Midnight Light, page 1
Also by Dave Bidini
On a Cold Road (1998)
Tropic of Hockey (2001)
Baseballissimo (2004)
For Those About to Rock (2004)
The Best Game You Can Name (2005)
The Five Hole Stories (2006)
For Those About to Write (2007)
Around the World in 57½ Gigs (2007)
Home and Away (2010)
Writing Gordon Lightfoot (2011)
A Wild Stab for It (2012)
Keon and Me (2013)
Copyright © 2018 Dave Bidini
First edition published 2018
McClelland & Stewart and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House Canada.
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher—or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency—is an infringement of the copyright law.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Bidini, Dave, author
Midnight light: a personal journey to the north / Dave Bidini.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 9780771017759 (paperback).—ISBN 9780771017797 (EPUB)
1. Bidini, Dave—Travel—Northwest Territories. 2. Journalists—Travel—Northwest Territories. 3. Yellowknife (N. W. T.)—Description and travel. 4. Northwest Territories—Description and travel. I. Title.
FC4167. 4. B53 2018 917.19′3044 C2018-900565-3
C2018-900566-1
Photographs are courtesy of the author.
Cover design: Five Seventeen
Cover photo © GALessard, mediamentor.ca.
McClelland & Stewart,
a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited,
a Penguin Random House Company
www.penguinrandomhouse.ca
v5.3.2
a
To journalists everywhere.
And to Dene Nation.
“To write is, in some metaphoric sense, to go North.
To go North is, in some sense, to write.”
Robert Kroetsch, A Likely Story
“It’s a shame to leave this masterpiece
With its gallery gods and its garbage-bag trees”
The Tragically Hip,
“Looking for a Place to Happen”
Cover
Also by Dave Bidini
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
1
We’ll Make It, I Swear
2
A Thousand Shining Eyes
3
Sharper Than Most Gravel
4
Fuck Elsewhere
5
Pharaohs of the Press
6
Akaitcho and the Wolf
7
Fuzz and Distortion
8
Sloppy Punches on Spaghetti Legs
9
Gloriously and Gloriouser
10
Stay Off the Booze and Out of the News
11
The First Female Fishing Guide on Great Slave Lake
12
Beatlesque
13
Yellowknife Is Burning
14
A Not Boring Section about Rocks (and Fishing)
15
Here Come the Warm Jets
16
A Boy and His Dog
17
Mama Grizzly
18
Yelling and Screaming
19
Pony Does a Trick
20
Jaysus Moy Lag
21
The Heart of a Lake
22
Get out the Cookies
23
Time among the Hosers
24
Swallowed by a Bigger Thing
25
The Vulcan Appetizer
26
The End of Away
27
Playing Country Music with Ricky Kikoak in a Trailer in Tuktoyaktuk
28
The North Slave Prison Blues
29
The Northern Shire
30
The Woman Who Swallowed a Continent
31
The Headliner
32
The Yellowknifer
Photo Insert
Acknowledgements
A Note About the Author
WE’LL MAKE IT, I SWEAR
Among the capital cities of Canada, Yellowknife is easily the least celebrated. No one has ever written a popular poem or song about the place. No one can pronounce, nor remember, the name of the region’s emblematic flower—this is, literally, true, since it’s the Dryas octopetala, although its floral grouping, the subshrub, is almost too fun to say—and no famous hockey or baseball or soccer player has come from here, even though many players were born in smaller places. No one ever started a bar fight because the Ingraham Trail or Somba K’e Park or the old KFC across from the Independent grocery store—all local signposts—were insulted. No one has ever defamed incumbent mayor Mark Heyck—who, when asked on national television one New Year’s Eve if he had a message for Canadians, shouted, “People live here!”—and no eco-terrorist has ever scribbled down the name of the town’s main intersection—50th and 50th—as a place to stage an attack in an effort to draw attention to man’s abuse of the natural world, a crusading principle that wouldn’t make sense in Yellowknife seeing as many of the city’s wooden homes—brick being too expensive to import—fit into great unyielding shards of steep, 2.7-billion-year-old Canadian Shield granite like arrows of cardboard into a bookcase’s shelving (Yellowknifers also live in long, narrow trailers—a.k.a. modular or manufactured homes—plunked on undiggable permafrost while a whole shoreline section, called The Woodyard, consists, more or less, of shacks). No matter where you stand, your feet are sloped at an angle, the product of dinosaur-hump-like terrain that rolls into two pronounced bodies of water—Back Bay and Yellowknife Bay, and its attendant wine-gum-coloured houseboats—on the northern arm of Great Slave Lake. To echo a Cape Breton drywaller who swayed next to me at a urinal one night at the Black Knight, a British identikit downtown pub: “Nothing in this town is fookin’ level,” as good a slogan as any for the largest settlement close to the Arctic Circle—437 kilometres south, to be exact—and the people who live in it.
I first came to Yellowknife in 2014, twenty-five years after setting out as an itinerant musician in the 1980s. Those early, epiphanous journeys yielded a parcel of albums and a handful of books, after which I strutted about the land declaring myself an authority on this type of travel, carving tracks through endless prairie towns too small for a single horse and ocean hamlets smashed flat one season only to rise the next. I felt like I’d been everywhere, man, but I hadn’t; not really. While I’d visited Iqaluit and Dawson City and Whitehorse, I’d never been up there, which is how people in the Territories describe the white ribbon across the top of North American maps, found beneath a paper crease still crisp at the fold.
I told myself that ignoring Canada’s neglected northern middle was probably a matter of logistics, but getting to Yellowknife and the Northwest Territories isn’t especially challenging. A plane will take you there and you can drive, too, provided you’re willing to shuttle eighteen hours north from Edmonton through Hay River. After arriving at the airport’s baggage carousel for the first time—I’d been invited to read at the city’s NorthWords literary festival—I stood atop an enormous coloured floor-tile map of the Territories’ vast region—as big as Alberta and Saskatchewan combined, or twelve Belgiums, if that’s your preferred metric—and wondered if I knew anything at all. What if the Northwest Territories was everything Canada wasn’t? What if people spat out maple syrup, hated hockey, and considered Mr. Dressup a fraud? Perhaps my entire sense of Canada would go to hell, and maybe that’s why I’d never gone there. I wondered who the real fraud was.
NorthWords ended up being one of the strangest—and thus, best—literary festivals I’d ever attended. Save for a handful of writers from elsewhere, it eschewed the temptation of imported authors in favour of local scribblers, many of whom had never been published. This was partly because organizers couldn’t afford to fly guests so far north and partly because very few publishers lobbied for their writers to read in a tiny market with zero influence on the tastemakers of Canada. In this and many other ways, the location and conditions of Yellowknife—north of 60 and minus 45 down 50th Avenue in the wintertime—acted as a kind of filtering agent. Those who visited traversed great distances through multiple airports for as much as it cost to get to Tunisia, and those who stayed did so because the North doesn’t ask questions of its visitors (the average stay for newcomers is five years, which is to say, five winters). In this sense, the Northwest Territories is a microcosm within a microcosm. If Canada is a country of vast spaces pinned with the occasional city, the Northwest Territories had but one major centre whose population had dwindled in the twenty-first century, owing to the declining mining industry. It’s a small busy place within an enormously empty place, so whenever anyone arrives, they’re noticed. They’re talked about in the supermarkets and Elks Club, and within five minutes, everyone knows their name, where they’re from, and why they’re in Yellowknife (also,
Before coming to town, I asked a friend who’d spent some time there what he thought of the city. He shrugged and told me, “I dunno; it’s kind of goat.” “Kind of goat” may or may not have been an expression used by contemporary youths (my friend is forty-three), but it’s what a lot of people thought about Yellowknife. At first glance, I saw how they might have arrived at this conclusion. During the festival, I stayed at a hotel overlooking a stand of small jack pines and spruce—at the 62nd parallel, Yellowknife is where Canada’s receding floral hairline begins—but after heading out for a closer look, I noticed the ground strewn with garbage: smoke packs and beer cans and a few crumpled condoms. Beside the hotel, a crane gouged the foundation of what I discovered would be another hotel, its jaws chewing into the surrounding rock and working to destroy what I thought, at first, was the only truly grand and beautiful thing about Yellowknife: Precambrian skulls of rock rearing up at you whenever you turned a corner. There were times around the city when I found myself fanning my hands against the rock’s lichen-plastered stone and feeling closer to an eternity of time than anywhere else I’d been, although this sensation was somewhat conflicted by the city’s social decay: vampires in torn parkas lurking in store doorways; stoned Inuvialuit giants asleep in the mouth of a parking garage; and hives of truant kids pooling weed money or, worse, looking for whatever harder stuff was being supplied to them by the 856 boys, a B. C. drug gang that sold to easy and isolated marks up north. Because of them—and because of other things, too—tourists hadn’t flooded the city even though it was, perhaps, the last unself-conscious social hub in Canada, built in a thundering and mystical natural setting, no less.
In 2014, Yellowknife boasted—perhaps “boasted” is the wrong word here—the country’s highest rate of violent crime per capita. Things were bad enough that “suicide-by-cop” was a known term, one invented, according to some locals, by RCMP brass trying to justify their occasionally questionable tactics. The city also had a homeless population magnetized around its dive-bar row; the sun holidayed elsewhere for more than half the year; the city’s modern downtown sections were mostly grey with mining company offices and government buildings; the Internet sucked; there were more overweight chronic smokers in the Northwest Territories than anywhere in Canada (you could look it up); and the RCMP operated with zero oversight, lacking a police services board and no local force, filling the jails with Indigenous men and women scarred after centuries of residential school abuse and genocide. Yellowknife didn’t even have 911. One woman, Audrey Henderson, a nurse at Stanton Territorial Hospital, printed sets of vehicle magnets to remind people of the appropriate emergency numbers: 1111 for police; 2222 for ambulance and fire; and, naturally, 4111 for the hospital. Even though 911 didn’t exist—Bell charged residents for the phantom service—people kept calling it, and those who didn’t simply drove to the fire department to tell them that their business was ablaze, which is what happened during an incident at a local carpet store.
My first reading at NorthWords took place at an old-age home (okay, “seniors facility”) alongside a large moustached man in his fifties wearing grey sweatpants who told a story about what it felt like to kiss a woman who’d just eaten a hunk of walrus meat. He was followed by a teenager in a Metallica shirt and Coke-bottle glasses who read an angry, spittled poem about how his dad abandoned the family when he was young. The next reader talked about pooping on the tundra while on a two-day snowmobile journey. The Edinburgh Festival of Authors, it was not. It was better.
For certain events, NorthWords employed a young woman to sit on stage in front of her electronic keyboard and play awful Richard Clayderman—style piano musings whenever the reader went past the five-minute limit: death by minor fifths padded with painted fingernails. Veterans of the literary racket were able to navigate through the Middle-of-the-Road assault, but new readers grew unsettled at the sound of the first B diminished chord. Their voices tightened. Their words became rushed and papers fell out of their hands. It was awful. Finally, a brutal woman in a glittering blue dress with a Phyllis Diller voice walked from behind a screen like a demented matron and waved for them to get off. It was humiliating and terrible and the crowd laughed their asses off.
For my last night in the city, I went with two of the other visiting writers—Edmonton’s Todd Babiak and Vancouver’s Billeh Nickerson—to what is, possibly, the most famous place in Yellowknife: the Gold Range tavern. Built in 1958 by the early business pioneer Jacob Glick above his root cellar, and, in the beginning, the only place in town where you could place a long-distance phone call, the Range—a beer hall lit by neon BUD signs washed over aging wood-panelled walls with rows of tables running to a small stage—possessed a whole other level of goatishness. Inside the bar, a sallow light suggested the middle of January around 11 p.m. on a Tuesday, even in the warmth of the two-month summer. Sitting below a rooming house with forty apartments, the Range was like an old, smoking lady—menthol darts—who swore a lot and never took off her parka holed at the elbow with grease stains along the fringe. Still, once you started talking to her, you were drawn into the complicated and tragic wealth of her story. This was also a little what Yellowknife was like. It concealed very little about itself. For better or worse, it rarely pretended to be something it was not.
The Range smelled, on first rush of stale air, like an old stained carpet (that it sold more beer than any other tavern in Canada in the entirety of the 1980s probably had something to do with it, and so did its notorious “two and a juice,” a combination drink that married two glasses of draft beer with a tomato juice mixer). Having toured rooms like this for the early parts of my musical life—and some of the later parts, too—my reaction wasn’t so much regret as nostalgia. Among the taxidermied pike and the twirling ceiling fans—there was no AC at the Gold Range—we found a cover band playing: Colt 45 from Kelowna, British Columbia. The band had a barrel-chested, goateed, and razor-skulled singer-drummer with a headset mic, somebody’s uncle on bass, and a guitar player with a withered picking hand shaped like a claw who played the bejesus out of his instrument. They were ungainly misfits in the same way that a lot of the people in the bar were—in the same way that we, as Canadian writers, were, I thought—although, like many of the patrons, the band was at home playing whatever they wanted without the airy demands of an airy crowd. The people in the bar appeared grateful for the noise. At one point, a willowy dude from N’dilo—a nearby Dene community—(pronounced “DeeLo”) sat on a barrel near the stage and barked something at the guitar player. The guitar player gave him the thumbs-up with his good hand and went over and talked to the drummer. The drummer nodded—dwarfed by cymbals from behind the kit, he looked like an enormous goateed egg—and said into the microphone, winking at the crowd, “It’s time to play Ray’s favourite song.” Ray clapped with such enthusiasm that he fell off the barrel. The drummer clacked his sticks to start what I assumed would be something by Toby Keith or Skynyrd, but, instead, the band laid into an unlikely song by INXS, the Australian pop ensemble. Ray climbed to his feet and waved his hands over his head. I hadn’t heard the song before, but Babiak had, which he thought made him look cool, but did not.
A few people joined Ray on the dance floor, if only to try to coax him off it. He waved them away. They turned and made “Oh that Ray!” gestures with their palms turned skyward, and the band played on. I left my table for a moment and went to the bar at the back of the club: only bottles, only cash. I looked to my right and to my left. I looked over to the washrooms and to the archway leading to a few pool tables around the corner. I looked at the bar staff—gregarious, pony-tailed, Dene—slinging drinks across the counter. I looked at a group of people in fancy dress—a wedding party—seated at tables with dozens of empty bottles surrounding flowery centrepieces. I looked to the stage and at the band, who’d begun a thirty-two-minute Creedence Clearwater Revival medley. I looked at Ray, who’d fallen to the dance floor and was wriggling about on his knees, his pants pulled down to his bum. I looked at the writers.
