Piqhiqpaa? Piqhinngittuq.

ᐱᖅᓯᖅᐹ? (Blizzard; Is there a … ?)
ᐱᖅᓯᙱᑦᑐᖅ. (Blizzarding; It is not .)

When one kind of accidentally realizes they’re going to be away from home for 3 months, the option of trying to see one’s spouse occasionally comes to mind. Josh and I tossed around endless possibilities, trying to find what made most sense: Should he come to Toronto, about the halfway point of my travels, which would also give him the chance to see his cousins? Should he come to Ottawa, getting to stay with my family and one of his best buddies, but then would that be silly if I was going to be in Winnipeg (albeit very briefly) the next weekend? At the back of our minds in all these discussions was the dream of him visiting me in Rankin, but it remained firmly in dreamland. While I knew his intrigue for Nunavut was at least equal to my own, we also knew that flights to the Territories are prohibitively expensive at the best of times, let alone for a brief weekend visit.

Air miles, on the other hand? Apparently cheaper to get to Rankin than Ottawa.

And suddenly our complicated decision-making got a whole lot simpler!

His flight blew in Thursday night, just hours ahead of a blizzard that would shut down the town the next morning, leaving us with an open day to explore Rankin in the daylight. With sunset sweeping the skies by 2:30PM, extra daylight hours are not something to take for granted!

11:30AM

2:30PM

Josh’s welcome feast of leftover birthday kwak and maqtaq… I assured my host he most definitely would NOT mind leftovers, particularly of this variety!

Josh trying his hand at the ulu, under Aanak’s watchful eye

Aanak’s expert ulu wielding

Sadly leaving Josh at home, I blindly made my way to clinic through the gusting snow on Friday morning, only to be informed an hour later that we were now shut down. Apparently there’s an Environment Canada gnome who sits on high and makes the call of Blizzard or Non… and apparently he slept in on Friday. Gnome needs to get his act together!

As I struggled back home and was swept in through the door by the winds, I was greeted by my host and her friend having coffee. “Pshh” they scoffed. “This isn’t even a real blizzard. You can still see the car in the driveway.”
…I’d love to know what Toronto would think of this system.

Josh’s visit fortuitously fell on a Flea Market weekend, where the whole hamlet gathers at the arena to hawk traditional felted banners, sealskin gloves, hand-sewn parkas, and spring rolls from the Filipino family in town. We continued our shopping expedition by combing through every inch of the tiny but packed craft store Ivalu, stocked by artisans throughout Nunavut.

We then holed up at The Matchbox Gallery for a few hours, hearing the fascinating history of the ceramics studio from the artist-teacher gallery owner Susan Shirley. After the original nickel mine closed in the 1960s, Matchbox was first opened as a government-run program to train ex-miners in a new craft: sculpting and ceramics. When government funding ran out, Jim and Sue Shirley took over the gallery and continued coordinating art classes and studio space for local artists, “preserv[ing] the reputation of Rankin as the only community producing Inuit fine-arts ceramics in the world.” You can find Rankin work at the National Gallery of Canada, the Winnipeg Art Gallery, and throughout Europe and the USA.

Sunday however, was my favourite day, when we finally did what I’ve been wanting to do since I first arrived: Venture out of town and onto the land.

Perfect weather for an adventure!

Sea ice waves still struggling to surge in the tide of Hudson Bay

Dabbing at Char River … inevitable when one of your hosts is 9 years old

Photos could not begin to capture the ethereal beauty of this deep port bay

Classic Canadian method of warming up frozen toes and fingers

This time, it was only a weekend. But we will continue to seek out those beautiful and wild places we may one day call home together!

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For anyone who read to the end of this most momentous post, congratulations!!! Thank you for sharing in saratreetravel’s ONE HUNDREDTH POST!!! The first person to post a comment containing a limerick or haiku about their favourite travel adventure will be contacted personally by saratree and receive a Northern prize (that may or may not be fermented walrus, depending on the rest of Calm Air’s passengers feel about that… but I have a feeling they’d be down).

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ᖁᕕᐊᓱᒃᑐᖓ (quviahuktunga!)*

Being the youngest of four kids with nine years between my older sister and I, the (almost) youngest of a large extended family, and a December baby to boot, I am in the unique position of having a long period of observation of others celebrating birthday milestones before it is my own turn. This year in particular has seen high school friends one after another celebrate / bemoan / shrug off / enthusiastically embrace the big 3-0.

30 seems to strike more significantly than 20. At 30, many people around me have long graduated from post-secondary training, are more settled in long-term relationships, are starting to gain confidence in their current career… and sometimes more importantly, are truly starting to question if they are comfortable where they are and what they want to do about it if not. At 30, we are in the unique position of having gained some essential life perspectives, and are now wanting to go back and apply that needed perspective to all the important decisions we made during our 20s!

For myself, I am still in school (and damn Med still makes me call it an “undergrad”), having taken a number of years between my first undergraduate degree and entering Medicine. I have already had one life-changing career as a biochemical technician in an interdisciplinary research lab, but even at the time, I knew it was a career that would not be permanent. I am in a relationship with the same individual I have been with since I was 20 (!!!), but both him and I have changed so much and spent just as many intense days living our individual lives apart from each other as together that it sometimes seems as though we have had a number of different unique and life-changing relationships with each other. And through everything, I have never stopped questioning if I am comfortable where I am at, and what I should do about it.

My difficulty in making decisions is a running family joke, whether it’s ordering ice cream at BDI or choosing a university degree. I’m often tempted to succumb to the general mantra that I should be done university already / have a permanent career already / have bought a house already / have kids already / spend more time with my husband already. But I am thankful that I was raised with a joy of pursuing the unique and the unknown.

Talk about people paving their own way… who needs a road when a field is right there!

I grew up with a conservative small-town Ukrainian Baptist mom… who eschewed all norms and moved to Flin Flon on her own for her first nursing job. A cousin who, when I wistfully talked about wanting to take a trip after graduation, asked, “Well, where are we going?” and sent me an email the next day with flight itineraries to Rome. Inspiring preceptors who see their role as physicians to recognize inequity and take action now to address it, no matter how unpopular it makes them with more mainstream medical colleagues. A best friend I met at camp when I was just 14, who also loved spontaneous road trips and was willing to move to Argentina for a year to live in a tent and wanted to learn firsthand from Northern Manitoba populations and threw himself wholeheartedly into recording an album when he already had a full-time job.

And yet another of my heroes: The Nunavut Cyclist

As I sat down on the eve of my 30th birthday to contemplate life and things (as I felt one should do on the last day of their 20s), I realized just how thankful I am to have surrounded myself with people who not only recognize the life-shaping value in pursuing the unique and unknown, but have embraced it for themselves.

With pursuit of the unique and unknown as my guiding philosophy for the last 3 decades, it seemed very fitting to celebrate this decade turnover in Nunavut, living with an Inuit family, learning a craft that inspires and terrifies me (aka Medicine), and surrounded by one of the most beautiful landscapes in the world.

Impromptu breakfast performance by my host and her “throat singing soulmate”

The morning of my birthday, I heard my host yelling to her 9-year old son, “Run to annanaqa’s (auntie’s) and grab the maqtaq for tonight!” After a busy day at the health centre, I walked home and found cardboard already spread on the ground, graced by 2 massive chunks of frozen meat: maqtaq (beluga) & tuktu (caribou). My host busily laid the cardboard table: uluit at the ready for slicing thin strips of tuktu, small dishes of soy sauce and hot butter and onions for dipping, Greenlandic Aromat spice. It was enlightening chatting with my host’s sister the other night, who told me, “I hate it when Southerners assume we’re all poor because we eat on the ground. We always eat on the ground for certain foods, even if we have a table. You can’t cut maqtaq on a table.” Or as my host put it, “People with food on the floor are rich.”

“These Pampered Chef knives have a lifetime warranty. I’ve already had 3 replaced. The last time, the customer service rep asked me what I did to the knife, and I told him I was trying to cut a caribou head open. He told me, ‘Ma’am, you probably shouldn’t do that again.’”

Aftermath!

I still catch myself looking for a restart button on my decisions. Yes, I could have been graduated from Med at this point and been an attending physician already for 3 years. But then I wouldn’t have toured Great Britain with my chamber choir while at Prov for a year, igniting my passion for music and travel. I wouldn’t have built on my French at CUSB. If I didn’t work at camp all those summers, sacrificing some connections in the city, I never would have been on the drama team, wouldn’t have been at FRBC that night, wouldn’t have asked Josh for a ride or Michelle for her mom’s contact information for a lab job. If not at the lab, then I wouldn’t have learned about social determinants of health or interdisciplinary collaboration, or first been challenged by my own racism. If not for those 2 years in Nursing, I wouldn’t have built my interviewing skills, wouldn’t have taken Economics or Native Studies. If not for all my university wanderings, I wouldn’t have run into Josh again at Fort Garry campus – so no band, no Argentina, likely no learning a third language, definitely a lot less love. I wouldn’t be me, with all the experiences and empathy I can offer to my future patients.

I also struggle with the trap of worrying about how much time I’m ‘wasting’ before getting to start living my life. The only thing that is a waste of time is that thought. A life does not start once I start receiving a regular paycheque or making regular down payments or having a regular address that my bills can be sent to. All these things that I’m doing or have done – studying, arguing with MPs, putting my thoughts in order on this blog, exploring new locations for a week or for 8 months or for 10 years, putting in sutures for the 1st time and the 50th time, going to my mom’s for supper, going to Nunavut for supper – This is my life and I’m living it right now!

While hard to see in the moment, it was an incredible exercise to sit down on December 4 and trace the path where my decisions have led me thus far, all I would have missed if I had chosen differently, and all the unknown opportunities still open before me. I am so thankful for this life, shaped by the pursuit of the unique and unknown!

* “Quviahuktunga” (ᖁᕕᐊᓱᒃᑐᖓ) = Happy (I am…)

Truer North

Nunavut.

The word evokes such longing and mystery, perhaps in part because I actually remember the announcement of its creation as a territory (also perhaps because that memory occurred while I was sitting in a junior high science class, a location that also evokes feelings of longing [but to leave] and mystery [but of acids and bases, which I still don’t fully understand]). While both the sara and the tree authors of this blog are titillated by the thought of any travel, the far North of Canada holds an especially strong fascination for each of us.

Which is why, when an inspiring physician mentor asked me rather out of the blue if I’d be interested an elective in Rankin Inlet, I couldn’t stammer out my acceptance fast enough. It turns out that she was offering an elective that did not quite exist yet: While the site took pre-clerks for summer early exposures and resident physicians for part of their Family Med specialty training, Rankin had never before been a part of the electives list for Med 4 students. Like so many other decisions I made this fall, trying to apply for an elective we were creating on the spot made my elective application process exceptionally interesting!

Hiccups (like finding out only a few weeks ago that one apparently needs a special educational permit to practice in Nunavut which normally takes months to procure… but I got that bad boy with days to spare, thankyouverymuch!) and weather advisories (apparently the day of my flight here was one of the few days this month they didn’t have a blizzard!) aside, it has actually been a remarkably smooth transition to this, my last out-of-province elective of these crazy 3 months away. After a rapid-fire but perfect 36 hours home in Winnipeg (huge thanks to Tree and our lovely roommates Scott & Laura for making that happen 🙂 ), I repacked my bags, traded my spring jacket for my new long down parka, and climbed aboard a tiny plane for a bumpy ride north.

Serendipitously (although the more remote you wander, the more frequently serendipity seems to become the norm), my host’s son and an indeterminate amount of cousins were on the same flight from WInnipeg as me, so I was welcomed at the airport by a bevy of friends and relatives who all seemed to pile into the car with us for the drive home. After a late night supper of delicious homemade ribs (my host apologized that they had just run out of caribou meat, but assured me her dad is going hunting this weekend!), I crawled into bed and had already drifted off by 10PM… when suddenly at 10:30 a crashing knock at my door sent me bolting upright. “Sara!! We’re sorry to wake you, but there are bears at the dump!!”

My host had seen her friends posting on Facebook pictures of a momma polar bear and cub meandering through the town, a rare sight in this town that is normally too far inland for bears to venture. We hopped into her truck and tore along the rimy roads to the dump, where we were greeted by the lights of 20 other trucks already sitting for the show. (Un?)fortunately, the wildlife rangers had chased the bears from town by the time we arrived, so we had to content ourselves with the ominous beauty of a massive harvest half moon, and the thrill of trying to back the truck down a narrow ice ridge lined by looming piles of snow and trash.

ᖁᔭᓐᓇᒦᒃ / qujannamiik / quana / ma’na (just starting to learn the difference between Inuktitut dialects!) for the first memorable day of many…