A Horseshoer’s Great-Grandson Drones On (progressively?)

On the 27th of March I was flying alone over the blank white tundra of the upper Hanbury River country. It was a cold clear afternoon, 30 below zero, and I was thinking how lucky I was to be out there. 500 feet above the snow, doing about 85 knots in my little fabric-and-tube fart-cart airplane, with a cup of coffee at hand and some lively music piped in through my headset. My assigned task that day was — as it has so often been — simply to fly along and look constantly down and around, mile by mile, and to record locations and numbers of what the wildlife scientists lump together as “charismatic mega-fauna.” Big furry critters. On that particular day it was a survey for  muskox, and my assigned straight-line east-west transects were around 80 miles long, spaced five miles apart. By the time I had logged nearly seven hours of this, including a quick and rough ski landing so that I could pour in some extra fuel from jerry cans, my butt hurt and I wasn’t feeling quite so lucky. 

Yet even as I turned from the final waypoint and sped down the home stretch to McLeod Bay, I was thinking about what interesting work it is. I was thinking too of how completely it changed with the advent of GPS navigation. Over the past few decades countless advances have been labelled “revolutionary,” everything from dentures to digital cameras to hybrid drive-trains. Often that is just hyperbole and hooey, but for pilots there is no doubt that the advent of the Global Positioning System, or GPS, was a revolution.

Consider that as recently as 1990, a wildlife survey of the sort I have been flying these past few weeks would have involved a paper map gridded with carefully-drawn pencil lines. Once airborne, map in hand, the day’s flying demanded non-stop minute-to-minute human navigation, usually done with one finger firmly on the pencil line, a careful eye on the compass and the directional gyro and the landmarks below, with locations of animals jotted to a paper notepad on a small clipboard.  Circa 2024, it’s “Send me the route files, and when we’re done flying I’ll send you the track and waypoint files.” If anybody today has to stoop so low as to type in coordinates for latitude and longitude, one peck at a time on a keypad, you’d think from their whining that they’d been forced to break rocks in the hot sun for a few hours. Yee-gads, the labor!

But we won’t stop here, with a little ski-plane and its bemused pilot glancing at a GPS screen and pressing “Enter” to record each sighting and create a waypoint. We never stop here, or anywhere, us humanoids. In less than two more decades, you can bet that this happy gig that I have spent so much of my flying life doing — that is, a lone pilot, or a pilot and a few hand-picked observers, flying straight lines over wild country, low and slow, watching intently out the window and recording what we see — will surely have gone the way of the old map-and-pencil. Because, of course, this is tricky and expensive and increasingly unpopular work. It can be cold, it can be boring, and it holds plenty of potential for human and mechanical error. There are new methods and tools coming that will put this form of knowledge collection into a bygone era. Another revolution.

Of course I am referring to drones. 

A colleague of mine, who owns and manages a regional airline in the territories, and who clearly does not relish wildlife survey work, was waxing enthusiastic the other day in front of his hangar, as we both prepared to head out, each with a planeload of biologists and hired observers, for Day Five of a twelve-day moose survey. “You know, Dave, for less than the combined dollar value of these two planes, there is a drone being manufactured and marketed, right now today, with a Rotax engine and a six-hundred-mile range. You fit that sucker with an infrared camera and it will not miss so much as a lemming. Anything warm-blooded, it sees it. Fly it at a hundred feet.  No observers, no fuel caches, no 35-below start-ups, no need to piss in a bottle or dehydrate yourself for the entire working day just to keep your bladder empty. Just settle in and control that baby right from your office chair. Slip out for lunch, come back, it’s still on course, it’s still takin’ down the info. It’s what’s comin’.”

Yep, I said. I know. I’ve heard.  

And I am lucky. I have been paid to be out there, season after season, year after year, flying along, looking down and around at country that I first travelled by ski and dogsled, exactly 43 years ago (gulp.)  Radford River, Campbell Lake, Crystal Island…   Aloft, and often alone, on nice days with blue sky and sunshine, on crummy days with ice on the wings and windshield, pesky turbulence, white-outs and winds and patchy fog, and one especially memorable day when the engine knocked and coughed and sputtered and forced me to make a hurriedly selected touchdown on a snowy lake.  Luckily the crew with me that day was unfazed by those festivities, and we soon had a fire going in the taiga spruce-patch while we waited for help to arrive in the form of a Single Otter on skis (from that same drone-enthusiastic friend’s company, two hundred miles away.) Kristen, back at home, had quickly arranged our rescue, over the satphone. That was March, 2010. Even then, when things went sideways, we already felt as though we were living in the future.  

My great-grandfather was a blacksmith and a horse-shoer, who as a young man in 1890 emigrated from the Danish island of Samsø to the city of Chicago. I was thinking of him the other day — and of the drones that are coming to replace me, just as electric street-cars and the first Fords swiftly changed the streets of Chicago and put a serious dent in the demand for my ancestor’s horse-shoeing skills. 

I doubt whether the residents of Chicago in 1925 truly missed the aroma of fresh horse manure on a muggy July afternoon. I do wonder, though, whether the desk-bound muskox-and-caribou-counters, seated at their monitors in the year 2044, programming and “flying” the drones and watching the tallies from the infra-red camera,  will have managed to stay in touch with the country that is out there, mile upon white mile.

Will they have any real inkling about this cold pure landscape — how it feels, what makes it tick, how one watershed connects to another, or what mysteries it might hold? 

I know this won’t surprise anyone, but on the chances of those drone drivers attaining or even aspiring to attain those insights, I am dubious. 

The Hungarian sociologist Karl Mannheim, who lived from 1893 until 1947 — right through the horse-shoe to street-car revolution, and on to the birth of computers and nuclear fission, wrote that “For progressive people the present is the beginning of the future. For conservative people the present is the end of the past.” 

There is more such work in the days ahead. Thankfully, I get to go do it.  On this next round I even get to do it with Kristen, who will take high-res photos of muskox herds, from the ski-plane Husky with the window slid open. We will fly the lines, low and slow, mile by mile, in “real time,” as the folks in the know like to put it. (My great-grandpa and Karl Mannheim preferred to call it “the present.” Or just “now.”)

And we will remark to each other, every so often, that there is no one out here anymore.  No one doing anything, in a space that dwarfs the Empty Quarter of Saudi Arabia, and is today emptier of day-to-day human activity than it has been since the ice sheets pulled away. My mind will wander, and I will ask myself: Are we at the beginning of something precise, sterile, safe, and efficient, or at the end of something direct, real, warm-blooded, and a bit risky?

In short, am I progressive, or conservative?

Well, yes.  

(Here’s a photo from around 1910, in Chicago. My grandfather is the little fellow on the horse. His father is holding the bridle.  Below that is the view out the side window of the Husky, at about 500 feet over the Mary Frances Lake area, the other day.)

Out the door yet again, into winter…

 

Hello to you all far and wide. I am smack dab in the midst of the tenth and final dogteam course with Augustana University students. 

We have done these 15-day winter expedition courses here in 2005, 2006, 2008, 2010, 2012, 2014, 2017,2019,2022… and now this year. And this is the last hurrah. The grand finale.  Prof retiring, program at the school ending, and — perhaps —  a dwindling level of interest in such adventures amongst the coming generation.  All food for thought, and speculation. 

I am on the layover day between two six-day trips. The first one was stormy and we dragged in late yesterday. Pulling out again tomorrow.  Tonight, month’s end looming,  I post this passage from the first chapter of Kinds of Winter, describing a long-ago morning in February, 2002:

“I woke early, feeling rested and calm. I savoured the little luxuries of cabin life as I sat and read for the first time an obscure essay by Thoreau, “A Winter Walk.” “We sleep,” he begins, “and at length awake to the still reality of a winter morning.”

Bare feet, porcelain coffee mug, the pulsating glow and soft hiss of gas lights. It would be several weeks, I knew, before life would again be so physically luxurious. I was finished getting ready, and I had made my peace with the long delay of the preparation days just past. A person can only do so much in a day, in a year, in a life. In middle age I desperately needed to accept that, or I would wind up rushing forever, in a foul and frustrated mood, with lacklustre results.

I was still nagged with worry about my sled, though. I had finally pushed it out the door of the cluttered workshop the night before. It was a long narrow sled I had built twelve years earlier. Its unorthodox slenderness (16 inches instead of the usual 20), along with its yellow nylon cargo bag, had quickly earned it the nickname “The Banana.” Kristen, who has always disliked driving it, has other names for it, by far the most polite of which is “that horrible yellow thing.” Its long ash runners are cracked and splinted. In a desperate last-ditch fix, I had bolted on a pair of three-inch-wide, half-inch-thick runner shoes of high-density polyethylene. When I finally launched it out the workshop door that night, it did not slither gracefully across the snow. It landed with a thud and stuck there like something inert until I put a shoulder to it and heaved it toward the dog yard. New cold snow, fine-grained and windblown, is more like dry sand than frozen water. I could only hope that milder weather would ease the laws of physics for the first few days, while we climbed heavily laden out of the basin of Great Slave Lake.

The main thing, I had to remind myself, was that I was going. If a man always postponed departure until every last thing was perfect, he would never leave home. Over the morning my innards gradually tightened, and the peace of that Thoreauvian dawn was replaced by tension. I had set out on enough big trips and long races to know that the easing of that tension would only come a few days down the trail—if I could find the trail. “Well, if we can’t find a trail,” I said out loud to the puzzled dogs, “We’ll just have to make one.”

At a few minutes past noon I stepped onto the runners and yanked the snub line free of the hitching post. The yelping dogs fell silent as they instantly shifted their efforts from insane barking to a smooth slow lope. We crossed the ten-mile breadth of McLeod Bay in just over an hour. It was the fastest, easiest ten miles we would make on the entire trip.

At Reliance, the home of our nearest neighbours sits on the prominent point across from the abandoned weather station. Beside the weather station is a cluster of buildings where the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (mounted on dogsleds instead of horses at this location) maintained a detachment for nearly forty years. Those buildings are now a sport fishing lodge and retreat, but the lodge is open and occupied only in summer. The manned weather station closed in the early 1990s, replaced by an automated weather device that transmits its data via satellite. There is also an old trading post at Reliance, now occupied by mice and voles, and a cache of aviation fuel in drums that are delivered by barge. Little by little, year by year, the entire outback of the North is losing its year-round human presence, and on no route of mine would this be more apparent than on the trip south.”

Cold Comfort

After my father died, quite unexpectedly, twenty years ago, I started finding some comfort when at night I could see some stars. In those months after his death I could look at the stars and I would remember lying back, Dad and I, on the thwarts of our drifting canoe, on some little lake off the Gunflint Trail, sometime when I was young. The sky was moonless and cloudless and we were hundreds of miles north of our Illinois home, and the stars were blazing. “Makes you feel real big and important, doesn’t it?” was all he said. Then he chuckled.

Now it’s a lifetime or nearly so later, and here in my house the head of the bed is right up under a big triple-pane window. No one pulls any curtains in this neighborhood, except in high summer to help darken the room, so on clear nights in winter I can crane my neck and look out through the glass and beyond the eave, and there they are: stars, galaxies of them, with fathomless black chasms between. The whole shebang just going on. Forever falling into forever. And real big and important me, warm lump in warm bed with my warm wife in our warm log house, peering right over the rim into a bowl of eternity.

Some nights that view is a comfort. On other nights it scares the hell out of me. Most nights, there’s some of both, and I am lucky and grateful to have it so handy, with just a sleepy yawn and a tip of the head.

I pity the billions of people who nowadays never see the stars at all, sequestered as those throngs of humanity are beneath massive domes of electric light –night after night, month after month, year after year. I wonder how they keep their bearings. Honestly, I wonder if they do. I think a nightly or even a thrice-monthly dose of star-gazing would do anyone a world of good. A handful of real big and important earthlings in particular could use a solid month set out adrift in a canoe under the stars right about now. Maybe a solid year, in fact. I could name some names.

Seeing the anonymous swaths of pinprick stars in a dark sky is completely different from looking up at our own star, the sun, or admiring our favorite pet rock, the moon. Those two trustworthy pals never steer my thoughts down the road toward infinity and utter mystery the way a faint star or two can. We circle the sun, the moon circles us, and we tug and pull at each other, play peek-a-boo behind predictable eclipses, mark the ebb and flow of tides, and dance our friendly dance year by year. Solstice, equinox, crescent moon to waxing gibbous, full to waning to new, and round we all go again. Allemande left with the ol’ left hand, as if existence and the universe were orderly, predictable, and, well, all pretty much figgered out. Oh yeah, says a part of me, gimme some o’ that!

The stars brook no such nonsense. Still, I can on some winter nights find a strange cold comfort in the brief sighting of just one of them. Nameless, trivial, out there hundreds of quadrillions of miles distant — and drifting ever away, if I understand the theories correctly. Its faint shred of light, after centuries, finally reaching our window.

Comfort, yes, but strange and cold. And, like I said a little earlier, on other nights that faint star is no comfort to me at all. Not one little bit.

August 1930, Fort Reliance.

Hello and Happy New Year, everyone. I am running out of days in the month. In the first weeks of December I was at work writing Revision Four of the Company Operations Manual, for our little mom and pop flying business, and my Christmas gift from Transport Canada was a stamp of approval.

I have also been at work, by fits and starts, on a historical novel.

And hey, you might enjoy an excerpt from the draft of the novel even more than an excerpt from the revised and approved Ops Manual.

It is a mild moonlit night as I get ready to post this, and what follows is a bit of foreshadowing, linked to the macabre events of another mild and moonlit night, 140 miles east of here on the upper Thelon, in early December, 1930. Linked to the piece I posted here back in May, “The Discovery.”

One of my New Year’s Resolutions is to get this manuscript done and find a home for it. But then again, that was a resolution last year, come to think of it. 

(“The Procrastinators Anonymous meeting has been cancelled and re-scheduled for a week from Tuesday…”)

_______________________________

August, 1930. Fort Reliance

On a morning in late July, the week after the first three motor scows had pulled into Police Bay at Reliance, Blacky Lanner was lying alongside the wharf wrapped in a tattered wool blanket, his shirt and shoes off and his trousers still on.

Emil Bode, Howard Price and Jack Stark had taken on a paid stint as stevedores offloading and stowing boxes and kegs off the scows, and lightering supplies by skiff over to the police cabin. Stark passed Lanner with a big wheelbarrow, the steel wheel clattering on the stones. Lanner rolled over in his blanket and opened his eyes. Stark swerved the wheelbarrow toward his head and Lanner let out a low growl. Stark laughed.

You nutty bastard, it’s nearly noon.

Lanner said, Ya, but it’s summer, and today there’s no mo-skeet-toes, and I’m yus’ gonna keep on sleepin’.

Plenty of time to sleep when you’re dead, said Stark.  So I’m told. 

Stark met Emil coming the other way up the path, jockeying the other wheelbarrow with a big wooden crate in it. Bode stopped and straightened up.

Nice day, he said.  No blackflies yet.

Stark said, Are you partnering up with that lump on the beach down there, I mean for winter?

Emil put his index finger up across his lips and shook his head.  Stark raised his eyebrows and nodded. Walked on.

That same evening they were cooking supper. Stark and Emil and Price, around a fireplace alongside the deck of the trader’s cabin. Lanner had rowed out in one of the skiffs to visit his net.

Stark said, so you aren’t going with Blacky?

Emil said no, Gene Olson and me are gonna partner up. Go to the Thelon below Jim Lake. I know a good place.

And Lanner?

Lanner can just go it alone.

I don’t know if he can, to tell the truth.

Well he can find somebody else then.

Well, Stark said, he won’t.  He told me he knew you would come around. And I don’t think anybody else will touch him with a ten-foot pole.

Well I won’t. Come around. Or touch him with a pole, no matter how long.

Stark chuckled.  You told him yet?

He knows.

And?

He got his back up and said he did all the work anyway and he doesn’t need me and that I can rot in hell and maybe he can help put me there some night.

Stark shook his head then. Emil, he said, you watch out.

Bode said, Oh, we’re gonna go way out, bring two years of stuff, and after two winters out that way we’re gonna yus’ keep goin’ east, and go out by way of Baker.  And after that I t’ink I might be done in this country. And Gene thinks he might be done too.  Done like dinner.

Let’s eat.

…

… One afternoon a week or so later, Stark came across to the shack on the point in the middle of Police Bay. Half a dozen trappers were sitting in the sun, and Lanner was sound asleep again, on the gravel by the fire pit. 

I was over at the police just now. That cop Williams has a newspaper from Edmonton, from July, with a story about Jack Hornby.

Olson grunted. Another one?

Stark chuckled. No, same one. The dead one. The good lord broke the mold after him.

They’re still writing about him?

Mattsen said, Oh if you do something crazy enough the papers will write about it for years. No one wants to read stories about people ‘yus gettin’ along, happy folks ‘yus workin’, raisin’ kids, goin’ to church. You know. They want people starvin’, killin’ each other, cops chasin’ ‘em. Rum-runner gangsters. Valentine’s Day massacres. That sort of thing.

Stark nodded. I never met Hornby face to face. Only heard about him. I was over in the mountains. You figure he was crazy?

Oh he was every bit as crazy as they come, Olson said. ‘Specially that last year or two.

Or three, Emil said. He was crazy as a loon. But you know what? Sittin’ here right now I can name a half dozen fellows yus’ as crazy as Hornby. Without even tryin’. Most of ‘em harmless. Hornby was crazy and harmless. I’m harmless myself, and some days I do think I have to be crazy. Yus’ to do this. Sometimes I t’ink ever’one of us out here is crazy. By January, or maybe by December. Almost have to be. Dark, cold, no women or children, nobody around. Yus’ killin’ and skinnin’ fur all day, every day. Goin’ to bed and wakin’ up and killin’ and skinnin’ again. You ever live in a six foot by nine foot tent for a week with the carcasses of three doped wolves you brought in to skin, all hung up around the stove, hangin’ right from the ridgepole to the floor, and you’re waitin’ for the damned things to thaw? Crawling around underneath dose stinkers, wolf hair and wolf slobber and wolf blood ‘yus everywhere you look, and it’s forty below an’ darker dan de inside of a cow outside? And there’s two of you in dere and one of ‘em is Blacky Lanner? My God almighty, Jack Stark, a man can’t be anything but crazy after a winter of that. And every one of us has done it, or something close. Some for year after year. Not to mention any names. He smiled at Stark.

Stark grinned. And who’s the nuttiest nut in the nuthouse, then — just in your half-nutty view on it?

Emil turned toward where Lanner was sprawled on the gravel, looked back at Stark and Gene and the others, looked at Lanner and gave his head a little tilt. He said, well it sure wasn’t Jack Hornby, rest his crazy ass.

His very bony and crazy ass, said Gene.

Stark nodded again but he had stopped smiling. He shook his head and started fussing with his pipe.

_______________________________

It was the third of August when Arab Pete’s scow, the last one of the season, the one everyone had been waiting for, pulled in and tied up over at the police post, and the mail bag came out. A final round of letters got read, and some were answered. A day of purchasing and provisioning: tobacco and flour; boxes of bullets; vials of strychnine; sacks of green coffee beans and boxes of tea leaves; Debits in Pete Baker’s ledger book, against fur come spring, and some payments in cash.

Early the next day, on the morning he and Gene were to start up Pike’s to Artillery Lake and the Barrens, Bode passed right by Lanner’s camp on the point south of the police post. Blacky was lying alongside his tent, still in his boots, his hair full of woodchips and sand, a hungover grimace on his face even as he slept.  Emil stood for a minute, wanting to say something, some sort of a warning or a threat, but there was nothing he could think of to say. He walked on.

His uncle liked to say, “Sovende hund skal man ej vække.” Let sleeping dogs lie, they said in Canada. Emil would not see Lanner again until early December, and then it would be only a glimpse, at a distance. But the glimpse, the realization that it was Lanner, would turn his insides to jelly.

Excerpt from the RCMP Commissioner’s Report, 1932:

Frontier, Defined.

Frontiers are having a hard time lately.

Well, not the frontiers themselves; they don’t have hard times, or easy times. They just are.

But the word “Frontier,” the notion of a “Frontier,” strikes people nowadays as odd. Outdated. Somehow it has gotten itself loaded with baggage in these fraught times.

Fraught times for frontiersmen, er, frontierspersons, um, frontiers-beings?

A few days ago I spotted an article in a magazine sitting around here, titled “Why the Myth of the Frontier Will Not Die.” And I have to say, that morning, I looked out the window and thought, “Why ‘Myth’?” Then I started thinking about the word and all its modern-day baggage and fraught-ness. Who, in 2023, by way of introduction or small talk, would say “Oh me? I live out on the frontier.” Who would? Well, maybe I would say it, just to get a rise out of you: “My wife and I live out on the frontier.”

Because we do. A frontier being an edge, a boundary, a border between lands known and lands unknown, places settled and places wild, surroundings familiar and surroundings frightening. No exaggeration here, because I guarantee that if you climb up the hills and keep going north and north-east from where I stand this afternoon, you are heading into unknown, wild, and sometimes frightening country. Yep, right now, in 2023, tail end of November. Darned cold and dark up that way too, as bonus attributes.

Oh yes, there were men and women who knew vast swathes of that country intimately — like the backs of their hands, as the saying goes. For them there was no frontier up in those hills and hundreds of miles onto the barrens north and east from here. But you know what? Those people are all gone. And almost every one of them is dead. Despite what you may hear on the radio or read in the papers, nobody knows that country now, not like those old-timers did. I wonder if anyone ever will again. I doubt it.

Might there be some way to define this hackneyed old word “frontier?” Here is a little anecdote, something that led me to a cumbersome and kind of playful definition. I intend to use it from time to time, to ascertain in short order whether I am actually out on the frontier, or not.

Consider this. The other night the dogs were making a ruckus. We have two dozen working dogs plus a handful of walking hospice cases, so when they all start barking and howling and ki-yiing at once, you notice. Those dogs can generate some decibels, believe me. The noise woke us out of a sound sleep. It was many hours ’til daylight, maybe three in the morning. I stepped out onto the second-floor catwalk, elegantly clad in my Frontiersman Series nightwear: old Walmart shoe-pac boots and baggy boxer shorts. I flicked on the jack-light beam and swept it around. Most of the dogs were standing on top of their snow-covered flat-roofed duplex wooden houses. Most of them were looking north, and everybody was revved up about whatever was up that way. I swept the powerful white beam around: west toward the sawmill; up onto the path and ridge toward Blue Fox Cove; north past the woodshed and the outhouse and the skid-steer track.

Snow, scrub, rock. The usual. Nothing out of the ordinary, nothing moving or lurking.

The dogs might not have seen anything either. Often they don’t. They live in another dimension that we don’t have, because our sense of smell is useless. I have read that the human olfactory processors are about the size of a postage stamp, while a dog’s are the size of a football field.

I knew there had to be something out there, and quite close by, to get thirty huskies so riled up at three in the morning in the cold and dark.

Wolf?

Bear?

Moose?

Muskox?

Those were the first four choices, in that order. “Bear” is on the list because in fact we have seen bears this late in the autumn, every once in a decade or so. Farther down my mental list were “wolverine” and “fox.” The dogs seemed more excited than “fox.” Way more excited than “rabbit.”

The thing is, there is one big mammal, a very common one nowadays in a lot of places (but not nearly as common right across the planet as a lot of people seem to think), one species of “charismatic mega-fauna” (as the biologists like to say) that never for a moment crossed my mind until I was thinking about it all, many hours later, and talking with Kristen over breakfast.

The one thing I knew it absolutely could not be — not in November, not with the lake still open, and not with it being 2023, and with every neighbor we’ve ever had now gone, and on and on — the one thing it was most assuredly not, no way, was a person. A fellow human. If the beam of that jack-light had played across the figure of a human being out there in the night, well, you probably would have been able to knock me over with a feather. I think I might have fainted, really. Up on the deck that might have been downright dangerous.

And maybe, right there, is a convoluted but also distilled definition of “frontier.” A quick test to see whether you’re on one. I will use it again.

Oh and by the way, tracks in the snow the next day showed that there is a smallish wolf around, and although we still have not seen it, it’s still coming in close to the dogyard at night. Likely a lone animal, likely young, and by now it must be in serious trouble, calorie-wise. One year we had one juvenile wolf that started sharing a straw-filled doghouse with one of our older huskies. Maybe that would lead to another tangential take on where you are in relation to a frontier.

Here’s a poem I have always loved, by the late John Haines. It’s from 1967. I love that he just goes right ahead and uses the word “frontier.” I paste the poem here without asking for permissions, because I knew John just a tiny bit. We wrote back and forth a long time ago, after I first came to the Hoarfrost River. I last saw him in Fairbanks in 2004. About forty years ago today I took him for a little airplane ride above Lake Superior at Chequamegon Bay, in my 1946 Cessna 140, and we had a good time. He smiled. When John smiled, you knew he was pretty tickled. He died in 2011.

The Sweater of Vladimir Ussachevsky

BY JOHN HAINES

Facing the wind of the avenues

one spring evening in New York,

I wore under my thin jacket

a sweater given me by the wife

of a genial Manchurian.

The warmth in that sweater changed

the indifferent city block by block.

The buildings were mountains

that fled as I approached them.

The traffic became sheep and cattle

milling in muddy pastures.

I could feel around me the large

movements of men and horses.

It was spring in Siberia or Mongolia,

wherever I happened to be.

Rough but honest voices called to me

out of that solitude:

they told me we are all tired

of this coiling weight,

the oppression of a long winter;

that it was time to renew our life,

burn the expired contracts,

elect new governments.

The old Imperial sun has set,

and I must write a poem to the Emperor.

I shall speak it like the man

I should be, an inhabitant of the frontier,

clad in sweat-darkened wool,

my face stained by wind and smoke.

Surely the Emperor and his court

will want to know what a fine

and generous revolution begins tomorrow

in one of his remote provinces…

                                                   

Beaches Raised, Beaches Lowered

The lake has gone way down. As October ends, the broad sand beach here is broader than we have ever seen it. But we have only lived here for 36 years, so that’s pretty close to no time at all. The water level has dropped  below the “lowest ever” level we saw in early November, 2006. (Of course I say “lowest ever” with tongue in cheek.) That year, in the “tidal flats” alongside what we call Windmill Island (an island sometimes, a rocky peninsula or Presque Isle when not) my sharp-eyed friend Mitch discovered what turned out to be parts and pieces of an old birchbark canoe, encased in the thick clay and silt of the lake-bottom. Flakes of bark, lashed with spruce-root to delicate bands of gunwale.

Someone’s canoe, pulled up, left behind, then flooded and gradually buried. Clearly,  the lake had been this low before, we mused. But when? A hundred years ago?

That’s what I have been musing about again these past couple of months. Not raised beaches, which the geologists so handily point out here and there, but lowered beaches — which are not so easy to point out at all. We can only imagine them. Any beach of bygone low-water eras is now underwater. The gist of it is the realization that for every set of raised beaches, there is probably a lowered beach or two. When water gets high and then subsides, it leaves a tell-tale bathtub ring, or a raised beach, some obvious stains on shoreline rocks, crescents of stranded gravel high up and inland from the “normal” — or what we would better call the “current” shoreline.

We all fall victim to this way of looking at our world , i.e., what we are used to, referenced to our brief three-or-four-score-give-or-take-ten (should we be so fortunate) span of years,  goes down on our mental ledger as “normal.”

A raised beach leaves its telltale marks. A lowered beach, that is, a beach flooded and submerged, leaves no such marks. I did read of some stone tools found far out on the continental shelf, in fishing nets off the Carolina coast of the Atlantic. Signs that during the last Ice Age, the sea level had been much lower than it is today.  Makes me wonder how far out I might look, and how, and for what, exactly, for any sign that the bay here has in the past been drastically lower than our “normal.” Because I am willing to bet my bottom dollar that it has. Because “the past” is a very long time. And normal is not a very useful word, out in the real world.

I fly above this huge and variable lake a lot, looking down at its coastlines from five hundred to a thousand feet. It is a fantastic vantage point, and I still find it interesting after thousands of hours and thirty-some years.  Along the south shore, east of Hay River, the shoreline is flat and the shallow water always extends far out from shore. A few years ago the water there was lapping right up into the trees — some big trees, trees that had taken many decades to grow that big without any flooding. Now, that same stretch of shoreline looks like the tide has gone out. A few weeks back, flying along there, I saw a party of people out on four-wheel ATV’s merrily driving, maybe picnicking or moose hunting, where in August of 2020 they were likely boating without so much as a niggle of concern about nicking the propellers of their outboards. And of course, in other parts of the lake where the shoreline drops straight off into deep water, this recent “drastic” drop of three or four feet of lake level is not even noticeable, because only a foot or two of shoreline is newly exposed. It all depends. In 2000 feet of water, a two-foot drop is not “drastic.” Two hundred might be.

It is wondrous how quickly new vegetation marches out to colonize the “tidal flats” as soon as the water level drops. It’s first-come, first-served, in a wide swath of mucky substrate suddenly exposed to warm summer sun, and the tiny blades of greenery appear there within weeks. A few storms may wash water over them, but if the lake continues to drop, those early settlers will be followed by alder, willow, and eventually even spruce and birch. And every creature affiliated with that shoreline will adapt. What choice will we all have?

This year by the first of September all of our docks, ramps, piers and fuel cache access points were high and dry and utterly useless. We moved our entire floatplane operation — planes, boats, fueling gear, pull-out ramps — half a mile east down the shoreline to the river mouth. The August fuel barge could not come anywhere close to our shoreline here or at the river, so we directed it in to the deep bay we call Blue Fox, just over the ridge to the west, and offloaded it there.  Things became a little less convenient, with over a mile between the two ends of our workaday world.

If the water goes down still farther, and the enormous hydraulic forces of monstrous waves and big autumn storms have a few years to sculpt these new shoreline edges, unexpected places will suddenly become candidates for getting into shore, pulling up a boat, dipping a water pail, or landing a barge. Places I can’t even guess at yet. We will adapt. I think it will be kind of interesting.

If the water comes up again (spoiler alert — it will), we will adapt again. It is what we all do. It is what everything does. Adaptation is survival. The alternative is extinction.

Platitudes for the End of Fire Season

Nine years ago the landscape here was charred black in the aftermath of the July fire. We were settling in for what turned out to be five and a half years of life based in our big drafty workshop, and we were working to turn it into our temporary home. We needed a place to winter, a place to spend some months musing about whether to stay or go.

On the first of October, 2014, still way off kilter from it all and not sure what to say, I posted these lines:

Reddest red / Blood of moose, quarters hung.

Blackest black / Fire-killed birch, split and stacked.

Whitest white / Any day now, ready or not.

Today I paced the high catwalk of our new log house – Hoarfrost Cabin Version 2.0 as one friend calls it – and looked away to the north and west and east, and what I saw is a landscape utterly different from the taiga-edge picture-postcard before the fire. (Can I even remember that view now? I wonder.) The rock of the big bluff to the north is baked and pale, its mauve covering of lichen and rock-tripe still many years from re-appearing. Looking closely, though, down lower in more sheltered nooks, I spied a few spruce seedlings here and there, some of them nearly eighteen inches tall. Tufts of grass, dried-out fireflower gone to seed, and clumped young birches are interspersed amidst endless acres of jumbled burnt deadfall.

To the south the big lake, with cold whitecaps dancing out there to remind me: there are some things fire doesn’t touch.

The summers here have become colorful again, probably even more colorful than they were before the burn. There is every shade of green, there are tans and reds, and miles of the stunning purple blossoms I am making a humble quest to re-name “fireflower.” (How much nicer than “fireweed” is that? C’mon.)

Autumns here now are not black, as that autumn was nine years ago, but vivid with yellow and gold from new birch saplings. Winter, however — that dominant half of the year now bearing down on us, the fall equinox behind us — will still be a monochrome. No green spruce will be in sight above the snowpack for at least a few more years. Those seedlings have a ways to go.

So be it. We can bear another round of monochrome. We had a choice, and we stayed. Some days we wonder why, and some days we even act as if we know.

After a season of fire, and losses to fire, there are always shrill voices chirping platitudes. Pithy phrases about re-growth, cleansing, and the marvelous cycles of nature. Mostly they come from people with no ashes or burned wreckage in view out their picture windows.

All I can say to those who have lost family homes, beloved trails, and back-country retreats to wildfire this time around is yes, there are platitudes, and yes, there will be resurrection, and yes, there is wisdom and some comfort to be had… but this is the start of a long haul. This is going to take time.

My own post-fire platitudes, from here, nine years on, include these:

Day by day, mark the tiny signs of new life, as best you can. Write these down.

Try to think of some onerous chore that the fire spared you from. And when you think of one, smile!

Consider moving on, and consider staying put.

And by all means take your sweet time as you make that decision.

The McLeod Bay Antelope, 1983

Down the bay we came, on the heels of ice-out. It was the first week of July, and we were dodging the last few mini-bergs and pollen-covered shards. Miles and acres of rotten ice had blocked our way for two days just north of Taltheilei Narrows, until a west wind finally piped up to blow it all to smithereens.

Our ship was a beamy plywood-lapstrake seventeen-foot Thompson runabout, with steam-bent white-oak ribs, mahogany trim, and beautiful bronze fittings. Without a doubt she’d been a stunner in her heyday, the early 1960’s, towing water skiers on Lake Vermillion. But she had fallen on hard times, and when on an April day my buddy Mitch and I spotted her careened on a front lawn in Tower, Minnesota, we stopped and knocked. “Boys, if you can get that boat out of here, you can have it.”  “We’ll be back in the morning,” we replied.

She was reincarnated as a no-nonsense miniature freighter. A couple of thick coats of blue and yellow paint, a refurbished Seliga canoe strapped upside-down on an overhead pole rack, kegs and jerry cans of gasoline, boxes of grub and tools, Duluth packs of camping gear, and – lest I forget – ten (count ‘em!) feisty bug-bitten summer-time-shedding huskies, tucked in and hunkered low on short picket chains — five to starboard, five to port. Our Evinrude forty-horse, a gas-hungry chugger about the size of a baby grand piano, was discovered at Joe Gilbert’s used-motor emporium on Chapman Street in Ely, and it was bolted to the transom. It pushed the whole show, not very stealthily, up the lake at a steady seven or eight knots. Which is the perfect speed, may I point out, for poking a motorboat into unfamiliar and uncharted waters.

No radio, no GPS, no batteries, no chargers, no wires, no satellite check-ins.

And I swear, just writing that previous sentence makes me sigh. Those were the days, people. You can still find your own version of them if you want to.

Well, come to think of it, there were two tiny 16-gauge wires running side by side together up from the motor to the steering station, where we had mounted a throttle and a shifter and the stout wheel from an early-70’s junkyard Pontiac. A toggle switch there gave us a way to kill Mr. Evinrude at the flick of a finger. That switch came in handy now and then, when a dog jumped overboard or we glimpsed bottom or suspicious-looking breakers dead ahead.

The McLeod Bay Antelope, we christened her, after Stan Rogers’ infamous Antelope in his ballad of Barrett’s Privateers: “With a list to port and her sails in rags, and the cook in the scuppers with the staggers and jags. God damn them all…”

It was quite a summer, that summer of 1983. Upon reaching Hoarfrost River, by then six days out from Yellowknife, we discovered another scruffy-looking young gent happily ensconced in the tilting log cabin there. That was a surprise for us, to say the least, since we had a note from Jimmy Colburn advising “Whomever it may concern” that we had his permission to base ourselves at the Hoarfrost for the season – and for even longer if things worked out. Mr. Wooledge assured us that he expected to finalize his own purchase of the place in just a few days. That part of the story (for of course he never did finalize the purchase, and two years later I did) was yet to be written.

We were a little crestfallen, but we took him at his word and chugged on down the bay another seven miles to a cluster of small islands, where we moored our trusty Antelope, launched the Seliga, set the dogs loose on an island across from ours, and made ourselves a base camp for two months. There were solo trips up to Artillery Lake and back with the canoe, five-day walks with a dog or two in the hills around the bay, days of smoke from distant fires, days of visiting with the weathermen down at the Reliance station, days of fishing, days of restlessness, days of fishing, days of reading, days of fishing, days of rain, days of bliss, and days of fishing.

Come mid-September we had given up on the entire Hoarfrost River scheme. We loaded dogs, gear, and what little remained of our grub, and turned the McLeod Bay Antelope west for Yellowknife, 220 miles away. We almost made it there under our own steam, but that is another story. In a nutshell, we found a few days of paid work for some stakers in the Thor Lake area, and ended our voyage with the dogs sprawled on the foredeck of the freighter Hearne Channel  and the Antelope on a tow-rope behind. Dear Mr. Evinrude was only hitting on one cylinder by then, and we were very happy for the lift as the snow began to fly.

Forty years? Can it have been 40 years now? Yep.

And what, you may ask, was the point of this flurry of nostalgia this morning, as I sit on a train chugging along the south shore of Lake Erie, toward a nephew’s wedding in Vermont?

No point really, except perhaps to re-iterate a favorite couplet from W.H. Murray, attributed (apparently wrongly) to Goethe:

“Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it.  /  Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.”

And then to segue to Stan Rogers.

A Thousand Miles of Foo

METAR CYLK 291600Z 00000KT 1SM FU SCT012 BKN150 20/11 A2995 RMK FU4AC3 SLP148 DENSITY ALT 1300FT=

METAR CYLK 291500Z VRB02KT 1/2SM FU VV009 19/11 A2996 RMK FU8 SLP152

Aviation loves acronyms, abbreviations, and deviously coded information, like the pair of hourly METARs pasted above.

Without even deciphering very much of the above coded weather report from today, for our nearest reporting station at the community of Lutsel K’e NWT, a pilot could just zero in on the “1SM FU” at 10 a.m., preceded by the “1/2SM FU” at 9 a.m., and, well, go ahead and make some others plans for the day. A walk, maybe, or a nap.

The reference to a thousand miles in the title is a drastic underestimate, but “a thousand miles” always has a nice ring to it. In this wildfire summer we are all working our way through, the tally of smoky miles logged by countless pilots across Canada must be in the hundreds of millions by now. Maybe more. It’s getting wearisome and it ain’t over yet.

What’s with the “foo,” you ask? As I said, aviation is all about abbreviations, acronyms, and terse codes. Sometimes these are easy to decipher, for example “CLD” for cloud and “OVC” for overcast. For years, though, I was puzzled by “Fu” for smoke and “Br” for mist. Answer is, the French factor. Flying machines have historic roots in both the francophone and anglophone worlds, and the lexicon of flying shorthand draws from both. Fumée = Smoke, and Brume = Mist.

Thus “Fu,” which a few days ago I started calling Foo — sometimes uttered with an adjective also beginning with F.

Wildfire smoke is strange stuff to fly through. 30 and 40 years ago, I labored under the false notion that smoke could only ever get so bad. That is, it could hamper VFR flying and be a pain in the keester, but it could not ground me. How wrong I was! Smoke is essentially different from cloud. It is more like a thin, surrounding ooze that mile by mile lulls a pilot into complacency. No sharp edges, no real definition. You can still see the ground below you, even from many thousands of feet above, but looking forward you have nothing. Foo can form layers, like cloud, but more often it is just a diaphonous maddening veil or blob, sometimes thick, sometimes not so thick — up, down, and all around. Yuck.

It is August tomorrow. A little darkness has come back to the nights of the North. I have yet to see my first star, but I will be cheering when I do.

Last week I set off to get a routine maintenance inspection on one of our floatplanes, 500 miles away in Fort Nelson, British Columbia. After a four-and-a-half hour flight that saw me under smoke at 300 feet AGL (above ground level) , almost above the smoke at 11,000 feet MSL (mean sea level) and in and around and through it everywhere else, I got word that the best option was to land the floatplane at the airport on the grass of the infield, as we do in the autumn at season’s end. There was so little water in the floatplane lake that taking off from there after the inspection was not going to be a sure bet. Another adventure. Another foo-filled flight getting back to home, followed by more days of some of the worst smoke we have seen here in years. Visibility down to half a mile or less at times. No one was even tempted to fly, which is actually a good thing because it removes the second-guessing.

Right across the country pilots of every stripe are just rolling with the punches, cursing the FU, and trying to finish out this smoky summer safe and sound. Props boring holes through the smoke, the mist, the VFR, becoming IFR, becoming stay-put, with our FT planted firmly on the GRND.

A Visit to the Neighbors

In late May I spent a week up visiting our nearest neighbors. Forty miles straight north of home, I could look out from my little dormitory-room window upon a scene of massive modern industry. The Gacho Kue diamond mine. The hundreds of workers there are, truly and amazingly, our closest year-round neighbors nowadays. And in the years since 2013, when construction of the mine began, I had never once visited them!  Never even considered the possibility.

The mine is a model of fly-in, fly-out mining, replete with security checks, Muster Stations, a huge processing plant, a distant row of bunkers for storage of explosives, and workers — from drillers to dishwashers — all putting in 12-hour shifts, 7 to 7, night and day, two weeks in, two weeks out.  All this activity is fed by a trio of bulk fuel tanks the capacity of which I will not try to guess. Having eyeballed them for a week out the window of my dormitory room, I would say each cylindrical tank is 80 feet tall and 200 feet in diameter. Sea cans and pallets, heavy equipment, hard hats, orange vests and two-way radios were everywhere. On a May sub-arctic evening it was all very sunny and fine, but on a windy January night at minus gazillion, the mine complex must feel like a self-contained capsule careening through the blackness of outer space.

Spring came early this year and forced us off the ice at home on May tenth. That was the earliest “get everything off the ice” date in 25 years — since 1998.  The early meltdown this year threw a wrench into the plans for some contracted wolf-den search flying, and there was a scramble to find a place to base from — a place with access to the tundra, a place to re-fuel and eat and sleep — and with a gravel landing strip. (This 6,000-foot “strip” is kind of comical for the two-seat Husky on fat tires. In serious wind I would probably have had to land across it. And when parking and taxiing, it was vital to keep tabs on the jet blast from the Boeing 737 and other large jetliners that came and went alongside us.)

After about six hours of online training, a criminal background check, and submission of some medical forms  — voila — the little Husky on bush tires and its two occupants were suddenly welcome to land and work from the mine-site, as guests of DeBeers Canada.

Given the sudden upheaval in plans I tried, for a change, to look on the bright side, and all in all that was not very hard. Everyone up there was friendly and helpful, the mine facilities are clean and painstakingly organized, and my friend the biologist and I happily got all of our work done. Did not find many wolves, but spent our days diligently looking, at the rate of about 600 miles a day.

The days went flying past, but every now and then I mused about the oddity of life in this self-contained “company town” plopped out on the tundra — so close to, and yet so unbelievably far from, home sweet home.  Unbelievably far, because up there at the neighbors’ place, while on “free time,” a person is completely cut off from the landscape beyond the limits of the mine’s hub and hubbub.  Suffice it to say that an evening stroll outdoors —  that is, just ambling out onto the tundra to have a look around — would be unthinkable up there. As in absolutely, utterly, totally out of the question. Security would have been summoned, questions would have been asked, and every vestige of our warm welcome there would have faded instantly. I understand. Honest.

Yet for many years before the mine complex was established, I often passed right by that same spot, caribou hunting or paddling or running a team of dogs, or shuttling geologists and their sample pails hither and yon in the early days of the diamond rush, circa 1993.

And before that, before the diamond rush was even a shuffle, I remember guiding a canoe group from Minnesota; we camped on Fletcher Lake in August,1991. On a sunny morning after breakfast a Cessna floatplane landed and two fellows walked up the sandy esker with a shovel. They panned and sifted a small sample, labelled it, and stowed it in a numbered cloth sack.

“Hi,” they said, “We work for DeBeers.”

“DeBeers?” I said. “As in ‘A Diamond is Forever?'”

“Yep.”

“Wow.”

Those same headwaters of the Hoarfrost River were almost in sight of my dorm-room window the other night, 32 years later.  My oh my.

Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that the tiny nameless lakes atop the kimberlite deposits  would someday be drained, and a truly awe-inspiring hole in the ground would supplant them, along with a small city of workers.  The only thing even more amazing than the holes in the ground are the massive piles of crushed rock alongside them. Those man-made mountains will be there, literally, until the next ice-age glacier arrives to grind them down.  There is nothing toxic about them — they are just big piles of crushed rock.  Flying back at the end of each day’s work, we could spot the rockpiles on the horizon from forty miles away. Not a word of exaggeration. The Pyramids of Egypt have nothing on these babies. They make those big steel fuel tanks look like thimbles.

Yes, it was good to be welcomed, and to visit the neighbors after all these years, but the mine is not the sort of place where we will ever casually wander by to sit at the kitchen table for a cup of coffee and a good long natter. So, are those neighbors, or something else?

And, of course, diamonds are not forever. In about another eight years, from what I have been told, the Gacho Kue mine will begin to do what all mines everywhere inevitably and eventually do: it will run out of the good stuff, and it will be shut down and put away. That will be another interesting process to observe, from our slight remove, if we are still around.

And in forty years, what will be up there? My children will be as old by then as I am now. I will be long gone. The diamonds that came from there, the tiny shiny stones that are the raison d’etre  of everything I could see in every direction out my dorm-room window, will be scattered far and wide around the world, maybe hung on elegant brooches clasping elegant clothes around elegant shoulders, festooned on ring and pinky fingers, or perhaps tucked away in safe-deposit boxes — if in the world of 2063 there are still such things as brick-and-mortar banks and steel safe-deposits.

I stand here tonight at home and look toward the north. No sight or sound or hint of the mine from here, but now I have a better mental picture of life up at the neighbors’ place. People strolling down the hallway to the gymnasium for a session on the treadmill. People settled in for a movie on the screen above their bed. Eating at the cafeteria, or toiling away deep down in the pit, blasting and hauling and crushing kimberlite.

Is this the future of the north? Maybe.

“There are strange things done in the midnight sun.” You got that right, Robert.