The Nick of Time

When you are filming with helicopter pilots, you tend to get fairly constant and detailed updates about the weather. Well over our last few days on this shoot, in the beautifully spelled hamlet of Qikiqtarjuaq, the weather forecasts were getting gloomier and gloomier. A giant low-pressure system was working its way down Baffin Island towards us, getting closer ... and closer ...
Please imagine ominous music beginning here, and underscoring the rest of the post, filling you with nameless dread.

The town is full of people with stories about how they've had to wait three or four days for an airplane. The weather around here is full of local nastiness, you can be in sunshine and a light breeze in town, and then once you get out into the fiords, you can suddenly meet up with twenty-five knot winds coming down off the glaciers above you, cold winds that would really rather like to slam your helicopter down onto the valley floor like a basketball.
Airplanes into Qikiqtarjuaq go through Pangnirtung first; Pangnirtung and Grise Fiord are tied for being the worst airports in Canada to get in and out of. Pangnirtung is famous for high winds, and the airport is conveniently parked between two mountain faces, and regularly decorated with low-lying cloud banks. It happens pretty regularly that the plane from Iqaluit flies all the way there, then the pilot takes one look at the local situation, soils his flight suit, and turns around to go straight back where he came from. If you want to get out of Qikiqtarjuaq, you have to wait for them to finish those antics before they even try to come and get you. So when a low pressure system is approaching, you start to realize that it might well mean an extra three or four days continuing to explore the social and cultural richness of a village of 500 people, while the things you are supposed to be doing elsewhere go delightfully undone. So we changed our flight, raced like mad to wrap up our shooting early and get the equipment packed, and set out to leave on the afternoon plane instead of waiting for the next morning.
You could see the weather just hanging there in the hills all day, inching its way closer and closer to the airfield. I figured if that wall of fog hit the end of the runway it was game over.

Meanwhile, from the airport window, we had ringside seats to watch the airline staff dealing with the baggage, using a system that involved putting all the outgoing bags into the airplane first, then trying to get an entire shipment of fruits and vegetables for the local store out from behind them. It was like watching your favourite team trying to hang onto a one-point lead in the playoffs, and taking stupid penalties every few minutes. We were all giving them body English from our vantage point inside, we must have looked like a four man a capella group rehearsing their dance routines.
But the home team pulled through in the clutch, and our flight took off just ahead of the dreaded low pressure system. It was goodbye to Qikiqtarjuaq, and for me, goodbye to the Arctic. Even though it was in fact just the first step of the journey home; as it turned out, it would take us almost three days to get from Qikiqtarjuaq to Iqaluit, from Iqaluit to Ottawa, and finally from Ottawa home. But the rest of that story is boring and I will spare you.
I'm heading back home to sit in a windowless edit room, not being chased by polar bears, and surrounded by peculiar southern things like streetcars and trees. Other people are covering the rest of the Northwest Passage; I got from Iceland to Resolute Bay and turned back. But that's OK, not making it through is a Northwest Passage tradition, and at least we didn't have to eat our sled dogs, or resort to cannibalism. So we are among the lucky ones.
So that is the end of my Arctic adventure, and the end of this blog. See you all at Starbucks.
Over and out.

Weird

The Arctic Hotel in Iqaluit is decorated with old photos from the fifties of Inuit hunting camps, Hudson's Bay Stores, and so on, scenes of life in the Arctic as it used to be. Sanjay the soundman went off to his room in the Arctic Hotel in Iqaluit to repair one of his cables and discovered this decorating the wall of his room:

It's an NFB soundman, on a shoot in the Arctic in the fifties, sitting in his room repairing equipment. There's a funny coincidence. I immediately checked the walls of my room; there were some old photos from the same period, but no directors. Or bloggers.
I thought that was the end of that, until the next day, when I suddenly realized that just outside my room, there was a picture from the same shoot of .... Doug Wilkinson, the director!
Writing in his diary!

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the term, a diary is an early form of blogging.Weird.
This is the point at which, were I telling you this at a party, I would make a noise like the soundtrack of an old horror film. Sadly, blogging doesn't allow that sort of humour.
Instead, please enjoy this very expressive emoticon:
= O

No shooting

We were going to shoot here, but then we figured we had better not.

Aiming your dish

I notice that these satellite dishes are aimed almost down at the horizon; back home they are still pointed more or less at the sky. That's part of what makes internet access so difficult up here - every form of telecommunication goes through these things, and the signal is going sideways through the atmosphere for many miles before it emerges. So if it's cloudy, or otherwise atmospherically challenged, all that interference gets extra time to work on your signal and mess it up.
These particular dishes are at 72 degrees north. Beyond 81 degrees north your satellite dish has to be pointed below the horizon. Which doesn't work at all.
That means that Santa Claus can't receive emails, which explains why he is the last guy on the planet to still get regular mail addressed to him. He can't get satellite TV or Netflix either. This year I'm switching, no more leaving out cookies and milk. Santa needs DVDs!

Rebecca and Edwin

Here are two of my favourite neighbors at the hunting camp. I don't have a lot to say about them. I like them. They are cute. End of story.

The Missing Link

Here's one of those peculiar combinations of images from different worlds I often see combined by random chance up here: a soldier taking a snapshot of the missing link. The soldier is up here for an extensive military exercise that's taking place up here, the base that's normally used by scientists is now stuffed to bursting with people in camouflage gear, although I'm not exactly sure what good green camouflage is going to do in a place that is entirely brown, grey and white.

On the table in the office is a replica of a famous fossil that was discovered in 2006 by a scientist working from here. It's called Tiktaalik Roseae, and it's a creature that shows the intermediate stage of development between fins and legs, one of the first animals ever to have the bright idea of crawling out of the water onto land. Which probably seemed like a better idea back in the Devonian period, when the weather around here was apparently quite tropical.
The military exercises are part of an effort by the Canadian government to establish sovereignty up here. Apparently the Northwest Passage is being used by all sorts of riff-raff these days, every now and then the local people look out into the bay and see a submarine popping up, and nobody knows whose submarine it is or what it's doing there. Russians, collecting glacial ice for their vodka, perhaps. Apparently the Canadians are a bit behind technologically - the Russians have submarines and stuff, the Canadian Army on the other hand don't even have enough skidoos to go round, I hear. Which could slow them down a bit if the battle for the north takes place anywhere away from paved roads. However no armed force in the world can match them in a snowball fight.
So the Canadian armed forces are spread out across the Arctic practicing various tasks, in this particular neighborhood they have a doll hidden somewhere representing a lost little girl and they're trying to find it and rescue it. Which will teach those pesky Russkies a thing or two; they may have the submarines but in the end, it's the scrappy Canadian underdogs who get the girl.
This noble effort to convince the world that Canada really owns the Arctic has been going on at least since the fifties, when they took a bunch of Inuit from a nice place near Pond Inlet, full of caribou and seal, and relocated them up here to Resolute Bay, where there is little to hunt and the landscape is basically a gravel pit. Human flags, they called them, and planted them here to flap in the breeze. It's a shameful little incident in Canada's past, which a few years later they tried to fix up by taking children away from their parents and sending them off to residential schools. And we all know how that worked out.
Some of the people who got uprooted and parked in Resolute Bay in the fifties are still living here now. One of them is a wonderful lady named Zipporah, which is such a great name that I would be her biggest fan even if she weren't awesome, which she is. Coincidentally, there is a photo of her on the front cover of this week's Nunavut News, blessing the military's new Arctic Training Centre. Which is very nice of her, considering.

There is also a photo of a bunch of people wading into the Arctic waters to participate in the "polar dip." Which shows that the survival instincts that drove Tiktaalik up onto land have pretty much faded away, I think.

An old friend

We just ran into our old friend the helicopter with the smashed windshield again. It has been patched together from two other broken windshields and joined with some kind of high-tech bandaid called 3M hundred mile an hour tape. If anyone from 3M wants to send me money for my mention of their product, I am open to discussing the idea.
I hope it works, because John is about to climb on that helicopter and fly around chasing polar bears in it. Here is the plan: a scientist drops John off, then flies over to a nearby polar bear and shoots it with a dart that tears off a little piece of its skin so he can get a DNA sample. Then he goes down to retrieve his dart, then he flies back to pick up John again.
That means a large irritated predatory mammal will be running around in a bad mood near my cameraman. This could be great cinema, or a nice lunch for one deserving polar bear. It's a win-win situation.

Inuit artist's statements

We have been filming with a number of Inuit artists, and their point of view about their art has been uniformly extremely practical. If you talk to an artist from my culture about their work, they talk about inspiration, about esthetics, about trying to communicate ideas, or in some cases, about stuff that's completely unintelligible to the average human being. But without exception, the artists we have been filming up here have talked money, about materials, and about logistics. Maybe they got offered a job so they started weaving, maybe  people were buying theor sculptures so it seemed like a good idea to keep making them, and so on.
I read something once about Inuit sculpture a long time ago that really struck a chord; I read that when they start working with a stone they don't decide in advance what it's going to be, they start carving it and discover the shape within it as they work. I spent years editing documentaries, I would quote that line a lot when I was talking about what an editor does. Sometimes a film becomes something rather different from what was planned, and you only find out what it should be by starting to work on it. People who watch what you've done often seem to discover things you hadn't realized were there, or at least hadn't realized were perceptible. So you sort of discover the film you are working on within the great big pile of raw material you start with.
We filmed with one of the best-known Inuit carvers in Canada, Looty Pijamini, and I had heard that he had been quoted as saying something much like this phrase I remembered hearing. So I asked him about it. Well guess what, he says something rather different. He said that he doesn't start carving without a plan, because then he would waste material. And he does try to imagine the shape within the stone, but mostly so that he can come up with a shape that more or less matches the shape of the stone, because then there will be less work to do to carve the excess away. Totally practical.
I am going to have to stop using that line about documentary editing now. That's too bad, it was my artist's statement, and now I will have to come up with a new one. Perhaps something completely unintelligible.

The Hunting of the Shark

We spent the day fishing for greenland shark. The scientist we are working with, Steven Kessel, had dropped a long line of hooks, baited with big delicious chunks of slightly rancid seal meat, the day before, and had left it there, anchored to the bottom, with a device that automatically releases a float when it is triggered remotely from above. Out we went in a small flotilla, one eighteen-foot boat piloted by Jeffrey Amarualik, our local Inuit captain, one small zodiac with a few military people from the base who were really really curious to see a greenland shark, and Scott and me with a second camera in a smaller aluminum boat with a motor that didn't exactly work correctly, stalled frequently, and had to be slightly disassembled and wrapped with an improvised starter cord to get going again. Humming the theme from Gilligan's Island.

Steven reached the point in the centre of the bay where his line had been dropped, hit the release code, and received a signal saying that the float had been deployed. But nothing came to the surface. He roamed around looking for it for a while, then he figured perhaps the line had tangled somewhat, so he enlisted us all to scan the waters for a float hovering just below the surface. We didn't find that either. So back to shore we went. The curious onlookers went home, and Steven started jury-rigging a grapple out of a variety of individual hooks and scrap metal that were lying about the shore. Back out he went to drag the bottom, trying to hook the line. I sent the cameraman and soundman back out for another try, knowing that they'd be out in an open boat on a windy lake in sub-zero temperatures for ages with a good chance of filming nothing at all. But if he did catch a shark with his little McGyver toy it was going to be awesome, so they had to go. Meanwhile Scott and I, who couldn't fit in the boat, hung out at the hotel bar for a while then decided we'd try out the steam room.
Just kidding. Hotel bars and steam rooms are not available options. Scott downloaded media in his room and I sat in a van waiting for the crew to return. But the van had a heater and a radio, up here that is the lap of luxury.
After an hour or two the adventurers returned to shore, cold, damp, and sharkless. Too bad. This is the problem with filming reality, reality doesn't arrange itself into nice neat storylines for you. That device would totally have worked in the sitcom. Steven would have wound up with the pretty corporal in camouflage fatigues, and I would have been played by Danny de Vito. That would be a much better film than mine. Drat.

Dog Food

The Inuit we are with, when they hunt narwhal, are mostly after the tusk and the muktuk, which is the skin. The meat itself, on the first one they caught, they just left behind. But we tried it and thought it was delicious. Way better than the muktuk. They say that the older people eat that stuff, but they don't really eat it any more themselves. Although perhaps different families have different tastes, because we did hear that the people at the next cabin were eating the meat too. In any case, we thought it was too good to waste, so Sanjay and Scott got permission to go down and carve off a few steaks to fry up later for ourselves.

Sam Omik, our boat captain, then killed another narwhal, and he took all the meat off that one. He's an older guy, we figured perhaps he still had a taste for it, but no - it turns out he eats the muktuk, and feeds the meat to his sled dogs. So when we started eating our narwhal steaks, there was a lot of laughing going on, because basically we were eating dog food. A few people tried it, Sam had a piece for example, but when his wife saw what we were up to she looked like she had seen someone picking their nose in public, and quickly went into her tent.
The next morning, Michael Kusugak, a storyteller and writer we brought along for this journey, told us about how when he was small, his father would bring a big sack of oatmeal along with them when they went out with the dog team in winter. Not to eat, but to fix the sled. If a piece of the runner broke you would mix up some oatmeal and pat it into place to freeze. In a few minutes, you had nice new runners ready to go.

But if times were tough, if the hunting was bad, if you didn't have enough walrus meat or whatever to keep your sled team going, guess what you would do with the oatmeal. Feed it to the dogs.
At that point one of the two scientists was having a nice big bowl of oatmeal for breakfast. Yep, dog food again.
Crazy white people.