Highs and Lows

Highlights and lowlights of today all relate to my siblings.

First, a highlight. On the weekend, we had a party at the farm and both of my brothers were there. I didn't actually spend any time with Matthias - I was talking to all sorts of people, and then he left. So when Lorenz commented on Matthias and his lead dilemma where flying was concerned, I had no idea what he was on about (how can Lorenz know more about my brother than I do?). So, on instinct, I checked Matthias website, and I found this. I want to send that rant to all my friends. Very cool.

And then a lowlight. When I lived in Guelph, I would never, ever consider not locking up my bike even if I was just popping into the corner store. Bikes are highly transportable, they get stolen. My kayak, on the other hand, I rationalized in an entirely different way. My secure boat storage was a half hour's drive from home. Sometimes, I wanted to get going very, very early and other times I came home late, and the last thing I wanted to do was drive to unload the boat. So I'd park it in the back of the house, with the boat on the roofracks. The first time did it, I kept getting up at night to check on it. Soon, though, I trusted that it would still be there in the morning. My rationalization was along the lines of: something that is 17 feet long and beastly heavy is not easy to steal impuslively. So you would have to plan for that sort of stealing. Now, the average lug-brain thug who would do something as low as steal your most prized possession, chances are that said thug hasn't got a clue what to do with a kayak. And it's also not the easiest thing to move, once you've stolen it. People don't buy kayaks the way they do CDs. So you'd have to be a lug-brained thug who knows enough about boats to either want to paddle it yourself, or the channels for reselling. If you are such a thug, you would also know that a used plastic boat is worth half of what a used glass boat is. So if you're going to go to the trouble of having transport for the boat, and you know boats... well, there are much more high-end boats to steal. I've seen them parked on the top of cars in many places. So the argument.

Last night, Marlene had her plastic sea kayak on the roof of her car, strapped down, ready for a trip to Pukaskwa today. This morning, nothing but cut straps and empty cradles. Out of her driveway, under her bedroom window. Some lug-brained thug has managed to ruin my sister's holiday, take away the only thing she had that is worth anything in terms of replacement value, and leave her feeling like victims of crime often do: like she did something wrong. I'm so unbelievably angry - if someone has a kayak on a car that isn't worth half as much as the boat, you could probably guess that she also doesn't carry the sort of insurance that would replace the boat, deductible or no deductible. If someone is driving a 1984 VW Rabbit, chances are, she can't just go to the boat store and buy a new one. Chances are, she scraped and saved to buy this boat, and she loves it like you love things that required giving up other things you love so you could afford it, and even then it was tough.

But the kind of people who steal, I suspect they don't care about anything like that. If you steal a chocolate bar out of the grocery store, chances are that I don't care. If you walk away with three boxes of paper from your work and manage to buy your girlfriend dinnner with a company expense card, I'll probably think you're a bit of opportunist slimeball, but I won't care. But to steal something that is loved, from someone who can't easily replace it - that's low. Right now, I'm angry enough to think, hey, if you take it out onto Lake Superior and you dump and fall out and drown because you didn't bother to steal the PFD that goes with the boat, I won't care. As long as the kayak washes up on shore and is returned to my sister.

I want to fix this. I sent out an email to the rest of my family, and Markus immediately came back with a generous offer to go with my suggestion. If the rest of them are in a postiion to help right now (and maybe if they're having a good day), we can fix this. I love that one of my siblings, within minutes, came back with a willingness to help on this. So that's the second highlight of the day.

People who steal kayaks don't deserve to paddle. Where is the karma that's going to bite them in the ass, I want to know?

Back on the farm

You'd think I'd fallen off the face of the earth, but that's hardly likely seeing as I was stuck to the top of it for weeks (maybe if I'd been in the Antarctic...). In any case, I'm back in Ontario and overwhelmed by the sheer volume of pictures I need to sort through and stories I want to tell. I need to do some Arctic pages soon, otherwise they'll hit the back burner as I've got another adventure lurking on the horizon.

It didn't even get as warm as 10 degrees in Arctic Bay while I was there, but despite this I was never cold (except when I had a fever, but I would have been chilled even in 30 degree weather that day). And you wouldn't think your body starts craving its regular diet when you interrupt it for a mere month, but my list of things I missed included the grocery store. Hard to believe considering my lack of love for grocery shopping most times. Since I've been back, I've been munching my way through the last of the local strawberries, Ontario cherries, lettuce right from the field, nectarines, apples, tomatoes, cucumber, bananas and blueberries. Oh, and beer. With all of this, there hasn't been room for anything processed (beer doesn't count) or even cooked since I got home. Except for the raisin braid bread Ruth brought by today, I devoured that. If you've ever had anything coming out of the Schmidts' bakery, you would understand.

I also missed: sunsets, darkness, the smell of trees, going barefoot, my own bed, and of course the farm and most of all my garden. The weeds are now under control (or as controlled as I want them to be, there are still lots of weeds), lots of things are blooming, the grass is established and trimmed, and when I look at it, I think it's just as pretty as the spot I imagined when I first surveyed the overgrown patch behind the heritage building. Few of my projects have had as satisfactory an outcome as this one.

Overwhelmed, however, is the theme of the month. Not only do I need to spend precious free time sorting through my digital pictures and putting up some web pages (boring...), but work is as busy as busy could be. On the one hand, I'm glad my vacation is coming up because I sure need a vacation, but on the other, I feel like not taking any time off in the futile hope of catching up on all that I need to do.

Sheesh. Welcome back to my everyday life...

Updated July 26 to say...
The whole Arctic adventure is now online.

When it turns dark

Of course, my Arctic experience isn't just tundra and ice. People live here, and - hard for people like me, who are used to a completely different climate - have done so longer than the likes of me have been on the continent. Since the 1960s, most of the Inuit live in permanent settlements, such as this hamlet. One of the first things I noticed when I came here is how many children there are. Half the population here is children!

Every summer, on the weekend following Canada Day, the Midnight Sun Marathon takes place in Arctic Bay. The marathoners come from all over the place, and they have some tough options: the longest course is the 100 km ultra marathon, but there is also a regular length 42 km marathon and a shorter 32 km one. The day after they run, the marathoners put on a road race for the kids: you can do either 6 km or 10 km, and there are refreshments, t-shirts, and toys up for grabs for entering.

These kids are into it, as are some of the older people (and the biggest kid of them all, Kip the cop!). Me, I should have brought running shoes and taken part. Instead, I hopped into the police truck with Anna Marie and drove the course. The RCMP have many functions, including storing people's coats when they get too hot (it was a nice day). At the beginning of the race, when the starting horn (from the fire truck) gave them the signal to start, they took off running flat out. Most of them slowed to a walk (though there was the one kid who had run the 32 km course the day before, and then sailed through the 10 km one the second day) - except when we passed them in the truck. Then they tried to race the police! They run it in regular clothes, some of them wearing rubber boots - and they have a lot of fun with it. The marathoners man the gatorade and snack stations, pick up garbage, act as human sign-posts and oversee the goodie table. Nice!

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Since I've been here, much has changed. You can tell break-up is near. No longer are the snowmobiles (or snowmachines, as they say here - I like that, that's what we said in northern Ontario too) parked on the ice in Arctic Bay. Now, there is a big strip of open water, and the ice is rotting away. I'm told that any day now, they'll start being able to fish for arctic char along the shore.

It looks like chunks of ice floating in the bay, but it's still (rotting) landfast ice. Though the surface is more water than ice, it's fresh water, and those are puddles (except where there are leads). It's a cool effect, seeing reflections that are interrupted by ice. You can still see the kids out on the Bay, hopping over the puddles.

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Arctic Bay faces south. On the other side of the isthmus which connects the Uluksan Peninsula to the mainland (if Baffin Island is mainland!) is Victor Bay, and it faces north. This is where the snowmobiles have gone, now, because the ice is much stronger there, still. Mishak took me over there with his ATV last night, and it's an easy stroll onto the ice at Victor Bay - no hopping over puddles required. You'd hardly believe that this is only a few kilometers from the hamlet.

People go to Victor Bay to camp. We went and visited, and I'll admit to having serious lustings after a wall tent now. They're much more spacious than even the most palacious of our self-supporting southern wonders. Walking into that tent, it was one of my favourite moments of this trip: thanks to the white gas heater inside (along with a Coleman two-burner stove and the ever-present VHF radio monitoring hunters out on the ice - some recently got stranded when the floe edge broke off) it was toasty inside, and the smell of bannock backing made it feel like the homiest tent I've ever been in.

After a fun visit, Mishak and I climbed back onto the ATV. He showed me a few truly cool things: a fox trap (you put the bait into this hive-shaped structure. The fox jumps in, but can't get out) and a blind for seal hunting. Seals travel along the leads, and pop out at seal holes. Mishak likes waiting for them in the blind - covered from rain, smoke in hand. I can see the attraction. The seal blinds vaguely remind me of the vision pits I know from Lake Superior - a place constructed of loose shoreline rock which facilitates sitting and... well, hunting in this case. Nobody's really sure what the Pukaskwa pits were used for, seeing these blinds makes me guess they had a similar purpose. Unlike the Lake Superior ones, though, these ones are still very much in use.

I've asked "how do you know when the ice isn't safe anymore?" many times now, and I always get the same answer: when it turns dark. If it's puddles, it's a much lighter colour than if there's nothing under it anymore. The picture below shows both dark and light - the dark is open.

There's more to do than camp, ride ATVs, hunt, travel to the floe edge on the ice, skip over puddles and bake bannock (what, that wasn't enough for you?). You can play tundra golf here! Over at Victor Bay, they've put in a three-hole golf course. It makes me wish I played golf - and, really, I can't think of a physical environment more suited to golf course construction than the tundra!

Today, to celebrate my 33rd birthday, I wanted to go find the waterfall, polar bears or no polar bears, but it's raining. Hopefully, I'll still get a chance...

Conquering King George

Some things taunt you until you get a chance to conquer them. The tallest mountain in these parts is King George V, just outside of town. Of course I needed to summit King George. So, one morning with heavy mist in town, Lea and I set out to explore.

Here in Arctic Bay, it was cold and windy. We dressed accordingly - Lea even put on long underwear. After all, if it's this nasty down here, it's going to be really brutal up there. This assumption was based on both of our previous experiences with mountains - you go up, it gets colder and windier.

We got warmer as we got closer - it seemed like it was less windy. Plus, of course, the effort of going up... We decided to go a very direct way, and cut across the tundra to the base of the scree slope.

Now, no doubt, all of you intelligent people out there could tell me that scree slopes are not the best way to get up a mountain. But it was kind of like playing on big blocks, and they seemed so stable at the bottom. On we went!

Yeah, yeah, yeah, spare me the I told you so's... of course it got a lot less stable when we got a few hundred feet up. It was still fun, but with that edge of, I could start a massive landslide and die.

There were two plateau-type interruptions. I was pretty happy to attain the first, and waited for Lea - who wisely kept her distance from my rock-dislodging feet and was scrambling parallel to me. After the second plateau, the bedrock changed - it was now very loose sandstone that was weathering into flat plates. Much better... there were drifts of sand, and it wasn't as steep. A pleasant stroll to the summit.

There is a summit cairn, so of course I had to go to the top, the very top! It's only human nature! Supposedly there is a summit canister too, but we couldn't find it despite probing into the cairn from all angles.

There's something pretty special about being high up above tundra and frozen inlets, with a 360 degree view. Not to mention that there was no wind up here. It was balmy, if 7 degrees or so can be called balmy (and having been here for a while, it can!). We looked down at the mist, and I called on words like inversion and katabatic winds to try and explain this curious reversal of what I'd been expecting.

And finally, finally I manage to take pictures of the tundra that show what I think I see. Now do you see why I think this is so startlingly beautiful?

There was a second, smaller cairn on a rocky promontory that was a bit lower than the main summit. We lounged there, eating our lunch, basking in the warmth while besides us, snow melted.

Our way down was a much gentler slope, though we couldn't get away from the inevitable fields of scree. But this time, we weren't scared. There were no landslides being started by us! We felt comfortable enough to discuss Touching the Void (which I haven't seen yet) in great detail. When we got to the road, we were much further from town than when we'd left it on the way up, but as luck would have it we hitched a ride with an Inuk on an ATV. Fun comes in many versions in Arctic Bay, though all the fun I've had has been outside!

10 more days, and I will be home. It hasn't been that long that I've been here, but time moves differently. It feels like the time should be measured in months, not weeks. I don't know why that is...

There is a waterfall to find before I go, too. I'm looking for a free day with great weather!