A Sunday Drive - Nunavut-Style

A fog bank, lounging on the hills to the south of Kugluktuk, delayed my departure a little. The pilot of a Dash-7 airborne survey ‘plane had confirmed that zero visibility prevailed just 30-miles to the south – exactly where I wanted to spend the day.

But the delay lasted only two hours and then I was on my way, climbing my heavily-loaded Challenger south, across the Coppermine River and over the rising terrain.

The flight was a short one – just 30-minutes, but it took me into the hilly terrain just west of the broad river valley, where scattered patches of black spruce cluster together along the streams that empty into the Coppermine.

The lake I wanted to visit, one of few named lakes in the area, is called Tundra Lake on the topo map, a rather un-inspired name probably assigned by some 1960’s era diamond-drilling crew during the copper staking rush of that decade. It is a longish lake, separated by a narrow bog from another, similar but smaller lake to the north. At the head of the larger lake, at the leeward end, is a sandy beach. After a couple of passes to confirm the safety of landing here, I set C-INUK down and taxied to the beach.

The wind was already increasing when I landed, and I wondered if there might be anything but some scrubby willows to tie the ‘plane to. Fortunately, a large piece of lumber, weighing a hundred pounds or more, lay conveniently in the willows. I tied-up to this dead-man, reasoning it would take a mighty wind indeed to pull it sideways through the two-foot bushes.

I unloaded all the food from the aircraft and placed most of it some distance away. Better not to have a bear rip the ‘plane apart trying to find that beef jerky or Caramilk bar! Grabbing my back-pack with just the essentials, and of course the loaded 30-30, I hiked to a level spot just above the lake where the map said was located three cabins.

Like most of the old exploration camps from decades past, this one had been picked over by humans, chewed on by bears and the remnants blown away by the ferocious winds that must often funnel through this valley. Nothing of value remained, save an old farm wagon, the floor of one cabin, hundreds of rusty, bear-bitten tin cans and, of course, the territorial flower of Nunavut – the 45-gallon drum. Thirty of them lay scattered around willy-nilly, environmentally benign but certainly not very attractive to the eye.

With the ‘plane safely secured, I had a snack on the breezy hillside and then started off on a two-mile hike to a waterfall I had spotted just prior to my landing approach. It was slow-going. These sixty-year old legs are not quite what they used to be. I stopped every fifteen minutes or so for a five minute rest and did the two miles in a little over an hour.

The large, un-named creek falls steeply down it’s valley to the Coppermine. At its upper end it tumbles abruptly over a 50-foot ledge and into a 100-foot deep canyon. A rainbow rose up from the mist, and a pair of golden eagles screeched their annoyance at me as I approached. I sat quietly for a while, breathing in the sights and sounds of this wild place. Then, digging through my back-pack, I hauled out the digital camera to capture the moment for all eternity. Dead batteries! No problem, I have spares. Damn, they’re dead too! No pictures today.

In the “olden days” my little battery-less Olympus pocket 35-mm would have got the shot. Yes, I would not have been able to crop, re-size, compress, or e-mail it, but at least I’d have something!

On the hike back I crossed paths with a large bull musk-ox, the solitary wanderer of the summer tundra. He was prepared to mind his own business, as I was, so we parted company cordially. He seemed a little bored, anxious for the cold weather to arrive so he could join up with his new harem. For the time-being, he had food aplenty, no enemies other than the flies, and no rivals with whom to butt heads. Within a few months he would be grateful for that thick fur coat – and the thick skull!

Back at the ‘plane, I realized I had several hours to kill before the wind went down. My flight plan didn’t close until midnight, so I pulled out a paperback novel, found shelter from the wind behind a small rise and, face to the evening sun, I put in a few hours of reading, checking for approaching bears every half-hour.

By ten o’clock the wind, which should have gone down by then, was still howling. White-caps rolled across the lake as the gusts drew their hand over the water. I might as well go now, or be stuck here for the night. That wouldn’t be such a hardship as I had everything I needed for a prolonged stay, but tomorrow is a working day and I must admit that my old bones now prefer a proper mattress and a hot shower in the morning.

After the ‘plane was re-loaded I pushed away from the beach, climbed aboard the left float and squeezed myself into the cockpit. The wind was carrying me down the lake toward my take-off point so there was no rush to get the engine started, but when the time came she fired up enthusiastically and settled down to a smooth idle. I mentally ran through the check-list: doors latched, gear up and locked, trim set, water-rudder up, radio to the right frequency, altimeter at 29.92, temperature in the green. Good to go!

The take-off run was bumpy but short. The 'plane literally leaped off the last wave-top. Building up speed in ground-effect over the smaller lake to the north, I was soon climbing slowly toward a range of hills a couple of miles away. It occurred to me that there would be an unhealthy down-draft on the lee side of those hills, so I climbed another couple of hundred feet to allow a safety margin. Good thing too, as the down-draft, when it hit, was like a mighty paw pushing me toward the ground. Full throttle, but I was still losing altitude! The ‘plane cleared the top of the hill by a mere forty feet. "That’s how accidents happen", I reminded myself. "Put that in the experience bank and don’t let it happen again."

Against the strong north-east wind my ground speed was a mere 35 miles per hour. It took over an hour to get to the airport, with a slight detour to check on friends at their cabin on the Coppermine River. They were still there, not anxious to take on the heavy swells that had built through the day by the wind running against the current.

The cross-wind landing was un-eventful but required considerable concentration. The wind, 10-knots gusting to 15-knots at 90-degrees to the runway, was near the limit for a Challenger on wheels. On tundra tires it would have been fairly easy. On amphibious floats it was a little more interesting.

Cup of tea in -hand, it was almost midnight before I settled down in a comfy bed to watch The National. Sleep came easily that night.

Photo: My little, yellow tundra-bird at Dismal Lake, August 2007.

Link to my Challenger flying video on YouTube. (copy and paste to your browser).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VoQdDU6JSnI

Tiny Voyagers

Late in March each year they gather in large numbers on the telephone wires near the outskirts of Grover City, California, about a hundred miles north of Los Angeles. It’s a scenic spot, with the blue Pacific on the west and the Sierra Madre Mountains a little to the east. Excitedly, through vocalization and body language only understood by others of their kind, they encourage their companions for the great adventure ahead. Then, one morning, they’re gone.


Ten days later, after crossing the high desert and skirting the southern limit of the Sierra Nevada’s, they’re in Elko, Nevada, and a week after that they cross the Salmon River near the little town of Burgdorf, Idaho, under the light of a full moon.

By the first of May, the flock has crossed the Bitterroot Mountains in western Montana and is about to enter southern Alberta near the town of Cardston, but they are beaten back by a late spring snowstorm. They retreat southward a hundred miles to the shelter of one of many isolated river valleys where flying insects are abundant.

As the warm south winds return, the flock cruises high above the central Alberta countryside. Beneath their wings farmers are in their fields busy with the planting. Commuters on the highways and seismic crews on the cut-lines are oblivious to their passing. The tail winds are stronger at altitude, and they are spurred on by an instinctive urgency to find their summer range, but they still have a long way to go.

On the twelfth day of May they fly high across the Alberta border and into the Northwest Territories, spending several days in Hay River, resting for their journey across the big lake. The local residents, too busy with flood clean-up, don’t notice them. A few pairs stay behind, but the majority moves on, across the still-frozen, lifeless lake. Four hours after leaving Hay River the flock arrives in Yellowknife, where the micro-climate of the small city has spawned enough flying insects to satisfy their hunger.

Again, a few pairs stay behind to feed, build their nests and raise their young, but some go on. They are the pathfinders, legends among their kind, extending the range of their species beyond what the bird books proclaim as the limit.

Within a few days, they’re crossing the scraggly, black-spruce taiga country, following that sparse forest north along the Coppermine River. Tentatively, a few go even farther, finding their birthplace under the eaves of a hill-side, two-story house overlooking the Arctic Ocean. But it’s too early. The scouts return south to the main body of the flock near the arctic circle, and they all decide to remain in the shelter of the trees until warming temperatures on the coast bring out enough flying insects to allow simultaneous feeding and nest-building.

And so they arrive each year – the scouts around Victoria Day and the rest of the flock about the first of June. There follows a flurry of mud-finding, mud-carrying, nest-building and feeding.

Each year, when “my” swallows return to their birthplace, I feel a mix of awe and humility. Certainly, it is a great privilege to have these amazing birds nest on my house. Their adventurous and dangerous lives make those of mere humans seem pretty tame by comparison. They travel farther in a few weeks than I could walk in a couple of years. They fly with a degree of skill that the best fighter pilot would envy. A human-being with a multi-billion dollar GPS system at his disposal could navigate no better than my swallows, and no atmospheric scientist can predict the weather and winds as well as they can.

But their adventurous lives are short and often brutal. Starvation and hypothermia are constant companions. Sometimes they collide with cars or power lines or fall prey to a falcon. Sometimes their tiny hearts just capitulate, overcome by a life of constant activity with little time for rest.

When they arrive at their summer residence overlooking the mouth of the Coppermine River, their problems have only just begun. They must find and carry the mud for their nests, a tiny mouthful at a time, often from miles away. Hundred of trips may be necessary to repair a house, many more to build a new one from scratch. An early summer cold snap that lasts more than a few days can cause starvation and newly-laid eggs to be abandoned, wiping out an entire generation of young. A late-summer wind and rain storm can destroy nests, and the young contained there-in. Humans see the tragedy of it all, but the swallows simply get on with their lives – perhaps next year will be better.

But there are successes too. Most years, more swallows leave than had arrived a couple of months previously.

In late August, after waiting several days for the last of the fledglings to take wing, they will sit in rows on the cable-TV wire over our driveway, chattering excitedly and encouraging their young for the great adventure ahead.

Then, one morning, they’re gone.

Larry

Photo: Cliff Swallows winter in the southern United States, Mexico or Central America, and some spend their summers beyond the arctic circle.

Life's Little Mysteries

Those of us who come north and end up staying for more than a year or two often get involved in pastimes that suit our locale. Obviously, there’s hunting and fishing, riding snowmobiles and ATV’s, or more sedentary pursuits like collecting northern crafts and carvings. Of course, whether you’re a “southerner” or native-born, we all enjoy our television-watching, internet-surfing or other forms of couch-potato recreation designed to make our lives more pleasant – if shorter!

Gardening is not something that many of us get involved in. I suppose I may come about this particular interest quite honestly, coming as I do from a long line of dirt-farmers who eked out a living on some of the most unlikely agricultural land in the world, starting in the north of England and ending up in the rock, bog and impenetrable forest of the Canadian Shield country north of Montreal in the 1820’s.

It’s been over ten years now since we built our greenhouse and garden, labouriously finding, digging, hauling, sifting, spreading, spading, raking and “improving” many cubic metres of scarce soil. Now that “the land” has been worked for a decade, I must say that the soil is as good as anything you’d find on the fertile flat-lands of southern Manitoba.

As I grow older, the mysteries of life seem so much more ...well,…mysterious. How does a small seed manage to produce so much abundance? How that seed, without much fanfare, effortlessly converts the minerals and nutrients in the soil to a beet or a turnip is really quite a miracle, even if 21^st century science tells us it’s only basic chemistry. Just as ten pounds of plutonium can create quite a bang, the fact that a tiny seed can create a three-pound turnip with only the addition of dirt, water, sunlight and warmth is quite beyond my comprehension.

One can import bales of organic material (read “cow-shit”) and peat moss, and bags of chemical fertilizer each year on the barge (sea-lift for you poor Eastern Arctic types), but one thing we don’t have much control over is the weather. The greenhouse certainly helps, and although it isn’t sealed as well as I would like, it will typically create an oasis that is 15 to 25 degrees Celsius above the outside air temperature. This, and an occasional bit of supplementary heat from the boiler in the house, allows planting of seeds around mid-May, and transplants to be set out around the end of that month.

(As I write this, it’s three degrees outside, overcast with a few snowflakes coming down, yet the greenhouse, with no auxiliary heat, is a toasty 19 degrees.)

Gardeners are optimists by design and by necessity, so I usually push my luck a little and set the transplants out a week or two early. Sometimes this pays off, but I often lose a few plants to a frosty night. So far, things are looking pretty good this year: I have peas, radishes, wax beans, beets, turnips, lettuce and onions coming up already. I’ve set out a dozen tomato plants, a few cucumbers, and one pepper. The carrots, always the last to sprout, should be up any day now.

Outside, I grow potatoes and cabbages, but it’s still too early to think about that. However, I shoveled the snow off the garden, fertilized and raked the soil and covered the whole works with clear plastic last weekend. Soil temperature, at a depth of six-inches, is increasing by about half-a-degree per day and will soon be up around the seven-degree point where it will be safe to get into the potato business. The Yukon Gold seed potatoes are eager to get into the ground, with sprouts coming through the holes in the boxes. I’m hoping for a year like 2006, when I got 165-pounds of perfect potatoes from my little 120 square-foot patch.

Gardening in the arctic is not an economically viable exercise. If I factor in wages at even ten dollars an hour, and add the cost of supplies, my tomatoes probably cost ten-times what the Northern Store charges. Nevertheless, it’s a very satisfying endeavour that gets me out in the fresh air and provides a badly-needed, low-impact workout.

Besides, those new potatoes, onions and carrots go so nicely with some fried caribou tenderloin or a nice filet of arctic char!

Late in September each year, as the first snowflakes fall and the potatoes are dug and stowed away in cardboard boxes, Helen and I enjoy several great meals consisting of caribou, musk-ox or arctic char, wonderful little baby potatoes and carrots, and a nice salad. It’s certainly a pleasure to ignore all the work and concentrate on the taste of that fresh, northern-grown meat, fish and produce, and gloat a little over the fact that very few people in Nunavut will ever eat a full-course meal with no imported southern ingredients.

And somehow, that makes it all worthwhile.

Larry

It's the Sun, Stupid!

A newly-acquired friend, posted to this community about a year ago, confided to me the other day that when he first learned of his transfer to the Canadian arctic he was concerned because of reports on the effect that global warming was having on this part of the country. Would his kids disappear into the oozing permafrost? Would his home be inundated by rising sea levels? Should he buy a snowmobile if all the white-stuff was disappearing? Would the vanishing sea-ice result in hordes of starving polar bears roaming the community, ready to gobble up the family dog? It was quite a shock when he got here and found that the hype was just that, and that the manifestations so touted by the media were nowhere to be seen, in this community or elsewhere in the arctic. Peter Mansbridge wouldn’t lie to us, would he?

As everyone in this country knows, it has been a long, cold winter. In fact, it’s been a cold winter right ‘round the world. Roofs have not just been collapsing in Morin Heights, Quebec, but also across China. Baghdad had its first snowfall ever during this winter of 2007/08. Cold weather and high snowfall amounts have been reported across Europe and Antarctic sea-ice cover has increased to “above-average” values. Scientists report that global sea-temperatures have fallen over the last few years and that global air temperatures have also taken a nose-dive, wiping out all the warming that occurred during the last decade.

New evidence suggests that carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere increase as temperatures rise, not the other way round. In other words, something other than carbon dioxide level is driving temperature increase. This pretty much shoots down the theory that the burning of fossil fuel was causing global warming.

Perhaps we will soon see the global-warming fanatics falling off their band-wagon with the new mantra of a coming ice-age, a song they were singing loudly back in the 1970’s. Their rhetoric will allow another failed politician to make a fortune on the speaking-tour, complete with all kinds of arguments, graphs and pie-charts about how they were actually right all along, that we humans are to blame for the global-cooling, and if we had only heeded their warnings we wouldn't be in this mess.

Amid all of this, there are a few real scientists working away quietly in the basement labs of at least one Canadian university, finding some good evidence (well-known among the scientific community but scarce-heard above the screams of the Al Gore apostles) that the sun is in fact responsible for all this trouble. Who would have guessed that a little thing like the sun could cause such havoc on a small blue planet 93,000,000 miles away?

Our sun is, of course, the ultimate source of all energy on this planet, and that sun has been disturbingly quiet of late. With a new 11-year solar cycle set to start, the sun’s magnetic field has been surprisingly inactive. Previous solar cycles have been much more robust and, as many scientists have long known, solar energy output closely follows the magnetic-field activity of the sun. After several decades of hard work, the sun may be ready for a sabbatical.

We’ve come to believe that humans are more powerful than nature - that a little thing like the sun could not match a few thousand 5-litre V-8 SUV's on the climate-change battlefield. Yet if you doubt the power of the sun, just consider how it transforms the arctic, in but a few short months, from a minus 40-degree desert to a plus 20-degree oasis of life. All the gas-guzzlers in the world, smoking up all the freeways on the planet, don't stand a chance against that kind of a high-performance enemy.

It is global-cooling, not global-warming, that should really be the major concern, especially in temperate parts of the globe. If history is any indication at all, global-warming, such as occurred during the middle-ages, is a net benefit to human populations around the world as a result of increased food production. Global-cooling, as happened during the middle part of the nineteenth century, resulted in massive crop failures and starvation throughout Europe and Asia.

In this fossil-fuelled era, the prospect of burning even more of a limited resource is not very appealing. Canada would be especially hard-hit by a new ice-age. We have lots of oil (apparently) but we would still have to pay the going price, which would soar as demand increased. And the farther north one lived, the worse-off one would be.

At any rate, I’m not here to promote one side or the other in the global-warming/global-cooling debate. The mere fact that there is still a debate, inside and outside the "scientific" community, is enough to make a skeptic out of anyone. And that is the message: be a skeptic! The media will lie to you every chance they get. Hysteria makes the best news of all, as it feeds upon itself.

As any good reporter knows, the most interesting house on the block … is the one that’s on fire!

Larry

The Ant and the Grasshopper

Many of you may have seen this already. I thought it was cute, and wish I had written it myself.

Think about this when you're doing your Income Tax return.

CLASSIC VERSION:

The ant works hard in the withering heat all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter. The grasshopper thinks he's a fool, and laughs and dances and plays the summer away. Come winter, the ant is warm and well fed. The shivering grasshopper has no food or shelter, so he dies out in the cold.

THE END

THE CANADIAN VERSION:

The ant works hard in the withering heat all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter. The grasshopper thinks he's a fool, and laughs and dances and plays the summer away. Come winter, the ant is warm and well fed. So far, so good, eh?

The shivering grasshopper calls a press conference and demands to know why the ant should be allowed to be warm and well fed while others less fortunate, like him, are cold and starving.

The CBC shows up to provide live coverage of the shivering grasshopper, with cuts to a video of the ant in his comfortable warm home with a table laden with food.

Canadians are stunned that in a country of such wealth, this poor grasshopper is allowed to suffer so while others have plenty. The NDP, the CAW and the Coalition Against Poverty demonstrate in front of the ant's house. The CBC, interrupting an Inuit cultural festival special from Nunavut with breaking news, broadcasts them singing 'We Shall Overcome.'

Jack Layton rants in an interview with Mike Duffy that the ant has gotten rich off the backs of grasshoppers and calls for an immediate tax hike on the ant to make him pay his 'fair share'.

In response to polls, the Conservative Government drafts the Economic Equity and Grasshopper Anti-Discrimination Act, retroactive to the beginning of the summer.

The ant's taxes are reassessed, and he is also fined for failing to hire grasshoppers as helpers.

Without enough money to pay both the fine and his newly imposed retroactive taxes, his home is confiscated by the government.

The ant moves to the US, and starts a successful agribiz company.

The CBC later shows the now fat grasshopper finishing up the last of the ant's food, though spring is still months away, while the government house he is in, which just happens to be the ant's old house, crumbles around him because he hasn't bothered to maintain it.

Inadequate government funding is blamed, Bob Rae is appointed to head a commission of enquiry that will cost $10,000,000.

The grasshopper is soon dead of a drug overdose, the Toronto Star blames it on the obvious failure of government to address the root causes of despair arising from social inequity.

The abandoned house is taken over by a gang of immigrant spiders, praised by the government for enriching Canada's multicultural diversity, who promptly set up a marijuana grow op and terrorize the community.

THE END

The First Permanent Residents of Coppermine

For thousands of years before, and shortly after the “white-man” came to this land, the Inuit led a nomadic, hunter-
gatherer, stone-age
existence. They had no need of permanent settlements, and establishing fixed communities would have simply added to the hardships they already faced. Unless large areas were continually hunted, and unless a combination of luck and experience put them in the path of migrating animals, there was little chance of survival. It was the white-man, lacking the skills and knowledge to follow the Inuit around, who required the establishment of permanent outposts in an effort to initiate occasional interaction with the nomadic Inuit.

Although an American, Captain Joseph Bernard, in his small gasoline-powered schooner Teddy Bear was the first white-person to trade in the area from around 1910 to 1915, and a Dane named Charles Klengenberg set up a seasonal fishing hut at the mouth of the Coppermine River around 1916, the site of present-day Kugluktuk was not permanently inhabited until the Hudson’s Bay Company and Church of England arrived in 1928, followed by the Roman Catholic mission and the RCMP in 1929 and 1930 respectively. Around 1930, a rudimentary radio/weather station was set up, in 1932 the community’s first doctor arrived and in 1934 a Post Office was established. During the years of the Great Depression, the Government of Canada could not afford to add to this meager infrastructure, and the doctor was lost to government cut-backs, never to return. During and after the Second World War, investment by the government of Canada started anew, with the establishment of a Nursing Station in 1948 and a Federal Day-School in 1950. A new Nursing Station, improved government housing and a diesel power-plant were all established in 1967, and a proper air-strip was completed in 1969.

There were, of course, a few native people in the early years who acted as guides and interpreters for the RCMP, the missions and the Hudson’s Bay Company, fished for and tended the dogs and did other odd-jobs. Those people and their families, however, still did not live in the community year-round, preferring to spend much of their time hunting, fishing and trapping at traditional locations. It was not until the early 1950’s that people began to adapt to life in the permanent settlement of Coppermine, and that trend continued until the last outposts were gradually abandoned in the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s, despite government subsidies that attempted to maintain that traditional life-style.

It is important to note that the Hudson’s Bay Company actively discouraged Inuit people from moving into communities. The HBC was in the fur-trade business – they wanted people out on the land, engaged in trapping. When the government of Canada, through their agents (primarily the RCMP), started to provide welfare to those Inuit people who came to them in need, and when that policy became entrenched and morphed into what we now call social assistance, income-support, family allowance, child-tax credit, subsidized housing, etc., many people decided to give up their nomadic life in favour of a less precarious existence in the community, where schooling and medical care was available and where dependable wage-employment later became the norm.

So there was a time, from 1928 to about 1945, when the permanent residents of Coppermine (later Kugluktuk after 1996) consisted almost entirely of white people. Indeed, if white people and their institutions had never come to this land, there would be no community of Kugluktuk today, and the population of nomadic Inuit would have remained stable at a small fraction of the current numbers, which was about all that the land (and primitive hunting methods) could support. Whether contact has been a good thing or a bad thing is, nevertheless, certainly open to debate.

Somehow, there has developed an erroneous perception that Inuit people were forced off the land and into communities. There was never any such government policy or action. There was no advantage to white people in having Inuit confined to communities - quite the contrary. Inuit themselves saw the advantages, weighed the disadvantages, and (wisely, I think) chose to give up a lifestyle which, though fraught with immense hardship, could have otherwise continued to this day.

The history of practically every community in Nunavut follows a pattern similar to that of Kugluktuk. The heritage of white people in Nunavut is dominated by the creation of permanent communities. The heritage of Inuit people, for at least 4,940 of the last 5,000 years, has been a heritage dominated by seasonal movement from place to place.

In recent decades, many people have been led astray by the sanitized, politically-correct, revisionist version of Nunavut history that has been foisted on a younger generation by the schools and the media. The very significant contributions of bush-pilots, sea captains, traders, clergy, police, nurses, teachers and other non-Inuit has been pushed well into the background, where it does not deserve to be. We now are told that the Hudson’s Bay Company consisted of a bunch of mercenary carpet-baggers, when in fact both The Bay and the good, hard-working trapper prospered handsomely in the hey-day of the fur-trade and traders saved many people from starvation. Missionaries are sometimes seen as helping to destroy a culture, often by the same people who claim that their culture is now thriving - despite the continued presence of the churches. The fact is that the missionaries did far more good than harm. The police are accused of bringing north a “foreign” system of justice, when the undeniable fact is that the British common-law system, while flawed, is still the most enlightened form of justice that human kind has managed to come up with in the last 50,000 years. If there’s a better way, I’d be interested in hearing about it.

Not surprisingly, historical revisionists tend to spare the present-day “southern” teachers, nurses, police, administrators, government employees and business people from their wrath. They will leave that reprehensible chore to the next generation of revisionists, and our children and grandchildren will probably fall for their lies, distortions, omissions and half-truths as the current generation has seemed willing to do.

Larry

Photo (courtesy Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Centre photo database). The official caption reads "The residents of the town posing for a final picture with Joe Osborne. Left to right: Paddy Jackson, Johnny Jackson, Marguerite Webster, Dorothy Jackson, unidentified, behind her is Johnny Jackson [?], Joe Osborne is looking to the right, Wop May is wearing a check shirt, to his left his son, behind him Darcy Muro of the R.C.M.P. To Darcy's left is an unidentified operator who was Osborne's replacement. Girl holding baby is Lena, R.C.M.P. officer at back is R. "Dick" Connick. Girl in front of him is radiosonde operator's wife. Kneeling in front is H.B.C. apprentice [Syd] and to his left is Ernie Boffa. Chap on extreme right is Wop May's son. July 11, 1948."

I should add that bush-pilots Boffa and May were not residents of Coppermine. Wop May had retired from flying by the time this picture was taken, while Ernie Boffa was a frequent visitor and continued to fly into the 1960's. Missing from the photo are Reverend Webster and his wife Edie, HBC manager Leo Manning, his wife Mary and daughters Maureen and Rosemary, Fathers Lapointe and Delalande, Walt Taylor of DOT and Jack Scarlett of the Royal Canadian Corps of Signals. 1948 was the year that the first nursing station was built, so the missionaries were still doing basic medical and dental work, mostly for Inuit people. The nurse, Anne Dufresne arrived a few months after this photo was taken.

Man ... it's cold out there!

If you are a resident of northern or western Canada you will be well-aware of the current deep-freeze we’re experiencing. Air temperatures have been close to the minus 40C mark, with wind-chill temperatures approaching minus 60C. The implications of this will be obvious to any Canadian; minor frost-bite walking into the wind on the way to work, heating fuel being converted to CO2 as fast as I can earn money to buy the stuff, weight gain and a general malaise as a result of being confined indoors in front of the TV, and other minor annoyances.

Fortunately, we live in a warm, well-built house. Should the boiler or electric power fail, we have a wood-stove as back-up, a gas-lamp and candles for light and a Coleman stove for cooking. However, the boiler keeps chugging away, carrying my wages up the chimney and, because each community in Nunavut has a small, simple and self-contained generating system without any long-distance power-lines or complicated grids, the electricity is more reliable here than in the south, despite the extreme environmental conditions.

Still, one does get a sense, amid the arctic deep-freeze, of our vulnerability to a major calamity. It’s probably something that few people give any thought to, but perhaps we should.

To put it simply, if the supply of fossil fuel were disrupted by a major war or a world-wide economic or environmental disaster, the Canadian arctic would be pushed back into the stone-age in but a few short months. Essentially, it would become un-inhabitable, even (perhaps especially) for the Inuit, who are now no better-equipped than the “Europeans” to survive being deprived of the basic elements of life. Like it or not, oil is the lynch-pin without which the whole house-of-cards comes crashing down around our ears in very short order. At the very least, ninety-nine percent of the people presently living here would have to abandon the arctic in favour of warmer climes, and the few survivalists left behind, if any, would be living a short life under the same severe conditions as their ancestors, without the required skills and moral fortitude.

Though I would be the first to applaud the advances that have been made in science and industry that have given us the easy, safe and long lives we currently enjoy, as I get older I’m becoming more and more of a skeptic.

Is global warming a reality? Only if you believe that scientists know what the future holds, and scientists are no better at predicting the future than any three-year old. Do we have enough oil? Who knows – oil is as much about politics as it is about money. Admitting to a shortage will panic the public, admitting to an over-abundance will drive the price down. Will there be another world-war, or another Great Depression? Will an asteroid hit the earth, wiping out the dinosaurs (us!)?

At any rate, it does no good to dwell on these issues, we must simply get on with our lives, seemingly unaware, while the future comes hurtling toward us. That’s life, I guess.

Still, one wonders if the real calamity on the road to man’s future might well be not the burning of fossil fuel but the running out thereof. There is nothing in the pipe to replace oil. Nuclear power is still non grata to a large segment of the public, large-scale hydo-power creates its own environmental devastation, wind is too unreliable and solar is too expensive. Airplanes and ships can’t run on anything but fossil fuel and therefore global commerce and travel would grind to a halt without oil.

We have both wind and solar power at our cabin, but you cannot create heat with such small-scale generation. We still need oil and propane to warm our bodies and cook our food.

Prior to the Second World War, the few white traders, trappers and Hudson's Bay people in the arctic heated their homes with coal. I imagine they would not have tolerated or survived living the stone-age existence of the Inuit. From that basic fossil fuel we have “progressed” to oil furnaces, diesel trucks to deliver our water, diesel generators to provide our power, jet fuel for our aircraft, gasoline for our snowmobiles, boats and ATV’s. We simply can’t live without the stuff! It is oil that forms the basis of many of the medicines we take. Without oil there is no plastic and without plastic almost all of our consumer goods disappear. Without oil there is no way to make the Doritos or the aluminum cans for our Coca-Cola – and no Coca-Cola either.

It is not in the nature of human beings to voluntarily go backward. We have never done that in the tens of thousands of years of our evolution. We will not easily give up what we have gained. All the global-warming rhetoric aside, we will continue to burn fossil fuel at a faster and faster rate, we will not give more than a passing thought to the environmental damage being caused as a result, and we will not conserve. Instead, we will charge ahead into the future without much thought to our own self-destructive tendencies, until a point is reached where we have no choice but to go backward.

It isn’t going to happen next Tuesday, but it will happen one day.

So … who’s gonna win the Super Bowl?

Larry