One of those days

I dreamt last night of
the St. Lawrence but woke up
on the Mackenzie.

The ink-worthy Wells

Ack. Sorry about the delay on this one, folks. I had to screen it through the censorship police.

Just kidding, obviously. I'm not one of the free-speech-oppressed journalists of Iran or China or Vancouver.

Anyway, here's a little piece of my work trip to Norman Wells last month. There were many more pieces, but I won't give them away.



When I asked him what people were talking about around town, Larry got up from the table and disappeared from the café so abruptly I thought he must be fed up with all my questions. Then, a few seconds later, he reappeared with a clipboard and a black pen and started making a list of the most pressing issues facing the 800 residents of Norman Wells.

I shouldn't have been surprised. I'd landed at the airport of this little industry town one latitudinal degree below the Arctic Circle less than 48 hours earlier but it didn't take long to figure out what kind of people this place – The Wells – made a home for.

Just off the plane, I stopped by the window outside the arrivals gate, wondering about the giant grey van idling driverless at the curb. A stencil of a sleepy teddy bear peeked out from under tucked covers below a red emblazoned RAYUKA INN logo on the side door. And then, in front of me, was a tall, thin, mid-50s man in a ball cap and a baggy jacket. Eyes tired but kind behind rounded glasses. Smiling slightly, unassuming. Larry.

"Are you with News North?"

I didn't ask him how he knew. The answer would have been obvious. Mine was the only face he didn't recognize.

Larry and his wife, Carla – who welcomes me with a hearty handshake, laughing brightly to match her short burgundy hair and emerald eyeshadow – have been running this hotel since "before you were born." The way they are together seems rare, like they've been together all day and all night for all of their lives and they've never run out of things to talk about. In both ways they have, and they haven't.

They tell me about the town, a little, as I pop through the café on the way in or out to one of many excursions over the course of the week. No gossip, though. Not quite what I expected. They tell me about themselves, a little more, as I sit down with them for a late lunch at a table between the colouring-page-plastered help yourself drink cooler and the Keno lottery counter. One of them's always rushing up to "whoo-hoo" a ticket, sell a newspaper, ring up an order to go, check on the kitchen staff. The lunch break rush is over; now it's back to the regular afternoon rush. The place is small – only four or five tables – but everybody's just passing through, saying hello, grabbing a cup of coffee.

"Just stay in this spot," Larry chuckles as he gets up again, hurrying to answer the phone, "and you'll get all the news you need."

I look around. He's right, of course. To be a fly on this wall, amid the cutesy painted wooden placards with their kitschy sayings lamenting non-existent maids and know-it-all teenagers. For the record, no question I could ask and no answer I could jot down in my reporter's notebook would be news to anyone here. If they want to know the state of the town's affairs, they can ask the mayor directly. He comes in here for breakfast every morning.

By now Larry's flipped two ruled sheets over the back of his clipboard, scrawling a fresh page of news tips, most of which would never have occurred to me. Some reporter I am. I feel I've been missing out, and I tell him so.

"You wereeen't heeeere!" he sing-songs, making me laugh, making me forget for a moment my inadequacies. I can't argue with that.

"But I hope I can come back soon," I tell him.

And I mean it.

Message from Mexico

Four exclamation points, really? You just have to rub it in, don't you?

I love my parents. They probably don't mean to be cruel. But, I don't know, maybe there's something about restricted blood flow as a side effect of extreme cold weather that makes it difficult to feel all warm and fuzzy upon receiving an e-mail from them euphorically dashed off and sent via high speed connection from somewhere in the tropical depths of the Mayan Riviera, just off the coast of a grand turquoise-soaked coral reef.

It's -22 C in Inuvik right now. That's mild. It's basically spring. Apart from the 20 km/h white winds, of course. Well, the good news is, it's pretty unlikely any little furry herbivorous mammals will be seeing their shadows with such limited sunlight here, so spring has got to be on the way. I'm not sure very many groundhogs live in the Arctic, though. Can foxes predict the weather, too?

Oops, I seem to have caught these two in the middle of a game of "Watch while I pretend to freeze to death!" Fun.

Yes, spring is on its way. In the meantime, Inuvik winter is pretty chill. I can dig (out of) it.

Stay tuned: I've got a new tale of wintry bliss simmering about my recent trip to Norman Wells, NWT. Oh, simmering. My new favourite word.

Dragon clouds

Can't remember what I'm thinking of

Lemonade

Plastic bags of beer cans clunk between our identical black down parkas as we trudge through packed snow along the side of the road, gasping out cloudy breaths of air so cold it stings the teeth.

"I feel like a teenager, walking down the road with my booze to sneak into some party," you snicker into your fur-trimmed hood.

"I know what you mean," I laugh but it comes out too loud and abrupt in our silent surroundings. "But if we were teenagers we'd be carrying Bacardi coolers and Smirnoff Ice."

"That's true. I remember when I found out about Mike's Hard Lemonade. It was like, awww yeah! I was so happy. Every time I was gonna get drunk I'd buy a five-cent bag of candy, wash it down with a swig of hard lemonade. It was the best."

You're walking at least six paces ahead of me and I'm stepping on your shadow. But I don’t blame you. Your legs are longer, for one thing. And it's too cold to slow down. You're talking out into the wind and I'm zipped up to the bridge of my nose. We can barely hear each other and we don't even really know what we're saying but we still talk. Otherwise it would be too quiet.

"How long do you think it would take to die out here? I'd say not long."

"Would you rather die of cold exposure or heat exposure?"

We agree in a calm, casual, sick, twisted way that freezing to death would likely be faster, and therefore preferable, over slowly dehydrating, writhing listlessly in a pool of your own sweat until the end.

"But," I think aloud, "Freezing is probably more painful. At least until you go numb. Right now I feel like someone dumped a bucket of hot coals on my legs."

"A bucket of what on what?!"

Later I'd discover an ugly, red and white patch of frostbite on my left knee just under where the parka hem hits. Punishment for not tending to my leggings-dominated laundry pile in a timely fashion.


But it doesn't matter, at least not until after we're inside, warm, laughing naturally, and then, not much does. We're here now.

Another reason not to smoke

This is what -48 C with windchill and fog looks like.

And I was able to enjoy this scenic view whilst walking back to the office from tonight's town council meeting.

Yes, I said walking...


That's why. Well, also because town hall is about a two-minute jaunt from my office and I'm young and healthy and I can take the cold. Right. Just to be clear: I returned to the office afterward not because I had to file, but because I had to get warm before journeying on.

My goal for this winter is to keep all my fingers and toes.

The glory days

As I prepare to head back to work tomorrow after a very short break with a renewed energy aimed at producing quality journalism, I can't help but think back on a time when my passion for the craft blossomed and thrived. A time when my colleagues and I inspired each other every day. A time when we could spend hours debating every facet of the paper we produced, from the front page headline to the puzzling horoscopes on the back page. That is, we could have debated those things for hours, if we took the time, but as it was we were always rushed. Regardless, my three years working for our weekly university student newspaper seems, in hindsight, a time when anything was possible.

OK, maybe not anything. We might not have won any awards during my years there, but The Gazette crew I remember did work hard for little thanks. And we did manage to have some good times. Some moments, of course, were better than others. The great divide between the news section and the arts section, the epic power struggles between some of the editors and the general insomnia (or was that just me?) probably did more harm than good. Some of us threatened to quit every week, while some of us actually did throw in the towel (strikingly similar to my current work life, actually.) But (to wax poetic) I found a sense of camaraderie (however naive) in our little third floor newspaper office that can only exist among people who know what it's like to put out a paper every week, starting from nothing every time.

And it so happens that I came across video evidence of our commendable togetherness and impeccable communication skills while sorting through files on my laptop recently.

I demonstrated my pro-quality super awesome videography skills by filming this video during one of the final Gazette staff meetings (a.k.a. Greco's carnage ritual) of the school year on April 1, 2008, while I was news editor. We sparred for the better part of an hour in what seemed, on the surface, to be a silly argument about streeters and hot/nots. But underneath all that superficial stuff, we were really concerned with the deeper ethics guiding the entire newspaper industry. Unrecognized geniouses are we. A pretty typical meeting, I would say. I like to call it The Great Printable Humour Debate of '08.

If any of my former colleagues object to (read: have lost all sense of humour about) this brilliance being broadcast on the interwebs, let me know and I promise to duly consider your desperate pleas to remove it. As with all good journalistic endeavours, this piece has not been censored.

To my fellow journos: if this doesn't inspire you, I don't know what will. For the rest of you, there's not really much sense in watching.


Enjoy.