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magazine / so07 / indepth
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The Mackenzie Delta: The people
Relive Lisa's week long adventure in the Arctic as she ventures into new places, meeting new faces.
By Lisa Gregoire
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Lisa's Journal: epilogue
Months later...
Months after my trip north, I'm chatting with Tommy Thrasher on the phone when he makes a humble request. Thrasher used to play the accordion but the one he had was broken and lost years ago. He had the money-he'd just received his residential school settlement-and he wanted to treat himself to something indulgent. Would I help him find one? Sure, I say. No problem.
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| Tommy and Linda Thrasher |
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I don't know anything about accordions. I emailed a couple of accordion players I know (Geoff Berner, Bob Wiseman) and got some advice about where to look and how much it should cost. Then I happened to tell a friend about my quest and she said her partner had an accordion he could sell me. I visited their house, saw the instrument and it was the exact one Tommy had described owning years ago: a mint condition black Hohner piano accordion, like it was meant to be. I brokered the deal, an ecstatic Thrasher mailed me a money order and I spent an afternoon wrapping the damn thing in 14 cubits of bubble wrap before squeezing it into a baby car seat box for the journey. I handed it to the Canada Post clerk the next day and held my breath.
| "He spent the next fifteen minutes playing me jigs and hymns interspersed with teary professions of gratitude." |
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A couple of weeks later, the phone rang. It was Thrasher and his accordion. He spent the next fifteen minutes playing me jigs and hymns interspersed with teary professions of gratitude. But it was only fair. He took a stranger into his house months before, fed me food that he and his wife procured with their own hands, spent hours answering nosy questions about his hopes and tragedies and then took me for a ride in his boat. Tommy and Linda don't have much in their small house by the Arctic Ocean but they gave generously so that I could tell you a little bit about their life at the top of the world. I reckon it was worth the bubble wrap.
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| PHOTO: BOBBI BARBARICH |
About the author: Lisa Gregoire
Edmonton freelancer Lisa Gregoire was the perfect fit to cover the story on the Mackenzie
Delta. In the early 1990s, Gregoire worked as a reporter for the Nunatsiaq News,
an English-Inuktitut weekly publication in Iqaluit, and had traveled through Nunavut, the
Northwest Territories and the Yukon. "Once the buzz of discovering a new part of the
North subsided, the breadth of the challenge materialized," she writes in a foreword
to her journals, "I was
going to the delta in the summer when people travel, hunt, camp, build, renovate, stock up
on food and supplies and generally don't have time to talk to nosy writers from away." Despite
the challenges, she visited several communities and was invited into the homes of the local
residents to learn how their lives will be affected by the construction of the Mackenzie
Gas Pipeline. Read on with Canadian Geographic and relive her week-long adventure
in the Arctic.
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In 1940 there were only three permanent families living in Tsiigehtchich. More came with the construction of the Dempster Highway.
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