Ice Bridge

The ice bridge opened this past thursday;  the brave man that walks across first every year had made it back safely so it seemed like a good opportunity to escape from isolation for a little while at least. We drove for about an hour before we reached the 1km stretch of ice. The bridge is not elevated, you drive down to the ferry terminal out on to the ice surrounded by 10 foot ice ridges and huge mounds of graying snow. It was a very turbulent ride, i took off my seatbelt so as not to let myself be lost if the ice broke and water pulled us under. (which happens every year). There were students from Fort Simpson walking across, they park their cars on both sides and simply drive into town after. 

Fort Simpson was pretty sleepy on saturday morning. it was pay week so everyone everywhere goes somewhere else to spend their money. The vegetable selection was disappointing, everything was within days of expiring. By the time the food gets to the Northern store in Fort Simpson from Edmonton it is mostly rotten anyways. We spend $70 each on produce! I feel like I am in a race against the clock with my food here, as much as I'd like to save and salvage nature demands me to splurge. We filled two garbage bags with food waste on sunday and i am constantly biting into sandwiches and fruit to taste bitterness and decay. Not nice when a bag of apples is $10.(I feel like Anne Frank haha).

Christmas Festivities

This week's excitement in pictures....

Gingerbread cookie resemblance contest!

WE made too many so I ate all the nudies. The 5 year old esmeralda was so funny when she was decorating she was licking all the knives them decorating the cookies and eating them right after so there weren't any for judging.

Karaoke Night

Hayley hosts Jean Marie's First Karaoke Night....

                                                 

                                                                       

                                 It was a success! I am working on gathering a crowd for it. This is the first time in two weeks we actually got people organized enough to come. Everyone gets their pay checks every two weeks and goes out of town for reasons good and bad so we had to change the day. All the equipment was pretty well trashed when I got there because the rec leader was fired this past week and hadn't bothered to put any of the microphones or music away.I  overcame my anger and brought my own stuff and the show went on.... The kids sang a lot of johnny cash and miley cyrus, an interesting evening cocktail of music.

The 12 days of Christmas North

I have been spending long grueling hours painting giant boxes to look like presents for the infamous Louie Norwegian Christmas concert. Every time I set the kids up to paint they mix the colours and paint tribal masks on their faces so I have given up and now have to make 4 more giant boxes and matching bows. It was my brilliant idea to make it all out of recyclable materials so I am ripping out magazine pages and scrounging for cans and egg cartons to decorate with. Not so easy because all the kids, along with the janitor and others who are scrounging for petty cash to support drug habits, hoard these for the spring when the recycling people come and pay them $5 a bag for all the cans they have collected over the year. 

Anyways I am sure it will be glorious when they all mutter the song and hold up these obsenely large packages I have created, opening them to show their drawings inside for each day. Each kid is also performing a Christmas carol solo which I have trusted them to practice outside of school, so it should all be very interesting. Apparently last year the concert was 2 hours of Christmas solos so i didn't want to mess with the usual formula and introduce something bearable. 

Here is a link to my song.... 12 days of christmas north

Northern Lights

I have started taking walks around town after supper the silence and stillness of the trees and the houses, and the people is amazing. the past couple of nights I have bundled up and journeyed out after making Terry promise me he would come looking for me after half and hour just in cause I slip and die on the black ice or get mauled by bears or huskies or moose.... I have been taking my camera and risking frost bite to get pictures of the stars but dispute their astounding brightness no such luck. I walk around the corner from my house into the forest and just sit on the ground in the snow and look up to the panoramic view of the night sky. And I lay there and stare at the north star which seems to be a hundred times brighter than all the others and am mesmerized until I start worrying about the bear behind me that I can not hear because my parka is buttoned up to my nose and all i can hear is the noise of my own thoughts. 

yesterday night I walked down along the 'beach,' to take in the sweet smoke than envelopes the town every evening from the family's wood burning chimneys and looked up along the water to see the northern lights. huge blue streaks in the sky and a stripe of blue circling the island across from Jean Marie (in the northerly direction)  just inches above the tree tops. It made me stop and think about what Canada was before colonization and wonder how many more treasures of nature these people experience in the north everyday every year. the little houses lining the beach looked beautiful with their fuming chimneys and empty little dog huts buried deep in the snow, everyone inside with the warmth for the night. 

Florence

Florence has been Louie Norwegian's school janitor for the past 20 years. She is the daughter- in- law of Sara Hardisty, the eldest elder. She comes in at 4:00 each day wearing a big knit t shirt with no bra and a sweet yet confused crumpled little smile. When I first met her I was shocked that she was so determinedly working at such old age- she has long gray hair and limps around listlessly- but then i found out that she was only 56 years old. Her alcoholic, abusive husband has aged her considerably. She often walks in, pauses, sits down, waits and waits until someone gives in and takes the time to visit with her. A working day ends up being about 45 minutes for Florence, the rest of the 2 hours she is scheduled to work are occupied by conversation and blank stares. This bothered me at first but now I love Florence. She has a funny, quiet sense of humour and I have learned that if you start doing one of her clean up tasks she will finish it out, 60/40. She constantly forgets how many children she has but still insists on counting them on her fingers every time she brings up her family. Of course one died in the fire and the other killed himself with a hunting rifle, she tells me everyday. She has 14 brothers and sisters and only knows one of them. Her daughter was in a car accident and was nearly completely paralyzed so she is in a wheel chair. Florence lives with her and spends most of her time caring for her, cooking, chopping wood and trying to convince her to stop drinking. She gets pretty fed up some days. She says once the ice bridge is built she is going to push her across and hope she rolls all the way to civilization. 

Hot Dog Offering

Today we had a hot dog lunch for the community to mark addictions awareness week. The kids all made posters about the evils of addiction,s many of them with a little too detailed pictures of bottles, bongs and crack pipes, which I found scary considering they are 10-14 years old. There was a sense of great familiarity in these objects for them. We pinned the pictures up in the community for the elders and other members of the community to look a while eating. On the bulletin board where all the news goes up I noticed that they had written hot dog lunch celebrating national children's day, interesting. Sara, Jean Marie's eldest elder made an offering of a fully dressed hot dog to a small bonfire that was stationed right outside the band hall, and said a prayer in Slavey, kissing and clutching her rosary tight. She is sweet looking, she has a friendly turned in mouth, her lips form a cave around her teeth and her hair is fine and cut short. She looks like a first nations raggedy Anne doll but her hands tell you she was part of a generation of first nations whose salvation was the bush, hard work and struggle was a way of life. The other community members that attended mostly just stared me down when I introduced myself and had little  to say about recent affairs in the town. Big long tables of silent people. One man came up to me and offered to take me trapping in a few weeks. Could be days could be years. Or maybe that was a pick up line?

While I was cleaning up the smelly hot dog pots and carrying the bottles back to the cupboards in the gym's bathroom- sized canteen I noticed that a whole table of band members were watching me. I later found out that they were wondering if i am Canadian, employable and would I like to be the band's secretary treasurer??