Tales from the tundra
You may remember that the last time I wrote I said that I was possibly going to Rankin Inlet later that week. Well, three weeks and 180 billable hours later, I am finally home.
First off, let me thank all of you out there who drive vehicles that emit high levels of greenhouse gasses. I neglected to bring my snow clothes up there (I didn’t think I would be gone this long), but thanks to you, that didn’t matter. No snow fell when I was up there, which is very unusual. By this time of year, the primary form of transportation in Nunavut should be snowmobile, but this year the snow is late. Please continue to do your part for global warming!
This was my first time in Nunavut and I am proud to be part of the small percentage of Canadians that have actually visited Nunavut. It is neither cheap to get there nor to stay, so I am glad that my trip was paid for in full by my firm. It is a pretty radical change from the rest of Canada. My trip took two parts. First I was in Rankin Inlet for two weeks, then I was in Coral Harbour for a week (or so).
First, I will talk about Rankin Inlet, hometown of Jordin Tootoo, the NHL hockey player. His face appears often around town, which makes sense in a town of 2,500 people; not a lot of them attain that level of notoriety. Rankin Inlet is also the home of the world’s largest inukshuk. I suppose this is sort of like saying Hollywood is the home of the world’s largest Hollywood sign, but it is still impressive to see. I would like to take this opportunity to sidebar into a rank about how stupid it is that Vancouver, where the Haida and Salish aboriginal nations are, has elected to use an Inuit inukshuk as it’s 2010 Olympic games branding. It makes no sense to me. It is like Germany picking the Eiffel Tower to represent it: sure, they are both from the same continent, but they are not from the same nation. But I digress. When I first got to Rankin Inlet, where there is only one or two restaurants to go to and the roads are all unpaved, I thought it was at the edge of Canada (another sidebar: you can see in the map below there is a star at the geographical centre of Canada. Rankin Inlet is actually almost in the middle of Canada). This all changed when I left for Coral Harbour.
Flying into Coral Harbour, you understand that it is a small community. The airport consists of one small building where nobody works full time. The landing strip is gravel, and because there is no tower or radar, planes will not take off or land if it is cloudy. My co-worker and I were lucky to get a taxi to town 15 minutes away. When we got there, we discovered that the only decent hotel in town was full because there were construction workers, and we had been booked into the overflow “hotel” run by the local Co-op. I use scare quotes around hotel because that place barely qualifies as one. My complaining about this place could go on for hours. The rooms are all shared (4 beds to a room), the floors creak constantly when you walk, the bathrooms are small and unheated (yes, unheated), there is one phone, and if you are unlucky enough to be the last person to shower, you may end up running out of water. No, not running out of HOT water; running out of water. The water tank is only so large, so you may end up going to work smelly and coming back at lunch to clean up after the water truck has been by. All of this luxury will only cost you $200 per night! The upside of this “hotel” is that you meet lots of people. There were about ten of us staying there, and it was a surprisingly diverse group. I met a telephone-pole cable splicer in town working for a few days and who spent his weekends leading dog-sled teams for tourists. I met a Swedish ship-building mogul who was in the Canadian arctic hunting polar bears (he complained about the accommodations a lot too, haha). I met an electrician from New Brunswick who had his invention of a better light bulb sunk by government bureaucrats and who now had to work up north (at least, that is what I gathered from his story, because he had a wonderfully think Quebecois accent). It was a very diverse group.
We spent most of our time working in the schools, which is always more fun for me than working in an office building. One of the most interesting things is that every morning they sing the national anthem in the classrooms. The peculiar part is that it is sung in Inuktitut, the Inuit language. I would normally dive into a philosophical discussion about how tolerance-prone Canada allows its anthem to be sung in three different languages without batting an eye, whereas the American melting-pot cries bloody murder if the stars and stripes is sung in Spanish, but I’m tired and I’m sure you are losing interest.
One final note about Nunavut is how isolated it is. There is no road access between any of the communities in Nunavut (that I am aware of). The only way to get supplies in is by plane or by barge. Barge is a bit of a misleading term, because they are actually huge container ships that come through two or three times a year in the late summer. The window of opportunity is relatively short because the ice around the cape of northern Quebec breaks up in the spring and becomes impassable around this time of year. This means that if the community leaders don’t plan for enough fuel, for example, they will simply have to go without power if they run out. I chuckled to myself when a school administrator complained that their supplier had short-shipped them pencils for the year and the kids had to write with little stubs of pencil. But I guess that really isn’t THAT funny.
Anyways, that is a (not so) brief outline of my tour of Nunavut. It was always a big culture shock the further I went north (by the way, Coral Harbour has exactly zero restaurants), but as the communities became more isolated, they also became much more interesting. I hope that my adoring readers have made it this far, because now I have more pictures and video for you!
And a final note: my favourite anecdote from my trip involves all of the people in Coral Harbour listening intently to the radio to hear who won the commuity raffle. “What was the prize?” you ask? The winner got to shoot and keep the next polar bear that wandered into town! When that happened, they would have a new raffle for the next one.
First off, let me thank all of you out there who drive vehicles that emit high levels of greenhouse gasses. I neglected to bring my snow clothes up there (I didn’t think I would be gone this long), but thanks to you, that didn’t matter. No snow fell when I was up there, which is very unusual. By this time of year, the primary form of transportation in Nunavut should be snowmobile, but this year the snow is late. Please continue to do your part for global warming!
This was my first time in Nunavut and I am proud to be part of the small percentage of Canadians that have actually visited Nunavut. It is neither cheap to get there nor to stay, so I am glad that my trip was paid for in full by my firm. It is a pretty radical change from the rest of Canada. My trip took two parts. First I was in Rankin Inlet for two weeks, then I was in Coral Harbour for a week (or so).
First, I will talk about Rankin Inlet, hometown of Jordin Tootoo, the NHL hockey player. His face appears often around town, which makes sense in a town of 2,500 people; not a lot of them attain that level of notoriety. Rankin Inlet is also the home of the world’s largest inukshuk. I suppose this is sort of like saying Hollywood is the home of the world’s largest Hollywood sign, but it is still impressive to see. I would like to take this opportunity to sidebar into a rank about how stupid it is that Vancouver, where the Haida and Salish aboriginal nations are, has elected to use an Inuit inukshuk as it’s 2010 Olympic games branding. It makes no sense to me. It is like Germany picking the Eiffel Tower to represent it: sure, they are both from the same continent, but they are not from the same nation. But I digress. When I first got to Rankin Inlet, where there is only one or two restaurants to go to and the roads are all unpaved, I thought it was at the edge of Canada (another sidebar: you can see in the map below there is a star at the geographical centre of Canada. Rankin Inlet is actually almost in the middle of Canada). This all changed when I left for Coral Harbour.
Flying into Coral Harbour, you understand that it is a small community. The airport consists of one small building where nobody works full time. The landing strip is gravel, and because there is no tower or radar, planes will not take off or land if it is cloudy. My co-worker and I were lucky to get a taxi to town 15 minutes away. When we got there, we discovered that the only decent hotel in town was full because there were construction workers, and we had been booked into the overflow “hotel” run by the local Co-op. I use scare quotes around hotel because that place barely qualifies as one. My complaining about this place could go on for hours. The rooms are all shared (4 beds to a room), the floors creak constantly when you walk, the bathrooms are small and unheated (yes, unheated), there is one phone, and if you are unlucky enough to be the last person to shower, you may end up running out of water. No, not running out of HOT water; running out of water. The water tank is only so large, so you may end up going to work smelly and coming back at lunch to clean up after the water truck has been by. All of this luxury will only cost you $200 per night! The upside of this “hotel” is that you meet lots of people. There were about ten of us staying there, and it was a surprisingly diverse group. I met a telephone-pole cable splicer in town working for a few days and who spent his weekends leading dog-sled teams for tourists. I met a Swedish ship-building mogul who was in the Canadian arctic hunting polar bears (he complained about the accommodations a lot too, haha). I met an electrician from New Brunswick who had his invention of a better light bulb sunk by government bureaucrats and who now had to work up north (at least, that is what I gathered from his story, because he had a wonderfully think Quebecois accent). It was a very diverse group.
We spent most of our time working in the schools, which is always more fun for me than working in an office building. One of the most interesting things is that every morning they sing the national anthem in the classrooms. The peculiar part is that it is sung in Inuktitut, the Inuit language. I would normally dive into a philosophical discussion about how tolerance-prone Canada allows its anthem to be sung in three different languages without batting an eye, whereas the American melting-pot cries bloody murder if the stars and stripes is sung in Spanish, but I’m tired and I’m sure you are losing interest.
One final note about Nunavut is how isolated it is. There is no road access between any of the communities in Nunavut (that I am aware of). The only way to get supplies in is by plane or by barge. Barge is a bit of a misleading term, because they are actually huge container ships that come through two or three times a year in the late summer. The window of opportunity is relatively short because the ice around the cape of northern Quebec breaks up in the spring and becomes impassable around this time of year. This means that if the community leaders don’t plan for enough fuel, for example, they will simply have to go without power if they run out. I chuckled to myself when a school administrator complained that their supplier had short-shipped them pencils for the year and the kids had to write with little stubs of pencil. But I guess that really isn’t THAT funny.
Anyways, that is a (not so) brief outline of my tour of Nunavut. It was always a big culture shock the further I went north (by the way, Coral Harbour has exactly zero restaurants), but as the communities became more isolated, they also became much more interesting. I hope that my adoring readers have made it this far, because now I have more pictures and video for you!
And a final note: my favourite anecdote from my trip involves all of the people in Coral Harbour listening intently to the radio to hear who won the commuity raffle. “What was the prize?” you ask? The winner got to shoot and keep the next polar bear that wandered into town! When that happened, they would have a new raffle for the next one.
posted by Byron at 7:37 PM
2 comments
