LEAVING THE NORTH

      This photo is just before the airplane came in to take us south.  Our baggage was on the G - 5 . 

    This was July 22 and I'm wearing a light winter jacket. I'm also wearing rubber boots. Most of the ground was soggy and wet. You couldn't wear ordinary shoes. 

      We had been at Wakeham Bay for two very busy years. I was teacher, principal and Local administrator. The principal position was a joke as there was only one other teacher. The teaching load was challenging as these kids had only been in school for five years . The Local administrator position paid the handsome salary of $1000.00 per year. Sometimes I worked on administration as much as teaching. 

     I had to account to the government for every dime I spent. I could write checks for $2000.00 per month for soapstone carvings. I gave out social assistance . Did I  say  correspondence? Lots of it.

     We did not have a post office. A bag or bags of mail would come in on the odd

airplane if somebody remembered to put it on. I would have to go through correspondence. 

    The Inuit didn't send out letters or receive letters. But some of them did some work at the mine and as a result had to pay income tax. They would get T4 slips. They knew that the would get money from T4 slips and would come up to me. I would fill out their income tax forms. 

   So here I am just a few hours before leaving, still working. I was distributing the family allowance checks. Family allowance is a system where mothers are paid so much for each child. It was one of my jobs to give them their checks. 

   I also had to sort out some mysteries. For most of the two years I would get a letter asking about the whereabouts of a certain child. At first I had no idea who the parents might be. The Govt. was paying family allowance for this kid. Finally I was talking to a family one day about this issue and they talked amongst themselves. I could understand what they were saying. It was their child. Apparently the child's birth was registered but the child died shortly after.  This had happened on an island off the coast. 

     So because I enjoyed all this work it was a sad time to leave.

    It was July 22 and teachers could have been gone for three weeks. I enjoyed the work and wanted to help the people as much as I could.

THE SECOND NORTHERN ADVENTURE

    I enjoyed writing a series of posts on my northern adventures from 1963 to 1966. I was young and adventurous. I was with many other young people and as young people we tended to have a good time.

    On my second venture things were different. I was older. I was married. I had much more responsibility. I saw things through different eyes.

    So in August 1967 I was on my way to Kangiqsujuaq (formerly Wakeham Bay.) Kangiqsujuaq is in northern Quebec. It's below the Arctic circle but the climate is very severe. It's on the Hudson Strait and Wakeham Bay which is a 24 mile deep bay. The tides are very high ...40 ft. The Bay froze up in late November. Small lakes froze up in late Sept. or early Oct. It was a very windy area as winds blew in from the Hudson strait or westerlies blew across northern Quebec and when they reached the east coast they dropped down to sea level with a bang. Snowfall wasn't great but what there was blew around and we had many blizzards. Snow would last from mid October to June. the ice on the bay would disappear in late July or early August. The ice actually went out on a tide to Hudson Strait rather than melt.

    Because of the severe climate vegetation was sparse and small. There were willows, spruce and birch trees. Some of these trees were knee high but most were half way up the knee. There were grasses , sedges and other plants. Flowers were plentiful and the spring was beautiful. In the fall much time was spent picking blueberries.

  So August of 1967 found me making my journey across Canada to this small isolated settlement.

  I first flew from Saskatoon , Sask to Ottawa. We were to spend 10 days in Ottawa for orientation. I was pumped for a 10 day orientation as I was going into something that was a completely different experience. There were three couples. We met the old superintendent the first morning and he suggested we look around Ottawa for the ten days and discover what we could find. Awesome. Just hang out. He shouldn't have given three young guys so much leeway. The 10 days went by . We learned a few things,  had a good time and felt more prepared for our postings.
 
    Notice that there were no flight delays or excitement over airplanes. We flew 900 miles northeast of Montreal on a Super Constellation. We were then in the small northern outpost of Fort Chimo. After a few days we were on our way to Kang on a twin Beech 18..a rather old airplane on floats. So another 300 miles and we land at Kang. The landing was exciting as there were 5 to 7 ft swells. the pilot had to hit the top of a swell and skip and bounce on two or three until the plane slowed down and awkwardly settled into the water. It was a landing like no other I had made.