Friday November 16th, 2018 (full photo album here)
[Editor’s note – as described in the previous post, I had actually squeezed in a LOT to the morning before departure from Iqaluit. I will still catalog a few of things here, but to get the whole story you will need to read Day 106 as well]
Up and at ’em.
Rachel was gracious enough to pick me up and take me around to various sites, from the “Road to Nowhere” to the other and unlabeled road to nowhere, both of which disappeared into a white and snowy wasteland. I could live there for the rest of my life, in some ways. We zipped around and she even got in a stop at her final work site for her business trip.
Then, it was time to drive to the airport, take in the sub-Arctic rainbow over the runway…
… and head inside the terminal. With only 2 gates, there was not a lot of space for Inuit artwork, but they made judicious use of the larger flat surfaces with excellent works:
Only 2 gates = only a handful of television screens with flight information – it was officially chilly all across Nunavut that morning!
With the sea frozen, and especially with the idiocy of teenage arsonists having burned down the food warehouse, the only way to bring in supplies (the modified front portion of the passenger planes, turned into an easy-access cargo hold) was higher priority than getting us paying customers onto the plane. Still, it was pretty cool to watch the hatch open like the gull-wing door on a DeLorean:
Maybe the most important moment in Canada for me was next – I got to wear shorts in around -15 degree F wind-chill, as I walked to the plane on the tarmac. Rachel surreptitiously snapped evidence of my (stylish) boots-and-shorts combo, and I got the satisfaction of Inuit people and Canadians shoveling their jaws off the asphalt when they saw me in that bitter and cold wind. Perfect:
My seat turned out to be right behind the cargo bay, and that wall was surprisingly poorly insulated. My cojones in wearing shorts for the walk made for an unpleasant flight, but there were two consolation prizes. Neither of them took the sting out of the highway robbery pricing for tickets to fly, but the warmed and gooey chocolate chip cookie was good…
… and the hot chocolate was great:
Even better – my seat was by itself so I was able to lean over and get some FANTASTIC photographs of the barren wilderness in its splendor and glory:
Eventually, that flight heading straight south reached Ottawa International Airport and my chilly legs were afforded a chance to debark. I walked into the terminal from the tarmac (always a weird experience) and gathered up my belongings. I wished Rachel the very best, trying my best to convey my gratitude at her having driven me to the places I would not have reached otherwise (and for becoming my friend). With a hug, she was off towards her next flight to get home. I was off towards the parking lot.
Or, rather, I tried to go that way. “Young man! YOUNG MAN!!” I turned, discerning from the voice that at 30 years of age, I could still qualify for that moniker. I turned around and eyed the source of that call. An elderly Inuit woman, who I recognized as someone who had been on the flight down from Iqaluit, caught up with me. She looked me right in the eye, and in perhaps the most unexpected pagan blessing I will ever receive, she told me the following:
“Young man, you should thank whichever hunter caught the seal you ate,” she explained, looking down from my eyes at my still bare legs, then back up at my eyes. “That hunter was very good, as you ate the flesh of that seal and gained its strength and spirit. That is the only way you could handle the cold, in those short pants.”
I was taken aback, and for a split second I suspect that my confusion played across my face. It was abundantly clear to me that she was entirely sincere – her religious explanation for my incomprehensible choice in wearing shorts was her best guess at trying to understand. In one fell swoop, I got a pagan omen in favor of my ever growing sense that perhaps I should move to Alaska for a few years in the shorter term (to make use of my inner spirit of the seal, you see); and also was blindsided once again by the satisfaction which is possible from interacting with a total stranger in a positive way without any sort of saccharine reference to social media likes or following or other disingenuous “connection” which is not really there.
What is life, if not a series of brief encounters by chance? Invigorating, then, to just have a chance meeting and a smile at the joy of those positive times in life which can be neither planned for nor expected.
I recovered from my confusion, and thanked her for her kind words indeed. I wished her well in the comparative warmth of Ottawa.
Then I walked outside and ran into “neither planned for nor expected” many inches of snow had fallen and encrusted my truck. This time, unlike up in Labrador, I did not have a hotel concierge to loan me a broom to try and clear the truck…
… so one of many tools crammed into the truck came to my rescue. A tiny and flimsy cheap handheld broom (for use with dustpan), to Bob Ross my way out of snowy truck encrustation:
My work of art took a while, but I got it done. I always do.
The truck was warmed up enough to put a very satisfying address into the GPS. The home country. But after such a long day of Nunavut adventuring; a chilly flight; and an Inuit blessing in an international airport… I was going to drive back down into those United States.
First, though, I *completed* the Canadian map on my tailgate, adding both Ontario and Nunavut. What a rush:
The next “rush” was me, following the speed limit all the way down to the border with New York state. Google Maps (what I ended up switching to, after a construction traffic snarl) was nice enough to offer me a personal welcome as I blazed back across to the land of franchises, litigation, and decency-gridlocked-by-headache.
The US of A:
The exhaustion, on schedule, had set in. I was in no shape to look for a campground but I did at a fuel stop. Nothing free near me, it was past midnight and I was burned too many times in the south by “show up and hope to pay in the morning, to find a locked gate barring my entry” so that option was out. I did that unpleasant calculus of “too tired to keep going, but no hotel near me, but need to make distance” – by this point in the trip, I was an expert. The equation spit out “somehow make it to the La Quinta of Johnson City, NY” and so I did it.
The night clerk was friendly, looked about half as tired as I felt, and inquisitive as to what brought me to Johnson City at such a late hour. I think I mumbled something semi-intelligible, it may have even been in English. I couldn’t tell you what it was. That room in my memory is a blur, as I stumbled in, set up my CPAP on muscle memory alone (my vision was faulty by that point) and I passed out, 1500 miles from where I woke up.
A Jaunt Around the States 