Day 106 – Relaxing in Iqaluit, Nunavut

Thursday November 15, 2018 (full photo album here)

1) The whole truth of the day: I was beat to hell tired. I spent the vast majority of it in bed, reading and relaxing. Only in the evening did I meet up with Rachel for dinner and then checking out the Nunavut Brewing Company (NuBrewCo):

Not only was I in the second furthest north brewing company in the world… I ended up making friends with the master brewer, also Mike (and also from Ohio) along with Rachel, and we had a grand time talking about the vagaries of brewing in such intensely cold climate and so forth:

2) Additionally, to keep tomorrow’s post from being too long, I will add some things discovered the next morning here, in bullet form:

• A daytime view of Iqaluit:

• Seeing the sad evidence of a couple of idiot teenagers who had decided to commit arson and burn down the primary food warehouse for the whole city AFTER the bay froze over and thus created a supply crisis for the balance of the winter ahead:

• Seeing the insane cost of food (in Canadian dollars, mind you, likely further elevated by the arson-induced shortage:

• Various soul-gripping experiences of the beauty of snow on what is, by rainfall, a snowy, treeless, desert of an island:

• A very quick jaunt over to the Road to Nowhere which is aptly named, as you can see…

… and braving some damned cold weather to get these photos, too:

• Admiring the outside of the Nunavut Legislative Assembly, with the yellow/red/white provincial flag…

… alongside the various tribal national flags of the constituent First Nation peoples within Nunavut:

• An abbreviated speed-run of a glimpse inside the legislative building, including gorgeous scrimshaw onto caribou antlers…

… a regal sword fashioned out of a narwhal tusk…

… and the center of the council chamber having a toboggan, with each delegate’s chair featuring traditional Inuit materials, such as sealskin and caribou leather:

• The sad reality of the town junkyard as emblematic for the problems facing Iqaluit, without any recycling program and waste (including hazards) being generated on the island and then left in place (or worse, leaking into the earth). Weird, what kinds of trash we create but never have to think about because we do not have to see or think about where we live (as we do not see junkyards):

 

Now, a set of facts or details learned along the way, also in bullet form as I crammed in so much while in Iqaluit:

• First Air and Canadian North are both Inuit owned and going to merge. They used a price war to kill off a new company (approved to create a competing airline) with $600 tickets vs First Air and Canadian North charging $1800. This pricing stranglehold by the monopolistic airlines are prime causal factors in the incredibly high cost of living in Iqaluit. Sadly, the high prices charged (to try and help the Inuit, by bringing in as much cash as possible) are also causal in the poorer Inuit being trapped in their cities and hamlets, unable to get out into the rest of Canada.
• In nearly all of Nunavut’s other cities besides Iqaluit, the cost of a medevac is well over $30,000. Yikes.
• Ridiculous red tape is endemic, with Facebook business ads requiring 6 months pre-approval to get posted without penalty.
• The province of Nunavut was created with the best mineral and natural resource rights being afforded to the Inuit tribes. This very fair ideal is tempered by the fact that the intense remoteness and lack of infrastructure prevent the vast majority of them from being worked.
• The entire province has no roads to the outside world, no deepwater ports, and only a narrow window when shallow draft ships can reach Iqaluit… so resupply and growth are strictly regimented by the realities of the natural world, and not human intentions.
• A small set of Inuit people were functionally abandoned in the Arctic by the Canadian military as part of the “High Arctic relocation” in an effort to assert Canadian ownership over the Arctic regions nearest the country.
• … so many other moments and stories and encounters. This life we live, and the people all around us… we are so very blessed.

 

My second day, my only full day, came to a close in frigid Iqaluit. Nunavut is 1/5 of Canada’s landmass, and it had an equivalently huge impact on my mind and spirit. I will say more in the post for tomorrow, as Day 107 is when I had the revelation hit me. But I will close with another story of the local lived experience.

From 4 different sources, I heard it told that the handful of men who had survived hand-to-hand combat with polar bears in local communities reported the same thing, in their own words. Boiled down, they all reported that at a certain point in that terrifying experience, they recognized in a primal way that the only way they would survive and perhaps win was to become the polar bear. Take on the aspect of the polar bear, assume its spirit, and best that unstoppable force with the equally unstoppable force within their core.

I have always been capable of being a work horse and applying myself indomitably to a task or specific goal. The intense and grueling pace of this trek had, at some point along the way, seen me take this on as my own spirit.

I might have been a hard worker before this trip of self-discovery, growth, meditation, and high fuel costs.

After the trip? I would be, in my own way, as unstoppable as the polar bear in hand-to-paw combat.