Rhythm of the Tides: my arctic experience

The Road To Nowhere

The name is intriguing and the walk is one of the suggested itineraries for visitors to Iqaluit. Don and I enjoy walking, so we don't need any arm twisting. We follow Federal Street to Happy Valley and then we take the Road to Nowhere. The first sites of interest are Dead Dog Lake on our right and the new suburb named after the road on the left; after that it's pretty much a boring road, so we climb the hill on the left and walk along the ridge, giving us a view of the surroundings. Moreover, walking on the tundra feels much better. However, at the Apex River we're forced to go down to the road to cross it.

But before we cross we meet a mother and toddler. They're out for their morning walk, but the child is interested in playing in the marshy area beside the river. He is Inuit and the mother is white, a southerner from the Greater Toronto Area. She's one of the few people who came to live and establish roots here.

After crossing the bridge we see two young men on the side of the river and we stop to talk to them. They're university students working on their theses, which brought them here to measure water flows in the Apex River. They tell us that the level of Lake Geraldine has been dropping over the years and it could threaten the city's water sufficiency. Iqaluit's population explosion, coupled with the wasteful habits of modern life, is already flashing a sustainability red light.

In response to this existential threat, the city has decided to pump water from the Apex River. But naturalists and conservationists are up in arms about the city's proposal and both sides are gathering information to prove their case. While the river flow may be torrential during early summer, it's down to almost a trickle now. These young men will provide some answers. Armed with an array of measuring instruments, they have been painstakingly recording water levels and flows on a regular basis since early summer.

Scientists from other universities across Canada have taken up the cause of protecting the river from shortsighted politicians. Some argue that pumping water from the Apex River would, at best, postpone the coming water crisis by only a few years, therefore the problem to be tackled is population growth, for which southerners are partly to blame.

They come up here on contracts to fill positions for which there are no qualified Inuit. If the latter would be trained for those positions, population growth would drop significantly, while reducing chronic unemployment within the Inuit population. Furthermore, Iqaluit would become a more Inuit town, run by them, for their best interests.

My thoughts go to that little toddler who we just passed. There is so much future potential for him here, in his own land, but will politicians make the right choices for him and others like him? Will he be taking orders from qallunaats or Inuit when he enters the work force?

Will his parents make the right choices for him? Will he be schooled in the Inuit or western tradition, or both? Will he believe in Agloolik, the powerful spirit who lives under the ice and helps with hunting and fishing, or the Christian god who lives in the sky, but is not particularly helpful, at least to the millions who die from starvation around the world each year?

Missionaries converted most Inuit to Christianity over a century ago. Do any of them still believe in their old religious myths? Will this child believe in the name soul (atiq) that is passed from one generation to another? Traditionally, when a person died, his or her name was passed on to the next child born, so that the name soul of the dead individual would continue to live.

Inuit people did not have last names. They only had first names, which were the soul names of their dead ancestors. The lack of last names complicated things for the bureaucrats in Ottawa, so they solved the problem by giving them numbers. Imagine the shock and resentment it created when numbers replaced their soul names! This lack of cultural and human sensitivity on behalf of our government, which was demonstrated in many other cases, made bad situations worse.

Will this child be looking at the moon as a big rock lighted by the sun, or as Igaluk, who chases his sister the sun? In Inuit mythology the sun is a beautiful young maiden carrying a torch across the sky.

Will he be taught the legend of the sea goddess, a beautiful young woman who was sacrificed by her father so that he could save his own life?

Mythology is the basis of culture. What would western culture be without its belief in Christian mythology? By the same token, what would Inuit culture be without its belief in the numerous spirits that helped them with hunting and fishing, fertility, childbirth and many other survival needs?

If this child and others in his cohort will be taught the ancient myths and traditions, then there is some hope that Inuit culture will survive the twenty-first century. He's only a toddler, but already the expectations on him and his peers are pretty high! A lot is riding on them, but only time will tell.

Our sense of serenity is shattered by gunshots off in the distance. Is someone shooting at the polar bear that menaces the town every once in a while? Or, are they shooting at the even more scarce caribou?

As the shooting continues and gets louder, we proceed with some apprehension. Soon we see the source of the noise. In front of us is a big sign telling us to keep away from the shooting range, unless we're members of the Iqaluit shooting club. Two cars are parked in front of it, one of them a police car. It's the same RCMP vehicle we had seen earlier while walking on the ridge of the hill.

The Road To Nowhere was originally a road to a sand and gravel quarry. We're standing in front of what was once a hill, or a number of them, which were carted away one truckful at a time and converted to concrete for the construction of the airport and the lower and upper military bases. There's still sand left here, but there are no signs of any recent excavating activities.

We return by walking on the other side of the road, going up and down hills and following the tall mounds of stones on their tops. They're direction markers, the poor cousins of the inuksuks. From a distance the ground looks lifeless, but it's far from it. Everywhere we walk we see countless numbers of flowers. They're small and close to the ground, but they're very beautiful and colourful. The tundra is full of life!

The fireweed, with a beautiful mauve colour, is the more pervasive, followed by arctic cotton and the purple saxifrage, but there are many others that are just as beautiful. This whole region of the arctic has less than two inches of soil on top of either bedrock or permafrost, and it's covered by a layer of lichens and mosses through which the flowers grow. When one considers that it receives very little precipitation, it's a wonder that there's anything growing here at all. The climate is actually dry enough to be considered desert!

We reach the Apex River but the two students are no longer here. We cross the river and we walk alongside of it toward Apex. Having the river beside us is like having another companion: we can see it, hear its soft and soothing murmur and we can feel its presence. We contemplate taking it all the way to Apex, but when we realize that our progress is slow because of the marshy terrain, causing us to go around wet areas, we decide to aim for the multidirectional beacon on the hill between the river and the bay. The climb looks challenging, but we make short shrift of it like two veteran hikers!

The first time we saw the beacon, on the way to the build site, we all wondered what this intriguing structure was. Everyone we asked seemed to have a different answer, but the best one we heard was, "It's Santa Claus's landing pad." So, what's a directional beacon? It's a large circular pad with numerous transmitters on its circumference; in a nutshell, it's an electronic compass that supplements the aircraft's magnetic compass.

From here, we walk through Tundra Ridge and Happy Valley. They look like nice places to live, but they are deserted. Is anybody home?

With no gardens to weed, no grass to mow, no hedges to trim, no leaves to collect, there's no need to be outside, I suppose. But more importantly, where are the kids? It's summer and schools are out, but there are no kids playing on the streets. We saw more people on the Road To Nowhere than here!

Arctic living is different from what we're used to in the south and we're slowly comprehending how different!