Rankin Inlet: A Novel

PART I

KEEWATIN

ALISON 1

Liverpool, England

March 15, 1970

I feel daft—a grown woman writing to her damn diary, like a schoolgirl.

I kept a diary when I was a teen, but it was mostly besotted rubbish—lovesick daydreams about dating a Herman’s Hermit.

But soon I will be moving far, far away from here, to a place where I don’t know a soul. I fear I may go mad without someone to talk to, living all by myself in an Eskimo village in the frozen north. I think I shall need this diary. I hope it will be more than a place for depressed musings, perhaps the record of a Grand Adventure, as many Brits and Scots have had before me—the ones with dim futures at home who signed on as traders or missionaries to explore the Arctic.

Canada needs nurse-midwives to work in the remote communities, so you’d think they would teach midwifery in their own nursing schools, but they don’t. Instead, they come to Europe to recruit trained midwives. They made me an offer I could not refuse, with terms much better than anything a new graduate can expect here nowadays. It includes generous pay, with an annual isolation bonus. Even my room and board is covered. I’ve signed on for two years, and then, who knows? Perhaps I will take all the money I will have saved by then and travel on to New Zealand or Australia, or somewhere warm like that, where I might find handsome fellows who speak English.

I’ve come back to Liverpool to say my goodbyes, which has not been easy. I feel badly about leaving Nancy behind, but I can’t go carting my little sister to the back of beyond. She wouldn’t be able to stay with me at the nursing facility, and who knows what kind of schools they have in the Arctic? It was her bad luck to be born last in our family. She will have to learn to deal with Mum and Dad, just as I did. They are not cruel, just disappointing at times, and boring as sod. I told Nancy she must work hard at school, and above all else do not get pregnant like Lydia did, then perhaps she will be lucky like me and win a scholarship to go to school in London, or somewhere away from here. It would save her life.

I have always felt as if the stork dropped me down the wrong chimney, into that cramped terrace house near the city centre. I could never decide which was worse—the depressing ranks of red brick houses with the odd gap left over from the war, or the anonymous high-rise blocks the government built to re-house people and improve the neighbourhood.

There were already four wee children in that home on Scottie Road when I arrived, and Nancy was still to come after me. Mum was our caregiver, and she became more and more of a martyr, as Dad began drinking more heavily. Without him around much to give them a good cuffing, my brothers ran wild. My sisters were better behaved, but where has it got them. Lydia eventually married and moved to Edinburgh, Marion’s gone to the nunnery, and poor Nancy is still in school, dreaming.

It is hard to believe that Liverpool was once the most prosperous city in the whole world, grown rich from trading sugar and cotton from the Indies. You’d never guess it now. It feels like a dying place. My brothers wanted to work at the docks like Dad, even though he complains about having to cross the water to Birkenhead now. But shipping has declined so much, there are no new jobs to be had. Seamus and Pete consider themselves very lucky to have found assembly work at the new Ford plant out in Halewood. So, when they are not on strike, they are building Escorts. Seamus even drives one now, though Pete is too fond of his Mini to give it up. They migrate like zombies from the plant to the pub or a football match, and then home to their flats that smell of sour milk, wet diapers, and chip fat.

That could have been my life, too, but I got away to London and saw a different sort of world altogether. I didn’t realize just how clannish we were, until I had my eyes opened by what was going on in Soho and Chelsea in the 60’s. You could actually feel the vibes of creativity and innovation around you. You could smell freedom and experimentation and dope in the air. There were young people from all over the world gathering there, and the world was looking to us as the leaders of trends and fashions. It was a funny mix of optimism and hedonism. At first I was startled by people my family would have branded as dodgy, but eventually I relaxed a bit, and even bought a miniskirt. I worked hard at school, but I learned to cut loose at the weekend. A bunch of us would gather to watch Ready Steady Go on Friday nights, and we’d be so excited after seeing the Beatles or the Rolling Stones or Manfred Mann play that we would have to go out dancing til the wee hours at the Bag O’ Nails or the Ad Lib, if we could find someone to pay our way. Those were fun times, daring times. People like Twiggy shouted it is okay to be different and to explore new values, rather than be bound up in archaic ways of thinking.

Mixing with new people opened my mind. I realized I did not want to live in Liverpool again. And I quit being Catholic. I could not come up with a good defence of some of the cornerstones of the faith (immaculate conception, infallibility of the pope), and I got tired of others sniggering at me when I would say that you just have to have faith and believe these things. Why, they would ask, insistently, and I began to wonder myself.

Religion is just not important to me any more, and some moments I think it is all a lot of poppycock. But the announcement that I no longer consider myself Catholic was like dropping a bomb on the family. I’ve never seen my parents get such a cob on. Perhaps I should have kept my mouth shut about it, but that would be living a lie. I could ask for forgiveness, but I don’t feel I have done anything wrong.

Mum and Dad barely speak to me now. Even my brothers and their wives give me swift pecks on the cheek—just air kisses really, no more heartfelt hugs. None of them seem able to look me straight in the eye, as if they are afraid they might glimpse the devil inside me. They have not even asked when I might be coming back. Goodbye and good riddance to you, too, then.

If only I were brave enough to sever all ties—just go and start a new life all my own. But when Nancy clung to me and cried, I broke down and promised her that I would write.

I am to be posted to a place called Rankin Inlet, Northwest Territories, an Eskimo village with a few hundred inhabitants, located on the west coast of the Hudson Bay, roughly halfway between Manitoba’s northern border and the Arctic Circle. The recruiter offered me a choice: Rankin Inlet in the eastern Arctic, or a place in the western part of the Territories called Bison Passage, which is inhabited by an Indian tribe. At first I was leaning toward the west, as I thought there would be more trees there and a warmer climate. But then the fellow came clean and told me that there had not been a natural death in Bison Passage for over a decade. It is all hunting accidents and truck crashes and murders and suicides. That frightened me, so I decided to take my chances with the Eskimos and chose Rankin Inlet.

I am saying goodbye to my childhood friends and school chums, sorting out my belongings to decide what to give to Nancy and what to sell, etc. Like an astronaut, I have begun to count down the days until departure, with a mix of excitement and trepidation.

ALISON 2

Rankin Inlet, Northwest Territories

March 28, 1970

I left home last Tuesday before first light. It was a gloomy, misty morning, which helped me to think I would never miss Liverpool. I paid for a taxi to Lime Street Station, as no one offered to drive me down, and I had too much baggage for the bus. It took about three hours to reach London Euston, where I was able to take the tube to Heathrow. I caught an afternoon flight from London to Toronto, then another flight from Toronto to Winnipeg. I slept at an airport hotel there, and the next morning I boarded a small plane that flew from Winnipeg through a series of small communities tucked away among pine trees, until we finally reached a town called Churchill, an old military base and shipping port on the south shore of the Hudson Bay. The government had arranged for a hotel room and meal vouchers in the town for me, as I was to attend an orientation program there before travelling on to Rankin Inlet.

The cabbie who picked me up at the airport was a taciturn native fellow, who peeked at me in the rear-view mirror, but would answer my questions only with grunts. He dropped me off at a very plain building with a large plate glass window that was covered with some kind of reflective material, above which a painted sign creaked in the wind, announcing that I had arrived at the Polar Bear Inn. I checked in and had my evening meal, the Polar Bear special of the day, which was moose steak with peas, mashed potatoes, and gravy. I was too full to do the pudding, even though I was curious to know what a Saskatoon pie might be.

Dusk was falling and I was feeling completely thrashed after my long trip, but I decided to take a walk around the town before turning in. I have never seen a place like Churchill, Manitoba. So desolate. Streets littered with clumps of dirty snow, and the many abandoned army buildings giving it the look and feel of a ghost town. All under the shadow of an oversized port building whose cranes and chutes look like gangly arms waiting to load grain onto foreign ships in the summertime.

The town is perched right at the edge of the tree line, where massive slabs of flat grey rock poke out of the snow everywhere you look, with runty pine and spruce trees growing out of their fissures. The stunted trees appear to lean drunkenly on one another for support. Where there is not pale grey rock there is paler grey ice—great frozen slabs of it piled along the shore of the Hudson Bay. I stood listening to the ice creaking and groaning, imagining the ancient voices of lost seamen, until I realized that my own exhaled breath was coating my eyelashes in frost.

I turned back toward the town and suddenly saw a splash of neon shining out from among a row of uniform metal Quonset huts. As I got closer, I saw that the neon letters spelled Aurora Borealis. There was a Moosehead beer sign bolted onto the door, and I could hear a jukebox playing inside. Just then two men in their thirties came strolling along between the grey buildings, their breath sending up two parallel plumes of vapour to mark their progress. Hello, love, are you new in town? one of them inquired. I said I was, and I asked what exactly the Aurora Borealis was. Well, it’s the northern lights, of course, one man replied. Don’t be stupid—she means our pub here, said the other.

They told me the Aurora Borealis was a private club for the government workers who are stationed in Churchill, but they invited me in as their guest. I thought there could be no harm in having a beer, and I had many questions about this outpost that I hoped they might be able answer for me.

The fellows introduced themselves as Bruce and Gordy. Bruce worked for Social Services and Gordy worked for the Department of Public Works. I told them I was a nurse headed for Rankin Inlet. They hooted and rolled their eyes and said I was in for an adventure. They said that I was younger and better looking than most of the nurses they’d seen heading to settlements in the far north. With that red hair, blue eyes, freckles, and that slim build of yours—they’ll have to lock you up in your room at night to keep the rogues at bay, they laughed.

The men told me that Churchill is the government headquarters for administration of the Keewatin Region, which stretches from the Manitoba border to the Arctic Circle. The region includes Rankin Inlet and six other small communities with exotic names like Eskimo Point, Whale Cove, and Coral Harbour. It seemed odd to me that they would administer a big chunk of the Northwest Territories from an outside province, and I said so, but Gordy replied that no one would want to live any further north. Churchill is the limit for most people, he said—cold, and isolated, and lacking enough in the amenities of a civilized society. They don’t call it the Barrenlands or the Barren Grounds up there for nothing, Bruce added.

Then they teased me and said I must be prescient, as the Government of the Northwest Territories recently announced plans to move the regional headquarters up north to Rankin Inlet. There is no set timetable for the move, but it is expected to happen sometime in the next few years. According to the men, this announcement has destroyed the civil servants’ morale. Everyone is threatening to quit their jobs and move back south. A half-stewed patron further down the bar chipped in with his two cents’ worth. The natives want autonomy—just let ‘em try running things themselves, he slurred, with a tone that implied of course they would fail.

Bruce and Gordy invited me to join them at a going-away party for a fellow civil servant, a senior administrator who was one of the first to flee, but I declined. They insisted on escorting me back to my hotel, however, warning me about the perils of drunken natives and wild polar bears. I wasn’t sure if they were kidding or not.

I collapsed onto the hotel bed in my travel clothes and slept like the dead until my morning wake up call. I brushed my teeth and took a glorious hot shower, then went downstairs and had the Polar Bear Inn breakfast special—a plate of greasy eggs and bacon with limp white toast and pitiful jelly that was nothing more than sugared gelatine. I felt a pang of missing Mum’s homemade scones with currant jam.

At nine o’clock, a car came around and picked me up to take me to the place where I was to have my orientation. When I arrived, I was ushered into the office of a heavy man with a ruddy complexion, who was dabbing perspiration from his brow, though the room was none too warm. He shook my hand and introduced himself as Dick Smithers. Smithers apologized and told me that the person in charge of providing orientations for new nurses was out on leave due to a sudden family emergency, and the backup staff person was on maternity leave. Given the uncertainties surrounding when either of these parties might return to work, he thought it unwise to detain me in Churchill indefinitely. Besides, the government offices would be closed tomorrow in observance of Good Friday. He advised me to travel ahead to Rankin Inlet, and get my orientation on the job. He said I would not be working alone. There are two other nurses there, and both have had considerable northern experience, so they would be able to help me out more than he could. Besides, he pointed out, scheduled flights to Rankin Inlet were few and far between, and there happened to be one departing that afternoon.

I agreed to go, but asked what sort of things one would typically learn in an orientation program. He said he was no expert, but he believed it covered such topics as how to cope with the stress of working long hours of overtime and having your leave denied in times of medical emergencies. Also coping with foreign cultural beliefs about illness and healing practices, or even about seeking treatment at all. And getting used to the level of violence in remote communities. I asked what he meant by violence. He flushed and said: Oh, you know, fights, stabbings, booze brawls, rape, murder, and so on.

Perhaps Smithers was an engineer or an architect, because he pulled out a diagram of the Rankin Inlet Nursing Station, to show me proudly that it was a state-of-the-art northern health facility, with three examination and treatment rooms, four private beds for longer term care, a community meeting room for classes or lectures, a large walk-in supply closet, living quarters with three separate bedrooms, a laundry, etc. Then he suggested I better hurry if I wanted to catch that plane to Rankin Inlet.

I stood up to go, and asked Smithers what his main bit of advice to me would be. He said every northern nurse should always think in terms of triage: try to sort out which patients we can treat right there, even if it means being a bit creative or extrapolating from what we have been taught to do, and which ones are in such dire condition that we will not be able to fix them with our limited resources. These patients we should arrange to have flown out as soon as possible for treatment in the bigger clinics and hospitals in Manitoba, keeping in mind how costly this would be to the taxpayers. With that, he wished me the best of luck and led me by the elbow to the door.

His secretary had already called a cab for me, and it was that same cheerless native driver, which made me wonder if he had the only cab in town. The fellow looked a bit more haggard, as if he had not slept or shaved since our last encounter. He drove me to the Polar Bear Inn, where I hurriedly packed my things and checked out. Then he drove me back out along the lonely road to the airport.

The day was cold and overcast, with an odd layer of white fog hovering a few meters above the ground. When I went to check in for the flight to Rankin Inlet I learned that, because of that fog, all flights were on hold. The agent explained that the northern navigational system is spotty and temperamental, so bush pilots must rely on their vision to get where they want to go.

I spent several hours sitting around the terminal, reading a Vogue magazine that I’d picked up in the Winnipeg airport, waiting for the fog to lift. There was no cafeteria of any kind in the terminal, but the agent had some thick coffee with tinned milk and a limited selection of candy bars available for purchase. It was just me, the agent, and a handful of Eskimos in the waiting room. There was a young family consisting of a mother and a father with their three young children and a wee baby. In addition, there were eight teenaged boys all wearing navy blue knit shirts, perhaps from some kind of a private school. The young men drew my attention like a magnet. I hoped my eyes were not popping out of my head, but I was very surprised to find them so attractive. Perhaps I’ve read too many books about spear hunters dressed from head to foot in fur clothing, because I was shocked to see these young Eskimo men wearing blue jeans and leather jackets and fringed suede vests and cowboy boots, snapping their gum in synch with the rock and roll music bouncing from their transistor radios and cassette players. They were smart and trim and sexy, and would have fit right in at any pub in Liverpool. They did not look like they were going home to live in skin tents or igloos. They had suitcases and backpacks, and bags of small appliances that clearly were going to require electricity: clock radios, coffee percolators, toaster ovens, and hair dryers. It seemed like enough stuff to set up a small department store wherever they were headed.

The two older adults would smile and nod at me in a friendly manner whenever our eyes met. They made me feel welcome and comfortable somehow, even though they could not speak a word of English. It occurred to me that I must learn to speak some of the local language, if I am ever to work with these people effectively.

The mother was wearing a beautiful embroidered white wool parka with a roomy pouch that allowed her to carry her baby on her back. She wore a colourful cord belt tied round her waist to prevent the baby’s legs from slipping down. The baby had rosy red cheeks and the shiniest black eyes, filled with curiosity and awe about everything around it. The mother walked round and round the terminal, rocking the baby on her back until it finally fell asleep.

The two wee girls, with very runny noses, knelt backwards on their hard plastic chairs to get a good stare at me—as if I were the best entertainment around. They were wearing some type of long traditional dresses made from bright floral print cotton, with colourful ribbon sewn around the hems and cuffs. Like their parents, they wore hand-made sealskin boots that made a pleasant scuffing sound when they pattered around the terminal. The little boy was dressed in store-bought corduroy pants and black leather cowboy boots, but had a wool duffle parka with fur around the hood that looked home made, with hand-embroidered animals on the back and pockets. He had a terrible rattling cough, but he kept himself amused by yanking at the knobs on the cigarette vending machine.

Finally, a handsome and fit looking young man with pale green eyes and curly brown hair strolled into the terminal. His neat wool trousers and brown leather jacket were quite a contrast to the podgy freight agent’s stained tweed coveralls. He spoke briefly with the agent, who then turned and announced that Wayne was a bush pilot who would be taking a charter to Rankin Inlet just as soon as the fog broke. He was taking a small load of perishable freight, like eggs and lettuce, for the Hudson Bay Company store, and he was concerned about taking off as soon as possible, before the goods froze solid in his cargo hold. He also had a dozen Easter lily plants on board, which would be useless to the store after the weekend.

Wayne’s twin-engine plane had four seats plus the co-pilot seat available, so if passengers wanted to go along with him, rather than wait for the commercial flight, which might well be cancelled since it was getting so late in the day, they could do so. I jumped at the chance to ride up front, and it was decided that the Eskimo family could squeeze into the four passenger seats, with the two girls sharing a seat. The teenaged boys would have to wait and fly together at a later time.

Within half an hour, we were in the air at last, on the way to Rankin Inlet. As we flew north, I could see the puny trees grow weaker