As the Solstice slides past and Christmas comes on, this morning I pull my chair up close to the yellow-orange stored-sunshine glow of the woodstove’s fire and consult a clipboard-mounted chart of dates, times and numbers.  Like all pilots who take off and land and fly small machines over country where there are no runway lights, and for many hundreds of miles no man-made lights at all, I am dutifully cognizant of the constant subtle shifts of daylight and darkness, season by season.  Here at the Hoarfrost River we count and measure the dwindling and advancing sunlight, and watch as it plays into our daily power usage, our indoor and outdoor light,  and the rhythms of our work.  We are well and truly “off the grid”  — that irksome recent label for any outback residence — as if The Grid and its brother The Net were themselves a pair of magnanimous new Deities, pinnacles of human accomplishment, and not in fact more akin to the shifty-eyed heartless dealers, selling dear to hundreds of millions of trembling, drooling addicts.  (And all of us groovy off-grid types are right in there with the rest, clamoring ever for More — more barrels of aviation fuel, more lead-acid batteries and solar panels, more and better generators and chainsaws and LED lights from China.)

But I digress, as usual.  The fire crackles and my knees toast in the glow.   “The chart” laid open on them is a day-by-day annual table, generated by the National Research Council of Canada, which I obtained by simply entering our longitude and latitude. Anyone can generate such a chart, for any location, and the link is here: http://www.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/eng/services/sunrise/advanced.html

For each date of the year the chart lists Sidereal Time (which I do not claim to comprehend), Nautical and Civil Twilight times for dawn and dusk, Sunrise, Local Noon, and Sunset, followed by three daily Totals. Today I am focused on those totals, one for Day (sun above the horizon) one for Sky (sun within 6 degrees of the horizon – thus giving legal daylight for flying) and, the last of the chart’s eleven columns, Total Illumination.

I am intent on the Total Illumination column – the sum of daylight and usable twilight, or in effect how many hours of light will our dear star send us today, here at 62 degrees, 51 minutes North, 109 degrees, 16 minutes West?

And I see that – oh happy day – tomorrow we will turn the corner, by 36 seconds.  Starting on December 19^th, we have had 7.13 hours of daylight per day, and for five days straight the total has been steady there at 7.13.  Seven hours, seven minutes, forty-eight seconds today,  Seven hours, eight minutes, twenty-four seconds tomorrow.  (And yes, I do know that this is all an approximation, an estimate to the nearest hundredth of an hour.)

Another digression is clearly called for, since as I sat here pondering that previous paragraph our battery-powered household system shut itself right down, as it is wont to do whenever the system voltage dips to 11.4 – which it does frequently in these darkest days.  Time to don a headlamp, fetch the little generator, lug it out into the 33-below darkness, pour the fuel, yank on the cord, swaddle the little machine in some old sleeping bags salvaged from the Yellowknife dump, and let it put some juice back into the batteries.  Or, alternatively, just sit here by the fire and peck away in the dark for a while, un-connected to almighty Net or Grid or what some insist upon calling The Real World (as in “reality T.V.?”)  I will digress no further into speculation about the cherished hallucinations of those who imagine that a fully-tricked-out modern North American household (micro-wave, electric lights around the bathroom mirror that are bright enough to illuminate open-heart surgery, dishwasher, ice-cube maker, clothes dryer, 56 inch HD teevee) can all be powered to the standard its inhabitants have so flippantly come to expect, just by bolting a few 2 X 3 solar panels up on the south-facing balcony.

Whoa there Nellie.  Fire-glow, warm knees, hot coffee, and climb down from Soapbox.  Clipboard, chart: Where was I before the lights went out?   Oh yes, for tomorrow, the 24^th of December, the Total Illumination here goes from 7.13 to 7.14.  Near as I can figure, that one-hundredth of an hour amounts to 36 seconds.  And – the cause for jubilation – this is 36 more seconds than today, not less.  We have turned the corner and begun the glorious winter-long slide of the sun’s day-by-day return.

What to do with those 36 seconds?  In these scary, secular, fundamentalist, para-scientific, crass, hateful, polarized, battered-Christmas-magic days, I think I will use those 36 seconds, once the sun is up tomorrow, to take down from the wall a plaque my sister made for us, and re-read a poem by Sandburg. Carl Sandburg, born in 1878 in Galesburg Illinois to Swedish immigrant parents, died in 1967.  He was a favorite of our Mor-Mor (Swedish for Mother’s Mother) and she always recited this one from memory, in candle-light  around the tree on Christmas Eve. That recitation, each year, is among my most enduring memories of the Solstice and Christmas and New Year holiday season.

With Sandburg’s homespun poem to fill your new-found seconds of sunlight, I wish each of you a Merry Christmas and a good New Year.

STAR-SILVER

The silver of one star
plays cross-lights against pine-green
And the play of this silver cross-wise against the green is an old story.
Thousands of years.

And sheep grazers on the hills by night
watching the woolly four-footed ramblers
watching a single silver star.
Why does this story never wear out?

And a baby, slung in a feed box back in a barn in a Bethlehem slum
A baby’s first cry,
mixing with the crunch of a mule’s teeth on Bethlehem Christmas corn
Baby fists, softer than snowflakes of Norway

The vagabond mother of Christ
and the vagabond men of wisdom
all in a barn on a winter night
and a baby there in swaddling clothes on hay
Why does this story never wear out?

The sheen of it all–is a star, silver and a pine, green
For the heart of a child asking a story
The red and hungry, red and hankering heart
Calling for cross-lights of silver and green

(Now I bet those are four words not strung together often!)

Since mid-November I have been away from the Hoarfrost River, based in Yellowknife, Gameti, and Lutsel K’e for a contract with the Bush Hawk.  Flying transect lines laid out by the survey biologist, with two observers in the back seats calling out wildlife spotted (“anything with fur” were the instructions to us on day one), and the wildlife biologist in the right front seat recording locations and details.  Lest some readers get the notion that these flights are a non-stop frenzy of animal sightings, I hasten to add that several of the common themes of our very widely spaced onboard conversation, interjected into long periods of engine-and-prop hum,  are comments like “Well, a few tracks there…” and “Wow, pretty quiet,” and the occasional wistful “Sure looks kinda moosey.”

The themes in my blog post from August 2013, “Summer Hunger” apply, although on this survey we are well within treeline. A Parks Canada brochure laying out the case for a new National Park out on the east end of Great Slave Lake included a remarkable comment, to wit:  “This is a land teeming with wildlife.”  I quoted it over the intercom the other day, after a perfectly silent low-level transect of some 90 nautical miles (167 kilometers) and my fellow observers responded with quiet chuckles. I really must invite the Parks Canada author of that phrase along for a flight or two.

This vast expanse of northern North America has many marvelous attributes, and I heartily support the uncompromising preservation of some enormous unfettered tracts of it. (Oh look, it’s the Chamber of Mines and the NWT Chamber of Commerce marching toward me with buckets of hot tar and Five-Star sleeping robes leaking duck feathers!)  But let’s get one thing straight, and keep it clearly in mind (remembering Haines’ admonition to northern writers about making “a sustained effort to demolish the cliché”):  This is the ice-scraped, fire-quilted, rock-floored northern limit of the boreal forest, squeezed between the cold depths of Great Slave Lake and the edge of the Arctic tundra.  “Teeming with wildlife” it is not.  Never has been, never will be.  In Saturday morning English, this is tough country for critters.

So what does a pilot do on these long quiet lines, hour after hour – and on these (even longer!) grounded “weather days,” one after the next? Lately I’ve been dabbling in Haiku.  5-7-5 syllables.  The textbooks tell me that this form is not to be punctuated and should be free of capital letters.  I will leave them the way I jotted them.

Over Stark Lake

Airborne, skis pumped down.

Cliffs and whitecaps slide below.

Engine snarl – good noise!

The Meadow

Shot caribou here,

But that was decades ago.

Now just ice and wind.

Ice on the Wings

Of the months we fly,

November is the worst by far.

Each night, down safe – good.

Groggy

Transect Line Three-Nine

Post-lunch sleepies setting in.

One-liner anyone?

Trumped — 1

Moose! – On the ridge there!

Do you know or give a rip

About this craziness?

Trumped – 2

Of course not, he says,

Or so I think I hear.

“You are strange creatures.”

Watching Hockey with Joe Lockhart

During ads we talk.

Old stories of his good bush life.

These days, TV games.

East of Yellowknife

These miles of charred moss

Will burst green again, someday.

Our children will see.

Airborne at Sunrise

Over water, cliffs and trees,

Skis down, as if they would help.

Life insurance paid?

Back in YZF

At least in Lutsel K’e

We could see the stars at night.

Here, only streetlights.

Weather Day 4

Two words are comfort,

Just five welcome syllables:

“Daily minimums.”

At the Pool — Weather Day 5

When we cannot fly,

Swim twenty-five meter lines.

Creature of habit.

Annual Reminder

Minute by minute

The days keep squeezing shorter.

Why am I surprised?

Grounded on yet another gray and snowy November day in Yellowknife.  Trying to get an aerial survey contract finished, and dodging the season’s unsettled weather day by day.  Reciting that old bush-pilot mantra: “Better to be on the ground wishing we were flying, than to be flying around, wishing like hell we were on the ground…”

I’ll try to post something for November in the next few days but today I have an announcement here, and as Tom and Ray of Car Talk on NPR would say, “Welcome to the Shameless Commerce Division, folks…”

A new edition of my 1994 book North of Reliance is now available from the publisher, Raven Productions of Ely, Minnesota, or by inquiring through your local bookstore.  This is a happy resurrection for this collection of essays, after a period of about 15 years in “out of print” status.

Congratulations and Thanks to everyone who has made this happen!

Here is the link to book information from Raven:

http://www.ravenwords.com/books_for_adults/books_for_adults/north_of_reliance.html

Some comments from the back cover:

Olesen confronts the contradictions in using the tools of the modern world to touch the purity, serenity, and magnificence of wild nature in the far North. …This is a beautifully written, often moving, account of a couple’s quest to live a life together that touches what matters.

— Erik F. Storlie, author of Nothing on my Mind and Go Deep and Take Plenty of Root

Dave Olesen has captured a sweet spot in place-based writing where mystery, beauty, paradox, contradiction, and intimacy all gel together into an elegant truth.

— Bob Henderson, author of Every Trail has a Story: Heritage Travel in Canada and co-editor, Pike’s Portage, Stories of a Distinguished Place 

Dave Olesen is a writer/poet/observer of nature’s relationship with humanity like no other. He writes in the tradition (and standard) of Thoreau, Muir, Leopold, Eisley, Abbey, Dillard, Stegner, Berry and Snyder, but his perspective of the subject is as different from theirs as his lifestyle is from yours or mine.

— Dick Dorworth, author of Climbing to Freedom and The Perfect Turn

If you enjoy my monthly Hoarfrost River musings on this blog, you will find some good reading in North of Reliance. And if you have already read the book, you will enjoy the layout of this new version, including 40 photographs by Kristen Gilbertson Olesen. A link to her portfolios is http://www.kristenolesenphotography.ca/Portfolio/     It was a pleasure for me to work with the people at Raven, and with Kristen, on this new edition — at times a mixed pleasure upon which I reflect in my Preface:

A late-winter morning here at home, half a mile west of the Hoarfrost River.  White ice, blue sky, and the fathomless silence that is the essence of the Far North. Time to place some new words ahead of this book’s original Preface.

It was John Dos Passos who claimed that “If there is a special Hell for writers it would be in the forced contemplation of their own works.” (New York Times, October 1959.) Re-reading North of Reliance chapter by chapter over these past few months has not been a hellish experience. Far from it. The memories and images, clear and strong, have come back to me from those mostly-halcyon first seven years here: visions of caribou streaming the October hills and of June mornings alone, peeling logs for the sauna. As I have reviewed these chapters I have smiled often.

But Dos Passos was onto something with his comment, too, and there have been plenty of moments during my review when I have had to pause and consider not only my writing, but my thinking.  In the easy and straightforward instances I have just smoothed the grammar, corrected a typo, or changed punctuation.  (I thank Erin and Johnna at Raven, too, for their eyes and hands in this.)  In other places – places the readers might not suspect – I have had to take a deep breath, cringe, and resist a strong impulse to delete a phrase or to scrap an entire three-paragraph riff. In those soul-searching moments I have looked to other writers for wisdom. British author and World War One pilot Cecil Lewis, in his preamble to a third edition of Sagittarius Rising:

“They say that men grow wiser as they grow older, but I think they only get more gaga.  However, I am not so far gone as to tinker with what I wrote in those glorious years when life stretched before me like a landscape from ten thousand feet and there were no shadows in the day.  Certainly I can add nothing to what I said then.  A few passages, somewhat naïve or foolish, I might have suppressed; but since they are all part of the picture of extreme youth in action, let them stay.”

With that example in mind I have done only what I set out to do – that is, to let the gist of these quarter-century-ago impressions and conclusions stand as first written, stalwart in the face of my urges to qualify or alter them.  So I admonish readers of this second edition:  take these stories and essays for what they are, written when they were, and be thankful, as I am, that the passage of time does change us all – or at least we can hope it will.  (For who would want to live in a world steered by headstrong, footloose, starry-eyed thirty-year-olds? Seriously now.)

With Cecil Lewis and countless others nodding sagely at my side I say:  “Here is how it was for me, way out here, back in those days. Enjoy!”

D.O.

8 April 2016

Call me dimwitted, because even the most obvious facts sometimes take a while to sink into my thick skull.  It is late October, and although the days have been calm and mild lately, we have had a few autumn gales and we will almost certainly have a few more before deep winter.  After every hard blow we walk our trails and find our way blocked by fire-killed trees that have fallen.  All the trees here and for many miles around being dead and burnt – their blackened skeletal stems stark in ranks across slope and swale – one by one and sometimes two by two and sometimes in dramatic domino-effect jumbles, the charred remains of a mature taiga forest are falling down. Day by day, storm by storm, month after month, year after year, the trees will fall until they are – and this is what it took me a couple of years to fully grasp – all lying down.  One by one and ten by ten gravity will call them home.  Of course this is obvious, and a given, but it took me a few years to realize it.  They will all fall down.  Not some of them, not just the weak ones.  All of them.  My, what a mess.

And I have been surprised by this lately.  Not sure why.  After all, what had I thought a dead tree would do, if not fall down? Did I think the trees would stand upright for decades, slowly turning to an elegant silvery gray, and then somehow melt away at their butts and sink gradually and gracefully out of sight?  Nope. Some might hang on for a decade or two or even three, but the soil around the bases of most of these trees is gone, and the roots and trunks of many of them are deeply charred. They topple down. They crash, they lie in jumbles, they heap themselves into thick piles that will, my friend Mitch likes to say, “stymie a moose.” In some places now, two years after the burn, it looks as though a tipsy D-8 Cat skinner has been wandering randomly across the hillsides, pushing up slash piles, clearing ground for a new airstrip or pasture. 

There are no new seedlings of spruce pushing up just yet, and where the fire burned hottest there is still no new growth at all, but blonde rows of grasses and rich stripes of purple fireweed laced the less intense portions of the burn this past summer. (It is interesting that it took two years for the fireweed to appear. Pink Corydalis was the only prominent pioneer in the first summer.)  Every so often old daydreams of Icelandic horses have revived.  Maybe, just maybe, a horse really could make a living around here in these coming years.

When the most precarious burned trees began to topple down in the weeks and months right after the fire, I was seized by an urge true to my boyhood roots in small-town street-and-yard Illinois.  The CBD (Call Big Doug) Landscaping mentality of my high-school part-time job: “It’s autumn and the leaves are down. Time to get raking and make the yards clean and neat again, and impose our tidy order on this unruly cycle, at least here in town.”  Here by the Hoarfrost River my urge was not to grab a rake but to reach for hardhat and chainsaw, to get out there and buck and pile and clear.  A laughable reaction really, in the face of the day-to-day realities of time and work, and the vast scale of the place, but the instinct is there and after every new windfall it surges again.   

But no, one does not rake up the fallen leaves in an autumn forest, and after a wildfire one does not blithely set out to cut and clear and slash-burn the millions upon millions of trees that will now be tipping over and falling down.  (In my layman’s calculations I easily get an estimate into billions, for this big burn alone, but I will hold back and stick with millions.) My urge is just a deep desire to combat the chaos, to do my small bit to restore the beauty and wholeness that have been obliterated. Tilting at windmills has been a theme around here for thirty years.  “Cleaning up” after a forest fire falls squarely in that category. 

The soothing sitting-room wisdoms of “nature’s cleanup,” “let it burn,” and “the wonder of rejuvenation,” like so many sitting-room wisdoms about wild nature, are all valid, and at some remove yes, they can be soothing.  Reality is more chaotic, and at times it is horrific.  (The string of starving wolves we have watched die slow deaths here over the past two winters come to mind as examples of not-so-soothing wildness.  Likewise the charge of a senile half-blind grizzly bear on a November morning nine years ago — his hot sour breath and the look in his eyes and the sudden realization that it might be my day to die, or his.)

It has not been soothing, but instead more like jarring and jaw-dropping, to pause deliberately and squint across miles of rolling outcrop hills, and to try to imagine the scene before me going through the changes and successions that lie ahead.  It is like trying to imagine the country under the weight of the last – or the next – wave of glacial ice.  That is something I have tried to do from time to time, but I have never honestly conjured up a convincing image of the ice sheet, in my mind’s eye. This latest attempt to envision long change is easier, because the change is already well underway: the once-lovely green hills are black and jumbled, and the trees are toppling day by day.  As if the lip of the next Keewatin ice sheet was visible on the far horizon, and on a calm day audible, rumbling and grinding down the valley.

My stilted efforts to conjure the changes that are coming to the scene before me are accompanied by a surprisingly deep sadness.  This, like the falling trees, caught me off guard, even as it brought me close to tears the other day.  “Heartfelt” is a maudlin word, but here it has its place.  I can feel sometimes, right in my heart, that span of years, and with it comes the awareness that I will not be here to see this place return to any semblance of that mature, deep-rooted, spongy-lichened, taiga-forest integrity that we all recall from a long Sunday hike we took together as a family, just over two years ago.  I will never see it come back to that. None of us will. That is gone, and all four of us will be long gone before it comes back to what it was on that memorable afternoon just before the lightning struck and the fire began to prowl the hills.

Once down, these dense spruce and tamarack trunks will lie in heaps for decades far beyond a narrow human time-span.  Decay proceeds extremely slowly here in a country where our first old cabin – the one that was here from the late 1970’s – stood for nearly 40 years on unpeeled birch rounds laid crosswise right on the sand.  When we took that place down, in 2004, to erect on its site this workshop that we have called home since the fire, the wood of those birch logs was as solid as it was on the day the trees were felled.  Try that in a temperate latitude!  Hell, in the Pacific Northwest an unpeeled birch round laid on the ground beneath a building would soften to mush before lunchtime. Charred wood being highly resistant to decay, the bark-free trunks that now lie perched a foot above the ground will still be here, lying in jumbles, when my children are older than I am now, just starting lap 60 around the sun.  This is not sad, but it is not soothing Mother Nature Knows Best stuff either.  More like the cold hard facts of life and death, more like the hot breath of a bear about to kill you. It gives new meaning to the glib phrase “a 200-year burn,” and gives visible and visceral meaning to a span of two centuries. 

Again and again I turn from my reverie and stride down the hill toward home, rifle or chainsaw forever in hand, while a trio of four-month-old husky pups rockets around and leaps over and wriggles under the windfalls.  Another generation of that boundless young-dog energy enlivening our walks down these familiar trails into another freeze-up season.  Sad as it makes me some days, I feel fortunate to have been given this first-hand lesson in Time, and Nature, and the Real Deal.  Not given, so much as smacked-up-side-o’-the-head by it.      

“What emerges from the recent work on chaos and complexity is the final dismemberment of the metaphor of the world as machine, and the emergence of a new metaphor – a view of a world that is characterized by vitality and autonomy, one which is close to Thoreau’s sense of wildness, a view that, of course, goes well beyond him, but one he would no doubt find glorious.  Instead of a vast machine, much of nature turns out to be a collection of dynamic systems, rather like the mean eddy lines in Lava Falls… They are aperiodic, like the weather, they never repeat themselves but forever generate new changes, one of the most important of which is evolution.  Life evolves at the edge of chaos, the area of maximum vitality and change.”  — Jack Turner, The Abstract Wild.   Tucson:  University of Arizona Press, 1996.

The inspection done and the crew gone home,

I slept on a rough plank dock beneath the wing.

Bedroll laid out on a mattress of red life jackets,

A hasty tarp pulled on top at one a.m. when rain spit down for half an hour.

By three in the morning the sky was clear again.

It was still dark, and the wind had calmed.

I rolled over, faced east and — There you were!

For the first time since late March your three-star belt, your scabbard and shield.

“Hello old friend Orion,” I said aloud to the night.

I’ve missed you through these long bright months of spring and summer.

And now it is September, and you are back.

No frost yet, but at dusk the high peaks to the southwest were all white.

Orion, I greet you gladly, but I know what you bring.

Soon you and I will be out in the dark morning, my thick fur hat scrunched down tight,

Nose-hairs frosted, cheeks stinging, fumbling with headlamp and numb fingers,

To warm an icy lump of engine and wrestle with stiff wing-covers.

Orion!  A familiar sharpness surges in.  The season tilts.

Brother, Old Hunter, climbing into the sky.

May I say, my friend, on this mild night – that you’re looking pretty good?

Somehow softer, less stern?  Have you mellowed since I saw you last?

We all do, I guess.  And this is nice here, isn’t it?

This gentle warm night, this quiet brown-water pond,

This trusty red plane on its fat white floats,

All tucked up easy against the smooth flank of the mountains.

I smile, close my eyes and drift off again.

Deep growl of a truck, shifting and accelerating, heading for the Yukon.

At sunrise I will fly north to Yellowknife,

And from there northeast to home, and the start of autumn.

Orion is back.  Old friend, brother hunter, arm raised, belt cinched,

Good Sirius panting happy at his heels.

But hey – who would want Summer to last all year?

Not you, Winter Star Man, and not me either.

• Parker Lake, outside Fort Nelson B.C. 7 September 2016

On Tuesday grasshoppers,

clicking yellow brown in hot sun.

Longest swim of the season that evening,

this shallow sandy rim of the continent’s deepest lake

cool silk on my skin.

Wednesday a 25 knot northerly with cold rain,

pounding take-offs and touchdowns,

long V’s of geese riding the cold front south,

that rare thin layer of warm water pushed offshore and gone.

Thursday a scouting flight northeast

to the upper Baillie River.

Caribou there, drifting down from the coast,

crossing the border from Nunavut.

As if a border, or a map,

means anything to them.

All that matters to them,

to the grasshoppers and the geese,

and to me, just now,

is that summer is ending.

On the night of 19 July each year we mark a change here, a subtle one not noticed by many, but significant to back country flyers who do not come and go from established airports. No runway lights and centreline markers here, just water and snow and tundra.  On the night of July 19th, for the first time since May 26th,  there starts to be some “legal darkness” in the middle of the night.  Flying in daylight has been a 24-hour option for nearly two months now.  Today summer has crested and that season is done.

We do not see the Midnight Sun here, being still a few hundred miles south of the Arctic Circle.  We do, however, have midnight sunlight for these halcyon nine weeks.  Centered on either side of local midnight, skewed an hour by the adjustment of Daylight Saving Time, this first hint of coming change delineates the period when the sun’s orb drops more than six degrees below the horizon.  When it does, not enough light spills up over the rim of the earth to let a pilot safely bring an airplane down to “land” (be it water, snow, or gravel) without the aid of some sort of artificial lighting. 

This little wedge of darkness in the middle of night grows rapidly longer over the next few weeks, widening to nearly four hours here, latitude 62° 51’ North, by the first of August.  We keep a chart of the times here on a clipboard, handy for reference. It is a binding rule of aviation, and unlike some other edicts passed down from on high (Ottawa, Washington, etc.) this one makes us all sit up and take notice.  Turning short final for landing in the final minute or two before “Civil Twilight” or “Legal Darkness,” on an overcast night over dark water can be – as any bush pilot’s curled toes and puckered sphincter muscles will attest – quite exciting. Reduce the visibility to a (legal) mile or two in forest-fire smoke, or coat the windshield with some light mist, make the water glassy smooth, and it becomes one of the operations professional pilots get paid for.  So we take heed of those numbers.

For a few weeks now some long-ago memorized lines from a poem by John Haines have been running through my mind.  I have been thinking about Haines, and his place in my life as literary hero and bush-life icon.  I was lucky enough to meet John Haines a few times, and I saw him last  in 2004 when I arrived un-announced at the office he kept that spring at the University of Alaska. I had flown a Husky from Hoarfrost River to Fairbanks, to deliver it to a new owner, and I was waiting for the buyer to fly down from Bettles. John had gone flying with me once, about 30 years earlier, over the south shore of Lake Superior in a little Cessna 140 I owned with a buddy.  He still remembered that flight, and told me he had always thought he might get his pilot’s license.  Not a surprising aspiration for an Alaskan woodsman, where pilots of small bush planes fill the skies from Skagway to Kotzebue.   

In 1979 or 1980, late in autumn, William Stafford came to read at Northland College.  My longtime friend Lee Merrill, himself a poet and in those years a professor of English at Northland, had asked Stafford to dinner.  Lee had asked me, former pupil and avid Stafford reader, to join them.  We had gone out to Lee and Melinda’s home deep in the woods and far from town, on a tiny lake south of Ashland.  Dumbstruck as I was in the presence of Stafford and Merrill, I rode along silently in the back seat as Lee steered his old sedan north through the dark, to the college on the coast of the big lake. Stafford in person was just as any reader of his poems would have expected: polite, soft-spoken, gracious and generous.  As the dark November miles ticked past, the conversation turned to poets.  Stafford told of a mountain picnic with Gary Snyder, and chuckled at how charmed his wife had been by the man, hinting that perhaps she had been a bit surprised by that.

“Haines? I remember this about my first meeting with John Haines. We were together in Oregon, and we had an apple we were going to share.  He passed me his knife so I could cut it in half.  ‘Careful,’ he said, ‘it’s very sharp.’ And it was! I think it was one of the sharpest knives I’ve ever handled.  And that seemed so right, you know?  That John would always have with him a sharp knife.”

Stafford and Haines.  Poet’s poets. What fine brief meetings those were, sprinkled across those years, and what steady inspiration the lines and the lives of those men have been, thrumming along in my mind day by day.  Thanks, Lee, for those introductions. 

Now maybe I’ll set this aside and touch up my belt knife.  It is not as sharp as it should be, and certainly not as sharp as John’s knife in Stafford’s anecdote.  Day after day, it is there in its leather scabbard, and out doing something: cutting a rope, trimming a frayed hose, tweaking the tiny screw on a headset… and slipped back into its sheath.  I reach for it without even thinking, which is as it should  be with some tools, and I literally feel only half-dressed if I do not have it.  No pre-flight security checks here!

Sitting here on this rainy cool morning, I can’t discern any connection between the lines from a Haines poem and my ramblings from sharp knives to the annual onset of summer twilight.  So be it — this blog is subtitled Musings from the Hoarfrost River, and this month you get “musings.”   I’ll paste the lines from Haines here below.  John would be pleased. 

Thanks for reading, have a good month, and watch those twilight times, comrades.

And there I too wanted to stay…

speak quietly to the trees,

tell in a notebook sewn from

their leaves my brief of passage:

long life without answering speech,

grief enforced in that absence;

much joy in the weather,

spilled blood on the snow.

 

With a few split boards,

a handful of straightened nails,

a rake and a broom;

my chair by the handmade window,

the stilled heart come home

through smoke and falling leaves.

 

• Final two stanzas from a poem “There Are No Such Trees in Alpine, California” from the collection Cicada by John Meade Haines (1924 – 2011)

I have been reading Old Jules, by Mari Sandoz.   I have been swept up in it for weeks.  (My reading these days being mainly a brief late-evening interlude, tuckered out and often ending sound asleep with the book lost somewhere alongside the bed, or with Kristen setting it gently aside as I snore.) Published in 1935, the book is considered a classic of American literature, and rightly so.  A broad biography of the author’s father, Jules Sandoz: Swiss immigrant settler, curmudgeon, visionary, sharpshooter, horticulturalist and, in most regards, to be honest (which Mari Sandoz – his daughter, the author – certainly is) a damned poor excuse for a father and husband.  A saga set on the western Nebraska plains, spanning from the 1880’s to the late 1920’s, clear through from the waning days of the bison and the free Lakota, to the coming of telephone, automobile, and radio.  A tough book, not a light book, and especially difficult for its frank portrayal of a father who was so incorrigibly hard on those closest to him.  Starting my Sunday with Sandoz, and it being Father’s Day today, has been a time to think about fathers and the legacy of fathers, good ones and not so good ones.  (I was lucky.  I had a good one.  A great one, and never forgotten.)  Sandoz’ masterpiece is thought-provoking and timely, too, for its litany of hard times on the high plains:  prairie fire, blizzard, hail and flood, near-starvation, insanity, feuds, local and national politics, the ending of one era and the start of another.  Much food for thought.

For those who relish such concrete tidbits more than my various ramblings, some near-Solstice Hoarfrost stats:  3 degrees above zero here this morning, about 37 degrees American.  Made a fire in the big kitchen wood stove for the first time in nearly a month, and the heat feels good. Out the door it is all cold rain and gusty north wind, and a gray bay ice-free as of one week ago, June 12. As always the final floes of ice in the entire lake were those in the mid-section of McLeod Bay, just north of Shelter Bay, forty miles west of us.  This ranks as our second earliest ice-out in 29 years.  1998 still takes the cake, by about eight days. 

Two years ago today here, it was bone dry and “our” fire was already burning, and just beginning its stealthy advance toward us from the east.  Little did we know. Today one would be hard pressed to light a campfire out in those soggy burned-over acres. The lake is rising visibly by the day, still “low” by our paltry three-decade perspective on “normal,” but higher than it has been for some years. The Hoarfrost River is surging down off the barrens, brim-full and boisterous for the first time in many springs.

Kristen is away from home, down on the prairies of North Dakota, helping her own father.  Our two daughters and I walked north up the trail last evening, with six loose dogs happy to join us. Startled a lone muskox, a big one, on the slope above the river, and had a few tense moments as several of the dogs gave chase.  Wisdom (or what passes for wisdom in the mind of a rambunctious summer sled dog) prevailed, and they saw the better part of valor as coming back to our calls.  Mr. Ovibos, for his part, decided it was best to lumber off through the charred spruce and pockets of ash now festooned with tiny sprouts of green, lurching along under his enormous shaggy coat, looking for all the world like a mastodon or mammoth back from the dawn of time.

After my past three monthly jottings here, my dear sister asked if I was “down.”  That was alarming, because no one who takes the time to read this does so for updates on my personal hard times or down times, and certainly no one needs a monthly rant-and-whine missive. Her question did get me thinking about the state of my own mental ship:  was it floating on a solid mooring, sailing in high seas, or foundering, or worse?  Bear with me, and read forward, because what I have come to is this: No, I am not down. I am just trying my best to continue to become disillusioned.

Hold on, wait, stay and don’t hit that instant-departure key.  Viva Disillusionment!  Is dis-illusion-ment not a good thing, something to strive for as we live?  Should we not, all of us, be eager to be dis – illusioned as we make our way and learn our (sometimes very hard) lessons? 

I’ve had many illusions. Still have plenty.  About people, about the Far North, about heroes and causes. About how much a man can do in a day, for how long, and how well. Some of these illusions are the stuff of dreams, of romance, of boldness and assurance and inspiration.  Long may they inspire, and motivate.  But the fire of 2014 and its aftermath burned up a lot of illusions around here, “permanence” right up at the head of the list:  The Illusion of Permanence.  Think about that, as my hero Dick Dorworth likes to write. Permanence?  Out here?  (Or anywhere for that matter, but here right now is always a good start.)  I know I am not alone, as I come close to 60, in having seen some of my own dearest illusions marched out into the bright light of morning, grabbed by the shoulders and turned to face the sun. We clever modern idiot-savants are nowadays much too cocksure of ourselves, in my view.  We have such deep belief in our own illusions of competence and grandeur, to name just two varieties, that we have soiled our planetary nest and put at peril far too many of our fellow voyageurs.

So this morning I am glad to make it my day’s work to try and step clear and see past the illusions around here.  And to do so with a light heart, if I can.  Mari Sandoz had no illusions about her father or about immigrant life on the Nebraska plains, and from her steadfast dis-illusionment came her book, a timeless masterpiece of a book.

Thoreau weighs in on this topic with one whopper of a sentence,  and still comes through like a champ, summing up perfectly what I am trying to say:

”Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe, through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and Concord, through church and state, through poetry and philosophy and religion, till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality, and say, This is, and no mistake; and then begin, having a point d’appui,  below freshet and frost and fire, a place where you might found a wall or a state, or set a lamp-post safely, or perhaps a gauge, not a Nilometer, but a Realometer, that future ages might know how deep a freshet of shams and appearances had gathered from time to time. If you stand right fronting and face to face with a fact, you will see the sun glimmer on both its surfaces, as if it were a cimeter [scimitar], and feel its sweet edge dividing you through the heart and marrow, and so you will happily conclude your mortal career. Be it life or death, we crave only reality.”

• Walden

 

Ah, the romance of the bush pilot life.  Floats rippling the smooth water of a pristine lake at dawn, the view of an Arctic watershed from a mile high, alone in a trusty fabric-and-tube wonder, propeller and pistons purring, and not another human soul for a hundred miles in any direction.  The chance to do for a living what most people dream of doing for adventure and recreation.  It is a good gig.  It is!

And its flip side. Because everything has a flip side, doesn’t it?  Motel room in Fort Nelson B.C., Mile 300 of the Alaska Highway. Day Three just beginning. The rain that has poured down all night is now forecast to change to snow. Low cloud and lively north winds. I am not scheduled to be in Yellowknife until Monday afternoon, for a charter to the ice strip at a tundra camp 200 miles north of there, and it is only Saturday. So I am long on time, and I am doing my best to be long on patience.

Patience is a virtue in this business.  Waiting on weather is a mental game, familiar to all who hang it out there at the whim and power and unpredictability of sky, water, and wide expanses of wild country. Over the ten years we have been having our airplanes maintained at Fort Nelson I have developed a healthy respect for the 360 miles of low ridges and blank terrain that lie in the northeastern-most corner of B.C. and the southern district of the Territories, a straight lonely line between Fort Nelson and Yellowknife.  I have spent some nerve-wracking moments aloft over that stretch, and I remember them on days like this.

One of the planes we operate is just emerging from a long saga of scheduled engine and prop overhaul, routine airframe inspections, all capped off by a very minor airframe repair that morphed into a 30-day delay. The common-sense-annihilating paper chase that is a bane of modern life is never so obvious and onerous as it is in aviation. No certified aircraft repair facility is going to weld a small patch on a minor tube of the secondary brace of the landing gear (appropriately enough the “drag brace”) without a document, a technical drawing, and a green light from every sub-clause of the Air Regs. At one point it seemed we were going to need a direct intervention from the Minister of Transportation in Ottawa to get the damned part fixed. ‘Nuff said on that.  The plane is ready, a month later than we and several frustrated customers had all planned for, and now the phone calls, e-mails, questions, and near-outbursts (by me, the patient one…) can cease.

Yesterday we rolled her out, the crew at the hangar happy to see her go, and the ground test was done by one of the AME’s.  Then I climbed in and strapped in and taxied out, a wary eye on gauges and dials.  It is pretty simple stuff, really – it’s just a bush plane, not the Space Shuttle.  Still, after any major overhaul or inspection it is always time for a careful test flight.  I lifted off and stayed close to the airport, watching the temperatures and pressures of oil and manifold and cylinder heads and exhaust gas, little orange bars all magically displayed on the Graphic Engine Monitor.  Orville and Wilbur would have been impressed.  Thirty minutes of circling, changing power settings and rpm’s, noting that number five cylinder was running consistently warmer than its five partners, but not at any temperature close to worrisome.  Circling just beneath the ceiling north of the airport in spitting rain and wisps of ragged cloud, the plane tossing around in gusty winds.

Back to the airport, land and taxi in, more paperwork to sign off, and a check of the weather map with an eye toward the Territories and Great Slave Lake.  Rain, low cloud, gusty winds, fog and snow over higher terrain on the east flank of the northern Rockies.  A truly massive low pressure centre squatting motionless over north-central Alberta.  The weather briefer I spoke with at Flight Service (a.k.a. “Fright Service”) was not optimistic, and by the time I hung up the phone, neither was I.

I finished my chores, swapped gear out of the other plane, the one I will leave here with the crew, and which they will now inspect and put onto floats.  When it is done and all the ice work up north on the tundra is done, I will come back to Fort Nelson again.  Then, with the ice beginning to melt away from the mouth of the Hoarfrost River, I can go home on floats.  Summer will begin.

Caught a ride back in to town and the Hideaway Motel, where I had checked out early in the morning in a fit of optimism.  The cheapest place in town, but it is clean and tidy and as I joke with the lady at the front desk I assure her that I will be back.  Patience, patience.  Library?  Swimming Pool?  Some paperwork? A blog post?  Here you go.

In a dream I met an older version of myself. A figure in the distance, alone on a small rise.  At first I thought it was my father, or my Alabama friend Augustus. But as I walked up  I realized it was me. Tall but a little bent, bald on top and all gray at the sides; glasses. He smiled when he saw me. “Ready to stop trying so hard?”  Yes, I nodded, I am. Good, he said.  He led me down a path through young birches, to a clearing and a chair.  “Come sit.”

Overcast with some snow in the air this morning, minus eight with the trademark northeast breeze flowing down off the barrens. April has been cold and windy here with only one day of real melting, on the 18th.  The inland trails are still in decent shape for sledding and hauling.  Spring is biding its time this year.

I have been thinking about frogs and hot water lately, and the hinterlands of Canada. One of those wonderful old words, hinterland – “From German, hinter, back + land, land; an area far from big cities or towns; back country.” The other day at lunch the three of us – Kristen, Liv and I – were speculating and scheming about the summer ahead, and about supplies and barges.  Avgas in drums, lumber and groceries, bags of cement for new house footings, heavy pails of acrylic chinking slurry, four tons of kibble and rice for the dogs, six cylinders of propane and so on. And vessels to move it — barges and push-boats: waterline length, displacement, hull speed, horsepower. Freight men and barge companies:  Captain Happy, Sean Buckley, Snow King, Mike Whittaker, the Rowe brothers, NTCL. All with an eye to moving some freight while the lake is open, and to another winter, and to re-building, and to more changes afoot and more changes ahead.

As we sat and talked I grew weary.  I remembered my recent dream.  There was no clear path ahead, at least that I could see. Certainly no pleasant path through autumn birches, leading to a sunny clearing and a chair.

It is a hazard of growing older, and of sticking to one place on the planet for decades, that one begins to spend as much time looking back as forward – or so it seems some days.  Such mental strolling back through time is hazardous, because the mood of the journey can change from reflective and inspiring to whiny and resentful, and the trail is bordered by the crevasses of self-pity, self-righteousness, and self-aggrandizement. No joy and no enlightenment in any of those wallow pits.

My 1994 book North of Reliance, a collection of essays and narratives set in our first years here at the Hoarfrost River, is to come back into print later this year. This second edition is thanks to Raven Productions down in the Minnesota / Ontario border country, where I lived for most of my twenties.  In preparation for a new edition I have been re-reading the book, correcting some of my grammar and fixing small passages that never read very smoothly, while at the same time resisting a strong impulse to edit its tone and alter some of its conclusions. Looking at those chapters again has brought me back in time, and has led me to this metaphor of warming frogs.

I first stood in the narrows at Reliance, first set foot on the ice of McLeod Bay proper, 35 years ago on this date.  April 26, 1981. I was 23. Two of us, Kurt Mitchell and I, along with ten dogs, had just finished a six-week journey, starting from Yellowknife, east four hundred miles or so to Hornby Point on the Thelon River, and back to Reliance.  But that is another story.

Now I am thinking back to that April day. I walked a half mile across the ice from the weather station to the locked-up summer cabin of Roger and Theresa (who in those years, with their two young children, still wintered out at their cabin on the upper Thelon), and continued west from there to stand alongside the narrow strait at the south tip of the Fairchild Peninsula. I remember the wind. It was a westerly that day, and cold.  l remember thinking, “ Wow, it’s still winter up here in late April.” Sentinel Point rose blue-black out in the far distance, and ten miles to the north of where I stood a small river called the Hoarfrost flowed into the bay.  Little did I know…

What strikes me today on this date is how “the country” felt to me that day, a third of a century ago.  “The country” being a vast place, but a somewhat defined place at least to its inhabitants, a smattering of personal fiefdoms and interwoven lives all centered on that little outpost called Reliance.  Call it the Greater Reliance Area.  I’m trying to recall how the place was and how it felt to me then, and how, subtly and steadily over the years, both the place and the feeling of being immersed and at home in it have changed.  This is where the frog comes in.  I have often heard that if you put a frog in a bath of pleasantly tepid water, and then gradually heat the water, the frog will not sense the rising temperature in time to hop out to safety.  Hot frog, hotter frog, boiled frog.

Those who have read my writing elsewhere have run across this quoted phrase before, but I will trot it out again:  “The land lives in its people.”  That was the late John Haines – Alaska woodsman and trapper, acclaimed poet and essayist.  I met John a few times and enjoyed a fleeting correspondence with him. In 1994, coming home from racing, Kristen and I stopped in at his homestead southeast of Fairbanks for a morning visit.  Haines was a serious and deep thinker, who did not think much of sled-dog racing and who would not think much of my flippant title today, but who just might crack an understanding smile at what I am trying to say, having lived a parallel experience along the upper Tanana.

What I realize is that by Haines’ measure the land hereabouts, our hinterland, was much more alive back then than it is now.  In fact by that measure, all of Canada’s back country was more alive 35 years ago than it is today – maybe, but be careful, because that broader statement is not entirely clear of confusion.  I gather from some queries to Mr. Google that in 1981 Canada had a population of about 24.3 million people. 24% of those lived in rural areas, defined as “outside centres with a population of 1,000 AND outside areas with 400 persons per square kilometer.”  (Note here that by this definition, if you live in a village of, say,  350 people, but you rarely if ever go out on the land or turn off the televsion, you are still a “rural person” in the view of Statistics Canada.  So one must tread carefully, as always, in the realm of statistics.)

5.8 million country people in 1981, 24% of 24.3 million.  (The planet in 1981 had about four and a half billion human souls on board.)  We have another accurate five-year National Census coming up in May, but a good estimate puts the total Canadian populace today at just under 36 million. That population is now less rural by percentage, down to 18% by the same definition given above, but in total “rural people” that is nearly six and a half million. And in those 35 years the world’s human population has grown by another three billion.  I didn’t ace my university Statistics class back at Missoula, but these numbers do tell a story that is worth pondering. Any way you cut it, the rural people as a species in Canada are steadily being outnumbered by the city people.  Canada, like the world at large, is becoming predominantly urban.

Here around the far east end of Great Slave Lake, and roaming out onto the barrens nearby, a reasonable population estimate of “the neighborhood,” circa 1981, would seem to be about 20-25.  There were trappers both native and non-native, active hunters on the move, and at least four or five distinct households spread thinly across those miles. Central to this human presence, albeit in an odd way, at Reliance proper there was the Weather Station, with three full-time meteorologists employed 24 /7, year-round, to collect and transmit hourly weather reports.  The reports went out by single-sideband radio, and were re-broadcast on the territorial CBC radio.  The visibility and wind conditions at Reliance were eagerly checked by the pilots who flew east from Yellowknife supplying and servicing various camps, projects, and outposts.  They flew bushplanes on floats and skis, year-round — Cessnas, Otters, Beavers, Twin Otters — and also helicopters.  The weather station and its staff, like the crew at a seasonal mining camp or fishing lodge, do not embody the kind of people that give the land its life in the way Haines meant. But those meteorologists, and all those planes and pilots dropping in on residents to re-fuel or bring mail or have coffee, and the station itself with its tall red-lighted NDB tower (now obsolete in the era of GPS), were certainly a part of the ambience I recall as I think back to standing on the ice in the narrows.

The weather station staff was a fluid entity, with individuals rarely posted to Reliance for more than a few years.  Some are still elsewhere in the North doing other work.  Most are not. The most well-known of them, Claire Martin Morehen, became for years the television “weather personality” on the evening CBC National news, and she would sometimes sneak a passing reference to Reliance into her monologue.  Claire thus ranks as the most nationally famous former denizen of Greater Reliance, with John Hornby a hungry but distant second. Helge Ingstad (Pelsjegerliv Blandt Nord-Kanadas Indianere, 1931, and its English version The Land of Feast and Famine, 1933) would undoubtedly take the honors if the vote was taken today in Norway.  Ingstad trapped and travelled hereabouts in the late 1920’s, and is now nothing short of a national icon over there.

Because “The Station” was there at Reliance, the barge came every summer from Hay River — the massive 5,000 horsepower NTCL barge with its trucks, loaders, bulk fuel and SeaCans stacked on board, its captain and first mate, cook and deckhands. Up top were the office people in lawn chairs and suntan oil who would sign on to the East Arm freight run as the most enticing plum voyage of all the various routes served by the company.  Every summer the barge came.  Groceries, fuel, skidoos, dog kibble, lumber, you name it.  If one managed to get something of any shape, size, or description delivered to the NTCL Terminal before the cut-off date, it would be on the barge.

Every autumn and every winter, with many variations on the theme, the caribou came, and along with them the wolves, the wolverines, the hunters and the trappers.  There was life, there was movement, there was give and take.  People stopped by other people’s camps and cabins, unannounced, for tea or repair parts, or a warm place to throw down a bedroll. There were even feuds — surely, that is some dubious measure of how populated a country is – “are there enough people out there that some of them have decided not to get along?”  Maybe Statistics Canada could probe that line of questioning on their next long form.

And now, these past two winters, there are six of us. Roger, Libby, and Gus at Reliance; Dave and Kristen and Liv at the Hoarfrost.  Six, down from twenty or twenty five (and yes, we are all getting along just fine.)  In those 35 years twelve million more people in Canada, and an additional three billion people in the world.

These years there are no trappers out at distant cabins, no prospecting or drill camps off to the east or northeast, and this year no one is coming out hunting from Lutsel K’e because no caribou have come.  The big NTCL barge ceased service east of Taltheilei Narrows after 2004, when they pushed and broke ice down McLeod Bay for 50 miles on the night of July 15, in the latest spring breakup on record. The weather station was shut down completely by 1994, replaced by an automated box that sends out coded weather information (hard to access and of dubious accuracy) via satellite. The Reliance weather doesn’t come up on the morning CBC, except on weekends when there is less rush for air time — and honestly, why should it? The dilapidated buildings of the station itself are falling down and being carted away as a Federal cleanup project, and the landing of a plane or helicopter is an event to be remarked upon.

Bush planes, you ask?  (This being, after all, the bushedpilot blog.) Two based here, one of those out for overhaul right now, still filling our oddball niche in the mom-and-pop charter business, yes, but these days in Yellowknife (a city of 20,000, up from 9,400 in 1981) there are no single-engine ski planes licensed for charter.  Say that again: There is not one single-engine bush plane for hire in a city of 20,000 people, for eight months of the year.

I sometimes smile.   It’s the water, I chuckle to myself, and it’s heating up.  I am imagining The Big Fella, or a quirky boreal version of Mark Twain’s Mysterious Stranger, with a labcoat and a vat and a frog:  “Let’s see what happens if we take away the weather station. OK now stop the barge; now stop the other barge.  Now the caribou.  All right let’s just torch the forest for 30 miles right down to the shoreline.  Hell, burn down the house while we’re at it.  Now build up those dams in B.C. and siphon off more water at the tarsands in Fort Mac, and drop the lake level by three feet. What? They’re still there?  Was that a kick I just saw from those froggy legs?”

Yup.  That was a kick. “Hot frogs in the hinterlands.”  (I’m working out the chords, don’t worry.) Stubborn, and still in love with this place.  Some mornings I find myself half-assed enthused at the prospect of building yet another log house, milling some big burnt timbers, and putting in all those days of honest sweat as I finish out my fifties. But believe me, sometimes we really do wonder.  I imagine there are plenty of other rural frogs, spread right across this second largest country in the world (Russia being the largest), all in that dwindling hinterland percentage of a city-fied and city-fying world, all sitting around the lunch table asking their own variations of the same questions. The gist of which is:  “Where did everybody go? And is it just me, or does it get harder every year to put the pieces of this logistical puzzle together?”

Thank you, if you have stuck with me this far.  I know these blog posts should ideally be shorter.  Let me close this ramble with a passage from the opening chapter of one of my all-time favorite books, Breaking Smith’s Quarter Horse, by Paul St. Pierre,a deceptively simple story set in the Chilcotin country of central British Columbia:

“Smith had come into the Namko Country to build a ranch on the four-thousand-foot contour of the fifty-third parallel of north latitude.  One might say that he and men like him should have more sense. One might be right.  Indeed, in the current view of government and industry, such country is better left unsettled until such time as a large corporation is prepared to establish instant towns therein, complete with pre-sliced bread and dripless candles. Nevertheless Smith went there and tried to build up a ranch.”