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.

Media management in the wild

Of course the early inhabitants of these parts didn't have diesel generators, they backed up their data using seal oil lamps. And an oral tradition.

Eating muktuk

Raw narwhal skin, that is, with a little blubber still attached. It's a bit like very very chewy octopus. Like a very weird sushi flavour - interesting but I probably wouldn't order it again next time. Maybe if I had had some wasabi.

Twins

John Tran and Sam Omik, two men obsessed with shooting stuff.

John steps up too

John, tired of hearing so much about how superior Sanjay's boots are, has upped the ante. In your face, Sanjay. These boots go up to 11.
This is how arms races begin. Although in this case arms don't really play a part.

Waiting on the shore, not quite sure what we are waiting for.

Here we are, having just been dropped off at an Inuit family's hunting camp, after a three-hour boat ride into a place called Milne Inlet. Apparently people call this area the Serengetti of the Arctic. I think Serengetti may be some kind of pasta. I do hope so, we haven't had lunch yet.

washing narwhal tusks

This guy was washing his narwhal tusks in the stream that runs through town. He had six of them. I am a bit confused about narwhals, they are not listed as endangered or at risk, but only Inuit can hunt them. In fact, it seems that there just isn't all that much information about them, nobody really knows how many of them there are. So perhaps they are protected from indiscriminate hunting just in case, by a society that puts care of the environment above immediate gain, and moves cautiously and wisely before endangering the delicate balance of nature.
Just kidding.
The Inuit hunt them for their meat and blubber, which they do love to eat, but the really valuable part is the tusk. They need to be registered and tagged before they can be sold, so they have to pass through the co-op, which I guess then resells them for more money. We saw the prices they go for at the co-op, they are posted. For a six or seven foot tusk, $240 per foot. This guy has six tusks, of various lengths; I figure he is soaking about nine thousand dollars in the stream. He won't be able to hunt narwhal all year, this may be his one big haul for the year for all I know, but still, in a place where there very few actual jobs as we know them down south, hunting narwhal is a pretty good thing to get good at.
It does make me wonder who is buying these things. Once they are tagged, marked up, and shipped somewhere they must cost the final buyer several thousand dollars each. Who is willing to spend that kind of money to put a weird animal tooth up on their wall?
There is a theory that narwhal tusks passing from hand to hand over a trade route from the north to Europe may have given rise to the myth of the unicorn. Maybe some of that magical value still attaches to them. Or maybe they make good pool cues. I don't know, it still seems like a lot of money. But I guess as long as someone out there disagrees, it's good news for this guy.
Bad news for narwhal, though.
Also - note to self - drink from upstream of this point only.

Dr. Seuss, field biologist

Here's an interesting-looking plant that grows all over the place here in Pond Inlet. We saw them in Greenland, too. They look oddly familiar; it took me a while to realize why. This is clearly the plant upon which Horton heard a Who. I was once in California and saw trees that looked exactly like the odd trees in Dr. Seuss' drawings, and realized that while I had thought his imaginary worlds were pure cartoon fantasies, in fact to some small extent he must have been drawing from life. Now I realize that he was faithfully depicting the arctic habitat as well. What a genius.
To further support my theory, I suggest that you look up a picture of a narwhal. See? Obviously drawn by Dr. Seuss. I rest my case.

Pond Inlet bulletin board

Naming places

In the Sirmilik park office in Pond Inlet they have a map showing the Inuit place names in the area. Europeans tended to name places for kings, queens, politicians, or their wealthy sponsors, that's why several islands in the far north are named for beer company owners, for example. The Inuit are more descriptive, if there are sharp rocks somewhere they name it accordingly. I want to visit number 233.

Shawarma below the Arctic Circle

Big news in Iqaluit: they now have a shawarma and donair place. Behind an unassuming facade next to the airport you can now find a delicious little piece of the Middle East in the Near North, which strikes me as a pretty great combination of moderate extremes. I hope I can be there one day when some people from the Midwest come visit.

Danish design

After all this time in Greenland, where the Danish influence is so evident in the architecture, furniture and fashions, it was a nice surprise to come home and find that a good portion of my house had been redecorated while I was away with the products of a well-known Danish design company.
Specifically, Lego.

Nive's biggest fan

As we were getting into the van with Nive to go shoot, we were approached by a very drunken man, who wanted to tell us that he loved her, and we should drive carefully, because he loved her. Also that we should drive carefully.
I was waiting in the driver's seat for the time to come when she would give him a polite brushofff, so I could start pulling away from him and get on with our business, but she carried on a long conversation with him in Greenlandic.
It turns out he was telling her a sad story, he had been diagnosed with cancer and given six months to live; he had told the doctor that he would rather drink himself to death first, and that is what he was setting out to do.
She also told me later that she had decided long ago not to treat people with any less respect because they were drunk, that is how they had chosen to live their lives and it was not up to her to judge them.
It''s a very different attitude to drunks on street corners than I have developed, living as I do in a large North American city. A much nicer and more tolerant attitude, although some days, in some parts of town, if I spent time having a conversation with every drunk that wanted to talk I'd spend all day walking ten blocks. Maybe it's different in a place like Nuuk, with 3,000 inhabitants.
Before we finished Nive had received several big hugs and a number of big wet kisses on her hand and on her cheeks. She accepted them all graciously.
I met him again the next morning, before he had managed to get himself thoroughly drunk yet. He's a nice guy, it turns out, and we had a conversation that made sense this time. He likes her music because it's real Greenlandic music, even though it's in a new style. She and he are two of the last real Nuukians (if that's a word), lots of people are moving in and it's changing fast, but they are both people whose families and whose roots are there.
So she is managing to make music that appeals to judgmental urban westerners like me, and at the same time makes inebriated authentic Greenlanders feel proud of their heritage. Quite an achievement.

Snorricam

This is our weird little camera mount in action at last.

Greenland fashion statement

Here we are preparing to record a performance by Nive Nielsen in buggy buggy Greenland. The mosquito netting is a very stylish look, I think, but we decided after much deliberation to remove it for the take. However, having done that, we then had to halt things a few times when insects flew into her ear or her eye. She did complete one entire take with a mosquito that had crawled up her sleeve munching happily on her arm. I am hoping that take will have a certain pained intensity that will make it stand out. However I suppose it's actually more probable that it will suck. Get it? Mosquito? Suck? Never mind.

Exotic Greenland

Here's something I would never see at home: a nice bicycle, unlocked.

Flight to Nuuk

5:30 am call for an early flight, in a harsh and unforgiving land where the coffee shops don't open until 11.

Captain Dave

This is the captain of our chase boat, as we call it, the boat from which we will be shooting the Dax dodging icebergs. It is also known as a follow boat. In Danish, foljebot. Hey, I almost speak Danish!
His name is David, which inspires confidence, don't you think?
It is very interesting for me to meet these Greenlandic people, having now spent some time in the Canadian arctic. To me, they seem exactly like the Canadian Inuit. The same accent, the same mannerisms, the same sense of humour.
"We are going to have to go back now," he says very seriously, "we have run out of coffee."
We Daves understand and respect each other in ways non-Daves can never fully understand.
I'm sure that to each other, the Greenlanders and the Inuit seem quite different, I'd love to learn enough to start noticing the differences myself. They were made up of populations that had actually lost contact, and were unaware of each other's existence for a long time. The person credited with discovering that they in fact shared the same language, the same culture, and the same genes, was an early explorer named Knud Rasmussen, who although clearly not a Dave, was nevertheless a righteous dude. He was born in Ilulissat, and his birth house is now a museum. We go up there to shoot a scene, arriving at the agreed-upon time, and discover that the woman who was supposed to meet us had showed up and waited for us a day early. The two people working there haven't been told anything about us, don't speak English, don't particularly care, and make if clear that they think the best plan would be for us to go away now. I try to communicate with them by inserting Js into my sentences here and there, but it doesn't work. I guess I don't almost speak Danish after all. However Swedish and Danish are closely related, and Martin, the captain of the Dax, steps in to help and manages to negotiate a plan.
I am now considering extending to Martins some of the respect I had previously reserved for Daves. Of course I shall first have to investigate more fully his feelings about coffee. 

Greenland sled dogs

Greenland dogs are bred to be sled dogs. So bred, in fact, that they won't allow any other dogs onto the island anywhere north of the arctic circle, so the breed will remain pure. There are dogs tethered all over Ilulissat, they're not working at the moment because it is summer, they just hang out, and occasionally, at feeding time, whimper and howl in unison.
There are several at the hotel. The adults are tethered, but the puppies roam about freely. There are signs asking people not to pet, feed, or interact with the dogs, because they are working dogs not pets. However I see several guests ignoring the signs, so I think the morals of these hotel dogs have been a bit tainted. However I observe the rules meticulously myself and walk past ignoring them dismissively. But they don't ignore me, several of them have taken to escorting me protectively down the path to my hotel room, stopping occasionally to look back and make sure I haven't gotten lost yet.
There is something about being escorted to my room by a group of young female dogs that incites me to indulge in an extended but inappropriate piece of wordplay, but I shall resist the temptation. Instead, please make up your own jokes, and enjoy this highly SFW photograph of a cute puppy.

Ice mountain

This is Richard Tegner one of the crew of the sailing ship we are following, being interviewed in front of a very large iceberg; that mountain in the background is actually floating very slowly out to sea, where it will slosh around among others of its kind, occasionally rolling over without warning,or breaking apart and dropping slabs the size of apartment buildings into the ocean, creating unexpected tidal waves that take six minutes to pass. In the fiord we could see the slow rise and fall of the water by about a metre, the leftover ripple from some massive collapse somewhere a long time ago and far far away.
Richard and his two compadres sailed through a posse of these bad boys on their way into town. Muy macho, as they say in Swedish.

The view from my window part 3

I am staying in Illulisat, the iceberg capital of the world. Two of us are staying in igloos. I stayed in an igloo once before, it was kind of cold and I got no sleep at all because I was sleeping between a cameraman and a soundman who both snored. This time it isn't a real igloo, it seems to be made of stainless steel, and instead of being kind of cold it is hot inside like a convection oven.
However there are no snoring technicians sharing it with me, and the view is amazing. I am looking out at the icebergs fresh off the glacier as they head out to look for ocean liners to sink.
Tomorrow our mission is to film the Dax making its way between these icebergs. And successfully failing to ram any, we hope.

The view from my window part 2

I was trying to take an interesting photo of the fields of icebergs we were flying over as we reached Greenland. Instead what I got was an interesting photo of how the high speed rotation of the propellor blades interacts with the scan of the camera built into my tablet.
Interesting to me anyway. Perhaps not to most people. Sorry, it's a long flight.

John Tran, relaxing again

This is John, the cameraman, taking his mind off work on the plane by reading a magazine about black and white photography. So relaxing! Only two colours!

Tortured artist

I'm heading off to Greenland tonight to continue my frigid adventures. The real star of this trip is icebergs, at least we hope so. but I'm also filming a performance with a Greenlandic singer named Nive Nielsen.
http://nivenielsen.com/ 
Since what I really like, esthetically. is to make things unnecessarily complicated, I have decided to subject her to an instrument of torture called a Snorricam. Named after its Icelandic inventor, Mr. Cam, I believe his name is. Or something like that, I forget.

Here is an image of this nefarious device, it's sort of a combination of a corset and the rack. The idea is that the camera is mounted on the performer, so their face remains still while the background moves around them.
Meanwhile my cameraman can enjoy a well-deserved rest. Or go off and film some icebergs.

Timelapse camping

We got two young local fellows to camp out and watch over a timelapse camera for us. It's a motorized timelapse camera, my idea was to get it to pan in a circle over a 24 hour period, following the 24 hour sun around the horizon. Kind of an ambitious idea, it didn't completely work out, it depended on technology we hadn't thoroughly tested and the weather all cooperating at once.
However, not knowing what the future would bring, we plunged ahead, and got the guy who runs the youth centre in Pond Inlet to recommend a couple of responsible young fellows to babysit it. It turned out to be a very complicated project, the whole town shut down that evening for a funeral, which meant that the store where we needed to buy them supplies was closed. Also the outfitter we had rented some stuff from was leaving town for his own camping trip, and we had forgotten to acquire a camp stove for them. Never mind, many errands later we had them all equipped, and left them behind, sitting in a tent out in the middle of nowhere listening to a camera make a clicking noise every two minutes.
When we came to pick them up I asked how camping was. Jesse, the sixteen-year old, said "great!" with a big grin. Jamesie, the eighteen-year old, said "Okay," with a very neutral expression. So, mixed reviews. I figure Jesse got to hang out with one of the cool kids, while Jamesie was stuck with a sixteen-year old. Hopefully Jamesie will now say hi to Jesse in the lunchroom, giving him some new awesome cred amongst his peers, and we will have spread a little joy to at least one deserving young lad.

The Gizmonator

This is our engineer Scott Burton brandishing a strange device. As he so often does, since his job is to operate gizmos of all description.
This one is a mount that holds an array of Gopro cameras pointing in all directions, so that the images they record can be stitched together later to form a complete sphere of video. That's mostly for the web, where people will be able to choose their point of view as they watch. Since what I am primarily working on is what is rather patronizingly known as "flat video," I'm not so inclined to let people choose their own point of view. People's point of view should be chosen for them by qualified professionals, in my opinion. That's right, people like me.
So those of you who have inconveniently independent ideas about such things can just stay on the web, amongst others of your ilk, you will not be missed in my world. The rest of you can summarize your multifarious and complex preferences by occasionally operating your remote control. Between button pushes, we will supply you with comforting and distracting imagery, that as time goes on, will start to look more and more similar on every channel.
There is some kind of metaphor for something taking shape here, but I can't for the life of me figure out what. Never mind, I can't think about that right now, Big Brother is coming on soon.

    photo by Ulla Lohmann

Who is Sanjay wearing this season?

This is Sanjay Mehta, our intrepid soundman, modelling this year's spring line from the well-known young designer Canadian Tire. Specifically a very chic pair of rubber boots.
These may look like ordinary boots, but in fact they confer on Sanjay an awesome superpower: the ability to walk through water.
If only the rest of us were able to acquire such boots, we could have that power too. But sadly, they are beyond our humble reach, and when the time comes to wade into some gruesome bog, or haul a heavy wooden boat through the shallows, we will have to count on Sanjay to step up. So to speak.
What a shame.

     photo by Ulla Lohmann

Fred the pilot and the three-legged dog

Our helicopter pilot to Bylot Island is a forty-year veteran. He got trained in 1973 and has been flying the Arctic ever since. So our little excursion across the frozen sound is like a picnic for him, I guess. When he shows up to ferry us across, he is just back from helping to rescue 31 people who got stranded when a giant chunk of ice broke off from the floe edge and started floating away with them aboard.
Fred has a three-legged dog named Mukluk who goes everywhere with him, including up in the air. Mukluk has a little blanket set up down on the floor in the copilot seat. Not that we have a copilot, instead, I get to ride shotgun, because John is hogging all the space in the back, with a harness on and his tripod ratchet-strapped down, shooting out the open door. Bet it's cold back there. It's nicer up front, especially with a warm dog on your lap.
As soon as we get back from a fairly long day on the island, and in Fred's case a fairly long day in the air, Fred gets a call. A bunch of hunters he rescued a week or two ago went back out onto the broken ice trying to retrieve their skidoos and stuff, and now they have to be rerescued.
The next morning, I expect Fred to be in the mood to make some kind of sharp comment about idiots that do the same life-threatening thing two times in a row, but he says nothing of the sort. He says he feels for them. They're people who have almost nothing, those skidoos are an important part of their lives and will be very hard for them to replace, and by the time he got there they had been out on the ice for a week and were basically starving. Fred doesn't see it as foolhardy behaviour, he just has compassion for people in a really difficult situation. Fred's a nice guy. Like a flying Dalai Lama.
We tell him we want his direct line. If I do something really stupid, endanger myself, and need rescuing, I want to be rescued by Fred.
And Mukluk. Who is also very non-judgmental.

The view from my window

Early this morning I heard a thump outside my window. I looked out, the top of a stepladder was being positioned there. Then the faces of two small children appeared, peering in. They'd noticed my window was open and climbed up to say hi. Joshua and Jewel. Nice kids. Lucky I had my pants on.

Skipping

If you look out from Pond Inlet across Lancaster Sound early in July, as I just did, the first thing you might notice is that the ice is all broken up into long strips, with channels of clear water running between them. The second thing you might notice is that there are still people out there in snowmobiles.
I had to do a double and then a triple take. Yes, that's right, the ice is melting, there is about fifty feet of open water between the nearest floe and the shore, and people are driving snowmobiles around on whatever is left. Snowmobiles pulling sleds, with a bunch of kids running after them jumping on and off.
I learned that a lot of the strips of water are actually pools of meltwater collecting on the surface of what is still a solid chunk of sea ice, so that's a relief. If you were to drive into one, you wouldn't fall in and drown, you'd merely drive a skidoo through a two-foot deep puddle of cold water, perhaps a couple of degrees below freezing because salt water can get extra cold. Oh, well. That's all right then.
But there is still that little problem of the fifty feet of water between you and dry land. I then learned that it is actually possible to drive a skidoo from ice floe to ice floe across water. You build up enough speed, and it will skim across the water like a jet ski. People who are good at it can cross a hundred feet. It's called skipping.
Think about it. They drive across a hundred feet of water so cold that if you fall in you will be dead in minutes, riding something with all the natural buoyancy of an anchor, in fact they do it for fun.
I would love to film that, it is the most awesome sport I have ever heard of. But I would be too afraid even to stand out there filming it.
I'm trying to think of a word other than "awesome" to use to describe the people who use this death-defying stunt as a normal part of everyday transportation, I already used it once and it is a word that has lost its value in recent years, but I can't come up with one. That's all I've got.
I would be dead so fast here.

Canada Day in Pangnirtung

I had a pretty surreal Canada Day up here in Pangnirtung. It started with a Mountie in full dress uniform unfurling the flag, surrounded by the local Inuit folk. These remote communities don't have municipal police forces, the RCMP are also the local cops, but they have the complete red tunic, riding boots and hat outfit ready to break out for ceremonial occasions. The Full Mountie, so to speak. Then a circle of Inuit elders, children and others sang Oh Canada. "Our home and native land." Literally in this case. It's a bit weird to see these people celebrating the political union of a bunch of French and English colonists a thousand miles south of them a hundred and forty odd years ago. I suppose it's a bit weird to see me celebrate it too, my parents are from Australia.
Then people climbed up on the roof of the church and threw down handfuls of candy. But this is not your typical urban pinata party, first of all they throw so much candy so hard that it's like being pelted with gravel, and secondly, when that candy hits the ground they are serious competitors. Not just the children, either, one elderly lady who couldn't bend down fast enough to beat the kids swarming around her feet was starting to look pretty intense. Finally the slammed her foot down on a couple of candies and got at least some of her share, but it was clear that noone was going to be cutting her any slack.

      Photos by Ulla Lohmann

In the evening they held a feast out by the water, with hot dogs, slices of raw beluga, and an entire seal, cut open and covered with blueberries. There was still a Canadian flag flapping here and there, but this part of the festivities isn't really about celebrating Canada any more, it's about celebrating family, friends, and perhaps most of all, food. It's nice to be able to attend, and many people are delightful, warm and friendly to us. Not everyone, though. I think a lot of TV crews come through here and some people are a bit sick of being documented by outsiders. One group spoke up pretty sharply to say they didn't want to be photographed. But afterwards another young guy made a point of coming over. "Don't mind them," he said, "some people are just like that." I didn't actually mind them, in fact, people are entitled not to be photographed if they want, but I did appreciate him wanting to make sure I didn't feel bad about it. Nice.
The food itself is another touchy issue. These people hunt seal and whale, and there has been a lot of negative attention down south directed at those two hunts in particular. When seal fur got banned in Europe, a lot of people up here lost the thing that was keeping their family fed. And media attention was what helped that happen. People like me. I have many possible reasons to be unpopular here, other than my unusually irritating personality, most places I don't have such handy ready-made excuses at hand, so I appreciate that.

    Photos by Ulla Lohmann

John the cameraman was happily filming the raw seal and blueberries. For him having something visually interesting like that is like a feast in its own right, he'd stay there all day if I let him, but I was starting to be aware that we might look as if that was the only thing we cared about. One woman left the lineup for hot dogs and came over to me. "Are you Greenpeace?" She asked. "No," I said, "not Greenpeace." In a slightly disgusted tone, as if she'd asked me if I had any crack for sale. "All, right, high five!" she said, and we slapped hands. Easiest high five I ever earned. All it takes is to not be from Greenpeace. So, hunting is an issue we clearly need to cover somehow. Maybe people are protecting the wrong animals sometimes for the wrong reasons. Seals got protected because baby seals are cute, for example. People care about whales and dolphins because they've heard they are as intelligent as humans. But I understand that has turned out not to be correct, I believe dolphins are now considered to be closer in intelligence to a pig maybe.
Pigs are fairly intelligent animals, of course, and baby pigs are very cute.
Save the Pigs.