The deafening silence

Roland was kind enough to take Melanie out for a skidoo ride last week, and today I was treated to the same trip. Having spent the majority of my Saturday vegging on the sofa this was probably a very good thing, and after a couple of hours out on the land I did indeed feel invigorated and refreshed. Whilst it wasn't an exceptionally cold day by northern standards (a mere -20° or so) one still needed to wrap up like the Michelin Man - I know that the Michelin Man never wrapped up in anything other than tyres, but you get the idea - and suitably attired I thoroughly enjoyed our little jaunt.

The one thing that you notice on excursions like these, other than the scenery, is the silence. Once you stop and the skidoo engine is switched off, there is simply no sound at all; as Roland put it, it's so quiet you can hear the silence. Without wishing to come over all existential, you really do feel at one with nature in those brief moments, and all the trivialities of everyday life seem like they belong in another realm...but then the engine roars back into life, and the real world snaps back into focus once again.

Those brief moments are well worth the trip though.

Back to work

I'm now back in Kangiqsujuaq, where it's only marginally colder than in the UK (-26 at the time of writing) and although my journey was relatively uneventful, especially compared to the one I made before Christmas, First Air managed to leave my suitcase in Montreal, along with the baggage of many of the other passengers on my flight. It's often a case of cargo or passengers in the North, as opposed to cargo and, but at least I didn't have too many essentials in my case and I can get by until it arrives.

Seeing as half my students haven't yet returned I made today into an unofficial ped day for myself, but it should be back to business as usual tomorrow, or at least as usual as you can expect in these parts. It's always interesting to see just who does and who doesn't return after the Christmas break, both in terms of students and staff, and I know that the school is at least one teacher down due to the fact that the chap who was meant to be replacing my erstwhile neighbour James, who is now on paternity leave, has not shown up.

So, if anyone fancies coming up to teach some Social Studies and Math for the next two or three months, there's a classroom waiting for you...

The last farewell?

Well, I endured my trip to the dentists with manful dignity, and compared to last year's marathon it was actually a breeze. I was only in the chair for ninety minutes this time round and, courtesy of the TV precariously bolted to the wall, I had the Weather Channel for company as the dentist and his assistant attacked my mouth with gay abandon. Many of the reports came from the UK, where temperatures have been rivalling ours of late, and whilst I have somewhat ridiculed the mother country's inability to deal with the cold in the past, I must admit that this year Britain's winter really has been one for the ages. This recent satellite picture looks like it could have been generated for a scene in The Day After Tomorrow, but I assure you it's for real:

On Monday I will be experiencing English-like temperatures as I head back North, but if Melanie can find me a job at King's Town School next year this could be the last time I make the trip. I enjoy what I do in Nunavik but it doesn't get any easier leaving Melanie behind each time I go back, and I really don't know if I could manage another year after this one. We don't own the future though, only the now, so for the time being I shall simply pack my bags and do what has to be done. Next stop: Kangiqsujuaq.

Christmas top 10 (part two)

Still cold here, but not as bad as a couple of days ago and certainly not as bad as in the Prairies, where it's been as low as -25 in Winnipeg and -28 in Regina. I shall be flying home this time next week - well, the plane I'm in will actually be doing most of the hard work - so as long as the weather's fine then I really don't care what it's like now.

In the meantime, let's carry on with our festive top ten; today we reveal numbers 8 and 7:

8. Jona Lewie - Stop The Cavalry (1980)
Never intended to be a Christmas hit but it's got sleigh bells and a brass band and will always be indelibly linked with the festive season. Only kept off the number one spot by the posthumous back-catalogue of John Lennon.




7. Chris de Burgh - A Spaceman Came Travelling (1975)
"And it went laaa la la laaa la la laaa la la la..." A Christmas song that actually debunks the whole foundation of Christianity, and the only time that Chris de Burgh will ever appear in one of my top tens. Wonderful.

Christmas top 10 (part one)

It's starting to get cold here now. I'm trying to keep the Canada Goose in mothballs for as long as possible, but it was -20 today, which felt distinctly chilly even given my short journey to school. Still, in little more than a week I shall be back in the relative warmth of of the south, although with impeccable timing Gananoque is in the midst of its first winter storm warning of the season. Better now than next week, I guess.

Now, a few posts ago I talked about my penchant for Christmas music and I threatened to give you a rundown of my top ten. Well, it may be somewhat self-ingratiating, but it is my blog after all, so we will start today with numbers ten and nine and hopefully work our way up to number one before Christmas day itself.

10. Stan Freberg - Green Christmas (1958)
Not really a song and will be completely unknown to virtually everyone except my family, but I've loved this track since I was very small. We had it on 7" vinyl and the record always got stuck when it got to the "All right, Abercrombie" part, and even though I now have it on mp3 and CD I'm still always surprised when we get past that bit without me having to shove the player or weigh down the needle with coins. Ah, memories...




9. Johnny Mathis - When A Child Is Born (1976)
Whenever I hear this song I must be the only person on Earth who thinks of Subbuteo; the table football set I got for Christmas that year was just about my best present ever, and the warbling voice of Johnny Mathis serenaded my plastic players as they took the field (well, green baize) for their first game.

Ice & fire

We had a fire drill at school today, and as we were all milling around outside in temperatures that must have been approaching -10, the thought struck me that had this been a real fire, we might have had a better chance of survival in the warmth of the burning building rather than in the frigid wastes that double as a car park.

Just a thought.

Farewell to February

Today's been the coldest day of the year so far: -32°C, which comes to -49°C with windchill. I had to take my glove off to open the door of the school this afternoon as the latch was stuck, and my hand almost adhered itself to the door handle; door handles really shouldn't be made of metal up here.

Despite its deficiency in the days department, February felt like it would never end, and I shall not be mourning its passing this weekend. The weather has steadfastly refused to change, and whilst crisp, white tundra and bright blue skies make for great photo opportunities, the lack of variety does tend to make the days merge into each other after a while. We need a good blizzard to shake things up a little, and March is traditionally a month when the winds can pick up as the temperatures start to rise a little.

So, here's to the month of March: may it bring blizzards-a-plenty.

I can't feel it in my fingers, I can't feel it in my toes

It was our school fishing trip on Friday, and I think I'm only just about regaining the feeling in my extremities. It was a mild day by Northern standards, but after a trip out of town of about an hour that began on the back of a skidoo and ended in a qamutik, it felt mighty, mighty cold once we were out on the land. I say land, but in reality the ice on which we were standing separated us not from terra firma but from the depths of the Hudson Bay, and what a lot of ice there was.

There were about thirty people in our group, but when you took time out to look around, you couldn't help but feel isolated and somehow apart from the rest of humanity, if only for a moment. I guess that is a large part of the attraction for those hardy souls that enjoy ice fishing, that idea of convening with nature and temporarily taking oneself out of the drudgery of everyday life, but before I start setting off pretentiousness alarms everywhere, let me just say that I am most certainly not one of those hardy souls.

I was cold. Bloody cold.

And I didn't think that standing still dangling a line into an icy hole would really do anything to change that fact. I did have a go for a few minutes and yes, I did try using my strips of plastic bag as bait, but to no avail. The only bite I, or anyone else for that matter, got all day was of the frost variety. As they say in Hollywood, not one fish was harmed during the making of this motion picture. Well, they don't actually say that exactly, but maybe they would if they made a film about ice fishing.

But I digest.

We had more success in dredging for mussels though, and even brought a few starfish and urchins to the surface as an added bonus. Needless to say, these were all consumed, raw, on site, and whilst I didn't partake on this occasion, I did supplement my lunch of (semi-frozen) egg sandwiches with a modest lump of caribou meat. Raw of course.

Whilst I was glad to have made the trip, I have to be honest and say that I don't think it's an experience I will be in a rush to repeat. Convening with nature is all well and good, but next time I'd prefer it if nature came to me, maybe for afternoon tea. We could have biscuits, discuss the state of the economy, maybe watch a movie even. And we could do it in the warm.

Blowing hot and cold

What a world of contrasts we live in. It was -32°C here today (-46 with windchill), and I honestly thought that my eyeballs were going to freeze on the way to work this morning. However, both I and my eyes survived, and as I write I'm watching play from the Australian Open tennis in Melbourne (on TV: my eyes, frozen or not, aren't that good), where the on-court temperature is a staggering 61°C (that's over 140°F). Novak Djokovic has just been receiving treatment for heat exhaustion, and has been seeking solace from an ice-pack version of one of those sausage things you that you wear around your neck on the plane.

So, allowing for windchill and 'heatchill' (just what is the equivalent word for an out-of-the-shade temperature?), that's a difference of over 100° (and 16000km) between Inukjuak and Melbourne! I don't think the players would be any better off playing up here though. Holding the raquet would be very difficult in oversize sealskin mittens, and certain parts of the body do tend to shrivel up somewhat in such extreme cold...

"...new balls, please."

Relativity Theory

I know everything is relative, especially your aunt and uncle, but I had to grin after reading an article on the BBC website this morning entitled 'More Arctic temperatures to come.' Wondering what environmental catastrophe had befallen the UK overnight, images from The Day After Tomorrow ran through my head as I brought up the page, but once I started reading I realised that I needn't have worried.

"Temperatures in some areas plummeted as low as -8C" proclaimed the article, which then went on to describe how the country had been plunged into near anarchy due to such conditions. I've become somewhat battle-hardened when it comes to cold weather after four winters in Canada, and although I will admit that -8C is indeed cold, I'd hardly call it Arctic. So, whilst I have sympathy for those of you shivering back in Blighty, just be thankful that your cars look like this:

Heavy snow in the West Midlands yesterday

rather than this:

My car last week

...and the paint's peeling off of my walls

Further to last Thursday's post, it was really, really cold today: this morning it was -28°C, which with windchill was a numbing -38°C! As I said before, it will get even colder than that in the months ahead, but for November this was exceptionally chilly, and even some of the locals found it a bit too cold for comfort. Numbers like these simply had no meaning until I moved to Canada, and although it can get so cold here that your nostrils literally freeze up on the walk to school, it's amazing what you can endure with the right clothing and a positive attitude. That said, I wouldn't have fancied having to live out in the open as the Inuit would have done not much more than fifty years ago, and I'm grateful for the haven of my (relatively) sumptuous apartment on days like this.

Nonetheless, despite the cold it was another beautiful day, although when I tried to take some photos of sunset over the (now frozen) Bay, my poor little camera simply refused to cooperate. It made a few whirring noises, the lens kind of half opened, then closed, then opened again and finally a message on the screen proclaimed 'lens error' before total and final shutdown. I think the message should have read 'it's too cold to be taking pictures you idiot; put me back in the case NOW!', but I got the picture (well, actually I didn't, but you know what I mean). Fortunately Stella, one of Dominick's Desktop Publishing students, got a good shot of the Bay with her obviously superior, Northern-proof camera - the photographic equivalent of Eddie Izzard's Stalinist oranges - and it is with great pleasure that I present it for you now (click to enlarge):

On a different note, it was the Grey Cup yesterday, which for those of you not in the know is the Canadian equivalent of the Superbowl. Canadian Football is similar to American Football, the main differences being that there are twelve players on a team not eleven, each side has three downs to gain ten yards rather than four, and the players apologise when they knock each other over. For the record, the Calgary Stampeders beat the Montreal Alouettes (all together now: ♪♫♪ je te plumerai la tête, je te plumerai la tête, et la tête, et la tête, alouette, alouette, ohhhhhhhhh......♪♫♪) 22-14, which will make Melanie happy as the Stampeders are her adopted Canadian Football team. She chose them because they have a horse on their helmet. Not a real horse, as that would make movement around the field very difficult, but just a picture.

Go Stamps!

It's cold outside...

Although the town has been covered by a blanket of snow for some time now, today was just about the first time that it felt really cold, the type of cold that literally does get into your bones and starts to freeze the end of your nose. As I write, it's a decidedly frosty -17°C outside, -25°C with windchill, which is quite cold enough thank you, but I've been here long enough now to know that it's going to get a lot colder than that in the months ahead.

However, it was also beautifully sunny today, and the view out onto the Bay really was rather stunning. Now, I vowed to myself when I started this blog that it wouldn't turn into yet another amateur travelogue, full of endless photos of the landscape which, after a while, all merge into one however beautiful they are. But today I feel the need to indulge myself and share with you a few photos that I took either at, or on the way to, school (click to enlarge):

The view from my classroom

Hudson Bay, as seen from the school

Smoke on the water...(go on, you know you want to!)

The last photo - not the best quality as it was literally taken through my classroom window - shows the phenomenon of sea smoke, or steam devils, caused when warmer air covers colder waters and winds are calm. The locals view this as a sign that the freeze has really begun, and if there's one thing I've learned to trust in my time here, it's local knowledge when it comes to the weather.

Finally, since I started writing, the temperature has dropped to -20°C (-28°C with windchill), so not only does this illustrate what I was just saying about local knowledge regarding the weather, it also means that it's time to break open the hot chocolate and marshmallows (the little, hot chocolate mug variety). Night, night.