Midnight Light, page 13
“Don’t worry,” said John. “I’m just here to tell your story.”
“Don’t get me mad!” she said, lurching forward in her floral print, grabbing at the middle arm rest with two hands.
“Not a problem,” said John, trying to keep his eyes on the road.
“You don’t wanna know what happened to the last person who got me mad!” she said. “You wanna know? I put him in the hospital. Oh, I can fight. I can fight good!”
“What’s your technique for fighting?” I asked her, trying to guide the conversation into a less explosive place.
“My technique. Okay,” she said, holding out her hands. “What I do first is, I punch them in the neck; maybe in the throat, if I can. I take away their air!” she exclaimed. “Then I grab them around here,” she told us, reaching out to a set of invisible shoulders, “and I twist them and push them down. And then I stomp all over them!” she said. “Don’t get me mad!”
“What if you miss?” I asked, both wanting and not wanting to know.
“Well,” she said, sitting back in her seat, a little winded after her demonstration. “That’s the first rule of fighting.”
“What’s the first rule?”
Susan paused.
“Don’t miss!” she told us, surging forward again. “Especially don’t miss when you’re fighting a man.”
“What if you’re fighting a woman?”
“I used to fight women, but I don’t anymore,” she said, shrugging. “It’s too easy. I feel too bad after the fights. I hurt a lot of them. It was pretty bad. I didn’t like doing it, no matter if they deserved it or not.”
After a few minutes of being both terrified and charmed by Susan, we pulled up to her brother’s house in N’dilo. Archie Paulette had been killed by his common-law wife, who was later charged with second-degree murder. In the aftermath, local kids had smashed windows and destroyed parts of the building, although the place was in disrepair before the killing. “When I used to come over with friends, I’d send them next door to use the bathroom instead of using Archie’s. Everything in there was spoiled. It was in an awful shape. There was mould and smoke everywhere. It was bad, a real mess. When Archie was still alive, he used to tell me that if anything ever happened to him, he wanted me, and me alone, to move into the place. I’d take care of it.”
The house was in limbo because of ownership concerns, and it’s why John was writing the story. There were issues with the home being potentially condemned, and no one was sure about the N’dilo chief’s role in its protection. “Chief Ernie [Ernest Betsina] told me that he’d help when the time comes, so I’m counting on that,” said Susan, although Kevin Brezinski, the director of public safety for the Territorial government’s Department of Municipal and Community Affairs told the newspaper that, “somewhere in the mix, there’s an owner and the owner is ultimately responsible for ensuring security and safety of the structure from unlawful or inappropriate access.” Still, I thought the salient—and terribly sad—point was that Susan’s options for residence were so limited that choosing to live in the decrepit home of a murdered family member seemed a decent prospect. With rent being disproportionately high and affordable housing at a premium, people had few choices, fewer still if you were an older Indigenous person.
John took Susan’s picture in front of the house—she smiled for the first time while holding up a photo of Archie—and finished his interview with her. On the drive back into town, I tried to get her to tell me more about fighting, but she lacked the spirit for it. She talked about Archie—how he’d been a father figure to people in the community, and a good guy to his family—and how he’d supported Susan during her time on the streets—eight years living in the bush around the city—after which she’d met her husband, with whom she still lived. I asked Susan how they’d met and she said, “At the Arctic Star fishing lodge.”
“What were you doing at the lodge?”
“I was guiding.”
“Guiding what?” I asked, sounding more like a doofus from the south than I had at any point during my trip.
“Guiding on the lake!”
“Oh.”
“I was the first female fishing guide on Slave Lake,” she told me, glowing with pride.
“How did that happen?” I asked her.
“It’s a long story,” she said.
She and I ended up at the Gold Range Bistro, where Susan talked about her time on the water. The raggedness of her voice softened and the light in her eyes washed across her sharpened features. Suddenly, the woman who’d punched at shadows in the back seat of the car grew calm and reflective, slowing the pace of her words as she drank coffee with honey and ate scrambled eggs. The diner emptied out after midday, leaving the two of us at the table.
“I grew up on the Barren Lands,” she told me, stirring her coffee. “There was nothing out there, maybe a few shrubs. There were no villages, just lots of empty space, and we moved around. That was my life growing up. That’s how it was. I was too young to know any beauty, really. Because it was so hard on the Barren Lands, my grandma and grandpa, who raised me, sent me out with my uncles to the East Arm of the lake, near Snowdrift. When I first saw it, I couldn’t believe my eyes: green everywhere, and all of this gorgeous water in the middle of it.
“First, they brought me in to do laundry. They had a ringer, an old-time washing machine. Nobody knew how to run it, but I figured it out; it was easy. They introduced me to the cook and the rest of the girls in the laundry room and we got along fine. No fighting. It was the first time I’d ever been part of this kind of group. It opened my eyes, that’s what it did.
“I wanted go to on the lake bad. The guides wouldn’t take me because they were out all day from 8 in morning till 5 o’clock, and they wanted to be on shore for the rest of their time. I asked one of the boys to teach me how to run the motor, but they were touchy about their stuff. If something broke, you couldn’t just run to the store to fix it, so they had to be careful. I asked a man named Alfred Abel if he’d take me out and he said he would. He brought me to the middle of the lake and shut the motor off. He said, ‘You wanna learn how to drive, right?’ I started the motor and we took off. I just missed hitting a rock, and made it back to the shore. I told myself: ‘That’s it. I don’t wanna do no laundry anymore.’
“I wanted to be on the lake, but I didn’t know anything about fishing. One day, I was down at the dock with my rod and I couldn’t catch nothing. I threw my rod down and started crying. Nobody would teach me. Al Simon—he was the head guy at the lodge—saw me crying and asked what was wrong. I told him, and he said, ‘You’re not going to learn how to guide by sitting here crying. Wipe your tears and come down to the motor shack.’ I went down there, and he said: ‘You see this motor here? This motor here is going to be yours. It might look funny, but it’s going to be fast. It’s going to be your baby.’
“He put it on a big twenty-foot boat and took me out on lake. He took my hand and said: ‘Pretty soon, you’re going to know every part of the lake and every reef like you know the palm of your hand. They’ll blindfold you and you’ll still be able to get around. I’m gonna make you my number one guide.’ He treated me like a younger sister. He taught me how to flay, bake, and fry and how to make fish chowder. I learned all of that. I learned how to guide.
“I took the rest of the girls out. They’d finish their chores and we’d go. I’d carry my twenty-horse-power Mercury motor by hand, by myself, and I’d bring it to the boat. I’d get the steel shore lunch boxes with me and fill them with salt, pepper, butter, and potatoes, and when we caught a fish, I’d cook it over a fire using spruce willows, laying the trout right there in the boughs. There were some guides who thought that just because I was a girl, I couldn’t do it. They thought women should stay home and look after kids, but I could do anything. I laughed at them, and so did my guests. I was bringing back twenty-two-pound catches and winning trophies. I was in my glory.
“I respected the water, the lake. My uncles had taught me this back when we were on the Barren Lands. When you’re going on the water, you pay your respects with tobacco. You talk to the water and you tell it: ‘With this tobacco, I’m gonna show my respect because I’m gonna be on you for half the summer. Thank you for everything you are gonna give me.’
“I thought a lot about my mum and my grandma when I was out there. I thought, ‘If only they could see me on the lake.’ Grandma didn’t know that I was guiding, and when she found out, she was ready to murder my uncles. When she got mad, she got really mad, oh boy. She was a midwife and she used to go with her dog teams to do the work. She had no vehicle, no Ski-Doo. When the diseases came—chickenpox and measles—she helped take the kids away from their homes into the city; 250 of them, but only eighty survived. The old women told her: ‘Take all of the clothes you have and get rid of them. Take the kids and wash them, too. Try and save them.’ She ended up burying the ones who died. She covered them in dirt and put a cross there and a sign that said ‘Don’t come here for a long time.’ My grandma and my grandpa taught me everything. And then one day, my so-called brother-in-law went into their home and killed them. He murdered them. He’s somewhere in a mental hospital now and they write me letters every few months to tell me how he is doing, but I can’t bring myself to read them. My husband reads them to me. I have a daughter and I don’t want my brother-in-law to know about her. I might not know how to read or write but I’m still responsible for my daughter. I’m still her mother.”
Susan had to stop guiding after her daughter was born. It’s a decision she didn’t regret, but it still hurt being away from the water. “It was the only thing I ever knew how to do,” she said. “I cried for three days when it ended. I still look at the old pictures.”
We finished our breakfast, with Susan’s plate only half-finished. She asked our server to wrap it up. We went outside into the warm daylight and I thanked her for the chat. She told me it was no problem before approaching a grey-faced man collapsed in one of the Gold Range alcoves:clothes like torn skin, lips bitten, eyes blotched and purple. Susan leaned down and said, “Hey buddy, here you go,” laying the take-out container at his feet. The fellow raised his hand and waved in appreciation before letting it fall with all its weight.
“I hope he’s hungry,” said the first female fishing guide on Slave Lake. “They was pretty good eggs.”
BEATLESQUE
Despite the terrestrial wonders of living in Old Town—the stone, the water, the bitten shoreline—I spent a lot of time staring into the northern sky, which, most summer days, was a tightly stretched canvas of blue and white before transforming later in the evening into cotton-candy pinks and Tim Burton mauves that seeped overhead as if a hand were tilting vials of paint from the edge of the frame. On long July nights, a golden ring-like glow gathered around the city as the sun dipped to hide its head below the covers, only to pop up moments later like a person deciding they weren’t very tired after all. Sometimes when the brightness of the glow made it impossible to sleep, I stayed awake doing cabinesque things: listening to weather reports on the radio for places with long clacking names: Kugluktuk, Tsiigehtchic, Kakisa; texting my wife at home while being careful to sound as if I were doing serious work when I was mostly reclining on the pleather listening to Bonaparte gulls flurrying in the cheeping marsh; keying into the sounds of a softball game being played at Fritz Theil Park, which sat behind the Allooloo grounds and hosted play deep into the evenings under the deathless light; and studying long tracts of geological compendia in an effort to write a not-boring chapter about rocks (and fishing). All of this ended, however, once I noticed a wriggle of new coloured light on the plywood walls, at which point I threw my book to the ground and ran out to the edge of the dock, watching the sky do its thing.
There were many strata of life above Old Town. Conventions of birds flew about constantly, and while I rifled through texts on northern natural life trying to identify species, I was best assisted by a set of large woodcuts by local artist Diane Boudreau bolted to a wall downtown, recognizing the common redpoll, Harris’s sparrow, northern flicker, belted kingfisher, lesser yellowlegs, and bald eagle, among others. Beside the birds was a series of indigenous flora—gooseberry, soapberry, crowberry, dewberry, cloudberry, et al.—their names translated into seven languages, including Tlicho, North Slavey, Gwich’in, Chipewyan, Inuktitut, Inuinnaqtun, Inuvialuktun, and South Slavey. The paintings provided further insight, I thought, of how the community measured the importance of animals and the land, putting images of birds and berries on a great open plank where, in most places, they would have hanged portraits of famous sons and daughters, or builders and politicians. One Hollywoodian who had emerged from the neighbourhoods was Margot Kidder, known for her role as Lois Lane in the Superman films, although the veracity and duration of her northern childhood was in question (Kidder’s father, Ken, was responsible for Yellowknife getting its first telephone system). The dirt road in Peace River Flats—Lois Lane—wasn’t named after her, but, rather, her character, and some historians insisted that it wasn’t even Kidder who inspired the road, but rather a local woman named Lois Little, who lived there longer than Margot ever did.
Another element of Old Town’s aerial life were the men and women standing on rooftops, scaffolds, and peaks calling out to one another, waving hammers and slinging canisters of water. Since it was impossible to build in the winter, people used June to August to obsessively work on their homes and businesses, echoing the longstanding yuk about there being two seasons in the North: winter and construction. This was especially true of the Old Town Glassworks and Bike Rental—the only source of two-wheeled transport in Yellowknife—which seemed to grow wider and more baroque with each passing season. One small building—an original Hudson’s Bay shack from the 40s—was engulfed by a bicycle repair shop domed in a Quonset hut with a geodesic roof built out of tire rims and wrapped in canvas. This gave way to a set of ladders climbing from one stone plateau to another, ending at a rocky lookout filled with two-wheelers, their tires and frames kicking at the sky. This stuttered pace of construction made everywhere in Old Town look like an architectural broken telephone, and the same was true of the Narwal, where elegantly designed lake-view rooms with monogrammed towels and fancy shower gel were but a hallway removed from the pale skeletal frame of a half-built addition going up beside the kennel, a project that, Cathy said, would take “however long it would take,” which seemed to be a common measurement of time for anything in the North. Every now and then, a truck arrived with parcels of wood that Cathy staked or cross-wove into a support, the excess lumber finding its way into yet another pile stored in one of the yard’s vinyl tents.
More than any of these visual elements, however, it’s what happened above the rooftops that left the deepest, most fantastic impression: a Yellow Submarine-era Beatlesque carnival of float planes that filled the air in the nearly twenty-four-hour light. They arrived in Back Bay announced by a distant propellered flutter followed by their cool shadow—Skyvans, Norsemans, Buffaloes—painted butterscotch and mint green and cruising low enough that it seemed as if I could poke them with a paddle. My sense of childlike glee while watching these long-shoed mechanical raptors skid to rest on the water proved limitless, my imagination piquing whenever the planes were from Wolverine Air, whose airline, I thought, couldn’t have sounded more northern (except, I suppose, Canadian North). The planes moved both weightlessly and with an enormous sense of force and power—Back Bay was at the heart of an aerodrome—before landing merrily pontooned on the lake, their noses bobbing in self-satisfaction while moving toward the wharf. The toaster oven, composite hockey stick, and Internet are all fine inventions, but whoever dreamed up the pontoon—or “float”—should be celebrated on a coin or festive pennant.
Yellowknife’s longstanding culture of air travel and transport was a huge part of its history, from Wop May to Marten Hartwell to other important figures not written about by Stompin’ Tom Connors. The Dene even had a word for travelling by float plane: endaruwi. When the first planes arrived in the 1920s and 30s—piloted with open cockpits by Punch Dickins, Max Ward, Whiskey Papa, Weldy Phipps, Daddy Ho Ho, and other men whose names sounded as if invented by an eight-year-old—people living in bush communities were startled after hearing what they called “thunder in March,” and terrified at the sight of the hulking metal birds. Soon, however, the aircraft provided mail service—all of this in treacherously unmapped parts of the land—and communication quickened between people across the North.
Flying in the Territories was a take-your-pick kind of adventure legacy, although I was partial to Hartwell’s terrifying and brave story, in which the pilot attempted to fly three passengers—Neemee Nulliayok, nurse Judy Hill, and fourteen-year-old David Pisurayak Kootook—from Cambridge Bay to Yellowknife for medical care in November 1972. Nulliayok was having issues with a late-term pregnancy at eight months; Kootook suffered from appendicitis; and Hill was accompanying the pair from their remote community of Taloyoak. According to a story written by the Yellowknifer’s Svjetlana Mlinarevic, “Hartwell began to worry after failing to pick up the Contwoyto beacon halfway to Yellowknife. A sudden break in the clouds gave him momentary relief as he recognized signals from Fort Reliance and Deline—700 km away—but Hartwell’s luck changed when clouds began to amass and the wind picked up speed.” When ice crystals formed over the aircraft’s exterior, Hartwell lowered the altitude of the plane, also hoping to get better radio reception. He unleafed a map across his lap and turned on an overhead light, but the plane’s right wing clipped a tree on a suddenly rising hill, sending the Beechwood cartwheeling into the bush. “Hartwell [was] knocked unconscious,” writes Mlinarevic, “but he soon awoke to the horror surrounding him as the cold air rushed into the broken cabin of his plane.”
Nurse Hill lay prone across Hartwell, half of her body sticking out of the pilot’s window. The other three passengers, however, were alive, if fleetingly. Kootook, the rubbery young teenager, was the least affected; Hartwell’s ankles and knee were broken; and Nulliayok and her unborn child would die within hours. The unlikely remaining pair kept starvation at bay by eating rations, lichen, and sugar pills, and, as Mlinarevic writes, “Kootook built a lean-to, gathered firewood, and tried several times to go fishing at a nearby lake but had to turn back each time after going part way,” the weather and distance proving untenable. Hartwell, a vegetarian, realized that the only way of surviving would be to cannibalize one of the bodies, and so he ate meat cut from Hill’s thighs. Kootook tried getting by on bark and lichen. Eventually, the boy’s heart fell to the hopelessness of their situation—they were living under the lean-to in minus 38 degree Celsius weather—and he died after the plane’s Dart signaller failed to catch the attention of a passing aircraft. Hartwell came to terms with his almost certain mortality, writing a letter to his son and telling him that he loved him and that, “in my heart, I was not all that bad.” The fifty-seven-year-old lay down to die, but, on his thirty-first day at the crash site, he was rescued by a Canadian Forces team responding to a faint distress beacon from the downed plane. When the soldiers found him, Hartwell announced: “Welcome to the camp of the cannibal.”
