It begins in motion, this story, the journey underway, lurching over the tundra in an ancient yellow twelve-passenger bombardier.  One twenty-two foot, green, square stern, cedar and canvas Hudson Bay canoe lashed up-side-down on the top with nylon rope and another dragging along behind  on a komatik. A chilly, overcast August day two hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle; the land of the lightless winters, the land of the nightless summers.
1972 it was. The year the sea ice didn’t melt. The year high summer was a Wednesday afternoon.

Me and Peeteeloo, Etunga and Jimmy Totalik and all our gear for a week heaped in the bombardier, rumbling out of Taloyuak, engine snorting, belching blue smoke, headed to Netsiksiuvik for seal.

Taloyoak, the northern most town on mainland Canada, sprawled over several rocky hills on the west side of the Boothia Isthmus.

The original inhabitants of Taloyoak country were the Netsilingmiut, the seal people. Well, that’s not really true. It was the Tunrit who first learned how to survive in this tough country. They were already here when the Netsilik arrived and taught them where the caribou crossed and how to fish the rivers.

The Tunrit were sea people who lived mostly on seal. They hunted with kayaks on the open water; walruses and whales too.  The Netsilik mostly hunted seal through the ice at their breathing holes. The Tunrit were a strong but timid people. They would apparently rather run than fight.

Then one time the Tunrit killed one of the Netsilik dogs. It was an accident they say. They ran away, scared of what the Netsilik might do. They all left, abandoned their villages, every one of them. Just ran away. So the Netsilik took over the country and hunted caribou the way the Tunrit had shown them.

The community began in 1948 when poor ice conditions forced the Hudson Bay Company to close its post at Fort Ross on Bellot Strait. Some Kinngamiut, Cape Dorset people, followed the Bay from Fort Ross south to the new post. The Netsilingmiut and Kinngamiut have been marrying one another ever since so they mostly call themselves the Taloyoamiut nowadays. Once the Hudson Bay Company arrived the RCMP and the Catholic and Anglican Missions soon followed; then the government, schools, and so went the neighborhood.

But, back to the story: we’re trucking on out of Taloyoak in the bombardier, past the last of the houses where an old man was savoring the morning.

MORNING PIPE

A keen eyed old man
face deep lined
weathered with the years
grey hair scraggly
from the night’s sleep
Seated on the wood steps
of his small house
legs out straight
smoking his morning pipe
wrapped warm in sunshine
Eyes on the far ridge tops
mind on young times
when the caribou came
trotting over the tundra
heads high and tails up
hooves clicking and clattering
blanketing the land
wandering north
over the rocky hills
wandering north
Young times
when meat was always juicy
fish plentiful and firm
with his morning pipe

excerpt from Netisiksiuvik: stories from the ice coast

To raise money for Christmas, the Dog River Women’s League held a Bazaar and Bake Sale last Saturday afternoon, which, as usual, was geared to make your mouth water and clean all the copper and silver and crumpled dollar bills out of your jeans.

Here are some samplings of what they had; pumpkin pie, lemon meringue pie, chocolate cake, butter tarts, ginger bread, oatmeal cookies with no walnuts.  And on another table, pickled beets, green tomato relish, beet horseradish relish and cranberry catsup.  Then, on the table in the corner, mint fudge, caramel popcorn, Christmas stockings, placemats, pot holders, wool mittens, braided coat hangers, crocheted pillow cases, nylon stocking dolls and woven willow wreaths.

My favorite things to eat, though, are them made from the berries we pick around Dog River.  Things like wild strawberry jam and jams made from raspberries, rose hips, saskatoons, rhubarb and cranberry jelly, rose petal syrup, blueberry tarts, Saskatoon pie, cranberry pudding and deep blueberry buckle.

But I hav’ta tell you my all-time favorite number one mouth-watering first-prize supreme ruler and red ribbon winner of fine taste in Dog River, and that’s Dora Beaulieu’s Whole Low Bush Cranberry Muffins.  Dora makes the kind where you don’t boil or mash up the berries.  You put ‘em in the dough whole then go ahead and bake the muffins as usual.  Then, when you take ‘em out of the oven, there’s little swirls of steam spiraling up and the cranberry tingle tickles your nose right down to the back of your throat  looking down at he pan of muffins, you can see dark wine colored cranberries here and there with little purple halos in the muffin around each berry.

And all you want to do is break one of those muffins in half, smear some butter on it real quick and pop it in your mouth and Kazam! Are you in for the treat of your life when you sink your chompers into that half of warm muffin you stuffed in your mouth!

It’s something like being in a shooting gallery at one of those Carnivals where you shoot tin ducks with a .22 rifle and they go Twang!  when you hit’em and something like those old time comics, where they have all the action words and sound effects in yellow balloons and red stars and orange blasts for words like Wham! Blam! Kapow!

Zing! Zang! & Zowee!

Because that’s what’s happening inside your mouth…
your teeth are biting down into those prime, plump cranberries
and the hot red cranberry juices are zapping around inside your mouth
rocketing off the roof of your mouth,
bouncing across your tongue,
squirting delicious glowing juices all over your gleaming white teeth,
running down between your gums and pulsating lips,
slathering all over your madly salivating taste buds…
until your whole mouth is jumping up and down with joy, smiling and laughing and feeling so good you just have to swallow that mouthful …
and sit back and have a little rest.

Now folks, I’m here to tell you,

if Dora Beaulieu’s Whole Low Bush Cranberry Muffins aren’t a mouthful of heaven,

they’re the next best thing.

excerpt from The Owl and the Teacup: Dog River Tales

The Miner’s Mess, the coffee shop and eatery in the original Yellowknife Inn, shut her down Sunday, June 14, the year of our Lord 19 and 92. A dismal day in the annals of northern history. A sad event that set a legion of lost souls adrift.
The heart of old Yellowknife was gone for good. One of the last remaining shreds of living history ripped asunder…POOPH!

It wasn’t the Miner’s Mess when I first sampled the coffee in April of 1969; it was still the Yellowknife Inn Coffee Shop. A real old tyme diner. Green vinyl booths with chrome poles to hang yer hat on. A jukebox you could play from your booth by poking quarters in the tabletop Select-O-matic record selector and punching in the letters and the numbers. Along one side of the room was a counter with a long row of round green vinyl, bolted to the floor, chrome stools that could spin all the way around. The stools had those chrome foot-rest dealies underneath you could hang the heels of yer boots on. A right fine establishment.

But things change so they do. Times change.

Now, you take Vic Ingraham as a for instance. He changed with the times. Back in 1933 he was working with Murphy Services out of Cameron Bay on the east shore of Great Bear Lake. Vic was running the schooner Speed II from Fort Franklin (Deline) to Cameron Bay when it caught fire and sank in a raging storm. He tried to save his crew but was badly burned in the attempt, made it shore and like to froze to death. After 14 shivering October days huddled among the beach rocks Vic was rescued and flown to the hospital in Aklavik where the doctor sawed off both of his legs and most of his fingers.

So Vic Ingraham had to find a new line of work. He moved to Yellowknife and went into the hotel business in the old town, down the hill, where the whole town used to be. He opened Yellowknife Rooms in 1941 and later the Yellowknife Hotel and beer parlor.

By and by the rocks of old town got some crowded. A government dude name of Fraser reckoned they aughtta build a new town up the hill. Old Towners called it a right stupid idea; called it “Fraser’s Folly” at first, then hung the moniker of “Blunderville” on it.

Not Vic Ingraham. He saw the writing on the wall. Changing times. He borrowed money from the beer companies and built the Ingraham Hotel up the hill in ‘46. He used to sit in the lobby with his feet up laughing at the mosquitoes trying to drill holes and suck blood from his wooden legs. Ingraham sold the hotel in 1951 and some time later it was renamed the Yellowknife Inn, housing the Yellowknife Inn Coffee Shop. Grace Skavinsky got her start in there.
So here’s the crowd in the Yellowknife Inn Coffee Shop. A morning ritual for many in the early 70s. Regulars gathered for coffee. The usual crowd. Tom Doornbos most every day, several times a day. Smokey Heal sporting his cattleman’s Stetson and cigar. Smokey met his wife to be in there. Sam Otto sometimes. Dunc Grant when he wasn’t flying. John Anderson-Thompson every once in a long while. Jim McAvoy. Some geezer who seemed to be pulling a yellow rubber chicken out from under his coat every time he came in there. Sonny Arden. Chuck Vaydik. Mike Piro. Bob Olexin. John Denison of ice road fame. Norm Byrne Jr. Shorty Brown. Danny Bacon. Walt Humphries if he was in town. Wayne Guzowski. Young George Tuccaro and a whole bunch more.

But we’re talking Thursday morning here, so there’s a difference. There’s an almighty powerful electric charge in the air. A tightness. Heavy. Like that pregnant pause before the wind hits, right before the first bolt of lightning of a purple thunder storm.

It’s the radio they’re all half-listening to. You can see that’s what’s on their minds. CBC radio. And here it comes. The dreaded introduction to the long awaited proclamations. And the deadly pronouncements from the Department of Northern Health.

“Would So-and-So please kindly report to Northern Health as soon as possible on a matter of personal urgency.”

Now, the thing was, most everybody, the young folks anyway, were at the dance at the Elks Hall the Friday before so they had a pretty fair idea of who went home with who. And the men gathered in the coffee shop, especially certain younger men, were feeling guilty as hell and absolutely terrified they were gunna hear their own names on the radio. So they’re sitting there hunched over, sucking coffee cups, and, some of them, praying they can keep the fear off their faces, fingers crossed that they won’t hear their names on the radio.

The older guys, meanwhile, are having trouble to keep from smiling. They’re getting a big kick out of the whole performance.

“Well, y’know what they did back in those days eh? You wouldn’t get yer shot. They wouldn’t give you the penicillin, unless you gave them the name of the person you got the dose from.”

It was a good idea I suppose. Good for the health of the public. But it sure played hell with a lot a folks who somehow managed to get along pretty fair without their private laundry flapping in the public breeze.

Many able-bodied men, and hefty women too, got themselves punched out in the Gold Range after the whole town heard their names, or their spouse’s names, or girlfriend’s or boyfriend’s names, or somebody else’s girlfriend or boyfriend’s names, over the radio. So it was a great relief, and of greater public service, to the patrons of the Yellowknife Inn Coffee Shop especially, when Northern Health and CBC stopped doing that.

Now we’re getting on to the days of the Miner’s Mess Cafeteria. Nobody ever used the word ‘cafeteria’; it was always the Miner’s Mess or just the Mess. “Meetcha at the Mess.” The renovations and renaming happened sometime in the early ‘70s. About 1972. Like colon cancer, progress had settled in and taken hold. The friendly old diner was deconstructed and remodeled to become a self-serve joint where you lined up with plastic trays to shuffle along the grub line. The new name was probably slapped on to make it at least feel feeder friendly. And it was, sort of, after a fashion.
Most folks agreed that self-service sucked but it was still the greatest place in Yellowknife by far to get together with the old time crowd. Northerners from all across the country had been congregating in that room for years and continued right on doing it.

But it was different room, that new place. The tables and chairs were all wood, for one thing, which made for a really noising room what with folks pulling and pushing chairs around. Real noisy.

But the greatest thing about that new place was the OLD TIMERS TABLE. It was just a bunch of little tables shoved together in a long row, but it was THE TABLE. Only a newcomer would sit there by accident. Others either knew their place at that table or sat somewhere else and waited, prayed, for an invitation.

There was also something called the MINER’S MESS COFFEE CLUB. An exclusive clan who actually had their own blue enamel cups hanging on pegs on the wall with their names painted on them. I was invited to sit at that table a few times – it felt some good I’ll tell ya.

I looked forward fondly to the day I could waltz into the Miner’s Mess any old time and plunk myself down at the oldtimer’s table knowing I belonged there.

Hell, I could do it now. I got 40 years in. But the Mess is gone.

excerpt from Yellowknife: notes from the gold range

Rules of Engagement

Now, way back in 1934 when the Twin Butte Mutual Telephone Company was organized, they had nineteen rules.  Bylaws, they called them.  The bylaws said as how it cost twenty five dollars for anybody to join up with the telephone outfit but since it was hard times, folks had three years to pay it off.  But they had to cough up the dollar twenty a month fee plus twenty five cents a month for maintenance on top of that.  She wasn’t cheap.

Another rule said everybody had to work four days a year digging post holes, resetting poles, stringing wire and stuff like that; whatever needed doing.  If they figured they was too busy they had to pay two dollars a day for each of those four days for somebody else to do the work. Seemed only fair.

Anybody wanting to join up after the company was first formed had to pay for and install their own line and telephone.

So ol man Hoffman, out there, he ran her in a half a mile along the top wire of his three strand barbwire fence.  Jacked up the voltage a bit with a couple more dry cells.  He had two scrawny aspen poles propped up at the road allowance where he ran her up and over so’s he could get his tractor under.  It worked pretty good most of the time but she’d short out pretty quick when a good rain blew in.  Short out the whole party line; not just his own phone.  So they made a rule about that, too.  No fence post lines and you weren’t allowed to the run the wire on no trees either.

There was telephones around, Talk-a-phones, they called them, way before the Co-op phones or Alberta Government Telephones.  Folks rigged’m up on fences so those quarter section lines of barbed wire became conduits linking up lonesome homesteads.

They were great daunting beasts, those bulky old boxes of hardwood, bolted to the kitchen wall.  A wet-cell battery supplied enough juice to send a voice rattling off along the fence line and there was a magneto crank to fire the bell down the line on the phone you were calling.

The fence lines worked sometimes if everybody shut the road gates but communication required shouting through raging wind storm roaring but all in all it was plumb nice to get word of a school house supper, hear your neighbour found his steer or Molly Burton had a baby boy.  A comfort is what it was, knowing you were connected with other folks.

excerpt from Party Line: telephone etiquette for rural folk