Far North (2 page)

T
HE WIND BLEW COLD
off the Great Slave Lake, even at the end of August, and the first leaves were starting to fall from the birches outside my dorm room. It was still a week before school started, and the dorm was empty. I felt like I'd landed at the end of the earth, which was pretty much the case. My father was up somewhere between Yellowknife and the Arctic Ocean on a remote drill site, working seven days a week. Before long they'd be working by artificial light.

Every fourth week my father would have his time off, and that's when I'd see him. He was used to that life, from the rigs in the Gulf of Mexico and the North Sea, and he had the stamina to keep up with it. So what was I doing here? I was asking myself. How much chance was there that I was going to get to see the real North my father
had been writing me about, and telling me about on his visits back to Texas? I was going to be stuck in this boarding school in the only city in the whole Northwest Territories.

I've done this to myself, I thought. Now I'm just going to be alone in a place where I don't know anybody.

I decided to get out and walk, at least see Yellowknife. I spent a couple of days taking a good look at this boomtown that was the capital of the Northwest Territories. Yellowknife was sure-enough bustling. It looked modern—lots of steel, concrete, and glass, lots of government buildings, lots of bars.

I spotted my first moose droppings in downtown Yellowknife. They were encased in the clear plastic of a tabletop at the Mooseburger Café. They were about like a deer's, only a whole lot bigger. I thought of Clint.

I hoped I'd get some chances to see the real Northwest Territories while I was up here. That's what I came for, I was telling myself. Walking around and looking at buildings had never been very high on my list. I could just imagine flying over all that wild country, like those bush pilots get to do. Unfortunately, I didn't have a bush plane at my disposal. I settled instead for holing
up in my room with a Zane Grey novel about the Navajos. I go through a book every three or four days—westerns, mysteries, science fiction. I brought quite a few with me.

Most of the students had checked in, but I was still waiting for my roommate to arrive. This much I knew about him: he was born on the twenty-first of December, same as me. They gave out the room assignments by pairing new kids with birthdays closest together, and you can't get much closer than being born on the same day, same year. The lady at the housing office told me that my roommate was a “Dih-nay,” that it was his first year at the school, too, that his name was Raymond Providence, and that he was from a remote village.

“What's a ‘Dih-nay'?” I asked her.

“It's spelled D-e-n-e,” she said. “They're native people. You're probably used to calling them Indians back where you come from. They speak an Athabaskan dialect called Slavey.”

I wondered if my roommate would speak much English. This was going to be interesting.

I was starting my third paperback when Raymond finally showed up, the evening before classes started. He came through the door lugging a huge duffel bag, a hockey stick, and a bright red
electric guitar. He was wearing jeans and a plaid Pendleton shirt. A little taller than me, he was a handsome kid with light brown skin and thick black hair down on his collar. He took a quick look at me, but his face was completely without expression, his dark brown eyes guarded and remote.

Now what? I thought. As he set his guitar down on his bed, I said, “Are you a rock star by any chance?”

It was a dumb thing to say; I guess I was uncomfortable. I was wondering what he was thinking about having a roommate with blue eyes and dirty blond hair. I hoped he could see I was just trying to be friendly.

“Not hardly,” he said quietly, standing the hockey stick in the corner by the sink, then sitting on his bed and looking around at the confines of our room. Well, at least he speaks English, I thought. I might as well try again. Glancing at his hockey stick, I said, “I don't know much about hockey—football's the big thing where I come from. I have heard of Wayne Gretzky, though, how they call him the Great One. Are you a pretty good hockey player?”

“Pretty good, yeah.”

That got a smile out of him. But even while he was smiling, his eyes stayed remote and cautious.
Maybe he was a kid who'd never been away from home before. I gave him some space and went back to the book I was reading. He started unpacking.

After a while he was back sitting on the edge of his bed, looking around. I could see his eyes go to the picture over on my desk, the one of my dad and me standing beside a raft down in the canyons of the Rio Grande in west Texas. “That's my dad,” I said. “He's up here working.”

“Oh,” Raymond said. “Is he on the drilling rigs?”

“All the time. He's hoping to save up enough money so we can get some land back in Texas—we want to build a house. So how 'bout you? That's a nice-looking guitar you got there. Are you in a rock band back home?”

“Yeah, sort of.”

“Maybe you can get a band together here.”

“They already told me I can't play my guitar.”

“You mean not in the dorm?”

“Not anywhere at this school, I guess.”

“Could you switch to acoustic?”

From the look on his face, it was like I'd asked him to take up the harpsichord. I said, “They got a lot of rules and regulations here, that's for sure. I've never been in a school like this. I guess it's kind of like being in the army. So where are you from?”

“Nahanni Butte.”

“Nahanni…,” I repeated. “Hey, I heard that name before…. Is it anywhere close to the Nahanni River?”

“It's right where the Nahanni River meets the Liard River.”

“I got it now,” I said. “Famous for headless men? And dinosaurs?”

He laughed. “Those headless guys must be world-famous.”

I was pleased to see him relax a little.

“I never heard the part about the dinosaurs before,” Raymond added with a smile. “Are you from Texas?”

“How'd you know that?”

He shrugged. “The way you talk.”

“I guess I must talk funny. Sounds normal to me. I grew up in the hill country near the Guadalupe River.”

“I've heard that name before, Guadalupe River. Isn't it a little river that people float down on inner tubes?”

“How'd you ever hear that?” I asked in amazement.

“I saw it on MTV—it was a show about spring break in different places. It looked like fun—hundreds of people splashing around and all that. The water must be pretty warm.”

“We used to do that all the time. It's real near where I lived. You get MTV way up here?”

“On satellite. We get thirty-nine channels.”

“That's a lot more than I got back home in Texas. My grandparents don't even get cable.”

“You live with your grandparents?”

“I've mostly lived with them since my mother died—almost nine years now. They're nice and all that, but it's pretty slow.”

That got a laugh out of Raymond. “Man, you should try Nahanni Butte sometime if you want to talk about slow. It only has a winter road to it.”

“What's that mean, ‘winter road'?”

“We're about twenty kilometers away from the year-round road that they built between Fort Nelson and Fort Simpson, plus we're on the other side of the Liard River from that road. In the winter you can drive our road into Nahanni Butte because everything's frozen solid underneath, but in the summer, with all the bogs and everything, you'd just sink into the muck. It takes lots of money to put enough rock and gravel down to make a road base.”

“But they must have spent a lot of money to make a bridge across the river.”

“There's no bridge,” Raymond said with a smile. “The Liard River always freezes real thick
just up from Nahanni Butte, so it's a safe crossing there. You can drive right across the ice. They plow the snow off after every storm.”

“What about before they built your winter road?”

“When my dad was a kid, there were no roads anywhere. They had dog teams to get around in the winter. In the summer they used their boats to get in and out, on the Liard River.”

“Do you have brothers and sisters?”

“I have a younger brother and a younger sister at home, and my older sister lives with my grandmother. How 'bout you?”

“It's just me.”

Raymond didn't say anything for a while, and I thought our conversation was over. Then he looked back at me with a puzzled expression on his face and said, “I still can't believe you decided to come up here.”

“I wanted to see the North. I'd get these letters from my dad. In one of them he said there's this saying that goes, ‘Once you drink from those northern waters, you'll never be happy away from them.' Have you ever heard of that saying?”

He shook his head. Raymond Providence was thinking about it, thinking about me. My roommate was wondering if I'd made a mistake.

I
THOUGHT WE'D HIT
it off real well, but the first couple of weeks it turned out Raymond and I hardly spent any time together. The native kids pretty much stuck to themselves. In the classrooms they all sat in a cluster at the back. They never spoke unless a teacher pried a few syllables out of them, and after school most of them, including Raymond, hung around together at one of the video arcades in Yellowknife. I noticed Raymond was spending most of his evenings at the library working on his math or trying to read
A Tale of Two Cities.
Once I walked over and said, “How're you doing with that book?”

“Not so good,” he said.

“Same here,” I told him.

“But you read all the time.”

“Maybe it's a great book, but you'd have to be
a walking dictionary of extinct words to read it. I think the teacher should be reading it to us, explaining everything.”

Raymond had a grin on his face. “Tell him.”

“He already thinks I have an attitude. He could tell I wasn't too happy when he said I couldn't do any extra-credit book reports on westerns or science fiction. They all have to be books from his list.”

After that I pretty much never saw Raymond in the library. He'd watch TV in the dorm lobby. Just before curfew he'd show up at the room, and then he'd sit at his desk and stare at his homework.

As for me, I was accepting that Raymond and I were as far apart as Texas and the Northwest Territories even though we were sharing the same room.

After school I'd been playing some pickup basketball with some of the other boom kids, making a few friends or what passed for friends. I missed playing football a lot; I missed faking out tacklers and running for daylight. I was thinking, too, about how the varsity coach back in San Antonio said I was crazy for going north when I could have such a great high school football career. The coach was practically guaranteeing me that I'd be his
number one running back. He never really understood how much I wanted to be with my dad.

The third week of September was my dad's week off, and we finally got to spend some time together. It was good to be with him. The first thing he did was take me to an outdoor clothing and sporting goods warehouse to get some winter clothes for me. I've never enjoyed shopping for clothes, so I had to tell myself to be patient, because I could see this was going to take a while. We picked up a set of thermal underwear, and I decided on a pair of heavy wool trousers. My father insisted the trousers had to be wool. I was joking around, asking if he'd heard about “the hammer,” and he said, “Yes indeed—the hammer's for real.”

The parka I found looked slick. It was light gray and had a waterproof outer shell and a hood ruff of genuine wolf fur. I was starting to get into this, into imagining the kind of cold that would require all this thermal overkill. My dad recommended a thick, soft cap woven from the under-fur of arctic musk-ox. I picked up a world-class pair of ski gloves and huge mittens to wear over them—everything top-of-the-line quality. “You're going to need all this stuff real soon,” my dad promised.

What impressed me the most was the boots. My father got me the same kind of tall white snow boots he wore on the rigs in the winter. He pulled out the thick felt liner and said, “Gotta keep these dry, that's the key. Dry 'em out good if they ever get damp. Once they get wet, they don't insulate. You hear about people making a mistake and getting bad frostbite, even losing their feet.”

Our arms were full as we stood in line at the checkout. My dad spotted a little thermometer on the display case and grabbed it. It was a couple inches long, encased in plastic. “For the zipper pull on your parka,” he said.

I got a chance to try out some of the new clothes when my dad hired a charter boat the next day and we went fishing out on the Great Slave Lake. It was freezing cold out there, wind blowing, too, but I knew that was all supposed to come with the territory, and I never mentioned it. I hate whiners, so I wasn't going to be one myself. I pulled the musk-ox cap out of my daypack and warmed right up after I pulled it down over my ears.

When I caught a twenty-five-pound lake trout—a toothy predator with a head bigger than my fist—I was glad I'd come north. There was
something about taking that big trout out of a body of water called the Great Slave Lake, doing it alongside my father, having him net the fish after a half hour's battle with only one of the treble hooks still attached at the last, and just barely. We were together in this strange place, and the wildness of the place itself was what had bent my rod double, and that wildness was running like electricity through the line and right through my veins. This is why I came, I thought.

We went bowling afterward, and then sat in the café at the alley and talked. With his huge hand wrapped around a coffee mug, my father talked with deep feeling about the land around the drill sites, the landscapes he was seeing from the bush planes and helicopters. Some of the sites were in the forest and some were north of the tree line, out in the barren lands. He spoke of seeing immense herds of caribou fording clear-running rivers and flowing across the tundra. He spoke of seeing a grizzly with three cubs, arctic foxes, snowshoe hares, musk-oxen…. “Any wolves?”

“I keep looking. Haven't seen a wolf yet.”

“So you still like it up here as much as ever?”

He had to think about that question, rubbing his beard against the grain. “Oh, I love the North, but
it's a sad time to be here, to my way of thinking.”

“How's that?”

“Flying into all these places where there have never been roads, knowing that the roads are coming soon, and so is everything that comes with them, for good and for bad.”

“That's progress, I guess.”

“It seems like everywhere the geologists have us drilling, they're finding these kimberlite pipes they're looking for, and they're finding plenty of diamonds in their core samples. It's just exploration up here now—in a couple of years the actual mines will be starting up. The talk is that the Northwest Territories could eventually rival South Africa as the world's largest diamond producer. I've worked with a couple of native people…they need the jobs, but they're afraid of what's going to happen. You know, they lived here for thousands of years without ruining it.”

“Isn't that because they didn't know any different?”

“I don't know…. Maybe it was a kind of genius, and we just can't recognize it. At any rate, it makes me sad thinking about it. You'd think we could leave the diamonds in the ground….We could do without the jewelry, but we need diamond drill bits for oil and gas, and they say we
even need diamonds for manufacturing those silicon chips for the computers. There's just never an end to it.”

“You could go back to the offshore rigs.”

His face brightened. “What I'd really like to do is quit following the booms for good. Build that place in the hill country we've always been talking about. I'm gettin' far enough ahead we should be able to get a decent amount of pasture. We could raise horses.”

“Good deal,” I said. He'd had this land dream with my mother even before I was born. “How much longer?” I asked.

With a smile spreading across his face, my father said, “This winter could be it. But probably one more for insurance—the cost of land and building materials is going up all the time down there.”

“Still want to do the log house?”

“Gotta be a log house, sitting on a little bluff in some live oaks above the Guadalupe.”

“I can sure picture it.”

“You're so strong we won't even need a machine to lift the logs into place…. Meanwhile, I'd like to get you out some into the boondocks up here. I see a lot of great country, and you're stuck in school.”

“How could we do that?” I asked.

“I'll ask my flying buddies to keep an eye out for a spot for you. I remember how much you always wanted to fly. Would you like to do some bush flying on a weekend, take a look around if they had a seat for you?”

“You know I would. I already met one bush pilot, that guy Clint who drove me from Fort Nelson. You ever fly with him?”

“No, these outfits have a lot of different pilots—how come you ask?”

“Just wondering what kind of pilot he'd make.”