Back to Normal: Arctic Cold!

After pestering from family and friends, I'm breaking down and updating the blog again.

Life here is back to 'normal' -- i.e. pretty cold with nice dry crunchy snow. Most days are around -15 now, which is usually in the mid -20s with the windchill. Everything seems very crisp and beautiful. The bay is beginning to freeze over, and I think the last sealift ship with community supplies has left (there may be one or two adventurous last ones).



John took this picture from close to his office, at his new job (he's working as a reporter for Nunatsiaq News: www.nunatsiaq.com.

The other exciting news is that John's new book has come back from the publisher, and it looks beautiful.

Check it out on John's own blog: www.spiritualityofmusic.blogspot.com. (If you decide you want a copy, order through John by emailing him at johnbird(at)sympatico(dot)ca (That way John receives a larger share of the sale price) They are $28 + shipping from John (compared to $35 in bookstores and on Amazon, etc.)

Seal Hunting and Clam Digging ...

For a landlubber like me (Lorraine), it has been fun living in a sea port and getting used to how that affects life. A lot of life in Iqaluit revolves around the sea -- skidooing on the ice in winter, boating in summer, hunting on the water or ice all year round, and paying attention to the incredible tides (second highest in Canada, after Bay of Fundy).

This past week I had a chance to get out and enjoy the sea, going on a seal hunt and clam digging. My friend Juan and I tagged along for the day with a local hunter, Nujalia, and his wife, Diane. We spent 12 hours out on the bay (having to time our outing according to the tides), most of the time on the ocean hunting for seals. We stopped for a while to dig for nice big clams, and later pulled onto shore for a seal feast. It was a fantastic day. And who knew that seal intestines tasted like calamari!

Here are some pictures from that day:


Getting ready to leave


Our boat captain, Nujalia the seal hunter


Diane


Clam digging


The fruits of our clam digging labours


Ring Seal Feast! Yummy!


More feasting and hanging out...


Juan and stoney faced friend...


Coming home through the ice

Ice Ice Ice Ice (and a little heat)

One of the things I love about living here is how the sea-scape changes every day (and during every day). The ice looks subtly different every time you see it in winter. Now in the summer, the open ocean in the bay looks different every day.

And what is different the last couple days is the amount of ice in the harbour - big chunks of icebergs, often stranded on the tidal flats. It is an amazing sight.

Ice ice ice ice. In July. And right on the heels of record-breaking hot arctic weather (see Iqaluit Sizzles Through Hottest Day on Record http://www.nunatsiaq.com/news/iqaluit/80725_1391.html )

A month ago, around July 1, the ice finally all broke up and left the bay in June. And the annual sea lift ships slowly began to arrive.

But channels that should have opened up more further down the bay remained full of ice. A lot of that ice is multi-year ice coming down the Cumberland Sound (apparently) and even from the Davis Strait, and being blown (by changing wind patterns) into Frobisher Bay. Sometimes winds and tides will bring the iceberg chunks all the way into town. Nice big chunks of ancient glacial green ice.

Last weekend, this is what one iceberg in the harbour looked like (this picture was taken by my friend Danielle Lepage):


Two weeks ago, friends of our were part of a group that was supposed to travel to Greenland on the Aurora Magnetica (see www.auroramagnetica.com), a french research ship that overwintered in the ice in the harbour here, testing its special hull built to withstand arctic ice. They couldn't make it through the band of ice across the top of Frobisher Bay. Things even got a little scary when their boat was pushed out of the water by the ice. Here are pictures taken by my friend Andre Samson, who was on the boat:

Apparently the Aurora Magnetica has now safely made it to Greenland, though. And though some of the sea lift ships are coming into port with heavy ice damage (those ancient pieces of glacial ice are like rocks), they're still getting through with ice breakers.

I'm finding the ice fascinating (and a little sobering, knowing that soon winter will back ...)

The Ship Comes In! ... and more Alianait ....

Its been a beautiful couple days, and its really starting to feel like summer in the arctic. Last week, the ice went out of the harbour, though you can still see it in the distance. And yesterday, the first sealift ship of the year arrived! Here it is:


Its been a really busy time, with work plus coordinating all the volunteers for the Alianait music festival. To tell you the truth, I'm at the end of my energy reserve, tapped out after a solid week of volunteer-rustling for musical concerts pretty well every day. So this afternoon, I shut off my cell phone and escaped my email for an hour, and went down to the harbour to check out that ship and look at the sea. Here are photos I took looking back into town from the pier:



After that brief sojourn, it was back to the big top tent at Alianait, to check in with John, who I'd roped into doing last minute security this afternoon. Here is a picture of three faithful Alianait volunteers: PolarMan (Iqaluit's own genuine superhero), Joshua (my 'wildest' volunteer), and John, Alianait pinch-hitting-volunteer extraordinaire:

John gets to eat polar bear meat....

[Lorraine writes]: Well, John, lucky guy, got to try out polar bear meat yesterday. A polar bear wandered into the outskirts of town, and was shot. Some of the meat was brought to the shelter where John is working, so he got to eat his first polar bear meat.

Here is the CBC story, and a picture of the meat being carted away:



Children run for cover before polar bear shot near Iqaluit
Elementary students were on scavenger hunt when wandering bear spotted
Last Updated: Wednesday, June 25, 2008 | 6:12 PM CT Comments45Recommend32
CBC News

A polar bear sent dozens of elementary school students racing for safety before the animal was shot and killed Wednesday morning in a park just outside of Iqaluit.

The bear died only a few hundred metres from the pavilion at Sylvia Grinnell Territorial Park, which is about a kilometre from Iqaluit.

At the time, 37 kindergarten, Grade 1 and Grade 2 students from Nakasuk School were at the park for a year-end picnic.

"The students were up running on the hill here, and I was at the bottom watching them, and they were on a scavenger hunt," teacher Jason Rochon told CBC News on Wednesday.

"Two men started running down and waving their arms. And they were like, 'Get out of here, get back to the cabin!' So I was kind of wondering why they were upsetting the kids so much. And they were like, 'There's a polar bear! There's a polar bear!'"

Lazarus Awa and another summer student working with Nunavut Parks raised the alarm after Awa spotted the bear rooting through the contents of a garbage can near the Sylvia Grinnell River.

"This is my first time seeing [one] here in the park," Awa said. "I was so amazed, and it's a huge, old male polar bear."

Conservation officers and the RCMP arrived on the scene and decided that given so many people were in the vicinity of the polar bear, that there was no choice but to kill the animal.

Speaking in Inuktitut, conservation officer Johnny Nowdlak said attempts were made to scare the bear away with a warning shot, but it didn't work.

Nowdlak cited safety as the reason why they shot the bear, saying there were children nearby and summer visitors had set up about a dozen tents near the river.

The bear was shot in an area popular with tourists and residents. It then fell onto a ridge above the end of the park's road, overlooking the tents.

Nowdlak, who skinned the polar bear after it was killed, estimated that it was male, about 10 years old and approximately 2½ metres long. It appeared to be healthy and was likely looking for food in the park, he said.

The bear's meat and skin were delivered Wednesday afternoon to the office of the Iqaluit hunters and trappers association, where the meat was doled out to some lucky bystanders.

Signs of summer ...

[Lorraine writes] Summer is starting to burst out even here in the arctic.

Today, after weeks of average temperatures of about +5, it was +17. This week's paper had a profile picture of an unusual arctic visitor: a robin -- probably the most photographed robin in a long time.

John tells me that the "news on the street" is that the icebreaker is within a week away, ploughing the way open for the first sealift ship of the year bringing community supplies. (John has finished the book, hoorah! and has been working at the local men's shelter, which is an excellent source of 'news on the street" info about everything you could possibly imagine ....)

And the big exciting thing today is that the Alianait tent went up. The Alianait Festival is a music and arts festival that runs for a week and a half starting this Saturday. Somehow I was rustled into the position of 'volunteer coordinator' and now I am happily trying to sort out about 200 volunteers (and counting) for the festival. Here is a picture of the tent going up (picture taken by Ed Maruyama, the official photographer for the festival; that crazy looking space-age building in the background is Nakasuk elementary school, by the way), and a link to the festival site: www.alianait.ca



My "honourary mother" Jack has been complaining that there is no 'real news' on our blog about what we are doing in our lives right now, so there you have it. I'm up to my eyeballs in music festival volunteers. John is finished the book and busy sussing out important 'news on the street'... and the worms are doing fine (no more crazy escape attempts)... all is well ...

1,000 Household Helpers Move In

One of the conundrums about living up here is what to do with compost. There are no community-wide composting programs here (there is one small test one for a few households, but nothing we could participate in). It was a shock to start throwing everything in the garbage again after years of getting used to more and more recycling and composting. (It was also sooooo easy to start doing ....) It also seemed crazy not to compost, because the outdoor soil here is almost all rock and gravel (with patches of moss etc on the tundra, but nothing you could garden with).

So, I began to dream of worms. Compost worms. To chew up our compost and give us nice soil in return. I have friends who have used compost worms in apartments, etc. for years, and swear by them. So I became obsessed with getting compost worms. I blogged about this before: I was plotting how to ship up compost worms - send them by air cargo? take them on the plane as 'pets'?

Then some friends up here phoned us to tell us they were moving and wanted their compost worms to go to a good home. So, about 1,000 little household helpers moved in on Saturday. They were a little spooked by the move, so there were a couple wild escape attempts at first, but as soon as we kept the lid off the bin and shone light in, they all burrowed back down into their dark wonderland. It amazes me that they are so efficient, and industrious, and don't even smell! And you can actually HEAR them if you get up close to the box. I'm very excited about their arrival. Go worms go!