North of Unreal--2007 Western Magazine Award WINNER--Best Column/Regular Feature
The way muskox bend to gentle herding
You go north to Whitehorse to knock on the door of a painter who speaks only in metaphor. You want to know how to scrape the hair off a muskox and use knitting needles made of bone. You surrender your vanilla yogurt to airport security and skim low over clouds and valleys in the belly of a plane that sweats and shakes as it drops down into the Yukon.
Your young daughter is puzzling over the white crayon that leaves no mark on her paper. She draws and draws and declares the crayon broken. She makes plans to bury it in the snow.
The kids here stay up late to dance in their snow pants on gym mats in a cavernous white tent by the river. The tent smells like diesel and the children jump to live music, their mittens dancing around them on strings. The floor dancers from Iqaluit spin on their shoulders and moon-walk and mime a seal hunt. The girls from Arviat lay their hands on each other’s arms and sing duets with their throats, singing mouth to mouth, sharing the air, until they collapse into giggles at the sounds they’re making of a bee and a buzz and the sharp crack of ice.
The river outside steams in the cold and a teenager on Main in a puffy blue coat begs for money to buy diapers. You walk back to your hotel bed in a cold so fierce it burns your stomach and turns your toes numb.
In the morning, a smiling family runs bacon and coffee to your table, even though today’s paper exposes their father as “Crazy Al.” The newspaper calls him an alleged drug runner who is only pretending to bring noodles back from Vancouver in a white cube van. “How can you have a business just selling noodles?” demands an anonymous source. But you’re only just starting to learn that all things are possible. That the world’s best ski waxer makes his living here, and the dancer who choreographed a parka ballet.
Years ago, another woman drove north to teach art to the kids in these schools, and she now sits happily in the white tent by the river, making bowls out of pig gut and milkweed pods her mother sends from Montreal. Nearby, Ruben is carving whalebone into high art and humming heavy metal in Innuktituk. Later on, he’ll put down his air guitar to translate for the Whip Master of Nunavut. The Whip Master uses his very long lash to slay ptarmigan and feed his family. But here, he cracks the whip only to take down pop cans and slash cigarettes in half. People shout and clap, and when the Whip Master’s done, he coils up his whip and puts it away in a big, green garbage bag.
You fall asleep to the percussion of old-fashioned typewriter keys. You dream of raven puppets and the shadows they make in the sky. Nearby, a lounge singer in a tight silver dress imitates sex and death with the sounds in her throat. Soon enough, you hit the road with Buckwheat and K. and a bag of cheezies and head north. The windows are frosty and there’s time for K. to remember what happened after his cousin tripped on the chains of a dog team and how he had to watch when they sewed her up again. There’s time to speed along the riverbank and rouse a moose back up on its stumble legs. All around you, the hoof prints of goats and sharp blue ice and spruce beetle ghost trees and the marks from a tsunami that swept down the valley and slammed a mountain. All around you, the texture of snow that made a painter sick with metaphor. The way that muskox bend to gentle herding.
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