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Lisa's Journal
Friday, August 18th, 2006
I have coffee with Bob Heath today, a Mississauga-born pilot who, like Grant, came north on a lark and stayed 16 years. He flies tourists, media, government staff and scientists to the north and south poles year round.
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| Inside Inuvik's Mosque. |
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He shows me a tattered copy of Arctic Canada from the Air, a formerly classified Canadian aviation book published during the Cold War in 1956. It contains detailed northern island shorelines and landmarks and has become an indispensable tool for navigating myriad snow-covered islands and finding places to land-even though it's five decades old. He tells me stories of metre-high Emperor penguins at the South Pole greeting him on the ice with a bow, chattering away in penguin for a few minutes and then departing with a final bow. I order a refill, set my chin on my hand and listen. He's flown over the migrating Porcupine caribou herd, seen them in clumps of 10,000 or more. It never gets boring, he says. Sometimes, in December's 24-hour darkness, he flies high enough to see the sun again.
Later, I meet up with Rafat, my cabbie friend, and his buddy, Ayman El Shafei, also from Egypt. We spend a banter-filled couple of hours riding around town in Rafat's van, me in the backseat wondering what they're laughing at when they joke in Arabic and give me a wink. We meet other Muslim men from Sudan, Nigeria, Lebanon, Palestine and visit the new mosque. They talk about the bootleggers and drug dealers in town and of course, the weather. "I don't mind it. I love the cold. It's good for high blood pressure," Rafat says.
| "He tells me stories of metre-high Emperor penguins at the South Pole greeting him on the ice with a bow." |
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I return to the Finto and read Thomas Berger's 1977 report from the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry, Northern Frontier, Northern Homeland. "Today, white and native populations in the Mackenzie Valley and the Western Arctic are about equal in number," he wrote. "But it is the native people who constitute the permanent population of the North. There they were born and there they will die. A large part of the white population consists of public servants, employees of the mining industry and of the oil and gas industry and their families. Most of them do not regard the North as their permanent home and usually return to the South." (pg 23, 1988 revised edition)
I'm ashamed to say it but I'm a bit chilly. I meekly call down to the front desk and ask for a space heater. I'm a frail girl. from the South.
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Inuvik is located 2° above the Arctic Circle.
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