for Aklavik.

The Gwich’in and Inuvialuit were gathering to bury three of their own: Doug Irish, Larry Semmler and Charlie Meyook. Northerners, aboriginal and non-aboriginal, look after their own.

Hundreds of Gwich’in, Inuvialuit and white men travelled by river and by air from Inuvik, from McPherson, from Tsiigehtchic, from the Yukon, from Alaska and from the South for the funerals at All Saints Anglican Church in Aklavik, on the site of the original Anglican Cathedral of the Arctic. The women volunteered to cook the community feast; the men hunted caribou and dug graves, all giving aid and comfort to their brothers and sister in Aklavik.

The Northwest Territories is a vast and open land, where two of the highest virtues practiced are tolerance and respect. I’d come home from work that first October in 2001 to my apartment on the shores of Great Slave Lake, and read more and more of Bern Will Brown’s Arctic Journal and  Arctic Journal II (a colleague had wisely recommended Brown’s writing as a good introduction to the Northwest Territories).

One dark December day, l got a sense of how imaginatively the lives of the peoples of the Circumpolar North are weaved together, between glances out my balcony window before 3 p.m. darkness fell and watching Smilla’s Sense of Snow, the delightful 1997 Danish thriller starring Julia Ormond, Gabriel Byrne, and Richard Harris, based on the 1992 novel Frøken Smillas fornemmelse by Danish author Peter Høeg, with both the book and the film telling the story of a transplanted Greenlander, Smilla Jasperson, who investigates the mysterious death of a small Inuit boy who lived in her housing complex in Copenhagen. Clues send her not just around Copenhagen, including the Hotel d’Angleterre, but also to Kiruna, the northernmost town in Sweden in Lapland, and Ilulissat in western Greenland.

I remember the first time I heard Stan Rogers’ “Northwest Passage” performed in the Northwest Territories in Yellowknife, with seemingly everyone in the audience in a school auditorium raising their voices in unison to join in. One of those moments that still send chills up your spine years later. I’ve long forgotten who performed it that night some 20 years ago almost now, but I haven’t forgotten it was a Stan Rogers song, and thinking the Bard of Guysborough County was truly one of Canada’s poets, a coast-to-coast-to-coast national treasure.

We are a country blessed with national treasures. Rhonda Payne, author of the play “Stars in the Sky Morning,” a tale of the hardships of women on the Northern Peninsula of Newfoundland – was a playwright the National Post described as a “national treasure” in 1999. Rhonda was a fiery actor, writer, director, producer and activist from Curling, who would go onto co-found Ground Zero Productions with Don Bouzek in Toronto, and after that Riverbank Productions in Peterborough, Ontario on Parkhill Road East (the studio office was quite literally on the banks of the Otonabee River).

From Churchill, Manitoba, I’ve had the chance to sail a beluga-populated Hudson Bay, across the invisible maritime boundary that divides Manitoba from Nunavut, and share the Seal River with polar bears. Churchill Airport was built by the United States military in 1942 and owned and operated by Transport Canada as a remote airport since 1964. Churchill Rocket Research Range, also built by the United States Army, under the aegis of Canada’s Defence Research Board in 1956, operated 23 kilometres east of town, where the Churchill Northern Studies Centre now is, until 1985.

I remember the haunting but not at all unwelcome sound of the train whistle when I would visit my mother, who lived near Amherst, Nova Scotia, on Fort Lawrence Road, east of Exit 1, as the Via Rail Ocean passenger train, en route from Montréal to Halifax, or Halifax to Montréal, crossed the saltwater Tantramar marshes between Amherst, Nova Scotia and Sackville, New Brunswick, a stone’s throw from the Missiguash River, bordering New Brunswick and Nova Scotia and connecting the Nova Scotia peninsula with those who come from away elsewhere in North America.

The saltwater Tantramar marshes, sometimes referred to singularly as the Tantramar Marsh, is a very special place indeed, and was even long before the first train crossed it in the 19th century. Memory surrounds you everywhere in Nova Scotia. This is the soil my Acadian ancestors lived and laboured on. All I have to do is close my eyes for but a moment listening to Lorena McKennitt’s The Mystic’s Dream and I clearly hear the words, “All along the English shore,” and in my mind’s eye I see the Acadian tricolor of blue, white and red, the gold star Stella Maris at top left, seeking the guidance and protection of the Virgin Mary, patron of the Acadians.

This is Aulac Ridge, a prominent rise running west to east across the Tantramar marshes on the Isthmus of Chignecto, just west of the Missiguash River. This is the demarcation line between Fort Lawrence and Fort Beauséjour, New France and British North America, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, overlooking the Cumberland Basin of the Bay of Fundy.

Nowhere, of course, in the song are the words, “All along the English shore” actually heard, not even as a mondegreen where you mishear the lyrics to a song, which is a sort of aural malapropism, where instead of saying the wrong word, you hear the wrong word as a result of near-homophony, in a way that gives it a new meaning. No, this, as it was for Marcel Proust, is remembrance of things past.

I spent a balmy Maritime spring evening reporting from Middle Musquodoboit Harbour on the Eastern Shore’s Musquodoboit Harbour River, while I’ve travelled deep in the woods near Earltown in Colchester County, on the north slope of the Cobequid Mountains, searching for Willard Kitchener MacDonald, the so-called “Hermit of Gully Lake,” who had gone AWOL in 1945 after being conscripted and abandoning a troop train during the Second World War. Canada declared an amnesty for army deserters in 1950, but MacDonald, retained a lifelong suspicion of government and police. In the same area, I later returned to Sugar Moon Farm, also near Earltown, in search of maple syrup stories, while travelling the back roads of Folly Lake-Folly Gap-Folly Mountain, and through the Cobequid Mountains and Wentworth Valley to Londonderry, formerly known as Acadia Mines, in Colchester County, where time appeared to have stood still.

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Vanquishing the Vortex: Punxsutawney Phil and Wiarton Willie rise to the rescue

Truth be told, if Thompson, Manitoba had a groundhog prognosticator when the sun rose several hours ago at 8:24 a.m. Central Standard Time (CST), he or she would very likely have predicted a short winter of only four more weeks because they probably wouldn’t have seen their shadow under mainly cloudy skies. Mind you, the groundhog would by lying. New arrivals to Thompson and environs are sometimes surprised their first year here to learn Feb. 2 really doesn’t have any resonance beyond wishful thinking. Winter ending in early or late March in Thompson? Six more weeks of winter only from Feb. 2?

Still, it could be worse. While Environment Canada again has us flagged under a red “Extreme Cold Warning” banner in its online weather forecast for Thompson today, the actual text of the bulletin helpfully notes, “The extreme wind chill has already abated for Thompson region but will likely redevelop tonight.” If you want to check out places with weather comparable to Thompson, you’d do well, says WeatherSpark, to check out of the Russian communities of Bayanday, (53°04′N latitude), and Mago  (53° 15′ 05″ N latitude) in southeastern Siberia and central Asia, somewhere north of Ulaanbaatar, (Ulan Bator), the capital of Mongolia, another well-known world hotspot. Thompson is located at 55.7433° N latitude. WeatherSpark, was started by James Diebel, an American, and Jacob Norda, a Swede. Thompson’s fun weather facts are available online through their WeatherSpark website at: http://weatherspark.com/averages/28377/Thompson-Manitoba-Canada

Diebel, born and raised in Wisconsin, has a bachelor’s degree in engineering mechanics and astronautics, and mathematics from University of Wisconsin, and a PhD in aeronautics and astronautics from Stanford University, and Norda, born and raised in Sweden, holds a master’s degree in electrical engineering and applied physics from Linköping Institute of Technology. They teamed up and started Vector Magic, now known as Cedar Lake Ventures, Inc., in December 2007. Their weather facts are based on historical records dating back to 1988. Cedar Lake Ventures is located in the Minneapolis area in Excelsior, Minnesota. Diebel lives in the Minneapolis area, while Norda has lived in the San Francisco Bay Area since 2001.

While Thompson may well be in for another eight weeks or so of winter, whether it be under sunny or cloudy skies, Punxsutawney Phil, from Gobbler’s Knob in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, and Wiarton Willie from South Bruce County, Ontario, did their parts this morning to putting paid to polar and vanquishing the vortex elsewhere, first described as the polar vortex as early as 1853, by predicting an early spring.  Punxsutawney Phil emerged from his burrow around 7:30 a.m. EST and did not see his shadow, predicting an early spring. “Faithful followers, there is no shadow of me and a beautiful spring it shall be,” a member of Phil’s Inner Circle read from the groundhog’s prediction scroll to the cheers and applause from the crowd. As the legend goes, if Phil sees his shadow, he considers it an “omen” of six more weeks of bad weather and heads back into his hole. If it’s cloudy and he doesn’t, you can put away that winter coat sooner than expected. Robert Buckle, mayor of the Town of South Bruce, which includes Wiarton, said Wiarton Willie had tweeted at 7:08 a.m. “So, my #prediction is #official. I didn’t see my shadow so an early spring it is.” (#officialprediction #earlyspring #WiartonWillie #Wiarton #PredictionMorning #GroundhogDay).

Rumour has it there were some groundhog dissenters to the early spring forecast, including Shubenacadie Sam. My one and only time covering a furry prognosticator came on Feb.2, 2000, when I was working for the Chronicle Herald’ s Truro bureau in Nova Scotia, and found myself that February morning assigned to go down to Shubenacadie, about 37 kilometres southwest of Truro in Hants County in central Nova Scotia, to cover the predictive prowess of Shubenacadie Sam, Nova Scotia’s most famous groundhog prognosticator. As well as Shubenacadie Sam, Punxsutawney Phil, and Wiarton Willie, other famous woodchuck prognosticators include (or have included), Manitoba’s own Winnipeg Willow, Manitoba Merv, and Winnipeg Wyn, who called for another six weeks of winter today after seeing her shadow.

In his 2002 book, The Day Niagara Falls Ran Dry, one of my favourites climatologists, David Phillips, cited a survey of 40 years of weather data from 13 Canadian cities, which concluded there was an equal number of cloudy and sunny days on Feb. 2 – and during that time, the groundhogs’ predictions were right only 37 per cent of the time. Sounds a bit like professional jealousy to me.  While NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration based in Washington, D.C. claims seven-day forecasts can now accurately predict the weather about 80 percent of the time and a five-day forecast can accurately predict the weather approximately 90 percent of the time, common sense tells us that can’t be true. Talk about fake news. We all know that the last day of a five or seven-day forecast is wildly hyped at the beginning of the period to be much nicer than it will turn out in reality when that day finally arrives five or seven days later. They hope, short-term memory being what it and all, that’s you’ll simply forget by day five or seven. If you don’t believe me, find out the truth for yourself by taking a look at the clip “Seven Day Forecast” from the Rick Mercer Report (https://www.cbc.ca/mercerreport/videos/clips/seven-day-forecast). In the past decade, Phil has predicted a longer winter seven times and an early spring three times. He was only right about 40 per cent of the time, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which says the groundhog shows “no predictive skill” (https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/customer-support/education-resources/groundhog-day).

Groundhog Day has its roots in the ancient Christian tradition of Candlemas Day, when clergy would bless and distribute candles needed for winter. The candles represented how long and cold the winter would be. Germans expanded on this concept by selecting an animal – the hedgehog – as a means of predicting weather. According to tradition, if a groundhog comes out of its burrow Feb. 2 – where the main entrance is often by a tree stump or rock and is usually conspicuous because of a pile of freshly excavated earth, with side entrances also and tunnels leading to an enlarged chamber three to six feet underground containing the nest – and sees its shadow, there will be six more weeks of winter weather; no shadow means an early spring.

Once they came to America, German settlers in Pennsylvania continued the tradition,” although they switched from hedgehogs to groundhogs, which were plentiful in the Keystone State,” A&E Television Networks’ This Day in History notes.  Clymer H. Freas, city editor of The Punxsutawney Spirit newspaper is credited with printing the news of the first observance in 1886 (one year before the first trek to Gobbler’s Knob) on Feb. 2, 1887, where Groundhog Day, featuring the rodent meteorologist, was first celebrated for the first time in Punxsutawney.) “Today is groundhog day and up to the time of going to press the beast has not seen its shadow,” he  wrote. Freas, who belonged to a group of groundhog hunters from Punxsutawney, who would later be called the Punxsutawney Groundhog Club, declared that “Punxsutawney Phil,” as the groundhog was named, was the “Seer of Seers, Sage of Sages, Prognosticator of Prognosticators, and Weather Prophet Extraordinary” and Punxsutawney, named by the Lenape or Delawares, and located halfway between the Allegheny and the Susquehanna rivers,  90 miles northeast of Pittsburgh, was henceforth to be known as the “Weather Capital of the World.”

The earliest American reference to Groundhog Day dates back to Feb. 4, 1841 and is found in the diary of Morgantown, Berks County,  Pennsylvania storekeeper James Morris, and can be found at the Pennsylvania Dutch Folklore Center at Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster. Morris wrote: “Last Tuesday, the 2nd, was Candlemas day, the day on which, according to the Germans, the Groundhog peeps out of his winter quarters and if he sees his shadow he pops back for another six weeks nap, but if the day be cloudy he remains out, as the weather is to be moderate.”

According to the Punxsutawney Groundhog Club, “insects do not bother groundhogs and germs pretty much leave them alone. They are resistant to the plagues that periodically wipe out large numbers of wild animals. One reason for this is their cleanliness.

“Groundhogs are one of the few animals that really hibernate,” the club says. “Hibernation is not just a deep sleep. It is actually a deep coma, where the body temperature drops to a few degrees above freezing, the heart barely beats, the blood scarcely flows, and breathing nearly stops.” Their heartbeats slow from 80 to five beats per minute and they can lose 30 percent of their body fat.

With all this in mind, plan to settle in tonight for what should be at minimum an annual viewing of Harold Ramis’ February 1993 movie Groundhog Day, staring Bill Murray as Channel 9 Pittsburgh weatherman Phil Connors, who apparently stuck in an infinite time loop after being stranded by an unexpected change in direction of a blizzard, wakes up every morning to a radio alarm clock at 6 a.m. in a bed-and-breakfast in Punxsutawney, reliving Groundhog Day over and over, again and again.

Andie MacDowell is perfect as Murray’s field producer, Rita Hanson, while Chris Elliott nicely rounds out the trio as the long-suffering cameraman (think “Paul from Shaw,” Thompsonites)

Film critic Ryan Gilbey of the New Statesman called Groundhog Day “the perfect comedy, for ever,” while Malcolm Jones at the Daily Beast went even further, saying it was “about as perfect as a movie gets.” Bill Murray called it “probably the best work I’ve done.”

Michael Keaton and Tom Hanks were both considered for Murray’s role, but weren’t chosen because  Ramis thought they were “too nice.” Brian-Doyle Murray, Bill Murray’s older brother, plays Mayor Buster Green, who acts as the Groundhog Day master of ceremonies on Gobbler’s Knob, as he pulls “Scooter,” perhaps the world’s most televised groundhog, as he plays Punxsutawney Phil, from his burrow to see if he sees his shadow.

Bill Hoffmann, owner of Animal Rentals in Chicago, trained Scooter for the movie. Hoffmann told Lisa Kucharski |of the Woodstock Independent in Woodstock, Illinois in a January 2014 interview that it was challenging work to keep Scooter happy. He said groundhogs have an attention span of about 15 minutes and in film work, it takes about 15 minutes just to set the lighting for a scene. Scooter had five understudies and all six groundhogs were rotated in for different scenes.

Groundhogs have short, powerful legs and a medium-long, bushy, and somewhat flattened tail. They are also called whistle pigs for their loud shrill alarm whistles when they become alarmed or are suddenly disturbed. Groundhogs also whistle in the spring when they begin courting. The name woodchuck is possibly derived from an Algonquian name for the animal. Groundhogs, whistle pigs or woodchucks – take your pick – normally weigh from 12 to 15 pounds and have a life expectancy of four to eight years.

Groundhogs are known as “true hibernators,” going into a dormant state – in which their body temperature and heart rate fall dramatically – from late fall until late winter or early spring. True hibernators, including groundhogs can reduce their body temperature below 20°C. Bears for example, when they hibernate, only drop their body temperature to 30°C from 37°C. True hibernators can also reduce their heart rate down to about five beats a minute, and their body temperature can go as low as 5°C.  Groundhogs go through bouts of torpor when their body temperature drops to about 5°C.  They’ll do this for about a week, then wake up for three or four days, then go back into torpor.

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Clymer H. Freas and the creation of Punxsutawney Phil, America’s most famous groundhog weather prognosticator

There will be no early spring in Winnipeg this year. Or at least not one that can be predicted Tuesday because winsome Winnipeg Willow, the provincial capital’s weather prognosticating woodchuck, a rodent in the squirrel family (or in Latin, Sciuridae in the order Rodentia, which also includes tree squirrels, ground squirrels, flying squirrels, chipmunks and larger bodied marmots), died Jan. 29, a bit shy of what would have been her sixth birthday this spring – and just four days before Groundhog Day Feb. 2.

For a woodchuck, also known as a groundhog or whistle pig, six years of age is a good long life, says the Prairie Wildlife Rehabilitation Centre in Winnipeg, where Willow lived most of her life. Groundhogs have short, powerful legs and a medium-long, bushy, and somewhat flattened tail. They are called whistle pigs for their loud shrill alarm whistles when they become alarmed or are suddenly disturbed. Groundhogs also whistle in the spring when they begin courting. The name woodchuck is possibly derived from an Algonquian name for the animal. Groundhogs, whistle pigs or woodchucks – take your pick – normally weigh from 12 to 15 pounds and have a life expectancy of four to eight years.

Prairie Wildlife Rehabilitation Centre has cancelled their scheduled Groundhog Day event that was to have taken place Feb. 2 at Cabela’s on Sterling Lyon Parkway in Winnipeg. Cabela’s, now one of the leading fishing and hunting outfitters in the world, was started by Dick Cabela in 1961 as a kitchen-table business, selling hand-tied fishing flies by mail-order from Chappell, Nebraska.

The Prairie Wildlife Rehabilitation Centre was founded in 2007 by a group of animal-loving volunteers. It is a non-profit organization whose main goal is to treat injured and orphaned wildlife and to successfully release them back into their natural habitat. Willow was born in the spring of 2010 and was brought to the centre after her mother was killed by a dog. She was being raised for release until she broke her leg in an outdoor enclosure. “With the extra handling and time spent in care, she became too friendly towards people to be released back into the wild,” Lisa Tretiak, a founding member and president of the Prairie Wildlife Rehabilitation Centre said Friday. In the spring of 2008, Tretiak became the first Manitoban, and only the fourth person in Canada, to be certified as a wildlife rehabilitator through the Eugene, Oregon-based International Wildlife Rehabilitation Council, founded in California in 1972.

Willow was adopted into Prairie Wildlife Rehabilitation Centre’s educational program and visited many Winnipeg schools and students. The woodchuck or groundhog’s scientific name is Marmota monax.

The first part of the scientific name, Marmota, is the Latin word for “marmot.” It was probably derived from corruption through two Latin words meaning “mouse of the mountain” and is the name given to the European marmot and the North American marmot, which are close relatives of the woodchuck. The last part, monax, is an aboriginal name that means “the digger,” as woodchucks are noted burrows excavators. Groundhogs are almost complete vegetarians, preferring to eat leaves, flowers, soft stems of various grasses, field crops, such as clover and alfalfa, and of many kinds of wild herbs. They occasionally climb trees to obtain apples. Willow reputedly loved kale, green leafy lettuce, broccoli, carrots, sweet potatoes, snap peas and peanuts.

“We loved trying to predict the upcoming forecast,” Tretiak said, although Willow was a bit … err … spotty, to put if charitably, as a prognosticator. “I think we only got one season right,” added Tretiak. “From her current behavior this past winter, we were going to predict an early spring as she was eager to head outdoors.” So perhaps best be keeping your parka handy, Winterpeggers, for the next six weeks.

My one and only time covering a furry prognosticator came on Feb.2, 2000, when I was working for the now strike-bound Chronicle Herald’ s Truro bureau in Nova Scotia.  As well as journeying to such locales as Middle Musquodoboit Harbour on the Eastern Shore’s Musquodoboit Harbour River, or the Folly Lake-Folly Gap-Folly Mountain area, and through the Cobequid Mountains and Wentworth Valley to Londonderry, formerly known as Acadia Mines, in Colchester County, where time appeared to have stood still, I also found myself that February morning assigned to go down to Shubenacadie, about 37 kilometres southwest of Truro in Hants County in central Nova Scotia, to cover the predictive prowess of Shubenacadie Sam, Nova Scotia’s most famous groundhog prognosticator.

A baby groundhog is called a kit or a cub. Because they are one of the few large mammals abroad in daylight, many people enjoy seeing them. As well as Winnipeg Willow and Shubenacadie Sam, other famous woodchuck prognosticators include (or have included) Punxsutawney Phil, from Gobbler’s Knob in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, Wiarton Willie from Bruce County, Ontario and Balzac Billy, from Balzac, Alberta, just north of Calgary.

Groundhog Day has its roots in the ancient Christian tradition of Candlemas Day, when clergy would bless and distribute candles needed for winter. The candles represented how long and cold the winter would be. Germans expanded on this concept by selecting an animal – the hedgehog – as a means of predicting weather. According to tradition, if a groundhog comes out of its burrow Feb. 2 – where the main entrance is often by a tree stump or rock and is usually conspicuous because of a pile of freshly excavated earth, with side entrances also and tunnels leading to an enlarged chamber three to six feet underground containing the nest – and sees its shadow, there will be six more weeks of winter weather; no shadow means an early spring.

Once they came to America, German settlers in Pennsylvania continued the tradition,” although they switched from hedgehogs to groundhogs, which were plentiful in the Keystone State,” A&E Television Networks’ This Day in History notes.  Clymer H. Freas, city editor of The Punxsutawney Spirit newspaper is credited with printing the news of the first observance in 1886 (one year before the first trek to Gobbler’s Knob) on Feb. 2, 1887, where Groundhog Day, featuring the rodent meteorologist, was first celebrated for the first time in Punxsutawney.) “Today is groundhog day and up to the time of going to press the beast has not seen its shadow,” he  wrote. Freas, who belonged to a group of groundhog hunters from Punxsutawney, who would later be called the Punxsutawney Groundhog Club, declared that “Punxsutawney Phil,” as the groundhog was named, was the “Seer of Seers, Sage of Sages, Prognosticator of Prognosticators, and Weather Prophet Extraordinary” and Punxsutawney, named by the Lenape or Delawares, and located halfway between the Allegheny and the Susquehanna rivers,  90 miles northeast of Pittsburgh, was henceforth to be known as the “Weather Capital of the World.”

But forget about weather predictions for just a minute and consider this: Groundhog fur was once used for fur coats, and the flesh of young, lean animals was considered a tasty treat by some late 19th and early 20th century Pennsylvania pioneers. While the line of Punxsutawney groundhogs that have been known since the late 1880s as “Punxsutawney Phil” make up America’s most famous groundhog lineage, and are now better known for their tourism potential, as opposed to their coat-making and vittles possibilities, Freas was involved even some 13 years after Phil’s debut in organizing Punxsutawney’s first “Groundhog Feast” in 1899, where groundhog meat was enjoyed as a local Pennsylvania  delicacy, washed down by a concoction known as “Groundhog Punch.”

But back to the weather. If you want to know just how good a weather prediction track record “Punxsutawney Phil” has, or perhaps how he stacks up against your local weather forecaster,  you can checkout the Groundhog Day webpage of the  U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) at https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/customer-support/education-resources/groundhog-day

The earliest American reference to Groundhog Day dates back to Feb. 4, 1841 and is found in the diary of Morgantown, Berks County,  Pennsylvania storekeeper James Morris, and can be found at the Pennsylvania Dutch Folklore Center at Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster. Morris wrote: “Last Tuesday, the 2nd, was Candlemas day, the day on which, according to the Germans, the Groundhog peeps out of his winter quarters and if he sees his shadow he pops back for another six weeks nap, but if the day be cloudy he remains out, as the weather is to be moderate.”

According to the Punxsutawney Groundhog Club, “insects do not bother groundhogs and germs pretty much leave them alone. They are resistant to the plagues that periodically wipe out large numbers of wild animals. One reason for this is their cleanliness.

“Groundhogs are one of the few animals that really hibernate,” the club says. “Hibernation is not just a deep sleep. It is actually a deep coma, where the body temperature drops to a few degrees above freezing, the heart barely beats, the blood scarcely flows, and breathing nearly stops.” Their heartbeats slow from 80 to five beats per minute and they can lose 30 percent of their body fat.

Spring, of course, is something of a relative concept here Northern Manitoba, just above 55 degrees north latitude. Relative to much of the rest of Canada and the United States that is. New arrivals to Thompson and environs are sometimes surprised their first year here to learn Feb. 2 really doesn’t have any resonance beyond wishful thinking here. Winter ending in early or late March in Thompson? Six more weeks of winter only from Feb. 2?

Yes, bring that on, any year! But hold the Groundhog Punch.

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Newsgathering travels: From Tuktoyaktuk in the Northwest Territories to Churchill, Manitoba to Middle Musquodoboit Harbour, Nova Scotia, and a few places in between

As a journalist, I always enjoyed getting out of the office or newsroom to travel whenever the opportunity presented itself and I could talk my way into a trip somewhere. Newspaper travel meant someone was spending money to send me somewhere, hence the story was usually interesting, as newspaper publishers are a rather parsimonious lot when it comes to travel costs and editorial budgets.

Here in Manitoba I’ve been able to write about polar bears and beluga whales in Churchill, after a boat trip out on Hudson Bay into the territorial waters of Nunavut, and up the Seal River, as well as spending an evening at the Churchill Northern Studies Centre (CNSC) with executive director Mike Goodyear, a wildlife biologist by training,  who is also a private pilot. Churchill Airport was built by the United States military in 1942 and owned and operated by Transport Canada as a remote airport since 1964. Churchill Rocket Research Range, also built by the United States Army, under the aegis of Canada’s Defence Research Board in 1956, operated 23 kilometres east of town, where the Churchill Northern Studies Centre now is, until 1985.

I also  travelled to The Pas to Our Lady of the Sacred Heart Cathedral for the episcopal ordination of Archbishop Murray Chatlain, as the sixth bishop of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Keewatin-Le Pas, and the first non-Oblate priest to shepherd the archdiocese since its creation originally as a vicariate apostolic in March 1910. Since it was March and a 6 p.m. mass, the Thompson Citizen put me up overnight in a cabin at Bakers Narrows Lodge on Lake Athapapuskow, near Flin Flon.  Mind you the overnight low dipped down to -34°C. And it was March 19, 2013.  Baseball legend Yogi Berra wasn’t talking about Northern Manitoba winters when he uttered his now famous and oft-quoted malapropism, “This is like déjà vu all over again.” But he could well have been. Environment Canada predicts an overnight low in Thompson tonight of -37°C with an “extreme wind chill” of -48°C.  Hence the seemingly constant red banner “Extreme Cold Warning in Effect” running across the top of my Environment Canada weather webpage.

Before heading back to Thompson from Bakers Narrows Lodge after the archbishop was properly installed, I made the short detour into downtown Flin Flon for a brief visit to The Orange Toad book store and coffee shop, and dropped in for a quick visit to get his take on the state-of-the-north with my then counterpart, Jonathon Naylor, editor of The Reminder, a sister paper of the Thompson Citizen and Nickel Belt News.

Other Manitoba road trips have taken me into Cross Lake, Nelson House and Snow Lake for stories and photographs, while former Churchill riding Liberal MP Tina Keeper, and  Kevin Carlson, then with Manitoba Keewatinowi Okimakanak (MKO), were kind enough to let Jeanette, who was taking photographs for the paper, as she also had done in Churchill, and me, newsgathering for stories, and taking photographs also, fly into Tadoule Lake and Lac Brochet with them on a day trip.

On Aug. 15, 2002 –  shortly after getting off the plane from Yellowknife and arriving at the Inuvik Drum and News/North office, Lynn Lau, the bureau chief, who was leaving on vacation the following day, and who I had volunteered to come off the news desk in Yk and do a six-week back-fill for –  handed me a plane ticket for the following day for Tuktoyaktuk, where a public meeting was scheduled after  five hamlet residents filed formal complaints against Tuktoyaktuk RCMP, accusing the Mounties of using “excessive force” in the recent arrests of intoxicated persons. Anger and frustration at the RCMP spilled out publicly during the special hamlet council meeting, called after more than 200 residents signed a petition accusing the RCMP of “using unnecessary use of force” and “harassing the citizens of the community.” At the time,Tuk had a population of 930. About 40 residents attended the meeting.

In a scene that would be familiar to Mounties, Crown attorneys, defence lawyers and judges here in Northern Manitoba, when the fireworks were over at the understandably tense public meeting, which the accused RCMP acting sergeant and an accused constable attended also, we all raced –  complainants, the criminally accused, who were free on recognizances, hamlet officials and the accused Mounties – to the Tuktoyaktuk Airport to catch the last Friday flight back to Inuvik on an 18-seat  Twin Otter. Did I mention the North and Canada’s Arctic (Tuktoyaktuk is at 69.4428° N) can be a bit surreal?

While working in the Truro bureau of the Chronicle-Herald in the winter of 2000, I remember driving for almost three hours through continuous freezing rain out to the Nova Scotia Community College (NSCC) Strait Area Campus in Port Hawkesbury to hear then Nova Scotia Progressive Conservative Premier John Hamm talk about a proposed Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) project to be located on the Strait of Canso, which provides a naturally deep, sheltered, ice-free and dredging free harbour.  More than 15 years later, the Bear Head LNG project, as it is now known, has had at least three owners and is only partially completed.

Fortunately, there were also plenty of pleasant drives on assignment in Nova Scotia, such as one on a balmy Maritime spring evening into Middle Musquodoboit Harbour on the Eastern Shore’s Musquodoboit Harbour River, or the Folly Lake-Folly Gap-Folly Mountain area and through the Cobequid Mountains and Wentworth Valley to Londonderry, formerly known as Acadia Mines, in Colchester County, where time appeared to have stood still. In a not unpleasant way, methinks.

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