Is.

We stopped at a roadside café/bar on our way to the Varadero airport.  As is typical in Cuba, there was a small, rail-thin cat lurking at the feet of the patrons, desperate for a scrap or two of food.  All the cats look like kittens in Cuba. I’m guessing that they never reach full-size due to malnutrition, though I also suspect that their lives are not very long, either.  Either way, I spent a few minutes watching this bony, starving cat sit patiently and attentively.  Then I saw some movement in a low hedge about 50 feet away from the cat.  A hen emerged, three chicks in tow.  The chicks were small; half fluff, half feather, and made a peeping cluck sound that reminded me of a teenage boy’s voice breaking.  The hen and her chicks moved in the direction of the cat, crossed within feet, and…nothing.  

That was my Cuba experience in a nutshell.

When a starving cat doesn’t hunt easy prey, that is defeat. I’ve seen that defeat before.  I really didn’t think that I’d go to Havana and spend a good part of the time struck by the similarities between Cuba and Nunavut, but there you have it.  No fruit, but 14 kinds of mayonnaise at the grocery store.  $7 bags of chips.  So. Much. Pop.  No real change on the immediate horizon.

“Is Cuba,” was the answer to nearly every question we asked all week.  Is Cuba, Is Nunavut, Is Long-Term Lack of Access to Resources Equals Shelf-Stable Food and a Culture of Shrugging Resignation. Like I said, I’ve seen it before.  There were coconuts everywhere, but we never saw a dish or a drink with coconut in it on a menu the entire time we were in the country.  

The food was mostly shit, and the Internet sucked.  I had an amazing time.  But let’s not kid ourselves—everything is amazing when you’re deeply in love and armed to the tits with charcoal pills and Immodium. 

I’m back in Baker Lake.  I just heard a radio announcement providing the local phone number for “if you want your dog to be shot”.  Then they played Aqua’s ‘Barbie Girl’ start to finish.

Is Baker Lake.

Is only two months.

Stark (Naked), Raven Mad.

Blame me.  Blame me.  I don’t care.  Blame me.  Just stop blaming each other.  Give me all of your blame.  Oh, wait.  You already have.  Fuck you, then.  

I’ve been absent.  I had a really bad cold, but more importantly, posting has been a near impossibility because I’ve had no Internet at home basically since I got here.  (By home, of course, I mean the lumpy single bed in which I sleep, under sheets printed with hula girls, a million years old, still inexplicably rough. Anyway.) 

I found a house with wifi that wasn’t password protected.  I found the sweet spot between their truck and front door.  Hidden, in rubber boots and pajamas, an Internet Interloper.  There is only daylight, and I’m sure the people on this stretch of road think of me as the weird, forgetful white lady.  The routine looks a little like this: walk a couple hundred feet from front door, stand and fiddle with wifi device until email uploads, “remember something incredibly important”, turn on rubber booted heel and hustle pajama-clad ass home.  Showtimes: midnight, 3:30, and 7:00.

It was like that for 6 weeks.  Week 7, I was able to steal a feeble signal from my room, so long as I was on my stomach, back hooked like a comma, facing the door, laptop perched on two pillows and a book, the book necessary to maintain a steady and specific angle. No moving.  When I got sick, it wasn’t until I started coughing that I realized I had a cold.  I’d just assumed that all my stiffness and immobile neck were the result of my nightly Internet poaching position.  

Who is to blame?  WHO IS TO BLAME? I'll tell you.  Fucking ravens.  The ravens up here are big, nearly the size of the Chihuahuan Raven (the largest in the world.  and no, i didn't look that up.  i just know that.  which is why i can't do long division anymore. moving on).  

The technician finally came to sort us out last week.  A Finn with a dry sense of humour and unusual dental arrangement, he arrived in a bright yellow jacket, flood pants and athletic sandals on his bare feet.   I was so excited that he'd actually shown up that I gave him my dessert.  He ate it very slowly, while boring me with a complete and detailed list of all the antique cars he owned but didn't drive.  To say that he was peculiar would be an understatement, but I nodded and smiled.  I needed the Internet.  Once he finished his (MY) dessert, he (LEISURELY) climbed a very tall ladder to inspect the dish. He spent so long at the top of the ladder that eventually I gave up and retired to my room.  

The next morning, he gave me the full report.  Rolling his Rs with a gleeful flourish that had to be at least a partial exaggeration, he provided a definitive cause for our long-standing internet issues.  At the top of the ladder, on the shelf built to hold the dish, he found a couple of pounds of caribou bones and fur, dropped by ravens.  "Don't worrrrrry," he said.  "Those rrrrrrravenssss, they arrrrrrrn't going to be a prrrrroblm for you now."  They had eaten the "rrrrrrreceiiiiivrrrr", he said.  It was "verrrrry rrrrrradioactive".  A crooked (and maybe demented?) smile stretched across his teeth.  "The rrrravennnnssss.  They arrrrn't a prrrrroblm ennymorrrrr."

So now I have internet.  I also have nightmares about clutches of glowing green eggs.  Soon-to-be Superravens, HulkHawks, blue-feathered monster birds.  They will perch on the roof of the Northern Store, shoot laser beams from their eyes and read my thoughts.  

What I'm saying is, I love you, Raven Overlords.  I know where all the good garbage in town is, and I'll save all my dryer lint and showerdrainhair for your nests.  I think we can make this work.  Please don't kill me.  I have a lot to live for.  

You Do It To Yourself, You Do.

Perhaps I should back up.  Seventeen months after I left, I am back in Nunavut.  I am back because I need money.  I need money because I took seventeen months off work.  I took seventeen months off work because I used to have a very intense job.  I signed up for a very intense job because I felt like I was stuck in a rut that I needed to get out of.  And sometimes it’s like when you’re stuck in a muddy ditch; you unnecessarily put the pedal to the floor and the next thing you know, you’ve smashed through the nice neighbor kid’s lemonade stand?  That’s me, in a nutshell.  When life gives me lemons, I wind up driving right through the lemonade stand.  In a very expensive, uninsured imported vehicle.  Or something.

So I’m back.  After being up for 48 straight hours, weepy and a little delirious, I made my way to the airport with 2 large bags.  These bags conformed to the weight restrictions laid out by the airline I was booked with—I’d been sure to research that.  What I’d failed to consider was the first leg of the flight, which was booked on a “partner airline”.  THEIR luggage allowance was exactly HALF of what I’d brought with me to the airport.  Here’s what you need to know: I’m beyond broke right now.  Like, hobo broke, and I couldn't cover the excess baggage charge.  So I had no choice; I hastily transferred fistfuls of socks and underwear from one bag to the other, obsessively weighed the thing down to the pound, and then left the rest.  Just left it there, in the airport.  I can’t think about what I’ve left behind.  It’s just stuff.  It is really just stuff.

The attendant on the flight north was warm and lovely, but had such a peculiar personal aesthetic that I found it difficult to look at her.  Her skin was the colour of caramel, which makes her sound exotic and sensual, but she wasn’t.  She had tanned herself to the colour of Wurther’s Originals, and chosen to make the tan ‘pop’ with a highly metallic silver eyeshadow.  To further contrast with her tan, she’d bleached her hair to the point where it was no longer hair, technically.  It was hay, so coarse from chemicals that it wouldn’t lay flat against her head.  Her ponytail stood out straight behind her, as though it were blowing in the wind.  All the time.

I recognized people on the plane, in the little airports along the way.  Their conversations sounded familiar.  It was like I’d never left.  In a good way.

I nearly tripped on a rabbit on my way to breakfast my first morning back.  I work in an airplane hangar, behind a plane, two loaders and a helicopter, in a heated box.  I wear my sunglasses when I walk home at 10 pm.  I’m homesick and more than a little heartsick.  It is a means to an end.  You should really come and visit.  And bring me some cheese.  And truffle honey.  And a custard tart.  

Right. But what was I wearing?

I often joke that at any given moment, I’m either thinking about cheeseburgers, the Internet, or sex.  The attention I devote to these thoughts is so great and intense that I often walk into walls, doors or fire hydrants, and I fall down stairs with a frequency that borders on alarming.  And I don’t just stumble down the stairs, I spiral down in what I call a “Twelve Coconut Cream Pies Fall”, a reference to an old Sesame Street bit where a chef, carrying said number of pies, tumbles dramatically and vocally down a flight of stairs.  But I digress.

Nowhere in this city have I fallen more frequently, spectacularly, and painfully than on the stairs at the Art Gallery of Ontario.  What I’m saying is that I should have thought twice about the shoes I wore yesterday to a preview of the Inuit art exhibition opening soon at the AGO.  In fact, given that I was meeting my good friend A's very fancy parents for the first time, I should have thought twice about the entire outfit. But, no.  That’s not what happened at all.

For most of my life, I’ve felt as though there’s been a major disconnect between who I am and what I look like.  We never had full-length mirrors in the house growing up, and I still don’t have one now (which is why I sometimes leave the house in dresses that are, in fact, shirts. Again, I digress). I don’t dry my hair in front of a mirror.  Until I started wearing makeup a few years ago, the only time I looked at my face at all was when I was either brushing my teeth or shopping for clothing.  So when I decided to take the time to figure out who I was, I also made a conscious effort to work out what I looked like.  Consequently, a lot of my clothes feel like markers along the path of my 'journey' over the last year and a half.  

Right.  But what was I wearing?  Well, because I’m going away to the Arctic for half a year, I’ve been digging deep into the closet and pulling out old sentimental favourites that I won’t get to wear for a very long time.  Yesterday, I wore one of my favourite blouses.  It’s a vintage cream thing with giant puffy sleeves and tiny pearl buttons and pleats and a collar like a Georgia O’Keeffe iris.  It’s also completely transparent.  The last time I wore it, my friend C. said “It only looks slutty when I open my eyes.”  And then we went out and had a night that I remember with great fondness.  It wasn’t until I arrived at the gallery that I also remembered that the tiny pearl buttons fly open if I’m not completely motionless.  So that, a cream leather jacket, a high-waisted black skirt, metallic bronze tights and stiletto-heeled granny boots.  All in all, an excellent outfit to meet very reserved parents and/or fall down stairs.

A. and I made our way to the gallery's basement cafeteria to wait for her parents.  I gripped the rail tightly and managed not to fall.  As we sat there, I grew increasingly more anxious about my outfit, and A's parents' reaction to it.  I got nervous, and started talking too much, too fast.  And sweating.  Obviously.

Someone recently said that an outfit I was wearing effectively gave them permission to say whatever they wanted about me.  That I was "asking for it" by dressing a certain way.  I went berzerk.  Cleavage is not consent, first of all.  But also, because I now feel that I look more like who I really am, superficial criticism hurts/insults on a completely new level.  This isn't something I really had to contend with before, somehow.  The possibility that A's parents would judge and potentially reject me based on my appearance (and therefore my personality) nearly did my head in.  As we climbed the slippery wooden spiral stairs, my wet palms could barely grip the railing.  Which only made me more anxious about the falling, which was an inevitability in my mind.

But none of this mattered the moment I stepped into the room full of art.  The work of people I've known, whose homes I've been in, on the walls of one of the largest galleries in North America. I was almost immediately overwhelmed.  And then I saw Tony's drawing.  I nearly came undone.

Tony, it was said, had sustained a moderate head injury a long time ago.  But what really messed him up was the gas huffing he'd done after.  He used to sit in my office 3 or 4 times a week, grinning, grinding his teeth, drinking our shitty coffee.  He was looking for work, and it didn't matter how many times I told him that we weren't hiring, he'd be back a day or so later.  When I first started, Tony had been employed by us out at the tent camp on the tundra.  He had been charged with emptying the giant buckets in the outhouses, and then setting the waste on fire along with the other garbage.  He loved his job.  The position no longer existed, but he always asked.  His snowpants were held together with duct tape.  He was always dirty.  He reeked of smoke.  I would sometimes pretend to be on the phone when he came by, having one-sided fake conversations with a ringtone.

But his drawing.  Was beautiful.  I stood in front of it for a long time, in my ridiculous outfit, in a Frank Gehry designed building, thinking about Tony and his duct tape repaired clothing and how I'd judged him, and I felt like a royal asshole.  I tried to imagine how he would even feel about the show, if he even knew about it.  I didn't want to even think about the valuation of his work, how little of it likely makes it to his hands.  All I know is that when I get back up there in a month, I'm looking forward to telling Tony about how much I liked his work, and how proud I am to know him.

Hare Pie

For 8 days in mid-January 2008, the town of Baker Lake, Nunavut was snowed in as the result of its longest blizzard since the 1940s. Baker Lake is considered to be the blizzard capital of Canada. It averages 75 snowy days per year, and my first year in the community, school was cancelled due to blizzard 55 times. So, while snow is not uncommon, it’s unusual for planes to be unable to land for more than a couple days at a time. By the third day of the blizzard, the national CBC was reporting that several towns in Nunavut had begun to run out of food. I knew this only from watching it on the television, because I was—of course--snowed in.

The night the blizzard started, I had gone to friends’ trailer to watch a movie. It was snowing lightly as I left my place. Less than 3 hours later, when I went to leave, I discovered a 5ft high and 4ft deep Arctic concrete snowdrift blocking the doorway. I was trapped.

This wasn’t such a big deal, initially. The two inhabitants of the trailer were a pilot and ground crew employee, and basically my only friends in town. We spent a couple of days eating through the food in the freezer and watching movies; a little giddy about the brief vacation from work we’d been given.

It’s at this point that I should mention that a few short weeks before, I’d been sleeping with the pilot. We'd always had a brother/sister dynamic, but it was Christmastime, we were lonely, and after a night of drinking bootleg Courvoisier while counting dozens of shooting stars under northern lights so low it felt like you could touch them, we fell into bed together. The morning after, we did it again. In the sober light of day, it was suddenly a little awkward. A few hours later, we had to dress up like Santa Claus and the Sugarplum Fairy. We had to hand out 550 presents to local children in 90 minutes. By time that was all over, things had gotten really awkward. But I guess why there's that saying...“fuck santa once, shame on me...". Anyway, that’s another story. We secretly clung to each other for comfort until parting company at the Winnipeg Airport Sheraton on Christmas Eve a few weeks later. It had been fine since returning from break, but as the days passed in captivity, things grew a little tense between us.

By the fourth day, we were basically out of food. I made banana bread for breakfast, and then we used the peels to lure arctic hares to the living room window. While we waited for them, we watched a cannibal movie, because of course that's what you do when you're running out of food and trapped with a couple other people in a confined space. Eventually, two rabbits took the bait, and the pilot shot them with a pellet gun. While he cleaned them, I got the ladder. I leaned it up against the drift in the doorway, and squeezed out through the 2ft space near the top. I walked, completely snowblind, 20 metres to the house next door to borrow flour. I phoned back to the trailer when it was time to return, and the ground crew employee yelled so I could follow his voice back.

We watched a second cannibal movie while the rabbit braised. The pilot and I gave each other the stink eye from across the room.

I made puff pastry from scratch, assembled two hare pies, and we watched the day’s third cannibal movie (I KNOW!) while they baked.

Bedtime came. The pilot and I retired to his room, a tiny, wood-paneled, orange-accented box with two single beds. We laid in silence for ten minutes, and then he came over to my bed. And then we did what sad, lonely people do in the Arctic when shack wacky in a tundra-tied tuna can. And then he went back to his bed. I rolled over to face the wall, and started to cry. A little bit at first. I heard him sigh. And then I cried harder. Ugly cry hard. He shushed me. And then he asked me to stop. And so of course, I couldn’t. In the previous 7 months, I’d left an 8 year relationship, moved to the Arctic, and was barely surviving 50 day runs of 18 hour days by living on off-brand energy drink and beef jerky. I was a little "delicate". And that’s when he shot me in the ass with the pellet gun he’d killed our dinner with. He shot me in the ass to get me to stop crying. I stopped crying, alright. And then I got up, took the gun and got back into my tiny bed. And then I shot him in the leg. And THEN I slept pretty soundly.

You know that moment? That moment when you know you’ve probably slept with someone for the last time? I’m often guilty of being in denial about those moments, but later am inevitably forced to admit that I KNEW. Anyway, the moment he shot me in the ass with a pellet gun at close range, I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to sleep with the pilot again.

The next morning, though the 110km/hr winds continued to blow, the snow had largely stopped falling, and a loader was carving the snow away from the entry door of the trailer. The pilot drove me home to the Iglu Hotel, where I was living. As I got out of the truck, I felt relief. I also felt a wave of the premature nostalgia that often befalls me. Reminiscing on moments that are still happening, and so on. And I was so lonely in those days that I already felt utterly alone before I was even out of the truck. So as I stepped out, I felt a little sad. I paused, holding the door open, and tried to imagine maybe sleeping with him again. That’s when, lost in thought, I lost my grip on the door in the 110km/hr winds, and the door crushed my nose. The pilot LAUGHED at me, and then basically drove off. You know that moment when you’re SURE you’ve slept with someone for the last time? That’s when I was SURE I was never going to sleep with the pilot again.

In the years since then, the pilot and I easily mended fences. He's a dear friend. Two nights ago, I accepted a contract working for him for the summer. So, yes. I will be returning to Nunavut for a spell, which should help bankroll some cool things I plan on doing in New York. I'm actually kind of excited. But if the pilot pulls a gun on me again, I will fuck him up. Mark my words.

Actually, no.

(In the office, in Nunavut)

Local Clerk: Which one is John Candy?

Local Receptionist: He's the guy who lost all that weight by eating at Subway.

Local Clerk: Right. He only ate 6" subs until his pants got big.

Local Receptionist: 6" subs without mayo. WITHOUT MAYO.

Local Clerk: Right on. I wish we had a Subway. I need my pants to get big.


It's not that you're getting smaller, it's that your pants are getting bigger. I like that.

Get Some Shit For Snacktime

She returned from her vacation, jet-lagged and exhausted, to an office in chaos. The photocopier was down. The scanner was broken. The shredder made low, groaning noises, and smelled of smoke whenever forced to shred more than 5 pieces of paper at a time. The sewage hadn't been pumped out in two days, which didn't matter because they hadn't had water in the tanks in three days, which didn't matter because they'd run out of coffee the week before.

Having traveled for 12 hours--the last 4 of which were spent in a filthy truck with no shocks, driving across the dusty tundra--her only intention was to quickly grab a few things from the office, then get as much sleep as possible, but The Receptionist hovered over her. The Receptionist rocked on his feet, shifting his weight back and forth. The Receptionist cleared his throat. Sometimes, it was clear that he wanted something from her, but the words he chose were too vague for her to quickly grasp his meaning. Other times, his words simply made no sense. Although he spoke English more clearly and articulately than most of the other locals, language often failed him. Occasionally, he would resort to acting out what he was trying to say, and this time, he was attempting to describe the dimensions of a man. He stretched, arched an arm in front like a belly, swirled a flat palm on his head to indicate a combover, gestured that the man was short. Then he stuck his index fingers in both ears, and made a cringing face.

It was in that moment that the short, fat, balding man walked, loudly, into her office. The receptionist scrambled away. The short, fat, balding man was sweating, even though it was winter in the Arctic. He was sweating, red in the face, and he was swearing. A lot. She quickly remembered that Jerome was in the building, and rose to shut her door behind the cursing man. Jerome was incredibly religious, and particularly sensitive to coarse language. She couldn't afford another complaint about the office environment from Jerome. He was a terrible employee, frequently absent without explanation, but it was imperative that the local employees be kept happy.

The door closed, she returned to her desk, working her way around the man, who was still sweating and swearing. She interrupted him to introduce herself. He quickly spat out that his name was Bill before returning to his tirade, which continued to make no sense. He had a thick Newfoundland accent, his vowels bouncing as though elasticized. Bill suddenly fell silent. He took off his coat, but not his work gloves, and stood on the other side of her desk. He was still breathing heavily, and his coveralls rustled every time he took in air. After about a minute, he took a slow, deep breath, removed his gloves, and moved to shake her hand. He smelled like diesel. Without thinking, and before she could stop herself, she put her hand to her nose and sniffed. There was a pause, and he locked eyes with her. Somewhat calmly, Bill explained that he'd arrived just after she'd gone on vacation. In the three weeks he'd been there, he said, he had not had one decent meal. This was, unfortunately, not an uncommon complaint. The food situation had been deteriorating since Christmas, and moving two rotating cooks into the guesthouse hadn't appeased people in the way that had been expected. Instead, it just gave people more to complain about. They developed preferences, allegiances. One cook's brown sauce was superior to the other's, they insisted, despite the fact that all the brown sauce was made from the same dusty powder. One cook's meat sauce was superior to that of the other, despite the fact that it had been sent to town from the mine site, prepared by neither of of the cooks in question. The white sauce was delicious. The white sauce was wallpaper paste. So much cheap frozen meat, so much sauce, so much disagreement.

"I ain't fuckin' around," he said. "We need snacks for morning breaktime. I don't want no bullshit pudding cups for snacks. Pudding isn't for morning break. My men need cookies. And Red Rose tea. Not that fuckin' Tetley bullshit. Nothing is worth this bullshit in this fuckin' cold! But I'M diabetic! So I can't haves cookies. I need bananas. I will pull my men, and we will walk. Like I said, I ain't fuckin' around. We gotsta to have the shit we asked for, or we will walk." He turned on his heel and left. She needed to appease Bill. Barge season was close at hand, and he and his crew were repairing an ancient, rusty, dilapidated crane that was to be used to offload materials. Without the crane, the entire mining project was sunk. So she went out and bought the cookies and the tea and the bananas, and several hundred dollars more in snacktime-appropriate groceries.

The next morning at ten, she heard the back door slam. She heard him swearing his way down the hall to her office. She rose and stood by the door for his arrival, which she quickly shut behind him as he entered the room. Again, he was swearing and sweaty and red. "Macaroni is bullshit," he muttered, seemingly to nobody in particular. "I comes up here, and I work some fuckin' hard in this God-foresaken shithole of a town, and they can't even serve me real fuckin' juice? It don't have to be freshly squeezed or nothing', but not even from concentrate?" He drew a deep breath. His face grew redder still. "And then this?! Macaroni is bullshit. My wife knows better than to put bullshit macaroni on my fuckin' table. She would never serve me fuckin' macaroni." A long-distant customer service job had taught her to ask probing questions in the face of perplexing complaints. No, he did not have a gluten allergy. Yes, he liked spaghetti just fine. But no, he would not eat macaroni, and he would pull his crew and leave town if macaroni appeared on the table again, without a moment's hesitation. She suggested that perhaps the matter could be resolved by simply not eating the macaroni on the days that it was served, but this was not satisfactory to Bill. So at 2 pm, when she knew the cook would be taking her mid-day nap, she snuck up to the house and threw out all the macaroni in the pantry.

Two days later, he again presented himself in her office. It was breaktime, and he was loudly insistent that the groceries had been stolen, throwing accusations at the local housekeepers who worked days at the guesthouse. She defended the housekeepers, and in a patronizing tone, explained how quickly groceries get eaten in a house of 15 people. She reminded Bill of her long-standing experience in matters relating to the crew house, and ushered him out the door, promising to buy more food. She went out and bought two kinds of cookies and tea, a dozen very green bananas (at $6/lb), a wide assortment of non-macaroni foodstuffs, brought them to the house, then went back to work.

The next day, Bill returned. Again. He was clutching a black plastic garbage bag that appeared to be mostly empty. His hands quickly fell limply to his sides, dropping the bag. It hit the floor with a muffled thud, and the bag rustled in the draft that blew under the door. He took two steps towards her. He took a deep breath. He closed his eyes. She could only imagine what the problem was this time. "They were the only bananas I could get, Bill. It's the Arctic. I am doing my best. But you need to meet me halfway." He opened his eyes. He took another deep breath. He nudged the bag towards her with his steel-toed boot. He looked her in the eyes.

"Some fuckin' eskimo got into the fuckin' kitchen. She corrected him, reprimanded him for using the offensive term. "Shit, man. In the kitchen." Again, he nudged the bag with his boot, pushing it even closer to her. "Someone got into the house. Someone got into the kitchen." "We went for break. We went for cookies and tea." "And bananas", she interjected, sarcastically. He looked her in the eye. He was not amused. "My men," he continued, "sat down for tea. In the kitchen." In the kitchen, he said, on top of the garbage can, they found a pair of men's briefs. The briefs had been "unloaded in", he said. Deliberately removed, then extensively, enormously, and attentively shat in. "You asked for shit for the kitchen?" she joked. He did not laugh, and she had to buy two $11 cartons of orange juice a day for a month so he wouldn't tell her supervisor.

Just another day at work.

See-Kow-Me-Took

Everything, it seems, is on the barge. The ice came in early this year--a full month earlier than last--trapping the barges in towns which were not their final destinations. Wedding dresses, snowmobiles, building supplies, furniture, and case upon case of pop.

He has a girlfriend and two young children, and his truck is on a barge. It's not his truck, rather it belongs to the company for which he works. He knows it's there, has photographs, like many others do of the things on the barges. Photographs of objects rendered intangible by distance, nature, and impossible Arctic logistics.

His family isn't on the barge, but they might as well be. Not terribly far when referring to a map, but inaccessible, removed enough to nearly not exist. She doesn't care about the things on the barges. They are just things, and she doesn't feel their absence, only the inconveniences that their absence cause for her. Initially, she feels the same way about his children.

It has become a bit of a joke or at least a stock answer of sorts to every question asked. Where is the office furniture? Where are the tools? Where are the toilets? Where is the photocopier? Has anyone seen my sister? Why can't you get wholewheat bread in this shithole town? The answer is simple, and always the same: "See kow me took". It's on the barge.

At first, it is frustrating. The barges nearly make it to town before getting turned around, and there is hope for a few days that a thaw might occur. It does not. Eventually, it becomes apparent that the items are trapped, not to be received until the summer, a full year after being ordered. Once this sinks in, it becomes a joke. The waiting is over, and people move on, able to survive without the things they thought they needed. They move on, planning to sell the snow machines still on the barge in favor of next year's model. No-one seems to notice how funny it all is--a culture seemingly averse to planning for anything in advance, planning obsessively, only to have it consistently derailed by predictably unpredictable weather. Sometimes, it makes her laugh to herself. Then again, it isn't her wedding dress stuck on a barge, just out of reach.

At first, it's innocent. In fact, it's innocent for the better part of a year. But one day, something changes. His truck is still on the barge, he still comes into town every once in a while, but something changes. She wonders if perhaps he'd been eyeing her all along, because she's never met anyone who falls in love as quickly as she does. But he does, and has. Suddenly, his children are real. Their absence is problematic, but not like a missing toilet or ATV. It is problematic because they are real, and they matter, suddenly. Suddenly, and somehow, she might love them. Not like a missing wedding dress.

He is as far away as the barge, but in the opposite direction. He is barely less abstract than the truck, but he is absolutely real. He has a girlfriend and 2 young boys and his truck is still on the barge, but he is not.