In November of last year I went to the Antarctic Peninsula via Ushuaia with my very good buddy Gabe Rogel, who does amazing adventure photography.  Look him up here.  We went down with polar operator, One Ocean Expeditions, who, for this trip, wanted to explore a ski-mountaineering option on their cruise of the very mountainous Peninsula.  Because I am writing an editorial about this trip, to be published imminently in a national magazine, I am going to keep the verbiage to a minimum and share a few highlights in image form, Gabe’s photos:

The ship still moored in Ushuaia, Argentina.

A shot of yours truly, on our best weather day… this one was actually just printed in the April edition of Outside magazine, in the Exposure section.

The most rad day of skiing… a pretty nifty, kind of steep couloir.

Speaks for itself.

This unspeakable magnitude everywhere, a labyrinth of beauty.

I also brought my kite and did some wind meditation in the [very] cold water down there… but very excellent winds coming off the South Pole.    In a dry suit.

A few more awesome shots by Gabe:

Up in the crows nest.

And this one by our friend Tad Boniecki: a 3,000 meter peak down there:

Ben P. and I just finished these doors for a Zen Temple not far from my house in NE Portland.  One is a dragon, the entrance to the zazen interview room, and the other a monk called Jizo Bodhisattva, known for being an enlightened one (bodhisattva) dedicated to protecting children and helping others, anyone who displayed the least inkling of being interested in ‘the way.’  Jizo is known for unflagging optimism.  The doors are made out of Oregon Elm (I think pretty closely related to Japanese keyake), rails and stiles are all book matched and engineered on a core of furniture ply, the solid carved panels are book matched as well.

A couple of days after we had bid farewell to Richard and Glenn–and after a very long day in the shop–I came home at about midnight and walked up into the second story kitchen of the house we were staying in, made some tea, and looked out over the bay… my eye scanned over to the main pier and I did a double take and then a triple take… because I was looking at the apparition of a yacht parked pleasantly right at the pier.  The day prior I had been back out at the cabins and knew that either I was cracking up a little from the long day of work… or this was a serious ice-breaking sail boat.

Looking from the window I could see that about 20 kids were playing around the boat, some slightly on the boat–excited to have a far away visitor, so early.  (They are used to the sea lift–freighter–coming every early September, delivering all the major necessaries for the year.)  I finished my tea, determined that I was not hallucinating and then walked down there.  It had warmed up a little and there was no wind, a mirror finish on the water… the drawback to this peace in the Arctic summer is that it brings mad mosquitoes, now easily capable of sensing carbon dioxide rising off the humans, and boat probably, so they were out in force along with the kids playing around the boat.

As I approached the vessel it was even more than I had suspected: a full-on luxury-adventure yacht, 115′ long, a double walled aluminum ice-breaking hull, two masts (schooner), three self-furling jibs, 30′ beam, sleeps 30, full instrument room, huge tinted enclosed helm  that opens onto the back deck (all decks Burmese teak), spare zodiacs, etc.  This boat would catch eyes arriving at the marina in Monaco, and I was looking at it at 70 degrees north, several hundred miles off the Northwest Passage, just east of the ice-locked bay it had sailed through a few hours’ previous.

I walked right up to the boat, taking these pictures, marveling at the thing… a few of the Inuit kids asked me if it was my boat (I guess because I’m white), which led me to believe that the crew had not been out to greet anyone yet.  Puzzled, I kept inspecting the boat and swatting at mosquitoes with the kids.  After a little while longer a tan pretty young European looking fellow came out on deck.  He asked if I’d seen Ryan?  I said, “I don’t know Ryan.”  There was an immediate odd feeling in the air here.  No one was receiving a greeting and assumptions were being made both ways, from boat to shore, and shore to boat.  I was puzzled that the crew of this fantastic vessel was not out on deck, saying hello to everyone, sort of celebrating the fact that they’d sailed to the Arctic in an insane yacht.  I heard another kid ask this European sailor what the boat was for and the kid answered, “We’re young explorers, traveling with Mike X—-, he’s an explorer and owns the boat…”  Now I was even more intrigued, and still it seemed weird that an explorer wouldn’t be out surveying his new surroundings.  As I looked more carefully at the boat I now saw that his name (which I will not completely disclose here, but you could probably figure it out pretty easily) was stenciled all over the boat, as a kind of message, along with ads for Mercedes Benz.  Some kind of sponsored explorer.  Then Ryan showed up… an Inuk kid–who I later learned runs a tourism company in Cambridge Bay–he had come by boat and it became evident that the yacht’s crew had employed him to go buy cigarettes for them…  I noted that the one crew member of the boat had said he was from Wisconsin (I guess looked Norwegian) and was wearing technical clothing that had the explorer’s name on the black wind stop fabric.  (All the kids out there playing had shorts and short sleeve shirts on.)  Then, after the cigarettes arrived, the rest of the crew came out, a total of four… all in matching clothing.  I was almost immediately reminded of the movie, Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, this being the opposing exploration crew, headed up by Alistair Hennessey, played by Jeff Goldblum, who represents the wealthy, dapper–and matching–crew who is always frustrating the efforts of Zissou.  I sat there staring, almost reverting to my state of hallucination.  I was the only white guy on the dock.  The crew did not really pay much mind to me, or the kids… they retreated over to the far side of the main deck and lit up cigarettes and swatted at the air to mix up the mosquitoes.  They looked over at us every so often.  Then, after quite a while, the older guy, who turned out to be the explorer himself, shouted, “Hey kid, get off the boat!” to one of the kids hanging on his stainless steel railing.  Then they kept talking so that we could not hear them.  I began to wonder about the idea of this guy being an explorer… like what was he exploring?  The NW Passage has been explored a lot already, most of the Arctic is mapped; obviously it can still be explored (though not “discovered”)… it simply seemed odd that this fellow Mike was not making more of an effort to reach out to the people whose dock he was using, and whose cigarettes he was smoking.  Not just that, but I had pieced together that he was leading a group of young explorers… and the first part of his leadership I see is lighting up cigarettes with them, and then projecting that as an example to the Inuit kids.  The first lines of the Odyssey came to mind,

Sing to me, Muse, and through me tell the story
of that man skilled in all ways and crafty,
the wanderer, harried for years on end,
after he plundered the stronghold
on the proud height of Troy.
He saw the townlands
and learned the minds of many distant men…
Odysseus went on perhaps the greatest voyage of exploration in all of literature… which took him through the minds of men.  I did not get that sense in the present situation… that this guy was exploring anyone’s mind, at least here, yet.  But then he began to talk to me.  It was brief and our conversation went something like this:

Mike: “…lot of mosquitoes here…”

When I was growing up my imagination was never held captive by the endeavors of explorers.  I’m not sure why… I believe I was probably  more interested in actually being outside and looking around for myself, however meager those researches were in comparison.  Christopher Columbus and James Cook and Francis Drake were never part of the archetypal repertoire that defined my youthful urges.  I was even less moved when forced to read about these demagogues, starting somewhere around fifth grade… Christopher Columbus being sent by some Queen to find a new trade route by which to expand the empire while I passively witnessed what a fourth or fifth hand narrator had to tell me about this character who mistakenly found America instead of the West Indies, in the margin a little Victorian glossy picture of a guy with a moustache and what looked like jester’s pantyhose, bowing before a royal court.  And then next is the chapter about the pilgrims.  The emphasis on the man, the explorer, I think has always seemed strange… like the whole place is associated with him, even though plenty of people were already living in the place he “found.”  I just looked up “explore”… ex plorare… literally “to cry out.”  Explorers cry out.  Something like, “I found it.”  When we were leaving the Arctic last year, Brendan Griebel (archaeologist) was telling me about an aspect of his PhD thesis being an analysis of the old explorers’ Arctic maps.  He wanted to translate them as maps of the individuals’ desires.  The map of a land starting as the urge in someone to go somewhere that hasn’t been visited before.  I don’t mean to speak about one explorer or another in a pejorative tone… because I’m pretty sure there are as many kinds of explorers as people.  I have spent some time now reading about the Arctic and about a few of those folks who came up here to look around over the past few hundred years.  This place has been the subject of the armchair explorer’s delight for something like two thousand years… starting with the idea of Thule.  Ultima Thule.  A majestic frozen land to the North where there are strange lights, gelatinous seas, ice mountains, mystical ice creatures, and home to the hyperboreans–those living above the north wind, Boreas… a tribe of immortal ice giants, by some accounts people with only one leg.  Pytheas, a Greek explorer from the second century B.C. is supposedly the first explorer to chart the Arctic seas of Ultima Thule, as described by Polybius in his Histories. (I would have much preferred to read Polybius and about the one legged hyperborean giants early in school than Christopher Columbus… both are appropriately history).  It is debatable whether Pytheas “found” the Shetland Islands, the southern tip of Greenland, Iceland or perhaps only northern Ireland.  Did he meet Druids, Vikings, or another native people?  No matter what he found or did not, the Inuit were already up here, living year after year, way further north, with two legs, and getting along quite well despite having not been discovered yet.

I think one bifurcating factor when I contemplate an explorer is something along these lines: is this person voyaging out to carry back a story… to return to London and put on a tuxedo and address the Royal Geographic Society about his findings in the Arctic after which there is a reception with champagne and caviar in a room filled with cologne, shiny black shoes and people who are desperate for the outré (armchair explorers) surrounding and questioning our man… or is this person going out there because it’s fun?  Those are (potentially) two different people.  Personally I wonder about the explorer who trudges mile after mile, oblivious of the native peoples, ethnographic background of the place, and archaeology, just to set foot there, plant a flag and take a picture… and bring a story back to London.  It doesn’t sound attractive to me mostly because it does not sound fun.  I would also be pretty chagrined to say I did something like that first, or found, cried out, a place which already had many many very well situated inhabitants with their own language and culture.  There are of course those adventurers who are bold and pure… who go for the going, who have fun being in dramatic and perilous landscapes, I think Amundsen was so, Hillary, Moitessier… lately I have been reading about Samuel Hearne… who worked for the Hudson Bay Co. in the late eighteenth century and was so good at learning from natives that he was able to live off the land by himself and adopted wearing furs (because they work so much better in Arctic climates) and komiks, poilus, etc… he was the first European, and perhaps first person, to go from Hudson Bay overland to the Arctic Sea in one go, more than 2,200 miles to the northwest.  I like the stories of the guys who go native as it were.  (If you’re interested in reading an incredible account of someone who adventured and loved the process so much that he could not reconcile it with the waiting parade at home… so just stayed out there, check out A Voyage for Madmen.)

Anyway, I am lucky enough to be up here in this Arctic region surrounded by 1) people who choose to live here, 2) people who have always lived here, and 3) people who are here to adventure.  (For the sake of this little foray into the idea of exploration, let’s divide the realm of explorers into tuxes and furs… and I’ll describe one of each from recent explorations of my own… of the gravel streets of Cambridge Bay.)

This past winter I was here with Brendan and at some point near the end of our stay he had been in communication with an Englishman called Richard Best who was planning a sort of epic kayak trip… from here to Gjoa Haven, about four hundred miles by paddle to the East.  He had invited Brendan, who was deliberating about it.  I have done a fair amount of kayaking, mostly whitewater, and told Brendan he would be welcome to come to Portland and hang out for a month and I’d teach him to roll and get acquainted with the water and the boat.  He ended up being too busy.  On this trip, luckily enough, I ran into Richard Best, who was here completing the finishing touches to his skin-on-frame kayak–that he built here–in preparation for the trip.  He was waiting for another fellow from Engand, Glen, who would accompany him to Gjoa Haven, leaving about the  21st of July.  As I discussed in the last post, there is still tons of ice up here.  At that time, last week, we had been going out to the sea every day and monitoring the ice situation (fishing)… and I was visiting with Richard almost every day… and he was growing nervous about the ice situation.  Once it is all broken up, the ice can shift quite dramatically… and–according to Brent Boddy, a local resident and explorer in his own right–can completely fill the bay back in here… which was extremely hard to believe looking at the huge bay of open water… until I saw it happen.

This is not in the bay directly in front of town, but just out past West Arm, where the sea opens up slightly between Victoria Island and the Mainland… a lot of people have little cabins out there and we had been there the day before and there was NO ICE.  It had all blown in from the west and stacked one two-ton block upon another for as far as you can see.  (Char will come in under the protection of ice, so I thought it would be a good fishing situation until I almost fell into the water as a piece of floating ice I was standing on disintegrated, only teetering on another piece below it, below the water line.)  It’s treacherous.  This picture was taken two days after Richard and Glen had departed.  Their plan had been to paddle around the Victoria coast line to the west until they reached a small strand of islands about forty miles away and then make the trip across the sea to the Mainland coast, another forty miles or so, broken up by this string of islands… the longest time in open water about ten miles.  At the last minute they had decided that the ice situation might be too difficult (which turned out to be right on) and they hired a float plane to take them over to the mainland.  I offered to help them rig the kayaks and load gear and get over there.  So I was fortunate enough to make the trip about seventy miles from here to a pristine white shell beach on the Mainland.

Here is the same area (as the above photo) two days prior:

It’s hard to see how far out that sea extends under the plane, but it’s far.  The ice was ( and is still) moving in the direction of Richard and Glen.  I also got another account from a different explorer (aviator), who had flown over the area they are currently paddling and said that it appeared ice was locking the Mainland pretty well.  After seeing how quickly the ice can move, I got a bit nervous for Richard and Glen.  I think the worst thing they’d have to endure at this point is simply staying put and waiting for the situation to clear.  They also have good dry suits and could attempt paddling a bit and then portaging over the teetering wind blown ice and then paddling again… but look at that ice.  Hard going.

Here are a couple of the shots I got in preparation for the float plane (de Havilland Beaver) flight…

Richard’s is the darker, less flexible boat, being carefully strapped to the pontoon of the plane.

From the air, here’s the ice labyrinth they were avoiding:

This is where I’m going to leave you:

The beach:

This is Richard with an absolute bat shit storm of mosquitoes invading all of our personal spaces.  I’ve never experienced a bug situation like this.  It’s a remarkable sensation… an audible buzzing sound extending many meters around your head and a sensation all over your body that mosquitoes are landing and doing their thing. 

I think Glen was kind of pissed that I took this picture, but it was one of the most awesome economic transactions I’ve been party to.  Glen paying Fred for the float plane ride across to the mainland:

As we lifted off the water and ascended into the ether above the Arctic, Cambridge Bay very quickly fell away, the plane picked up to 120 MPH and we flew.  Over the sea, over the ice labyrinth, for about forty minutes… as we navigated along the coast of the Mainland, looking for a place to land, I realized that I had never been to such a remote place.  I realized that there is no more remote a place on earth, than this… really thousands of miles from any kind of emergency service like a hospital, thousands of miles from any kind of ordinary civilization outside of these tiny Arctic hamlets.  This sensation filled the plane.  I knew what Richard and Glen were doing.  I could feel their excitement and trepidation, being left in this rocky place with only a skin boat and everything they needed to pack into it, hundreds of pounds of food and gear… only a layer of skin separating a harsh expedition from an emergency.  So we left them there:

Fred humored me in buzzing them on the beach once… the last time they would hear the sound of a motor for a month… the last time they would see anything made by man.  I kept them in the corner of my vision for another few seconds and as the de Havilland droned away and picked up to speed, it penetrated me quite viscerally how far away these gentlemen are from… anything.  A huge flood of feeling arose in my body… I saw all of Richard in a moment, a veterinarian from England who’d left his family to come make this trip because he loved it… leaving Cambridge Bay, where he’d made friends with about twenty kids–who were very reluctant to let him go–and charmed the adults he shook hands with, who had studied the kayak because it’s beautiful and decided to come here, build one and paddle it across the Arctic, because it’s possible, and fun.

I had encountered the fur species of explorer.

The others will have to wait, because it’s three o’clock in the morning and I have to do my job tomorrow.

I’m returning to the Canadian Arctic for the third time in this year.  I will have spent 25% of the past year in the Arctic, in Cambridge Bay (Iqaluqtutiaq), Nunavut, and that fact is sinking in this time.  I’m looking at the place in a new way this time, this summer; right now it’s eleven thirty p.m. and the sun has not even touched the horizon yet, and will not… it will skirt the norther radius of the plate for another hour and a half and then begin to rise again.  This time, not accompanied by Brendan–arctic scholar and archaeologist–but by my friend Ben, my carpentry conspirator: because his eyes are fresh, seeing this place for the first time, I’m re-experiencing it with him to a degree.  There are roughly 70 days here where the sea is not locked up with ice, an even smaller window when a sea lift (freighter) can get into the bay harbor (one rusty pier) and deliver all the vitals for the next year: diesel, heating fuel, aviation fuel, trucks, tractors, ATVs, skidoos, houses, furnaces, building materials, dry goods, container after container of those things determined necessary.  So this is the time that people are running… really in a flat out sprint with the day, to excavate for new house foundations (4″ or so can be removed down to permafrost to set house jack stands on the ice-clay hard pack), perform exterior maintenance on buildings, sealing, retro-fitting siding, windows, repairing vehicles and large equipment, administration for the arrival of the coming life line of materials, including–for the territory of Nunavut, 39,000 inhabitants–an almost $400,000,000 fuel expenditure that must be carefully inventoried and stored.

Looking out of the plane window, about 500 miles above tree line, the ice looks like it’s really pretty decrepit, like you could split it with a canoe:

Any of that ice upon which you can see white, however, is anywhere from 2-3 meters thick still:

I’m kicking myself for not bringing my wetsuit now because you could easily walk out the ice for miles, intermittently wading and quickly swimming from one piece to another… and get to some really good char fishing.

Anyway, there is a lot of ice out there still, this July 21st.  This is last night at about nine p.m.:

Walking around here–again–I am impressed with the raw reality of the environment.  Everything I’m used to is stripped away.  The town bears evidence of what it’s like to build up a place based basically on necessity, not on a marketplace or business strategy… and again I remember that I am not who I think I am.  I am one liver, one large and one small intestine, one spine, one brain, two hands, two eyes, two carotid arteries, two sciatic nerves, cartilage, bones, fat, hair, one spirit, and one pumping heart… and that’s all.  I remember leaving here last February and flying into Portland at night, looking down on the vast expanse of the grid, the glowing electrical web of the city, and thinking, “it’s burning hot.”  It looked ferocious and feverish compared to where I’d been (here), a peaceful dark frozen pillow on the top of our earth, it looked unnatural and sickly, not warm like the moon rising over the sea, spreading a soft light, one little moon rock reflecting the only true fire, below our horizon, ninety three million miles away.  Take away those things you come home to, your “job,” your art hobby, your addiction to an after-dinner drink or TV show or your new pair of shoes or computer or vacation to Mexico, or all of the most of the stuff that isn’t necessary… and what’s there?  I’m not sure I’m going to be able to answer that except by saying I’m getting the sensation of it here, where things seem clearer, basic.  The only way human life is possible in a place like this is by the death of animals… the animals hold the passage to life here, and that pathway is only possible through their own death: the terrible contract set up by whomever, wild architect of this planet, maker of the contract between all living things.  We know that this contract is real because there are still native people here, doing–in a way pretty closely related to how they used to manage–what they’ve always done:

I can imagine the relative horror of an environmentalist looking at this scene… this year’s muskox slaughter was less than what they normally shoot for: 250… I think they got around 190 muskoxen this year, harvested all the meat, and will tan and use the hides.  You might wonder, is this still necessary?  I guess it’s an interesting question; I’ve looked around at some websites where environmentalists are complaining about sovereign nations whale hunting, collapsing the problem of Inuit hunting whales with what the Japanese do.  I don’t mean to start that argument: to me, being here, it appears that it could be no other way… to ask them to stop would be like asking the muskoxen to be other than they are.  (Remember: America is the nation that ruined the whale, over-fishing every ocean to the point of eradication,  largely using it for lamp oil… to SEE by, not to live by.)  When you’re here in the cold, it likewise becomes obvious that the only way to be out in the cold is by the use of animal fat… an hour out in minus 45 is possible with the fuel of caribou stew and seal fat… and very dangerous and uncomfortable with a blueberry muffin.  When you cut into the flesh of an animal, there is that contract… all of those guts you clean out are virtually the same as your own… and what you clean and keep will move through your own and power up you, not the you you think you are, just you.

The tea by the fire and soup simmering on the stove and cribbage game with friends and warm electric light, snow falling outside, warm winter Christmasy spirits inside… that’s there and it’s yours, but only in the same balance as the hard arctic wind cracking over your head, a gust of inhuman cold blowing down over your elk hide parka, yelling over the wind at a dog team and cursing to stop and untangle and comb the chaotic lines running to the harnesses, frostbite black fingers and deathly panic that you will not make it back, that the storm will eclipse your way home and you will turn into a piece of ice statuary with your animals, never to emerge again from the frozen land.  The graceful smile of your beautiful lover… it is balanced by the death run of a fish on the line, a steel hook piercing its mouth, penetrating its scaly armor forever until its dead and clean and then part of your body.

I still do have a bit of squeamishness about accepting this contract, about killing an animal, looking at it, dissecting it, cleaning it, cooking it (sometimes), and eating it… but mostly I have the curiosity of a surgeon, a love for looking into the beautiful complex inventions of this universe, breathing deep and giving thanks for that creature… making it me.  We’ve been having some really good meals:

That’s an Arctic Char, caught by Ben P.  We’ve gone out with Mary Avalak several times and learned the ways she has caught fish for her whole life, killed them, cleaned them with her ulu, and prepared them.  Watching her work with the fish is like watching a carpenter with a saw… except more.  One night, while we cleaned a cod and all the guts came spilling out of it, I said, “All of that is in us.”  She looked at me and scrunched her nose.  Later on I was asking her about growing up in Wellington Bay (about 50 miles West of here) and she got this look of serenity and said, “I love it there, I love that life… that life, you can see what you do.”  She was describing her time really before significant “contact,” her time on the land with her parents, growing up on the land, with just one other family… a life and way of work where you can see what you do.

There’s more to the story of the ice and travels… but it’s past two in the morning now and will have to wait until soon.

Blessings.

We’re coming up on ten P.M. in Iqaluqtutiaq, the old curfew, denoted with the air raid siren… my last evening bell for a while here, in the north.  I spent the day doing odds and ends, cleaning the exhibits, installing the final artifacts with Brendan, making sure everything looks right….

Last night we put together the mannequins who now reside in the qalgiq, a man and a boy, the man somberly looking over a piece of driftwood that he’s whittling:

I’m not sure if you know it, but it’s a slightly eerie feeling, working with mannequins.  We bolted them together and began pulling their heavy caribou clothing on, leveraging against a bench or the floor to heave a set of pants on, then a boot.  They have a peculiar kind of weight; in the end it feels like you’re manhandling someone who is unconscious, putting them where you want them to be.  And finally, there they are, a man whittling an old piece of driftwood, perhaps into a fishing lure, his young boy watching, his kumiq (boot) on his dad’s knee.  What kind of incantation is this, to invent these humans from 1,000 years ago, doing something people might have done?  All in silicone.  They are Inuit, practicing a craft in a place that has long since passed.  Some modern Inuit looking on at them…

Besides a replica, what are they looking at?  They are looking on at an activity that we are engaged in, the activity of studying them, explaining what might have happened, based on careful archaeology and research… they are watching us study them.  I think in a way this feels like an honor, and in another way feels estranged.  If someone was making models of my ancestors, I would want to say, “I’m right here!”

Last night I was trying to divine what purpose a model like this serves.  Silicone waxy people behind bullet proof glass, wearing brand new incredible fur clothing, whittling.  I realized that if some kid, or some mother, or some lawyer looks at this… and ten years later realizes what it is, that it’s a moment, a real thing from a legacy, a story about the land, about the bitter weather of the pole, and the ability to sit down, talk to your son, make a tool, in a seal skin tent that you made, and teach him how to get to where you are… and then do it again, and again… their only traces bone and copper artifacts, stone tent rings, a few amulets and keepsakes, and nothing else besides the vanishing smoky quality of the story, turning into a myth.  Then it’s good.

Tonight we had a little opening party for the exhibit.  Here’s what it looks like with a wide angle lens:

There’s another qajaq frame hanging over it, to show the form before the membrane… we finished building that last week, steaming oak and sewing it together traditionally, with sinew and needle.

The Kitikmeot Heritage Society has an extensive archive room that is completely climate controlled, with beautiful artifacts from 3,000 years ago from all over the north.  Since some of this stuff is very valuable, it can only be displayed in certain instances.  For the artifacts in this display, Brendan took the originals and made plaster casts.  It is very convincing…  Here is old sinew, a hide scraper, a bone thimble… other tools for the building of a qajaq membrane.

For me it has been a deep pleasure working with these beautiful elder people.  They have grace and presence that is uncommon.  That they came through this exhibit, looked for a long time and talked about their grandparents hunting caribou in a river, in a boat very similar to this, looked through the artifacts and–for the women–talked about the sewing (and these particular women were the ones who did actually sew this boat), the challenges, the tools they used, well, that’s exhilarating.  It makes this very worthwhile.

This is Mary Kamoyuq… I believe the eldest elder.  She has the most incredible posture, kind of walks along hunchbacked but if she’s says hello to you she stands straight up.  I think she understands almost all English, but I can’t understand much of what she says.  She looks old, but she can move so fast, it’s alarming… she would kick your ass if she had to.  This woman has been around, seen the polar bear hunts, the walrus hunts, gone through more than 80 long bitter freezing winters, raised a lot of children, both her own and adopted.  She sewed that coat (like they all do); that’s a wolverine around the hood.  You are looking at the last of a great thing… perhaps the last of one of the most stalwart people that have ever been.

Sunrise from our front porch

20 second exposure, out on the ice, the Aurora Borealis:

Some frozen vehicles

Cute people

Frozen eyes

This was the temperature that day… and this dog is outside, nursing three puppies… whom I’m not sure are still alive.

Everything up here is frozen.  As I discussed over the summer, this makes for a curious architectural component: because the ground is frozen in the “summer,” everything is built up off the tundra.  In the event that someone puts in a large building (there are only a couple on this scale here), a very expensive crane is employed which pounds pylons into the twelve foot thick permafrost and then deeper… so that is not used very much.  When everything is built up off the ground, and there is no way to excavate the earth, there is no hard line to water utilities.  All water is delivered by truck, and all sewage is pumped out with another truck (if you’re lucky, this happens at roughly the same time).  Normally the water supply is in a clearly accessible spot on the outside of the house with an insulated housing around it and nothing else (otherwise it would freeze); the water utility just plugs into the pipe and pumps 400-1200 gallons.  The water tank is stored in a strategically warm place, usually in a mechanical room in the house and is connected to a fairly complex system which has significant electrical and mechanical components.  A large bilge places the house’s supply pipes under pressure… when water is demanded somewhere and falls below a certain level in a holding tank, the pump comes on and re-fills that tank.  The large water tank is also connected to another holding tank which tempers the heating systems, which run strictly on hydronic means now: glycol and water… this system uses very little water in the winter, but draws up some cold water to keep the glycol system from getting too hot.  Here is a picture of the mechanical room in the house of the Arctic explorer, where we’re staying:

I would guess that a system like this fully installed would cost about $60,000 in the U.S… and perhaps 50% again to do so up here.  This is what must be in every house, otherwise it will freeze. One of the dedicated lines on that hydronic heat system then goes to the sewage tank which is stored in a large cold storage space under the house.  (This space is commonly used by people to store caribou, musk ox, partially tanned hides, butchered meat, etc.)  The sewage must stay heated in order to be pumped out.  When that German made gas fired boiler comes on, it heats a glycol water solution and then cycles it through the various heating circuits; when it comes on, it sounds good.  It purrs.  It is the sound of staying alive in the winter.  (If anything goes wrong with these systems, it is possibly a pretty complicated plumbing and electrical problem: a house call from the mechanical company in town starts at $500 to show up and they bill at $250/hr.)  There are two essential raw components to this mechanical room: 1) water and 2) fuel.  (Electricity is a subsystem of fuel here.)

WATER

Everything is frozen.  The sea ice is estimated at seven feet thick now.  It heaves in huge fissures all along the bay shore where building ice continues to push down into the sea floor and push the surface up.  All rivers and freshwater supplies are likewise interminably frozen.  So where does the water come from?  The utility has created pump houses at the mouth of what they call ‘Water Lake,’ a couple of miles outside of town; the intake pipes go to the bottom and have long, large intake sections that are heated, to keep the water moving deep down at the bottom; there is one supply pipe that was very expensively buried in the permafrost and brings water to a treatment facility in town: trucks are filling from it all day long for deliveries.  If you call for water on a busy day, you may not get it until the following day; if you don’t plan right, no water.  The water is heavily treated with chlorine… I don’t know why.  I drank from that river in the summer and it’s the best water I’ve ever had.  Furthermore, the water is stored in these large plastic tanks… which are normally never fully drained; it therefore feels pretty gross to drink this water.  What we have been doing is getting sea ice, harvested with an axe at a natural fissure, melting it and drinking it.  This is superb water.  It is not salinated; too cold.  (Read here if you care to know why sea ice holds no salt.)

FUEL

I think there are three kinds of fuel up here: 1) gasoline for trucks, skidoos, ATVs, etc.  2) heating fuel, which is close to diesel but different (lower freezing temp.), and 3) diesel for the big trucks (that have to be kept in garages because diesel becomes gel at about minus 55) and diesel for generating power.  The fuel for the house is supplied at a tank stored outside and likewise has a pump that draws fuel into the boiler.  This is delivered when needed; depending on heating conditions (almost all houses keep the temp. up to avoid pipes freezing, because the cost of the fuel is so much lower than the expense of fixing a house with frozen pipes), a 500 gallon tank will last about two months.  I can see in the notes of the Arctic explorer that this house, in the past three years, has used an average of 17 litres of fuel per day.  I can also see that it costs $3,600 to fill the tank.  Pretty stiff.  Cambridge Bay, AKA Iqualuqtutiak, is part of the territory of Nunavut, one of three Arctic territories in Canada (the Northwest Territory, and Yukon Territory are the others).  Every year Nunavut purchases all of its fuel at once; from preliminary research it looks like the government takes this order out to bid: it’s called Ikummatiit, their strategy to bring energy to the territory.  Last year Nunavut spent about $240 million dollars on energy products, 200 million litres of fuel, roughly.  (Here’s more about that.)  There are roughly 40,000 people in Nunavut.  That’s a little more than $20,000 per person (after a re-sale with at least %100 markup) to stay warm all winter.  I’m sure a large portion of this cost is in utility, i.e. cargo to and from the communities, all the infrastructure, heavy equipment, and then lastly houses.  There’s a large complex of fuel storage containers that connect to a power generation facility…

When you walk past this place, it is extremely audible… a little like Don Quixote and the fulling mills.  This plant is producing all of the electricity for the community.  Without the fuel pouring into these generators, there are no lights in your house, no spark for the boiler, no stove to melt ice.  Without electricity, nothing works.  When it goes off, it all freezes again and things go back to the way they were 60 years ago, which is how things were for a long time before that.  Even in the tightest house, the tightest community, this only takes about 12 hours.  Then it’s minus 50 inside and outside.  Frozen.

The previous method for melting water was to bring sea ice or snow blocks back into your snow house and put them in a stone vessel; the house is heated with your body heat and the small flame of a seal oil quliq (soapstone lantern): it would melt slowly and be very good for when you were thirsty.

The government hugely subsidizes the energy cost for this territory of 10,000 people (Nunavut is about the size of Columbia)… for it would not otherwise be possible to be here, like this.  Obviously.  The cold is mitigated by fuel, for the time being.  Like in the note on the harpoon, it raises the question: is this way of life inexorably connected to a thing?  To fossil fuels?  Would we be thinking differently in the absence of that fuel?  The answer must be yes.  Just as when experiences in life mitigate life… and get into our dreams… so has the dream of the north been shifted from its original vernacular, to this, something more industrial, something more Christian, fossil fuel driven.  And the people who were born here before, in the absence of this fuel commodity are still telling another story, part of the old language, the old dream:

They are telling us about the harpoon, about sewing a caribou amauti coat, about their parents and grandparents who were around for the first significant contact with white men, coming up here to fur trade and barter tea, tobacco, steel, and cloth for seal skin, furs, precious narwhal tusk…  These people hold space differently; when I go in to visit them sewing in the Heritage Society, they like the presence of another human in a different way, like you’re entering a tent where they live, like life is just about that: about the contact… not about retirement or video games or homework or books or movies or anything else.  And when there isn’t anything else (like with them), it’s big: life.  They are almost always laughing; literally, if you listen to them talk in Inuitaqtun, about every 100 seconds: laughter.  It must feel strange for them, speaking a virtually dead language, with all these white people around them, studying them, bringing them all of this heavy stuff, making museum exhibits, taking notes, annotating their lives, and trading them their precious ambergris vitality for snowmobiles and facebook.  But they don’t get connected to that stuff, nor your attachment to it.  They are just there, laughing and sewing.  And because they have big hearts, they embrace your awkwardness and they embrace you and your culture, even though it has brought them to the brink of their way of life.  They have courage, in spates, looking at their grand kids, not fully understanding them, but loving them, being surrounded by people they don’t fully understand, because they are not fully there… but these ones have made it, made it through the last major push of Industrialized Civilization into Aboriginal tradition.  And they are the last of their kind, on earth.

Then think about the water and the fuel.  Aren’t those systems incredible?  They are certainly a marvel, when you see them working in this place, like Don Quixote watching the giant hammers coming down on the cloth, the new Industry.  But they are also this: me typing on this computer, in my t-shirt two feet from a triple pane window holding out minus 50 degree air.  And those systems are part of who we are, part of what made contact with this place, and part of what destroyed it.  It’s hard to think about it like that, like ‘would you trade one for the other?’  How would you know the answer to that… until it’s too late?  And when you know you want to go back to the old way, well… you can’t.

I’m pretty sure that we didn’t come here to destroy a way of life; on the contrary, we found it fascinating and inspiring, so we returned over and over, until a relation was made, and a joint agreement.  Obviously the natives accepted the white man’s voyages, his trading, ultimately his fuel.  But I think some of them now–the older ones–have a quiet kind of sorrow for what’s gone missing.

I heard Nick Jaina, a musician, explain the origin of a love song in the French custom of drowning their national bird, the Ortolan, in Armagnac before preparing it to eat.  (It’s the most expensive culinary delicacy in France.)  They so cherished the bird’s singing voice, that they invented a way to subsume the creature in delicate delicious spirit, and then eat it.  Because they love it so much.

This is Mary Avolak (the one pictured above in the middle) in the 70′s with her niece:

The sun’s ascent in the past week has been obvious, almost mechanical, like you can feel the ratcheting of North, clicking back towards the immense burning globe: there are a solid 15 minutes of light added to either side of the sun’s path, every day.  This has not caused any change in temperature or the general roughing up of the spirit at the hands of Mr. Boreas, however.  If anything, it has become more frigid.  The last week has sustained a high of about minus 38 and lows way lower, with several days of awesome wind and sideways snow.  Here’s the first full naked appearance, right around lunch time a few days ago:

It’s hard to explain just how huge it seems when you stand there in front of it.  It’s like the only player on the stage, built up by all the stage hands to take up the whole runway, and then they open the curtain and roll it out and wheel it across… and, since this is the most important part of the play, that’s all there is and the curtain falls.

I’ve heard that despite the return of the sun, late January and February are the most brutal period of winter… and several people have told me that they haven’t had winter like this for a long time, with temperatures sustained way down below minus 40 for weeks.  A couple of the elders have blamed it on me.  I take it as a complement.  We have also had some of the more smashing nights of Aurora Borealis since being here.  I ventured out last night with a tripod to try to document the green fire dance in the heavens and failed.  I couldn’t sustain more than about 60 seconds of naked hand before being incapable of moving my fingers and close to frostbite… and I couldn’t organize the camera properly at first… and then the cold zapped the batteries and everything in the camera froze.  I went with a friend and we took tea in a thermos.  I poured some out into the little cup and then raised it to my lips about 15 seconds later and my bottom lip stuck to the metal cup… I tipped the liquid back to get it to overflow the cup (carefully) to loosen the frozen bond of my lip to the cup and–astonishingly–the tea was already tepid.  About one minute later is was frozen.  So much for the idea of sharing tea out under the northern lights.  The show of light, on the other hand… is awesome.  It’s huge seams of light ripping through the sky, from the horizon to up over head; the light is most intense and pure at the seam and then the light diffuses up and partially blocks the view of the black starry night.  They move like flames, quietly oscillating through thousands of miles of space, moving up and then retracting and the seam closes up and is gone and several seconds later a new seam opens up.  Last night it was particularly green light, with a bit of phosphorous type white light at the crisp edge of the luminous crack.

(It’s about 3PM here now and the last light is fading behind a fairly powerful blizzard, sideways snows in 40 MPH wind… dark again until an earlier sun show tomorrow.)

I find myself thinking often about how things work, especially up here.  I suppose I look into these things to some degree until I come up with a story that satisfies my appetite.  Some things I have begun looking into recently:

The Aurora Borealis, why does it happen?

The mechanical systems of a modern Arctic home, how does it work?

A traditional Inuit caribou hunting qajaq, how was it made?

The modern Inuit educational system, how does it work, what does it say about the education of the West?

I won’t go through these questions systematically… I just wanted to share what I’ve been thinking about this past week.  As far as the show of the norther lights… I started my search in obvious places… and learned that they are the result of solar winds moving over the top ionosphere of earth (50 miles up), and result from the sun’s ions colliding with atmospheric particles, around the poles, releasing photons, blah blah blah.  (It says all that in the linked article.)  And as fantastic as that science is… it feels different than that.  It’s almost as if the quick knowledge of a wikipedia article replaces the beauty of the thing, rather than accentuate it.  Last night, out there walking underneath it, looking at it… it doesn’t look like ions colliding with oxygen atoms at all: it looks like a war between gods, or exhalation of some great mystical deity, smoking an evening pipe and exhausting the vapors of deep contemplation about his next creative endeavor.  And once again I am drawn to the Inuit sense of the phenomenon.  They figured the lights were a direct expression of their own emotional moods, reflected in the dark heavens of the dark season.  In a happy good time of abundance the lights come out, dance, flicker and exalt.  In a moodier, more brooding time there might not be any light.  If they whistle at them and call them, the light moves.  I know a modern scientist would look at those theories as silly… but I wonder if there might not be something even more scientific (using that word strictly) about just pure observation of a ton of green light cascading into the North from the heavens, dancing… because that is what’s happening.

I have also been up here doing my job, which is the installation of an exhibit case for a traditionally made Inuit qajaq.  The kayak form is a uniquely Inuit boat technology, developed by these peoples of the north for hunting.  It was only recently that I learned from Brendan that the main purpose these boats served was hunting the summer caribou, in rivers.  There was a certain amount of seal fishing done from kayak, but that would have been a different boat (than the one we’re displaying), and a much trickier hunt, not to say that the caribou hunt was “safe.”  This boat was built for speed, to rush up along side of a group of caribou, entering a river, herd them along into the middle of the river (there would have been multiple qajaq hunters on either side of the river), and spear as many as possible in the back and side of the neck while the caribou fled through deep water, swimming for safety.  Here is the boat, and case as of last week:

I have since put much more of the case together and completed all of the acrylic, plexi-glass work to enclose the boat in its climate controlled environment.  In each third section of the display apron is a box which will have a glass cover and the box is meant to display artifacts associated with the qajaq-caribou hunt.  Here is Brendan going through some of the possible artifacts with Mary and Annie.

I guess these artifacts (which range widely in age and value, but have all been collected from fairly nearby) had been poorly stored until just now, when Brendan went through all of them and cut special foam cradles for everything.  The ladies were elated to see how it had all been organized and were really excited to see these old tools.  There are all kinds of incredible artifacts here, old bone fishing lures, hide scrapers, a little bone scoop that Mary said was for scooping up frozen pee or excrement from a kid in an igloo to put it somewhere special outside, harpoons, knives, spear ends, spindles for tendon fishing line, etc.  So we went through them to choose some of the appropriate tools to display in the qajaq case, things that would have been used either in the maintenance of one’s qajaq or in the river caribou hunt.  There will be one box which displays the tools used to build and maintain a qajaq, little toggles for tying things off, the bone drill used to make the holes for lashing the ribs to the stringers of the boat, knives and chisels (blades often made of locally occurring copper) used to make the shoulders for wood joints… and another box displaying the spear ends the hunters used to slay the caribou.  There will also be displayed a pair of shaven seal skin boots sewn with the special waterproof stitch, and some of the amulets a hunter would have brought along in the boat for good luck, such as an arctic bumble bee, or the red throat skin of a loon.

A few of the case:

more soon…