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Lisa's Journal
Thursday, August 17th, 2006
Moe Grant was a young Scottish adventurer when, during a romp through Canada in the mid-70s,
she got tired of peanut butter sandwiches and decided to take a job as a cocktail waitress in Hay River,
NWT. She found her way to Inuvik in 1975 and has been here ever since. She now owns a stationery shop,
rents out commercial space and runs Midnight Express Tours on the Mackenzie River. She is four-foot-five
and three-quarters and emphasizes the "three-quarters," when she tells me. She shops at Gap Kids, shakes hands
like a man and drives a Toyota 4X4. I meet her at her store, Moe's Stationery.
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| Moe Grant from Inuvik. |
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Inuvik offers opportunity for anyone who wants to work hard and get ahead, she says. "It's still a bit of a frontier town. It's still got a roughness to it, a sense of adventure." She proves it with a story.
| "Despite high speed Internet and panini sandwiches, Inuvik is still just a human anomaly in a vast Arctic Wilderness." |
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A month before my visit, a black bear banged on a bedroom window in her house at around 4:30 a.m.,
woke a friend who had been sleeping there and prompted her to scurry upstairs to a portable phone.
The bear popped the window off its runners, sent it flying onto the bed, unbroken, and then climbed in.
A cub sought its own portal in the living room. The lumbering vandals nosed about for five minutes,
broke a carving, and left. Despite high speed Internet and panini sandwiches, Inuvik is still just a
human anomaly in a vast Arctic wilderness.
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Inuvik is located 2° above the Arctic Circle.
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