A Northern Education

The first thing I noticed when I stepped off the airplane in Rankin Inlet was the ground swaying beneath my feet. Aside from the small one-room airport and a chain-link fence, I could see for miles in every direction. For a girl who grew up in the piney woods of southeast Arkansas, this northern community several hundred kilometres above the tree line was the most vast, open expanse I had ever seen in my life, and the optical illusion of a bowing horizon line made me feel as if I had yet to get my sea legs, rather than having finally stepped on terra firma after the seven-hour trip from Edmonton.

I had come to Nunavut to write a story about Inuit midwives for New Trail magazine, but I had also come to experience the Far North for myself. It was a trip I could have hardly imagined making a few months earlier. I am a southerner born and bred, and I had hoped to spend my life below the Mason-Dixon line, sipping sweet tea in the 90-degree shade of my Magnolia tree. Although circumstance had brought me to Edmonton, I confess I came reluctantly. In the process I drew an imaginary line in the sand: I may settle in Edmonton, I told myself, but I will go no farther north than the 53rd parallel.

However, for the previous two months, I had been absorbed in stories about Canada's North for New Trail's Winter 2012 issue-stories about researchers who are studying climate change in the Arctic, about grads who are reimagining Edmonton as a more "northern" city, and about an alumnus who has made a career out of rafting the Northwest Territories. Together these stories began to whet my appetite for a northern experience of my own.

Then Parks Canada announced a renewed push to comb the Arctic for the wreckage of the Franklin Expedition, and, for a few brief weeks in the "heat" of the Canadian summer, Franklin-mania seemed to sweep the country. In talking about an upcoming story for the magazine with Franklin expert and president of the Royal Geographic Society John Geiger, '81 BA, I began to see a trip to up North as urgent. "You can't be a Canadian-you can't live in Canada"-he corrected himself-"without visiting the North," he told me, rattling off, to my virgin ears, a list of mystical-sounding places: Resolute Bay, Whale Cove, Coral Harbour, etc.

So when the opportunity arose for me to write about a story I was already passionate about and travel up to one of these communities for myself, Geiger's words echoed in my ears, calling me north like a siren. It wasn't until I stepped foot in Rankin that I realized just how otherworldly the Far North is to a southerner like me.

Hunting is a major part of most people's lives in the Far North. Here, a caribou hide dries on the side of a shed in Rankin Inlet.

Although I quickly gained my footing at the airport that day, I still felt off-kilter wherever I went. Rankin is home to some 2,500 people and is only about 20 square kilometres. You could walk its boundaries in under an hour. But the first day I found myself lost for three hours, even though I had a map and consider myself an experienced traveller. The street signs where all in Inuktitut, which seemed an indecipherable string of fourteen-letter words to me, and the houses all looked identically foreign. I was only able to find my way back to my accommodations by tracking the large Inuksuk overlooking the Bay-not unlike the Inuit had done for the millennia before street signs.

The next day, travelling beyond Rankin's boundaries, I was in for another surprise. Walking out on the tundra, or "the Land" as it is more commonly referred to, I realized that the view up-close was totally different from the one from the air. Seen from the airplane, the tundra appeared to be one flat, monochromatic expanse of rock and lichen, punctuated only by a million tiny lakes. But from the ground, each lake was immense and the tundra was a colourful palate of dark boulders, spongy lichen, blueberries and even a few September wildflowers. I didn't spot any caribou or muskox, but I was mesmerized with the small-scale life: the sik-sik (Arctic squirrel), the Arctic hare, and the hundred or so Tundra Swans en route to their winter homes down south.

Then, as I returned to the gravel streets of this small town, I began to notice the ways in which life in the Far North was incredibly familiar. Passing by a playground at dusk, I found it teeming with children from toddlers to teenagers-and no adults. The parent in me was alarmed, but then I remembered the playgrounds of my childhood in my tiny Southern town. Like the children in Rankin, we played out-of-doors, unchaperoned, until the darkness finally forced us inside. By comparison, the playgrounds in my Edmonton neighbourhood seem rather lonely: devoid of children (and their parents) except for a few warm, sunny weekends in the summer.

"Well, of course we let our children go to the playground by themselves," Rankin resident Barbara Porter said to me over a cup of coffee in her living room that evening. "Everyone knows where we live and would come get us if the kids were up in trouble." Barb and her husband, Ben Porter, are the parents of two boys, Alex, 8, and Logan, 6.

Although they are originally from Cape Breton Island, the Porters-Barbara and Ben, with their sons Alex and Logan-now think of Rankin as home.

Originally from Cape Breton, the Porters came to Rankin 15 years ago after Barb earned her bachelor's in education. "There was nothing for us back home," Ben explained. The typical career trajectory for someone with Barb's qualifications is a decade of substitute teaching before a full-time position opens up. In Rankin there was a contract waiting for her right after graduation, and Ben quickly found work in the town's booming construction industry, where he is now a journeyman carpenter for the community housing association.

They had never intended to stay up North. "But we got to know the community," said Barb, "And they were so welcoming they made it really feel like home." The Porters have contemplated leaving over the years, but after spending a summer visiting family in Edmonton they changed their minds. "We were trying to drive back from the airport one morning in rush hour and got stopped in traffic at South Edmonton Common for more than two hours," remembers Ben. "After that we said, 'No way! Life's too short for this.'"

In Rankin, the Porters can walk to work in five minutes and come home for lunch as a family. After work, instead of shuttling the boys back and forth to different lessons, they spend that time together as a family. And in the long evenings of the Arctic summer, they often head "out on the Land" like everyone else in town, to soak up the warmth and sunlight and splash in the ice-cold waters of the nearby Meliadine River. But the Porters-and most other locals I spoke with-see Rankin for what it offers rather than for what it lacks.

"Sure, there are lots of things the boys can't do because we live here," says Barb. "They can't take karate lessons or go to a movie theatre. But they're in the Inuktitut stream at school. They're being taught how to hunt and fish on the Land, and they have a real community, which they wouldn't have just anywhere else."

I don't want to romanticize the North. Its problems are well-documented and complex. But what struck me most on my first visit to the region that sense of a tight-knit community-a feeling I hadn't experienced since leaving my own hometown.

Kids on their way home from school in central Rankin Inlet.

That sense of community was really driven home for me one night when, returning to my bed and breakfast, I ran into a friend who had a pained expression on her face. "Did you hear?" she asked. A man from the community had gone missing earlier that day while on a solo fishing trip. The winds that morning had registered 60 km/h at the Rankin airport, and I had found it difficult just to walk through town. "Everyone is really worried," she said. "He's a good outdoorsman, but the water is cold, and it's supposed to be below freezing tonight."

Everywhere I went that evening, I was greeted with the same words, "Have you heard?" The name of the fisherman was on everyone's lips. And so when I walked into the local health centre the next morning to interview someone for my story and heard a woman wailing, I didn't have to be told the news. For the rest of my trip it was as if a veil had been pulled over the entire community. There was a palpable silence, for everyone either knew the man or was related to him or knew someone who was. More than at any other time during that week, I was reminded of how similar this remote Northern community was to the small Southern town of my birth. As in any small town, word travels fast, and a death in a small community is noted and mourned by every member.

A qamutik, or sled, waits for the snow to arrive on the tundra.

I was also reminded how here, a mere four latitudinal degrees from the Arctic Circle, Nature is still a mighty force to be reckoned with. In the South we remember Nature whenever there is a hurricane or a tornado or other disaster, but most of time she's just background, little more than a pretty sunset. Only in far northern communities like Rankin Inlet-where there are regular blinding blizzards and gale-force winds, where there are weeks without sunlight and harbours filled with whales and polar bears-are you constantly reminded of the power of Nature. No matter how the Far North changes, not matter what it has or lacks, living there will always be a struggle for survival. Having survived it-whether for a week or a millenium-teaches you just how special such a place truly is.

Despite the influx of ATVs, there are still several dog sled teams in Rankin Inlet.

Most Rankin Inlet mothers-and some fathers-carrier their children in hand-made amautis.

Associate Editor Sarah Ligon is a mother of two, originally from Warren, Arkansas (population: 6,200). Look for her story about a U of A professor and alumna who are helping train local women to serve as community midwives in the Far North in the Winter 2012 issue of New Trail, due out in early December.