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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Life in the Circumpolar North: Winter living with a sense of joie de vivre and koselig

Monday, Monday. Winter is set to arrive here in Northern Manitoba on winter solstice, Monday, Dec. 21 at 10:49 p.m. Central Standard Time (CST) – which is just eight minutes shy of seven hours after sunset at 3:57 p.m. that day.

The term solstice comes from the Latin word solstitium, meaning “the sun stands still.” This is because on this day, the sun reaches its southern-most position as seen from the Earth. The sun seems to stand still at the Tropic of Capricorn and then reverses its direction. It’s also known as the day the Sun turns around, and in the Northern Hemisphere, astronomers and scientists use the winter solstice Dec. 21 to mark the start of winter season, which ends with the spring equinox Saturday, March 19 at 11:31 p.m. Central Daylight Time (CDT).

Here in Thompson at 55.7433° N latitude, no matter what the official dates for the winter solstice and spring equinox may be, we know quite literally in our bones that we have really long, cold winters and on average there are about 140 frost-free days each year. New arrivals to Thompson and environs are sometimes surprised their first year here to learn Feb. 2 (Groundhog Day), the day when those furry prognosticators – Punxsutawney Phil in Gobbler’s Knob, Pennsylvania, Shubenacadie Sam in Nova Scotia and Wiarton Willie in Ontario – predict either four or six more weeks of winter, depending on whether they see their shadows when they emerge from their burrows, 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 it on.

As Thompson oldtimers sometimes tell newcomers: “You might want to consider making friends with winter since it lasts about eight months of the year here.” A slight – but not great – exaggeration. Having spent most of the 21st century living to date in Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories and Thompson in Manitoba, which Macleans magazine, using  Environment Canada, dated, ranked respectively as being number one and number two on their list of “The 10 coldest cities in Canada,” I have some notion of what it means to live in the North.

The North can be defined several ways. Quite often it is quite simply referred to as just that – the North. There is also the Canadian Arctic Archipelago, consisting of 94 major islands and 36,469 minor islands, which aside from Greenland that is almost entirely ice covered, forms the world’s largest High Arctic land area. There is also the Circumpolar North.

The idea of a Circumpolar North was something that caught my imagination in 2001 after I moved from Halifax in Nova Scotia to Yellowknife in Canada’s Northwest Territories. While the Arctic Circle, which I’ve crossed en route to places in the Mackenzie Delta, including the historically-Gwich’in founded community of Tetlit’Zheh (Fort McPherson) at 67.4353° N, Inuvik at 68.3617° and Tuktoyaktuk at 69.4428° N, is rather clearly defined as a circle of latitude that runs 66°33′45.9 N north of the equator, marking the southernmost latitude where the sun can stay continuously below or above the horizon for 24 hours – phenomena known as the Midnight Sun in summer and Polar Night in the depths of a deep and dark December, the Circumpolar North is partly a land of the imagination and a state of being, not quite so precisely defined by geographic lines of latitude, although it generally includes in Canada all that is North of 60, including the islands of the High Arctic, and the remainder of the Yukon, Northwest and Nunavut territories, plus those parts of northeastern Quebec and central Labrador settled by the Innu.

In the United States, the Circumpolar North is defined to include Alaska, except for the Southeast Alaska Panhandle. The Circumpolar North also is made up of Denmark, including Greenland, and the Faroe Islands; Iceland; Norway, including the archipelago of Svalbard; Sweden; Finland; the European Arctic south to the Arctic Circle; and the Russian Federation south to 63°N in European Russia and to 57° N in Asia, including all of the Kamchatka peninsula and Sakhalin Island.

Copenhagen at 55.6761° N is incredibly close latitudinally to Thompson, Manitoba at 55.7433° N, but neither are quite part of the Circumpolar North geographically. But imaginatively, one might make the argument. In winter, Northern Manitoba is vast land of isolation, ice roads, early sunsets and late sunrises. Copenhagen is not so different with short days during the winter with sunrise coming around 9:30 a.m. and sunset about 4:30 p.m.

One December day in 2001, living within sight of the western shore of Great Slave Lake in Yellowknife, I 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.

And while American poet T.S. Eliot told us that “April is the cruelest month” when he wrote The Waste Land, he seems to have been silent on the issue of November, which the Meteorological Service of Canada at Environment Canada in Winnipeg assures is still usually the snowiest month of the year with one average 35.4 centimetres of snow. At least on average. Usually.

When it comes to permafrost, there was no evidence of the existence of it here in Thompson until work started on the townsite in 1957. Then there was plenty of evidence, as permafrost was encountered at many locations in “scattered islands underlying somewhat less than 50 per cent of the townsite,” as noted by Robert M. Hardy, originally from Winnipeg, and co-founder of R.M. Hardy and Associates Ltd. in Edmonton, the only engineering firm in Alberta to offer geotechnical services at the time, and K.S. Goodman, manager of K.S. Goodman, Materials Testing Laboratories Ltd. in Calgary, in their paper “Permafrost Occurrence and Associated Problems at Thompson, Manitoba.”

Hardy and Goodman’s paper was presented at the National Research Council of Canada’s Associate Committee on Soil and Snow Mechanics Proceedings of the First Canadian Conference on Permafrost in Ottawa on April 17-18, 1962.

We are roughly 240 kilometres south of the line, which approximates the southern limit of continuous permafrost, as shown in the Climatological Atlas of Canada, and about 80 kilometres north of the southern limit of permafrost. But global warming may be causing the southern limit of permafrost to shift further north, meaning less permafrost here in Thompson, making some additional homebuilding on Wekusko Street, Arctic Drive and Char Bay, considered inadvisable 20 years ago, finally feasible within the last six or seven years.

How about the “average weather” for Thompson? Over the course of a year, the temperature typically varies from -29°C to 23°C and is rarely below -39°C or above 28°C. Remember, we’re talking averages now, not temperatures for a specific winter.

The “warm season” (again, a relative term) lasts from May 24 to Sept. 11 with an average daily high temperature above 15°C. The hottest day of the year is on average July 20, with an average high of 23°C and low of 10°C. The coldest day of the year on average is Jan. 15, with an average low of -29°C and high of -19°C

James Diebel, an American, and Jacob Norda, a Swede, who both live in the San Francisco Bay area, can be thanked for these fascinating Thompson weather facts available through their WeatherSpark website at: http://weatherspark.com/averages/28377/Thompson-Manitoba-Canada. Diebel, born and raised in Wisconsin, who 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, who holds a master’s degree in electrical engineering and applied physics from Linköping Institute of Technology, teamed up and started Vector Magic, now known as Cedar Lake Ventures, Inc., in December 2007. The weather facts are based on historical records from 1988 to 2012.

How best to live in the Circumpolar North or the North, however, one wishes to define it? With a sense of joie de vivre – joy of living, I think.

Oulu in Finland, which at 65.0167° N is about 1,600 kilometres farther north than Thompson and located just 200 kilometres below the Arctic Circle, is the sixth largest city in Finland with 141,000 residents, and played host to the first-ever two-day international Winter Cycling Congress in 2013. The second congress was in Winnipeg in February 2014.

I remember back in February 2011 reading about Bruce Krentz’s bet with Harold Smith, a former City of Thompson councillor and executive director for Manitoba Housing and Community Development’s northern housing operations, who challenged him to use active transportation commensurate with getting to his new job as health promotion co-ordinator with the Burntwood Regional Health Authority (now the Northern Regional Health Authority). “He said, ‘Really, you should walk the walk,’” Krentz said at the time. “I sort of made the commitment that I would bike all year.” Smith said he didn’t expect Krentz to use a bike as his method of transportation. “To be honest, when I threw down that challenge I was really thinking about him walking, not cycling,” said Smith, who noted in 2011 he wasn’t surprised that Krentz had stuck with the plan. “Bruce has a history of sticking with things, especially the crazier ones.”

That’s interesting, I thought. Sounds like Bruce. And Harold. Frankly, it didn’t hold any appeal to me personally, although I had been doing a good deal of fair weather riding from mid-April through early November since my arrival in Thompson in 2007.

Circumstances, however, can change and so last year when my circumstances changed, I changed my mind about winter biking in Thompson. Which is why you might spot me wearing my trademark-like red helmet, white front and rear red MEC lights flashing, courtesy of Jeanette, as I at first carefully nudge my way over the short city-owned public footpath connecting the 200-block of Juniper Drive to the back of Southwood Shopping Plaza on Thompson Drive South, before reaching the paved two-lane multi-use boulevard pathway for pedestrians and cyclists that delivers me to work at the Thompson campus library of the University College of the North (UCN).

The Norwegians, Circumpolar North residents that they are, have something to teach us, too.

Laura Vanderkam, in a Nov. 6 Fast Company online magazine piece headlined “The Norwegian Secret To Enjoying A Long Winter: Residents of Norway view their long dark winters as something to celebrate. How it’s possible to be cheerful for the next four months,” outlined the Norwegian notion of koselig, “that means a sense of coziness. It’s like the best parts of Christmas, without all the stress. People light candles, light fires, drink warm beverages, and sit under fuzzy blankets. There’s a community aspect to it too; it’s not just an excuse to sit on the couch watching Netflix.”  You can link to the article here at: http://www.fastcompany.com/3052970/how-to-be-a-success-at-everything/the-norwegian-secret-to-enjoying-a-long-winter

Lorelou Desjardins, who pens the Norwegian Frog in the Fjord blog, says, in fact, koselig is more even then being cosy. “Most English speakers translate it by ‘cosy’ but that term doesn’t even begin to cover everything that ‘koselig’ can express,” Desjardins writes at: http://afroginthefjord.com/2014/02/02/how-to-make-things-koselig/

“This concept is difficult to translate to those who do not live here, but basically anything can (and should) be koselig: a house, a conversation, a dinner, a person. It defines something/someone /an atmosphere that makes you feel a sense of warmth very deep inside in a way that all things should be: simple and comforting.”

Kari Leibowitz, a PhD student at Stanford University, spent August 2014 to last June on a Fulbright scholarship in Tromsø in northern Norway – a place “so far north that from late November to late January, the sun never climbs above the horizon,” Vanderkam notes in her Fast Company article.

Leibowitz studied the residents’ overall mental health, because rates of seasonal depression were lower than one might expect.

“At first, she was asking ‘Why aren’t people here more depressed?’ and if there were lessons that could be taken elsewhere. But once she was there, ‘I sort of realized that that was the wrong question to be asking,’ she says. When she asked people ‘Why don’t you have seasonal depression?’ the answer was “Why would we?'”

Vanderkam says that Leibowitz found that it “turns out that in northern Norway, ‘people view winter as something to be enjoyed, not something to be endured,’ and that makes all the difference.

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