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.

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

 

 

The train whistle carries on the east wind

I wrote the time down: 12:47 p.m. Yesterday. I wanted to make a note of it because I so seldom hear train whistles up here in Thompson, Manitoba. The wind has to be blowing in just the right direction at the right time.

Thompson is pretty much at the dead centre of Manitoba, Canada and North America, give or take a few kilometres here and there. Halfway north, halfway south, halfway east and halfway west, I have to remind myself at times. In the winter, we feel (quite literally with our legendary -40°C/-40°F temperatures) more connected to our northern geography. But conversely in summer, when July temperatures average 23°C and temperatures of 30°C and even higher are registered, we’re more aware of our southern connections to the Prairies of Southern Manitoba.

The bonus of a 30°C day in Thompson in July is that the humidity, with the exception of a few days usually each summer, remains relatively low and bearable compared to what I lived with for years in Southern Ontario. The only relief from that stifling summer heat for me for many years was annual trips to the Maritimes, when you knew that once you got just past Quebec City on the St. Lawrence River, somewhere between Montmagny, Kamouraska and Notre Dame du Portage, the air was going to clear of humidity and the temperature drop, making for pleasant driving for the rest of the evening to Edmundston, New Brunswick, gateway to the Atlantic time zone and jumping of point for all places in the Maritimes. Here in Thompson, the air cools off routinely at night to at least as low as 12°C or 13°C, even after a 30°C day, and the number of nights the temperature has been above say 20°C still at midnight, I could probably count on the fingers of one hand in my more than eight years living here now. Certainly, I’ve never needed a fan or air conditioning, although life-long Northerners tend to make a run on both here at Wal-Mart or Canadian Tire if they notice the thermometer is predicted to head up to 27°C or 28°C for more than a day or two.

Even in summer, we’re just close enough to Hudson Bay that a deep low pressure system with a strong counter-clockwise rotation, can send our temperature abruptly back down to 8°C for a day or so, reminding us the polar bears are never really that far away

As for train whistles, I’ve always found them to have a haunting, slightly distant sound that engages the soul instantly. All through my childhood, growing up in Oshawa, just east of Toronto, an east wind invariably meant two things: You could hear the train whistle from the CN tracks well south at Bloor Street, and rain, long steady rain, was an hour or two, not much more, away. You could not hear the train whistle at any other time from the house I lived in from the age of six to 19, and while it rained at other times, especially with summer thunderstorms, with winds from other directions, that was more unpredictable. An east wind started the clock running for the countdown to rain. For me, east winds and train whistles are so internalized they’re still part of my chronobiology at some deep level.

Years removed from Oshawa, I would still notice the haunting but not at all unwelcome sound of the train whistle when I would visit my mother, who by then lived 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 Missaguash 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.

Train whistles, which were also called steam trumpets, originated in England in 1832 with the stationmaster at the Leicester and Swannington Railway opening, who suggested that trains should have an audible signaling device. A local musical instrument maker was commissioned to create a steam trumpet for the steam locomotive. The proportional tracker action of the steam calliope in those days allowed for the engineer to individualize to some extent the expression of the sound and many locomotive operators would have their own style of blowing the whistle so it would be often be known who was operating the locomotive by the sound.

The purpose of the train whistle was to serve as an audible warning device, which it still does, and as a way to signal to other rail workers up and down the railway track, which, of course, in the latter case today has been supplemented, although not replaced, by two-way radios and even smartphones and text messaging. And train whistles to this day are still seen as an inexpensive warning device compared to other options, such as elevated rail crossings where tracks intersect with roads used by motor vehicles. Under Transport Canada’s Canadian Rail Operating Rule (CROR 14), a combination of two long whistles, followed by a short whistle, then followed by another long whistle, indicates that a train is approaching a public grade crossing.

Both the old steam whistle and today’s compressed air whistle waver in pitch, suggesting a cry or wail, giving them that distinct haunting, lonesome or melancholic sound often ascribed to them. In the United States in the 19th century, different whistle sounds were created for different railroads (the preferred term rather than railway in the U.S.) in order to distinguish them, ranging from high pitched to deeper tones.

When I lived in Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories, I found that to be an exception to the east wind-means-rain rule. There, deep in the continent, like here, but without the proximity of meteorological effects emanating from Hudson Bay, an east wind off Great Slave Lake and Yellowknife Bay, which I could see down the road from my place, often meant high pressure and plenty of sunshine and fine weather, especially in the summer. As for trains, they only ran as far north as Hay River in the Northwest Territories, as I recall. There were no train whistles to be heard in Yellowknife.

Here in Northern Manitoba, Via Rail Canada Train  693 runs north between Winnipeg and Churchill, stopping in Thompson, while Train 692 runs south from Churchill to Winnipeg, also making a stop in Thompson, As well, Hudson Bay Railway (HBR), which owns the track and is a wholly-owned subsidiary of  OmniTRAX Canada, runs its own freight Train 295 from its interchange with CN Rail and its railhead at The Pas along the route. OmniTRAX Canada is in turn a wholly-owned subsidiary of Denver-based shortline railroad OmniTRAX, Inc., an affiliate of The Broe Group, which was founded in 1986 and is privately owned by Pat Broe, who founded the company in Denver in 1972 as a real estate asset management firm.

Via Rail Canada stations and stops along the Winnipeg to Churchill route in Manitoba and Saskatchewan include Portage-La-Prairie, Gladstone, Plumas, Glenella, McCreary, Laurier, Ochre River, Dauphin, Gilbert Plains, Grandview, Roblin, Togo, Sask., Kamsack, Sask., Veregin, Sask., Mikado, Sask., Canora, Sask., Sturgis, Sask., Endeavour, Sask., Reserve, Sask., Hudson Bay, Sask., The Pas, Prospector, Root Lake, Wanless, Atik, Simonhouse, Cranberry Portage, Optic Lake, Heming Lake, Sherridon, Ruddock, Charles, Pawistik, Mile 151.8, Pukatawagan, Orok, Halcrow, Cormorant, Dering, Dyce, Wekusko, Turnbull, Ponton and Pipun.

Along the Bayline, the stations and stops include Wabowden, Lyddal, Odhil, Hockin, Thicket Portage, Leven, Thompson, Sipiwesk, Pikwitonei, Bridgar, Pit Siding, Ilford, Wivenhoe, Gillam, Bird, Sundance, Amery, Charlebois, Weir River, Lawledge, Thibaudeau, Silcox, Herchmer, Kellett, O’Day, Back, McClintock, Cromarty, Belcher, Chesnaye, Lamprey, Bylot, Digges, Tidal and Fort Churchill. The Bayline reached Churchill on March 29, 1929.

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22