On the ice, water splashed and pooled teal, like the colour of the Diavik office girl’s tattoo — that tentacle that snuck up her neck from under her white-collared shirt and made me wonder what it was attached to, and how far down it went.
The drive over the company ice road from Lac de Gras to Yellowknife was a routine whiteout of snow and cloud for 373 kilometres. I didn’t know the rig driver, and after we lost the radio we filled time with small talk that made me wish Dad had nearly killed himself in summer instead of winter.
When the road from the mine is thawed, which is most of the year, the company flies its crew between Yellowknife and the Diavik excavation site over the tundra. The view from the single otter — green in spring; red, pink, and purple near the end of summer; a real fiery autumn. Big stretch of crowberry and bearberry heath, moss, and lichen, splashed with lakes that throw the sky back at you. Blue creeks and waterways run everywhere, since there’s nothing to stop them in that flat, treeless place. And then Diavik itself: that open-pit mine — an outlandish, chalky hole corkscrewed in the centre of Lac de Gras. That first time I saw it, it blew my mind — that the water doesn’t fill the pit is a feat of engineering. Astonishing.
The driver dropped me in Yellowknife. I had time before I had to be at the airport, and I needed a drink. The bar was crowded with one of the young mining crews — I guess it was payday.
“Next round is on me,” I said. Why not. The kids were fresh from their first three weeks and, following their solo shifts, stank with the relief of company. In that crowd I felt I owned the city — the dirty snow, the gravelled strip, the saloon, the stuffed muskox that eyed us from the loft above the bar. I carried a couple pitchers to the table.
“How’d you end up at the mine?” someone asked.
“Before this I was Search and Rescue,” I said.
“How long at Diavik?” They topped my pint.
“What, maybe fifteen years?”
There was a pause, and then a kid asked, “How old are you anyway, man?”
A few years into my forties. That’s nothing — barely started. I paid for the pitchers and tried not to take it personal. So they couldn’t understand why I didn’t want to leave the north. Hell, I barely understood, and I definitely couldn’t explain it. Fuck them.
“Like,” I said. “What about the time I decided to snowshoe the lake? The air was cold and blue around the horizon, pink-and-orange twilight overhead. So pretty I didn’t watch where I was going. It was forty below and remote as shit. What was there to run into?”
The kids were onto pint three or five. They leaned toward each other and yelled above the music and noise of the bar. I rambled on and pretended I didn’t notice no one was listening.
“I ran into a caribou, what was left of it, caught by the legs in the ice. Wolves’d stripped the flesh from its back and rump. I had a view of the spine and ribcage, since, by some miracle of balance, the animal had frozen standing.”
“You want another?” The waitress cleared the empty pitchers and gauged the mood of the mine crew around the table.
“Keep it coming,” I said. That caribou on the lake, it carried a huge rack on top of its gnawed face. If you haven’t seen them, caribou antlers spread at the tips like they’ve been pressed with a spoon — big scoops of bone flatten into a palm, edged with any number of points, and this pair held palms at the top, mid, and brow. A spectacular set, each splayed palm twice the size of my hand. The breadth of the rack gave me a headache, how an animal could walk around with a pair like that.
I raised my voice. “In case anyone thinks Diavik is the ass-end of civilization, it isn’t.”
“Keep it together, dude,” someone said.
But isn’t the ass-end. Same way the parents’ place isn’t the ass-end of nowhere. Not quite. Wintertime, Diavik’s ice road extends beyond the mine. Keep trucking north from the hole in Lac de Gras and in thirty-eight kilometres you’ll hit Misery. I’m serious, Misery Lake. Misery Camp — a satellite of Ekati Diamond Mine. Check the maps. And 220 kilometres further, yet another mine spirals into Jericho Lake clawing even more diamonds from kimberlite. Beyond that there’s the islands, and a few kids who’ve never seen trees.
Outrageous, sure. Maybe even fable-esque, but not shit. Not ass-end.
You want fable-esque, let me go back even earlier than the dog heads and the rabies scare to when I was four or five, and my parents told us about where they were from. Most people in our town grew up there, were born at home or in Inuvik or Whitehorse hospital. Dad, his family sprouted so far south I couldn’t picture it: Edmonton.
“What’s it like there?” Trista asked. We were raking hay in the summer dog yard. The dogs draped themselves behind their houses, dug under the frames, and collapsed anywhere there was shade — it was mid-July and the sun had been up nine weeks straight.
“For starters,” Dad said. He had his motocross pulled apart in the open shed. “The sun sets each night, even in summer. Rises year round.”
“No way,” I said. “There’s no way.”
We had no doubt he was pulling our leg, and couldn’t understand why he insisted.
“I know,” he said, “the sun doesn’t always do that here. But trust me, they wouldn’t believe this place exists either.”
I caught a taxi from the bar to the airport, slightly drunk and disgruntled by the attitude of the younger crowd. To top that off, my flight was delayed and I had nothing to do. I scrolled through the contacts on my phone and decided to call an ex-common law, but hung up when I heard her voice. My ex, Rachel, she’d had a kid when I moved in with her, and he used to come in the bathroom and pee while I was showering. No big deal, I’m no prude, but it was all stops and starts with the kid’s urine stream. I asked him what was up and the kid showed me. He’d pinch his foreskin closed and pee into it until it ballooned, and then let the piss splash into the toilet bowl.
My ex called back thirty seconds after I pocketed my phone and said, like old times, “What the fuck gives you the right to hang up on me, fucker?”
“Rachel, you sure you got the right guy?” I asked.
“Call display, Jack,” she said. “What do you want?”
“I wasn’t thinking straight,” I said. I told her Mom had Alzheimer’s and I wanted to reminisce. She didn’t say no, so I went on. “That pee trick. Where’d Joey learn that?” It hadn’t come from me — I’m circumcised.
“How the hell should I know? Kids pick things up.”
“I guess that’s why the bathroom stank.”
Why’d I say any of that? Maybe the same reason that, after we found the box of decapitated dog heads as kids, I kept sneaking back to the ice hut and staying as long as I could. Which was a long time in the winter, when I could layer myself in a parka and snow gear, and a very short time in the summer. It was so weird I wanted to make sure I remembered it right. That it’d been real.
Rachel hung up on me this time, and I’d barely set down the phone when it rang again. It was my parents’ number. I didn’t pick up. It would be Trista wanting to know why I wasn’t in the air yet.
Outside the airport windows mechanics rose in bucket trucks and sprayed pink, foamy liquid over the wings of the plane. The flight wasn’t anywhere near ready. I wanted a smoke, but I’d quit years ago. That’s something that follows you — old habits. I could chart my life into smoking, quitting, craving. Shake up the order and the list would still be accurate.
I first smoked when I visited the dog heads as a kid — and thinking about that made me a little excited to see Trista. To rehash all the shit we pulled, everything we thought we got away with, who’d ratted on who. The time Trista and I had the guns taken away for popping ptarmigans — one shell from a 12-gauge and the fat birds exploded in gratifying puffs of white. I almost hit callback on my cell to chat with her, but I didn’t want her to tell me how far gone Mom was. Not yet.