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Ed Dallas — father, husband, Beargrease musher, cross-continental bike rider, raconteur, part-time movie-actor (Iron Will), Minnesotan, and Force of Nature, died last Sunday, the 21st of September. I will miss him. He was an inspiration to me. He and Julie, his wife of fifty-one years, visited us here twice, first in the early 1990’s and again in 2018. He always loved these monthly musings of mine and he let me know right away whenever he read them. Of course, for anyone writing anything and putting it out there on display to the world, there is nothing better than hearing from a kindly reader like Ed, with some homespun literary criticism such as”Wow, you knocked that one right outta the park!” (When dealing with any aspiring writers in your lives, trust me, people:  flat-out flattery will get you many miles down the road.)

It was last Sunday, too, the final day of Summer, that Kristen and I went together by boat down the coastline east of here. We pulled in near the mouth of Tent Creek, to pick berries and have a picnic.  Getting there, we rounded what has been “Dallas Point” ever since Ed and his family came here on a canoe voyage in 1992.

Dallas Point, for there a legend was made 33 years ago. We were paddling our twenty-six-foot voyageur canoe, a big fiberglass replica painted up to resemble (at a distance) a birch-bark canot du nord of fur-trade times. It was a flat-calm hot summer day, and we were paddling but not paddling too fast for there to be some fishing lures trolled behind us in the water. Just a few minutes earlier, Kristen and a photographer friend of ours, Donna, had hooked a fish and landed it into their smaller canoe. Donna was struck by an idea, as we rounded the steep rock headland where it drops off into the deep blue of the bay.  She asked Ed, who was in the stern steersman position of the big canoe, whether he would mind if – just for the sake of photographic artistry – the already-caught lake trout could be attached to Ed’s line, so he could hoist it sparkling in the sunlight off the gunwale of the birch-bark replica. Ed, being Ed, said that would be just fine with him, so the shot was set up, twice-caught fish and all. 

Another fellow on that trip was Jim Cotton. Jim had been up to McLeod Bay a few years earlier, as part of a team of paddlers who heroically delivered three custom-built 24-foot canoes all the way from Yellowknife to Walmsley Lake, the headwaters of the Hoarfrost River. Another long story, but not for tonight.  Jim had been in the Vietnam War – serving as a medic if I am not mistaken – and while there he had contracted some form of brain fever that severely affected his speech for the rest of his life. His speech was impaired, but not his mental clarity. He had a sharp sarcastic wit, but his lines were delivered at a snail’s pace while he painstakingly formed the words. As Ed hoisted the twice-suffering trout into the canoe and Donna snapped photos, Jim quipped, word. by. word: “Say. Ed. Did. You. Ever. Catch. A. Live. Fish?”

We all cracked up, but Ed got the last laugh. As we rounded Dallas Point, he kept trolling his spoon, and suddenly he said, “Whoa, back paddle, hold up, everybody, I’ve hooked bottom.” We held our paddles up, the huge canoe with six aboard lost headway, the drag on Ed’s reel buzzed, and then came a string of gibberish from Ed, something along the lines of “arr-ha-ousha-what-the-whoa-whoa-WHOA!” The bottom of the lake he thought he had snagged had suddenly started to move.  He had a live one. A very big live one. Either that or a small submarine.

Maybe Ed did not battle that fish for forty-five minutes, as the story now goes. Maybe it was thirty-five. It was way past twenty-five. And finally, that ancient enormous lake trout – all forty-six pounds of him or her — was lying tangled in the remains of a busted landing net in the bottom of that big canoe.  Ed was beyond excited. Jim was without sarcasm.  The rest of us, knowing that there was no way that monstrous man-handled fish was going to go back into the lake, were trying to guess just how long it was going to be on our camp menu. (Answer – about four long days, for eight of us. Remember my grandfather’s old adage about fish in the fridge, and relatives staying as house-guests: Three days, he’d say. Four at the very outer limit.)

As Ed got older his memory started to fail. I would bet my bottom dollar, though, that catching that big fish on that beautiful summer day on McLeod Bay was a memory that stayed and stayed, somewhere deep. I will bet, too, that none of the other six of us ever forgot that day.

Nor will I forget the night at the end of the trip, when, after the ladies had finished, Ed and Jim and Ed’s son Jay and I all trooped into the sauna to clean up and sweat and cool off with plunge after plunge into the lake. At one point in the festivities (which, I am quick to point out, did not include beer — sad but true), Ed was maneuvering his massive frame and considerable beam  down off the high bench in the hot room when he suddenly lost his balance. He stuck out a huge hand and found a brace against the interior log wall dividing the dressing room from the sauna, and barely kept himself from falling.  That massive log building made a lurch that I honestly thought might have knocked it from its boulder footings.

Jim, steaming silently and ever aware of a chance for some good play-by-play, spoke up through the steam. Word. By. Word.

“Amazing. Catch. Ed. I   can   see    the    headlines   now……    ‘American…     tourist…      injured…       while…      dismantling…      sauna……’ ”

We’ll be missing Ed. He was a gem. Jim Cotton, too, is now long gone. Good times. Times gone by. Were they simpler? Not sure. Seems so, sometimes.

I do look forward to seeing some beloved faces around the campfire up yonder, so to speak. Ed among them. I do fear, though, that we might still be grilling thick slabs of that darned fish, and hoping someone else will finally polish off the rest of it.

Yep, corny post, Dave.  But I know a few who would have liked it just fine.

It’s a time of the year when I do not spend much time writing, but I do spend many hours thinking about things other people have written. Snippets and quips, germane lines and sentences, nuggets that ring true.  Alone up at 7,500 or 9,500 feet, heater on just a bit, -2 degrees Celsius out the window, the sweaty smoky summery world far below, I do love my job.  Most days.

If there has been a theme to this season of floatplane flying, for our little mom-and-pop business, it could be summed up with an imaginary ringing of the phone, and someone launching breathlessly into a harried message (choose an accent): “Yes we were going to come on that date but we are coming two days earlier now, although our luggage has been lost and there’s been a strike so we may be delayed and we would like to change our pickup date and there are some other people coming also and once we are there we would like to stay a little longer than originally planned and we think there will be some other changes because of smoke and weather and wind but we’ll sort those out when we arrive. Uh, if we arrive.”

My dear wife has always maintained that “flexibility is the key to happiness.” This season has been a good one for us to implement that motto. “Nod, smile, and send out the invoices” has been one of our other muttered mottoes, if I am to be honest.

And now it’s nearly done with. Most of the summer float work is finished. Adventurous and inspiring people have been moved here and there, radio-telemetry widgets and gizmos have mostly been retrieved, the geologists have their samples back in the lab, and most of the canoers are back where they live, although there is one trio that is tonight hunkered down, wondering when the 50-knot gale and sideways snowstorm hammering the lower Back River south of Gjoa Haven is going to ease off.

The other day I went northwest from here to retrieve a little gizmo that has to do with a caribou study. It had fallen off a caribou’s GPS location collar at a pre-determined time and day in August, but of course at an utterly random location, caribou being caribou and — thank heavens — still free to move where and when they will. To say that this widget was a “fur piece” from here would be an understatement. It was a straight line distance of 331 Nautical Miles, about 612 kilometres, so bucking a headwind it took me nearly four hours to reach the site in the Husky on floats. (I had a much faster trip home, perched up at ten thousand feet, above a pall of wildfire smoke, in clear cool air, listening to music on the headset. Tough life some days, yes.)

The gift of my day (apart from the invoice generated) was to set down in a part of the north I have only crossed over in winter, and there to be utterly alone, and to have some quiet time to walk around. (Hard at work searching for and retrieving the widget, mind you.) I was about a dozen miles north of the northeast arm of Great Bear Lake. Great Bear is the largest lake completely contained within Canada. An awe-inspiring deep, vast basin of cold clear water. (The only three larger lakes in North America — Superior, Michigan, and Huron — all border the U.S., but Great Bear (#4) and Great Slave (#5) are within our borders, entire.)

Which brings us to the “Bear” part of Great Bear. For years now I have been fascinated by a fact pertaining to barren-ground bear history, a fact borne out by careful reading of old written accounts from the first Europeans to traverse this part of the world, and confirmed by conversations with native old-timers in the small villages and settlements of the far north. Nowadays we have the barren-ground grizzly wandering right across the barrens, north to the Arctic coast, and clear down in Wapusk National Park at the southern extreme of Hudson Bay. We see one here at the Hoarfrost River at least once every few years. But less than a hundred years ago, the many trappers and hunters traveling the barrens immediately north and east of here made no mention of grizzly bears — in their memoirs, their books, or their conversations. Arctic brown bears were known to be encountered only way off to the northwest, in the region of, yep, Great Bear Lake.

Samuel Hearne in 1772, George Back in 1833, Warburton Pike in 1889, David Hanbury in 1902, Ernest Seton in 1907, John Hornby and Helge Ingstad in the 1920’s — all of them in their written records agree that the brown bears of the tundra were far to the northwest, along the upper Coppermine River, and east along a narrow strip of coastline toward Tree River and Bathurst Inlet. That was where they lived, and elsewhere on the Canadian tundra they were vanishingly rare or completely unheard of. I find this gradual barren-ground grizzly range expansion fascinating, because so often we tend to think of things, especially wild and natural things, as fixed and static. The “status quo.” Think again. Nature, it seems, does not do “status quo.”

Another tidbit — nowadays we don’t see very many moose around here in summer. Down here, on the shores of McLeod Bay, I have not seen a moose since sometime last winter. Decades ago, we saw moose and moose tracks and moose sign around home in every month of the year, as we came and went. Not any more.

Come November, and on through the winter, we see plenty of moose. Where are they summering nowadays? They are up on the tundra and seemingly happy to be there. I had thought, when our neighborhood burned eleven years ago, that by around 2025 we would be awash in moose, but apparently they find the barrens even more appealing than the slowly re-greening burn. Is that a function of warming weather? Maybe.

And yet (there’s always an “and yet” in these matters, I think) the muskox herds are still piling pell-mell southbound into the jackpines and aspen of the boreal forest, now crossing the 60th parallel into northern Saskatchewan and northwestern Manitoba, apparently hellbent on grazing and browsing downtown Winnipeg, if not Chicago. Could it be that they appreciate the absence of grizzly bears once they get into the boreal forest? (Grizzlies being one of the few effective predators on muskox.)

I muse about such things when I am perched up at the top edge of “Low Level VFR Airspace.” Maybe it’s borderline hypoxia. I muse about lines from song lyrics, too, and about passages from books I’ve read. There are two such fragments that have been much on my mind lately. I’ll leave you to chew on them, and ramble off ’til next month.

First, a line from a character in Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Crossing, the second book in his Border Trilogy:

“He said that most men were in their lives like the carpenter whose work went so slowly for the dullness of his tools that he had not time to sharpen them.”

And then, from “Gravity” written by Robert Lee Castleman, sung by Alison Krauss on the album Lonely Runs Both Ways.

“All the answers that I started with / Turned out questions in the end.“

It’s a rare July morning or evening when we fire up the woodstove to take the chill off the house, but we’ve lit a few warming fires this past month.  I lit one just a few days ago, on the 28^th. And last Saturday I stopped through home to re-fuel enroute to Yellowknife after a week-long tour out in a far corner of the NWT. As I climbed out of the plane I caught a whiff of woodsmoke and Kristen said, “Yeah, I decided to stop layering on more sweaters up in my office, and lit the stove!”

“A frosty Friday?” I asked. 

“Well not quite, but close,” she said.

It was my bush-flying mentor Bruce Gordon, always fond of the nuances of language and a clever turn of phrase, who put “frosty Friday” into our lexicon. Sometimes spiced with an additional alliterative f-word, Frosty Friday connotes a hard “not-gonna-happen” response to something.  For example, taxiing away from a jagged pile of boulders after offloading a couple thousand pounds of stuff from a Twin Otter on floats, Bruce might mutter, “It’ll be a frosty Friday before we bring a load in there again, unless they build us some sort of a dock…”

I think the full derivation of frosty Friday is from the classic, “It’ll be a frosty Friday in Hades when such-and-such happens.”  Linked, of course, to the old “Snowball’s chance in hell.”  Not likely, in other words.

It’s ending warm, but it’s been a cold July in the far north. I looked back through my old airplane Journey Logs and found the date of a frosty July morning (a Tuesday, not a Friday) back in 2013, the 16^th of the month, when I was overnighting at a fishing lodge down at Taltheilei Narrows.  When I went out to the plane that morning, I was amazed to find an honest coating of frost on the windshield. And as anyone who knows me might imagine, I brought that up in conversations for about the next three weeks – frost in mid-July!  (Yawn.)

This year I think we will finish July with a tally of five or six fires in the woodstove, and that might be a record. As of today it looks looks like our average daily high temperature has been 15.3 degrees Celsius or 59.5 degrees F.  With a breeze, that’s wool-sweater territory for sure. In a canoe, with rain and a headwind, it’s almost mitten time.

My point? Don’t have one, really. But I’ll swerve right over to one now, because I feel some soapbox oratory coming on. This one is related to our sometimes-chilly summer weather hereabouts, and my work in floatplane transportation.

Standing on the dock at a fishing lodge the other day, watching a group of eager but very elderly anglers climb aboard a floatplane, for a day-trip fly-out to a lake at some distance from the main lodge, I heard the guide yammering on about how silly he thought it was that nowadays everyone aboard a floatplane is required to wear an inflatable life-jacket. Not wanting to make a scene, I didn’t interrupt his soapbox soliloquy. It wasn’t my plane and they weren’t my guests.

But I’ll interrupt now:

First, given the size and weight and – ahem – “waning physical prowess” of the heavy-paunched fishermen I saw clambering into that floatplane, I had to agree that it was a little silly, and likely useless, to hand each gent a tiny strap-on pouch that looked like a Victoria’s Secret purse, to serve as his legal “life-jacket.” I knew it was mostly silly and useless, because I’ve been upside down in a floatplane once, upside down in ice-cold water, and that was in the days before we were all required to wear a life jacket equipped with two brightly beaded pull-cords (a.k.a. “rosary beads”) to inflate your ample Mae West flotation.

We got out of the plane that day, and made it to shore, and no, we were not wearing our life jackets when we flipped over. Does that mean I think the ruling forcing us all nowadays to wear them is a dumb idea?  Nope.

I remember another bush-flying mentor of mine, the late Jimmy McAvoy. Every year, around Labor Day, Jimmy would start showing up for a day of Single Otter flying, wearing a life vest of the type sold in those days for wading fishermen – with a little sheepskin patch for your fishing flies, and a rip-cord CO2 canister for inflation. This was 1992 – three decades before the new ruling on life jackets.

Turns out Jimmy had once nearly died of hypothermia clinging to an overturned Helio Courier in the icy waters of a northern lake. The passenger who was with him was not quite as hefty and strong as Jimmy.  Jimmy lived, sans extra floatation. His companion that day, after some desperate hours,  had gone to the bottom before rescue arrived.

And that brings up another point here, fellow pilots:  if your passengers all have life jackets on, your job in the critical seconds after an accident just became a tiny bit easier, because you can reach over and yank the inflation rip-cords on someone else’s life jacket. That person’s chances just got a huge boost, and you can turn your attention to whatever or whomever needs it next. Pull on another ripcord, and even if that person might not be conscious, and could be badly injured, they are not going to sink. 

Yes, these are ghastly, scary scenarios to contemplate. I’m not trying to be a kill-joy. I spent all day flying a floatplane.  It went fine. It will likely go fine again tomorrow, and it’s been going fine for many years.  If we never wanted to take any chances, we would never get out of bed in the morning. And yet, whenever I hear people (including seasoned bush pilots) whine and harp about the “silly, stupid” requirement that everyone on board a seaplane needs to wear a life jacket, it makes me cringe.

Think about this: if you wanted to design a really lousy boat, it might end up looking a lot like a floatplane. And if you were stepping aboard that really lousy boat, and someone offered you a life jacket, would you really say “nah, I’m good.”  (Question mark?)

I’ll stop now. Wear a good inflatable life jacket in a floatplane. It just might save your bacon someday. It may be a Frosty f—-in’ Friday when you need it, but hey, Frosty Fridays do happen. Even in July.

Over the past several years I’ve begun writing notes on things around our place. With a permanent marker I’ve been writing words directly onto things – tools, boxes, pails, bins, and buildings. “Outback Homestead Hints,” to make some unknown day in the hazy future proceed a bit better for some future unknown hazy person, i.e., whoever the heck comes along here next. So far I can’t quite see who they might be, despite much squinting and conjuring. Old? Young? Man? Woman? Family? Bureaucrat? (Extended Family of Male and Female Bureaucrats?!)

Will our outback outpost here on the coast of McLeod Bay – alongside Thaidene Nene National Park, half a mile west from the outlet of the Hoarfrost River – morph into some sort of research centre? Or an outfitter’s base camp? Might it become home to a reclusive copy-editor or consultant, who – with nothing more than a high-speed link to the internet – can work from home and make a living at it? Thirty or forty years ago that last bit would have sounded like futuristic navel-gazing, but now (or maybe “for now”), it is well within the realm of reality.

Because for now, the march down the path toward constant and unrelenting connectivity seems to be a juggernaut. Interesting times in the Far North. We were told a while back that Parks Canada intends to install a free-for-all Starlink antenna up on the roof of the former Catling house at Reliance, so that visitors and wayfarers can simply drift past in their boats or canoes or snowmobiles, and oh, you know, download a movie or a book, check e-mail, or get a weather map, before proceeding on their “wilderness” journeys.

And hey, not just the Far North – interesting times everywhere, don’t you think? Are we on a cusp, or are we on the verge? On the brink (of disaster), or the cutting edge (of a new and enlightened era)? Or are we somehow teetering simultaneously on both? Whither these wild, quiet, and empty spaces? Spaces now even wilder, quieter, and emptier than they were 38 years ago when we – all starry-eyed and young and limber – arrived here to start in on what might today be glibly summarized as “our life and times?”

Who knows what the next sixty or eighty years will see, hereabouts? Not I. But I do often wish I could somehow come back to find out. And about all I can say with certainty about that point of history, three-score or four-score years ahead, is that it won’t be a part of my “life and times.”

I am not feeling particularly morose about this. In truth I am feeling fairly jovial and common-sensical about it, most days. The next chapter or two here are the edge of a vast unknown, now heaving into view on the horizon like the odd refracted mirages we get sometimes in late winter, looking south across the bay, when the distant shoreline looms up far higher than it can possibly be. And if there has been one theme in my life, it has been the jolt of energy, fear, and fascination I get as I glimpse the edge of the unknown.

And so, all common-sensical and jovial, I pocket my handy paint-marker. Then, after ten minutes of trial and error fumbling around, I finally hit upon the proper wrench to open the oil-drain plug on the small Champion generator (unpaid endorsement happily given – these little yellow Chinese knockoffs are the cat’s meow and the best bargain around. Sorry, Honda.) I open the plug, drain the oil, replace the plug, pour in 400 millilitres of fresh stuff, and then whip out my red marker and write “10 mm plug, .4 lt oil, change 100 hrs.” on the crankcase.

On the 4-gallon pail of “Boat Soup” home-made stain and weather-proofing, I write:

1: Boiled Linseed 1: Turpentine 1/4: Pine Tar 1/8: Japan Dryer.

On the circular saw, To Change Blade, Find Allen’s Wench! CLOCKWISE TO LOOSEN!

And so on.

It’s kind of fun.

And yeah, you’re welcome.

Whoever you are.

May 29th, 2025 Daring Lake camp, upper Coppermine River watershed

It is the season when winter can end in a day or two, 

and for some of us weirdos its ending is not welcomed. 

How strange is that?

Out the tent door, on the lake ice,

the tiny plane sits on its fat bush tires.

The ice is white, but flecked with round pools, dark bits of caribou scat soaking up sun and melting tunnels four feet deep.

A week ago, down at home, I was still hopeful we could stay there into June.

Every morning through the first three weeks of May

I watched the ice auger grind down, the chips still dry,

and I was smiling as I walked back to shore.

Thirty-six inches here, thirty-one over there.

Might we get another week? Nine days? Twelve?

Short answer, Nope.

Long answer, we might have made it a few more days, but not with any hope of having good nights of sleep, with the plane a quarter mile offshore on the distant white ice… out past the dark and candled stuff.

(“Yes, just push along with your boot and keep one foot in the canoe and we’ll go out to the plane and get going.” Not really the way they like to see us board passengers in the Ops Manual for Commercial Air Operators.)

Saturday morning we fled north, past treeline, to finish the work up here, and change the plan and re-jig the routes.

Someday, I tell myself,

someday very soon, I am going to settle in at this season

and not give a damn when the ice melts,

or what the nine-day or five-day or four-week forecasts say,

or how dry the ice-auger chips are as they churn up out of the hole,

or what the measuring stick says.

I’ll slip back to how it was when we started,

without forecasts, with nothing but wonder and whimsy and what-the-heck.

(Or at least that’s how I recall it. We all delude ourselves.)

The other day Bill Magie was on my mind all day. I had received a note from a friend that morning, and he told me that on a whim he had pulled A Wonderful Country, my collection of Bill’s stories, off the shelf and re-read a chapter about the 1920’s. Bill Magie (pronounced same as McGee) was a young man then, fresh out of Princeton, from a privileged upbringing in Duluth Minnesota, son of a well-known surgeon and doctor. He was trained in civil engineering and became a field boss for the water-level survey project in what is now the Quetico-Superior canoe country. Later in life, he would work as a timber cruiser, a pilot, a mining engineer, a wilderness guide, and an ardent canoe-country conservationist.  Throughout his long life he was forever a storyteller, irascible and ribald and full of laughter — what his generation called “a live wire.”

Fifty years after some of Bill’s water-survey work, in 1977, I had transferred from the University of Montana and enrolled at a tiny campus on Lake Superior down the shore from Duluth.  Northland College was fully in the grip of academia’s 1970’s La-La Land, complete with the option of “writing your own Major.” I took them up on this and designed a program for myself heavy on time in the woods and light on any such potentially useful realms of knowledge as computer science or taxonomy. Do I regret this? No, but it does make me chuckle. 

My alma mater has recently gone under, drowned in a sea of debt, as have so many small post-secondary institutions in North America. From its small-town roots in the late-1800’s logging and mining boom of northern Wisconsin, I guess Northland never quite found its footing in the 21^st century. And for another chuckle, you do have to wonder about a self-proclaimed “environmental college” with a logo featuring two swarthy lumberjacks atop a motto lifted from the book of Isaiah:  “And A Highway Shall Be There.”

Somehow, in my first autumn at Northland, I learned that Bill Magie, canoe-country legend, was living just south of campus, along with his wife Lucille. In a burst of enthusiasm I telephoned him to see if we could meet in person. What began was a ritual that led to my first book-length writing project. Every week or two I would pilot my rusty green “Saab-story” coupe down to Bill’s place on the Eau Claire chain of lakes. He and Lucille would have me in and put out coffee and cookies or lunch while I set up a microphone and a cassette-tape recorder. I would ask a few leading questions about some aspect of Bill’s northwoods life, something like, “What size and shape of snowshoes did you like the best?” or “How did you stake out your dogteams overnight on the trail?” Anything, just to prime the pump. (In hindsight I think Bill had usually primed the pump himself a few minutes before I showed up, but I could never tell for sure.)

And the stories would start. One leading to another, hour upon hour, tape after tape, week after week. Later, back at my dorm room, I would set up the tape player, equipped with a foot-pedal on-off switch, load a continuous spool of paper into a Royal manual typewriter, and type away, pausing the recording with my foot-pedal so that I could keep up. I transcribed it all, word for word, and then began to cut — with scissors –and edit and arrange.

And now, re-reading some of those stories, I cringe and shudder.

Bill, like all of us, was a product of his time, of his upbringing, and of his experiences and his peers. Inspired by my friend’s note, I leafed through his stories myself the other day, there in the book with my name alongside Bill’s on the cover, and thought, “Wow, there is some — ahem — ‘colorful’ stuff in here!” Four-Bottle McGovern, Three-Tit Nellie, Old Deafy, and Big Fred Frederickson, to name a handful among many… and there are some bigoted, racist, misogynist innuendos sprinkled around, to name just a few sins. And yikes — my name’s on this thing!

And — and! — there are some heartwarming, happy, generous stories, characters, and anecdotes through it all.

Which brings me to one of my points. Put bluntly, it is my frustration with a groundswell of group-think that cannot seem to accept that good people can have, at some times in their lives or perhaps through their entire lives, some bad ideas and bad attitudes. And that many people have done or said some despicable things even while living notable and exemplary lives.

Ever said or done anything you now regret? And? Well?

What do you think we should do about that? Or what should now be done about the description by Samuel Hearne of the 1771 massacre at Bloody Falls, or of his guide Matonabbee’s treatment of his seven or eight wives – yes the same Matonabbee of street-names and lakes, businesses and schools all across the NWT? He of the admirable… and the abhorrent. Or about the by-gone, and some now rightly unpalatable, attitudes reflected in the books of people like Alexander Mackenzie, John Franklin, Warburton Pike, David Hanbury, Helge Ingstad, J.W. Tyrrell, Thierry Mallet, and on down the list of those who came through this country as wandering newcomers and colonizers, as cartographers and ethnographers and shameless plunderers, and as writers who wrote down what they saw, and sometimes added a bit as to how they felt about what they saw people doing. Some of it admirable, some downright abhorrent.

It’s a question, and it’s worth pondering. Those old direct accounts, written from daily experience in times we can scarcely imagine, documenting things moment to moment, are invaluable. What are we to do? Ban them? Burn them? Bury them? I hope not. Because just like Bill Magie’s stories, they weave together a backdrop for our own life and times in whatever part of the world we call home. I think it behooves us to seek out those old accounts, the layers of history behind whatever parts of the planet and its human history most fascinate us. To cringe, yes, at times, but to delve into them.

Okay, off the soapbox, chum. I’ll leave it there for now, as the interviewers and reporters like to say.

Just before bed the other night, the 24th of April, after thinking about Bill all day, I picked up the Raven Press edition of my book of his stories, and went searching for a photo. I knew that Johnnie, the publisher of that edition, had found a copy of Bill’s old pilot license, notable for one of the signatures it showed.

Finally I found it, on page 174.  And then I really had to wonder about coincidence, since I had been thinking about Bill all day and I suddenly saw his birth date on the license: April 24, 1902. Well, I thought, happy 123rd birthday, old friend.

And yes, that’s Orville Wright’s signature.  Orville, of Orville and Wilbur, and Kitty Hawk. Cool, eh? And hey, I wonder if Orville and his brother will someday come under fire for some remark or incident, unearthed by some diligent historian. I hope not.

I remember Bill telling me he had that license suspended for a few months early on in his flying days, for flying a Jenny bi-plane right under the Aerial Lift Bridge in Duluth harbor, on a dare. Boys will be boys. Clearly “hold my beer and watch this” did not start with the advent of the Go-Pro.

Every morning, we write down the weather. On most mornings I do this just after seven, standing by the upstairs west window and the little weather station display, with a mug of hot coffee in hand. I write with the aid of a headlamp in the dark of winter, but for the past week there has been plenty of light, and the sun soon to rise over the ridges to the east.

Wind speed and direction, sky cover, temperature, dewpoint, pressure, high and low temperature, and “remarks.” On the back of the page, at random, notes and observations about animal sightings, leaves and buds on trees, water levels, and almost anything else under the broad category of “observations.” Usually I am the local resident (out of two nowadays) who does this, since I am more the weather nerd around here. We have a satchel filled with 38 years of these daily weather records, minus the several years of sheets that burned up in the 2014 fire, and minus some blocks of months in the winters of the 90’s when we went away to run sled-dog races and shut the place down.

It’s a great collection, replete with notes about arrivals and sightings of various birds and animals, notable dates in the yearly round, such as the onset and cessation of mosquito season, the freezing and melting of McLeod Bay and the inland lakes, notable storms and gales, and visits from big furry critters like muskox and grizzlies to the front yard. The morning ritual keeps me going, some days, and it never gets old. Maybe it is part of my life’s work. Maybe it is most of it. Remote sensing has come a long way, but I guarantee there is nobody else out here writing this stuff down nowadays, day after day, year after year, all backed up by the veracity of eyeball and eardrum.

This month, March 2025, is already locked into the Hoarfrost Weather Hall of Fame. It is today the 19th, and within hours it will be the Spring Equinox (I’ve scheduled this post to go out on the precise minute of that, just for kicks.) Hall of Fame status, because the weather record shows that on every single morning of the month thus far we have noted the wind as “calm” or “very light.”

Did somebody out there miss the memo on Equinoctial Winds? Are we in for 10 straight days of gale, starting tomorrow? Doesn’t seem so. And even if the rest of the month was just one long blow, it has still been calm and cold and sunny and stable for so long that I can honestly say we’ve never seen a March like this, in our (admittedly brief) time here.

I was out across McLeod Bay by skidoo the other day, putting in a track for our dogs to follow. Young and tentative lead dogs are carrying the teams forward now, as several old “power steering” leaders age and falter. The bay is smooth, and fluffy on top of a foot or more of snow. A ski-plane could be landed safely anywhere out there, even in flat light, without busting anything or even rattling anyone’s dentures. Had I been on a snowmobile with any sort of contemporary shock absorbers and springs, instead of our trusty old Bravo, I could have opened it right up, I’m sure, and covered the 13 miles down to my turnaround southeast of Reliance in under twenty minutes. There have been a few times over the past thirty-some years when the frozen surface of the bay has been as smooth and soft as it is right now, but never have we seen it like this in the month of March.

It is not calm right across the North. This morning the weather maps showed a big nasty cyclone centered 400 miles to the east of us, over Southampton Island, with tight isobars and wind flags marked “G45” for “gusts to 45 knots.” Visibility at the Baker Lake airport at 9 a.m. was 1/8 of a mile.

But here, this morning, it is calm, yet again. Smoke from the workshop chimney rising straight up. Sunrise minutes earlier than yesterday, and the bright light first cleared the horizon a few degrees of arc north of where it popped up yesterday. I was watching. (It’s part of my job.) And by now we have not had any significant new snowfall for nearly seven weeks. The deep snow cover around the entire area for many miles inland is absolutely covered with ptarmigan ptracks. The white birds are everywhere, and we are happy for the life they give to the landscape. They must be in some sort of cyclical high, for the past three winters. We have proclaimed a “no hunt zone” within sight of all buildings here, and several of them seem to have realized this. One in particular almost got himself booted in the tail feathers today, just in the spirit of neighbourly fun.

Happy Equinox! It is comforting to me to think that at this moment, the daylight and darkness ration right around the entire planet is the same from pole to equator to pole. Nobody can take that away. The sliding of our star through the celestial equator strikes me as an older and more interesting story than any of the other stories vying for my attention right now.

A week ago tonight I was aboard a Swedish inter-city train, rolling south in darkness through a snowy wooded landscape, en route from Östersund to Stockholm. Those simple facts — that just seven days ago I was over there, and that now I am here at home — are quite astounding to me. I am not a world traveler; I last ventured outside of North America in 2017, on another trip to Scandinavia.

You see, I suffer from periodic bouts of Scandi-envy. A friend of ours who worked for decades at the CBC introduced us to that term, and that affliction, claiming that many of the movers and shakers behind the scenes at Canada’s national broadcaster are similarly afflicted. I gather that my own case must be slightly different from theirs, though. I don’t pine away for a 25% sales tax, or the intrusion of a “nanny-state” into even the niggliest details of my day-to-day decisions and affairs.

But I still have it, that envy, oh yes. There is so much to admire over there in Scandinavia, that “other North.” And oh yes, since you ask, I am sure I could live there happily ever after, wherever assigned, you name it: Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Iceland, Finland. And who knows, maybe someday I will…

I love the landscapes and seasides, even the big cities — at least at this phase of my naivety. The sky, the broad white fjells, the jagged peaks, the rivers and coastlines. It is a pocket of the world, as Texans like to boast, where the women are all pretty and the men are all handsome. Even the kids, even the teenagers and college kids for Pete’s sake, come across as fit, firm, and friendly… well, friendly enough, in taciturn Nordic style. And hey, the trains and buses all run on time, and they come and go often, and they move very fast. If one is forced to drive, the roads are smooth, mostly two-lane and narrow, and almost all of the traffic is small and sensibly-sized vehicles, driven to very modest speed limits. Having so much as a miniscule trace of tipsiness in your bloodstream whilst behind the wheel will get your license suspended for years.

I have close family over there now, but another aspect of my fascination with these countries stems from my summer flying work, which for many years now has been chock full of carting around visitors from Norway, bound for the remote corners and watersheds and taiga edges of the Northwest Territories. The Northwest Territories are to Norwegian outdoor folk what the Yukon has for years been to the Germans — a fabled, distant, free-for-all paradise. In a typical recent summer, I fly six or eight parties of Norwegians into our little corner of the North here, most of them drawn at least tangentially by the legacy of another Norwegian who was here nearly a hundred years ago.

In 1927, a young Helge Ingstad appeared at the far east end of Great Slave Lake, where he spent just under three years living the life of a trapper and hunter. He returned to Norway in 1930, and not long after that he had written a book. The Land of Feast and Famine is the title of the English-language edition, and it is a great read. I gather it reads even better in the original Norwegian, because Ingstad was a gifted writer. His best-seller, set hereabouts, describes his sojourn in this region, and it was widely translated and today remains in print. I often try for, and usually get, a somewhat bewildered, somewhat offended, smile from my Norwegian-paddler customers, by referring to Ingstad as The Rock Star of Reliance. Nearly a hundred years on, his star here still burns brightly. Summer after summer his admirers arrive, to pore over his photos and words around their campfires, and to search for some further remnants of his fleeting youth in this part of Canada.

I admit that I was thinking of Ingstad and his legacy, and also pondering those summer paddlers and my own Scandi-envy, during my flight home, perched up in the Flight Levels enroute from Iceland to Toronto, last Saturday. In bright February sunshine we passed over the south tip of Greenland. From seven miles up I could make out a tiny cluster of colored dots at the head of a fjord, and offshore the white foam wake of a vessel heading in to harbor from the open sea. Something struck me. This did not feel quite like Scandinavia anymore, although yes, Greenland is politically a part of Denmark. (And let’s all hope it stays that way.) The soul of the icy land I was looking down upon had changed. This was more raw, more wild, more out there in a way I had not felt for the past few weeks, over there.

Then we lost sight of that south tip of Greenland and began another long crossing of open ocean, the Labrador Sea. Pan ice, floe ice, sheet ice, and mile after mile of smooth black water. An hour or more, at 400 knots. Yikes.

And land ho! Labrador! A jagged coast, and the taiga forest stretching inland. But here, try as I did, on that crystal clear afternoon, I could not find a single speck of a sign of humanity. Of course, yes, there were some people down there somewhere, a powerline or two, a mine, some short rugged stretches of road. But mostly a land looking much as it has for the past six or eight thousand years — whenever it was that it peeked out from beneath the last Ice Age glaciation.

Empty-ness.

Vast-ness.

Free-dom.

I get it, I thought. I get why they still come, year after year, clear over to Canada. We still have this wild and utterly empty magic. No wooden sign-posts pointing the directions and distances to tidy little huts, sculpted trails, and nearby peaks. No signs pointing to anything at all, and scarcely a hut, and almost never a real trail. This North, over on this side of the pond, is now emptier and quieter, in terms of quotidian human traffic and livelihoods, than it was even 95 years ago in Ingstad’s time. This may well be a portent of calamity, I think, but it is also kind of a thrill.

My virulent bout of Scandi-envy tucked its tail and slunk away, at that first glimpse of the Labrador forests, rocks, lakes, and rivers. It will come back, now and then, I’m sure. It always does.

By the time I left Toronto on an Airbus 320 later that night, the sky and land were all pitch dark, so I could not view the rest of the route, north of Lake Superior, southwest of Hudson Bay, up past Stony Rapids and Lake Athabasca. It was twenty below zero and snowing gently when we walked down the steps from the plane and into the terminal at Yellowknife, at one o’clock in the morning.

“Finally getting warmer again. Spring is coming,” said the cab driver.

What a month. What a week. What a day. I said we should buckle up, right? But holy shamoly.

It’s the last night of the month, and I was working on something else, but it’s been a long solo day in deep cold and all I have gumption for tonight is to post these closing passages from “Lighting Out,” the second chapter of my 1994 book North of Reliance. Now it is year 38 here, almost 33 years since I wrote that chapter, and when I happened across it again the other day the tone of it (so… confident? brash? glib?) made me pause, and cringe, and smile.

And oh yes, since you asked, we’re still together, and stayin’ warm.

_______

I proposed marriage to Kristen one morning in 1988, with the thermometer at fifty-two below zero. We were sitting by the big south window in the little eight-by-eight-foot cabin we’d built that first autumn at the Hoarfrost, “the cracker box,” as our neighbors called it. It was February, the month that always looms as a troublesome one in the northern bush. More feuds, petty disputes, grand schemes, vicious gossip, and sweeping changes have been born in February than in all other months of the year combined. It is a month to endure, and a month to be careful.

    We were trying to see the future that morning. Kristen had been invited to join a group of six women who would paddle the 600 miles of the Back River the following summer. It was a choice, and it brought into focus the question that was looming over us that February:  what to do when winter ended? When there was more to do each day than buck wood, stoke stoves, cut new trails and run the dogs… what would we do? Spring was coming. Already the daylight lasted until 5:30 in the evening, a two-hour gain from the solstice.

    “We could get married.” That is how I first broached the idea. Casually, as if I’d said, “we could build a shed,” or “we could enter that dogsled race in Fort McMurray.”

    Kristen asked me to repeat myself. I gazed out through the window at the thermometer, still stuck at fifty-some below, and back at the lovely dark-haired woman with the skin peeling from a recent frostbite on the tip of her nose, that nose that had been split down the middle by the handlebar of a sled almost exactly a year earlier, on a steep drop to the Yanert River valley in Alaska.

    “Will you marry me?”

    Silence. A pinging from the sheet-metal stove.

    “Yes.”

    February was beaten, and our days here took a giant step more deeply into permanence. Now year by year I watch the log walls of that tiny cabin weather and darken. I will always remember that there, right there, we decided to get married.

    A few nights later I passed the news out over the HF bush radio: “Kristen and I are going to get married.” Richard Black’s voice crackled back from his camp seventy miles to the east: “Well, now you’ll have someone to keep you warm all your years at the Hoarfrost.”

________________

A Lighting Out will, one hopes, lead to an Arrival. The lighting is the easy part; the arrival takes years. A part of arriving here has been to get a clear view of my motives; another part is the comprehension of my range. What is the extent of my territory? Where will I concentrate my efforts?

    If a person owns a certain acreage, that must be a help. This forty, this quarter-section, this yard and garden plot help to focus and narrow the attention. Here I own a single acre, a square 200 feet on a side. Beyond that in all directions lies uninhabited land and lake, all belonging to that vague Canadian government entity, The Crown. Of course my range must spill out beyond this acre. Learning how far it goes in any given direction is a part of finally arriving here.

    It is taking me a long time to grasp the scale of this country. Its resources are more sparsely scattered than were those of my old stomping grounds. The animals that live here have a wider range; the fish grow slowly and do not make such dependable and prolific spawning runs. Soil is a precious rarity and the trees grow tall only in sheltered pockets of fertile ground. Stands of stunted, twisted spruce cover most of the lowlands and dwindle to a few hardy individuals on the ridge tops.

    The enormity and emptiness of the country at first inspired me with visions of a huge territory. I would learn it all, from Aylmer Lake to the Thelon River, south beyond the Snowdrift River, west to the road-heads at Resolution and Yellowknife. Flying my small plane helped bolster those early notions of a vast range, but the longer I live here the smaller my territory becomes. The part of the landscape that feels truly familiar to me, and those certain places that have gained a personal significance – here I killed a moose, here we camped in that storm – is much more limited than those first grandiose visions would have had it.

    Country seen from an airplane, however low and intricate the flight, is not truly encountered. Only when I slow down and walk, stand behind a team of dogs, or paddle along in a canoe can I match the input of impressions to my capacity for interpretation and memory. It is only that realm within which I need no map, in which if pressed I could sketch an accurate map, that will become my range. From anywhere within it I could always find my way home, on foot or by canoe, with no supplies enroute.

    In his essay “Walking” Thoreau wrote “There is in fact a sort of harmony discoverable between the capabilities of the landscape within a circle of ten miles’ radius, or the limits of an afternoon walk, and the threescore and ten of human life. It will never become quite familiar to you.”

    I differ a bit with his limits – twenty miles, round trip, being more than an afternoon walk for me, but his idea is accurate. In every season since I arrived here I have found myself for one reason or another in some spot ten miles or less from our cabin, but as new and unfamiliar to me as the headwaters of the Nahanni or the coast of Labrador. I come ashore on beaches I have never seen before, or follow flocks of ptarmigan into a hidden stand of tall straight spruce. Despite its paucity of species and the relatively simple chains and webs among them, despite its straightforward geology and steady, dependable climate, this land still overwhelms my ability to know any more than a tiny tract of it. 

    Thoreau’s circle of 315 square miles, when skewed by the shape of the shoreline and the slant of these northeast-southwest watersheds, is the approximate size of my range. The area takes me well up the Hoarfrost beyond treeline, in a swath a few miles wide. It runs east and west along the coast of the big lake, and up other drainages I have come to know. Those creeks have no names on the map; we know places by the names we have given them:  Hawk Owl Creek, The Big Burn, Windy Lake, Obelisk.

    My restlessness has met its match. Gradually those old envies, that feeling that perhaps I was born too late, slips away. I lit out; at last I begin to settle. In  The Big Sky, A. B. Guthrie summed it up well:  “The feel of the country settled into Jim, the great emptiness and age of it, the feel of westward mountains old as time and plains wide as forever and the blue sky flung across. The country didn’t give a damn about a man or any animal. It let the buffalo and the antelope feed on it and the gophers dig and the birds fly and men crawl around, but what did it care, being one with time itself? What did it care about a man or his hankerings or what happened to him? There would be other men after him and others after them all wondering and all wishful and after a while all dead… He clucked to his horse and rolled in the saddle to its downhill jolt.”    

I am often astounded by the nonchalance of most airplane passengers during the critical moments of take-off. The plane takes position on the button of the runway, and there is a brief pause. Clearance comes from the Tower, the throttles are shoved ahead, and the roll begins.

When I am a passenger, on an airliner or even just a local sked flight, when takeoff time comes I am glued to the little window alongside my seat. I’m not saying I’m worried; I’m just interested. I love to watch as the runway markers clip past, and I imagine the terse back-and-forths up front on the pilots’ intercom. Acceleration, more acceleration, still more, and then the lift, and that incredible climb rate as the welded-bolted-glued-wired-shimmed-inflated-lubricated-ignited-repaired-signed-off behemoth strains upward to its preferred habitat of Flight Level 350, six or seven miles above terra firma. As a corny airshow commentator back in the Midwest could never resist saying, “Wow, folks, lookathat, she’s climbin’ like a homesick angel…” (A witty pilot friend of mine says, about less impressive climbs, “Looky there boys, she climbs like a ruptured duck.”)

And yet, all around me in the plane – even in the tiny planes I fly on floats and skis and fat tires – the moment of take-off is apparently hardly worth a glance from today’s jaded passengers. Everyone’s phones, of course, demand constant staring and pecking, and if those are already stowed away my fellow voyageurs just adopt the slightly-perturbed blank stare which is the default visage of the modern traveller.  You’d think that, instead of hurtling down a runway to rotation and liftoff, we were all on a Greyhound bus two days into a long trip, pulling out of the A & W in Kalamazoo, half-delirious and bored stiff.

In 1993 my mother – who happily turns 88 years young today – Happy Birthday Mom! – was in the Peace Corps, stationed in Armenia.  That was a mixed-bag experience, I gather, since she was over there to help the locals promote tourism, just as Armenia blundered into a half-hearted border war with neighboring Georgia.  The prospects for new tourist business tanked.  (My Mom had other overseas adventures, including a late-1980’s hike up to Everest Base Camp in Nepal. I – who have hardly been overseas at all – like to make much of those journeys whenever I introduce her these days. What a gal!)  

That summer, 1993, the Diamond Rush was in full swing up in the NWT (there was no Nunavut yet.) I was busy being a lowly co-pilot and human forklift aboard the Twin Otters at Air Tindi, so I did not go along when my father and sisters went to Armenia to visit my mother.  (And yes, I will regret that decision as long as I live.) On Mom’s summer break they all flew together from Yerevan to Paris, on a jet operated by Aeroflot, the notoriously haphazard Flagship Airline of Russia.  For the rest of his life my Dad loved to tell the story of that take-off from Yerevan, after being stranded for many hours on the tarmac, awaiting clearance. 

Evidently the Aeroflot crews in 1993 viewed the various “critical” phases of flight a lot more casually than most of us North American pilots do. For instance, there were several too many people aboard the plane, so some seatbelts had  been made into makeshift seats by buckling them together across the aisle to form a sitting sling.  And as the takeoff began at last and the plane began to gather speed, some passengers were still standing up, so they just braced a hand up against an overhead bin and steadied themselves, as they would in a street-car rounding a sharp corner downtown. Some were smoking, some were pouring shots of vodka, and everybody was obviously tickled to be on the way to gay Paris at last. And, needless to say, these decades later, even with all those hard-and-fast rules broken, it all worked out.

And here we all are, on the button of the runway again, tonight, cleared for takeoff into the brave new world labelled 2025.  Over the past week or two, though, my Dad’s vivid account of that Aeroflot take-off has been flashing again and again into my thoughts. What’s up with that? Well, I have that same mixture of dread, bemused and detached interest, and weary resignation that my Dad told me he felt that day in Yerevan, hurtling toward the stratosphere at last.

I can’t help but wonder, after all these years, whether this time around all the pre-takeoff checks are truly complete. Has the Minimum Equipment List been ticked off item by item? Is the crew licensed, current, and proven competent? Have they had a good night’s rest? Are the most recent repairs and service to the airframe and engine all signed off “in accordance with the acceptable standards of Airworthiness” and have the engineers scrawled their initials in the logbooks?

 Well, hmm.  I remain unconvinced. But hey, it looks like we’re about to roll.

Times like this, I sometimes find solace in a longer view. Or an even longer view. At least a slightly expanded version of our puny human-lifetime view.  I like to go backward or forward a stretch, say 300 years, or some similar blink of an eye.  Out beyond my own links of flesh and blood, back up the ladder past anyone I ever met or spoke to in person (ending in that direction with my grandparents) and down the road to my children and the newborn children of their next generation.

Some days, when I am flying around alone above the vast emptiness that is our home terrain, I ask myself, “What has changed, right here below me, since the year 1725?” Or again, “What will change, right here below me, by 2325?”  Rock. Sky. Lake. River. Herds of caribou, flocks of ptarmigan, fat fish in the rivers. And the very merest almost insignificant smattering of Homo sapiens.

I find solace in that long view, puttering along above that ever-enduring wilderness, on a New Year’s night like this. 

Buckle up your seatbelts and review those Safety Features Cards, folks.

Or, alternatively, just have a shot of something strong, light up a cigarette and brace one arm against that overhead luggage bin.  Maybe even this time, once we’ve lifted off and we’re climbing at 3500 feet a minute, it will all work out, yet again. Anyway, one way or another, we’re rollin’.