The day the country turned blue

The Olympics are over. I have mixed feelings about the whole Olympicorporation, though I do admire the athletes and their dedication. Today, I am happy to have my city return to some kind of normal.

Yesterday though, my ambivalence was on vacation. Gone so far it could not even text me a little reminder. No matter how I feel about the Olympics, I AM a hockey fan. Multiply fan by a thousand and you have the level of passion for the sport felt by my beloved and his father. So yesterday, we went en famille (me, husband, son, father-in-law and mother-in-law) to the packed local pub to watch the game on the big screen.

The game was a nail biter, though when only 24 seconds were left and we were a goal ahead it seemed time to start celebrating gold. Then; "OH NO!!!", and people across our puck-crazed Dominion groaned when the U.S. scored. I swear I heard a guy in Corner Brook scream "SON OF A BITCH! Lads, pass the screech, quick!" In the pub we shook our heads, disbelieving that the game was tied and would go into sudden death overtime.

In the interval, I commiserated by phone with my sister, who was watching from New Zealand. (She is a bigger hockey fan than I am, once mortifying me at a Canucks game by standing and screaming "I love you Trevor", after Linden was sent to the penalty box.) The pub patrons wondered how they could bear the tension. Many more pitchers of Molson Canadian seemed the answer at most tables. (I saw one young woman at a nearby table drinking a Corona. She must be foreign.)

The puck dropped for the overtime period. The din in the pub made the lampposts outside tremble. A rowdy woman kept shrieking at the T.V., "GET IT OUT! GET IT OUT!GET IT OUT!" It was my 80 year old mother-in-law. I looked nervously at my 89 year old father-in-law, who was half out of his chair, fists clenched. I mentally reviewed my CPR training. After five minutes , the tension and the beer forced me to take a very speedy trip to the ladies'. Too bad medals are not given for fastest trip to the loo. The score was still zip all when I breathlessly returned. Then the beer caught up with my son and he jogged off to the Gents'. Just as Son was out of sight, Crosby scored for Canada, and the Country let out its collective breath. My son came running back. "I missed it," he wailed. Many of you have seen the ensuing decorus pleasure shown by us reserved, shy Canadians. We went ape shit.

...

My mother claims that my father had a talent for being in the bathroom whenever something important happened. It looks like that gift has skipped a generation.


.
.

Through the rabbit hole

As you can see by this photo from my hotel room, I am back in Yellowknife for work, after less than a week home in Vancouver. Yesterday evening here was surreal. First of all, it was still light at 8:15 at night. Not just light, but sunny. At this time of year the days lengthen by about 10 minutes per day.

As I walked to a restaurant for dinner, a man came running toward me from the legion hall. "Can you give me a ride to the airport?" he shouts. "I hafta get to the airport."

"No," I reply, "I, um, don't have a car."

"Bullshit, all you cops got cars."

"I'm not a cop."

"Yes you are, I can tell by your clothes. And I seen you in your cop car before."

I looked down at my clothes: A red Mountain Equipment Co-op jacket, boots, blue fleece hat, mittens,and jeans. Jeans with bright embroidery around one leg. (Yes, I still embroider my jeans. You can take the girl out of the '70s but.....)

I just shrugged and walked on as he continued to implore me for a ride to the airport in my cop car. Incredulous, a block later I pulled out the little camera I carry in my pocket, and pointed it at my foot. Does this look like the leg of RCMP-issued trousers to you?


I opened the door to the restaurant, having found it easily. My northern colleague, who was meeting me there, had explained "You can't miss Thornton's, it is in the same building as the bowling alley". I expected bowling alley ambiance. What I saw was this:



A maitre de whisked my jacket away, seated me, and gave me food and wine menus. This was no Bullock's Bistro.

But what happened next truly set the world spinning upside down. The waiter asked me for I.D. when I ordered a beer. He carded me??!!?? I looked for his white cane or seeing-eye-dog. None. At my age, this is not flattering, or funny, it's just plain wrong. Bizarre. The last time I got asked for I.D. was 16 years ago at a bar in Whistler. I had been wearing ski clothes, a hat, and sun glasses when I went in. A bouncer came up behind me, tapped me on the shoulder and said "Miss, I need to see your I.D." I turned to him, took off my hat and sunglasses, and began fumbling in my pocket for my wallet. The tactless punk then looked at me and said "Never mind Ma'am, that's O.K."

The only explanation I could think of this time was this establishment must have a policy of checking every patron, no matter how decrepit, for I.D. Or the waiter was bucking for one helluva tip. But when my much younger colleague arrived a few minutes later, she ordered her wine without incident.

I commented to my dinner companion that the restaurant was not very busy. There were only two occupied tables, although she had told me earlier that Thornton's was very popular. "Restaurants around here are all slow right now," she replied. "It's the start of home barbecue season, a spring ritual." WTF? BARBECUE SEASON? Granted, the day had warmed up somewhat from the -24 chill I walked to work in that morning. But Barbecue season? This is what the start of the barbecue season looks like here:





After a delicious (and crazy expensive) dinner of shared tapas, I walked back to my hotel. A couple of the local Franken-Ravens, (bigger, cleverer creatures compared to their southern cousins) followed me, hoping I had saved some crumbs from dinner for them. I have been followed from a restaurant by ravens before up here.

It was a strange, enchanting evening. The north always surprises me. I love that.

Divine fish and dancing sky

I pause. Is this really the restaurant? I shyly open the door to this log building, which was built in the thirties as a store on the lakefront. A vivacious woman with abundant blond curly hair escaping from her baseball cap grins and yells out, "Look, our new waitress finally showed up."

"What's the pay for your waitress job?" I reply, immediately feeling at home. She, I find out later, is named Renata, and she is the chef, waitress, owner, dishwasher and entertainer of Bullock's Bistro in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories.

"Come on through, sit down," Renata invites, and leads me into a dining area about the size of my hotel room. All seven tables are full, so I take a stool at the tiny bar. "If you want a drink, help yourself from the cooler over there. Today we've got fresh whitefish, pike, trout, pickerel and arctic char, and all the meat on the menu." The meat on the menu is muskox, caribou, and buffalo. Fish can be battered, pan fried or grilled. All meals come with salad and freshly made fries. There are two choices of home made salad dressing: garlic or feta cheese.


I order pan fried arctic char. This delicate, pink fleshed fish looks like pale salmon, but has a flavour unlike any other fish I've tasted. It is only found in arctic and sub arctic waters. I try to get some every time I come north, but it is hard to find and rarely appears wild and fresh on menus.

For a single diner, there is no lack of reading material, on the walls, the ceiling, and even on the funky caribou's horns.






While watching Renata cook, which she does right behind the bar, I strike up conversation with my bar stool neighbours, both here on business like I am. One is a lab technician from Calgary, the other is a cable T.V. consultant from Florida, on his first trip to Canada. He is enchanted by the north. "They will never believe me at home when I tell them I drove on an ice road!" he says, shaking his head. He offers me a taste of his Great Slave Lake pickerel, which is sweet, firm, and a serious rival to my mouth watering arctic char.



Renata and her one helper keep the whole place laughing with her stories and banter. She serves my coffee with a warning: "Honey, be careful, this coffee will make your bra pop off." (Huh?)



Time to go. I zip up my parka, pull my hat down making sure it covers my ears, put my big mittens on over my gloves, and step out of Bullock's. After a moment I realize dogs are barking everywhere, all over town. Then in between barks I hear why; wolves are howling across the bay. The haunting sound of singing wolves brings sweet tears. When I was a girl my Grandpa Gordon taught me how to call to the wolves through a birch bark megaphone at our family cabin in Quebec. It took a lot of practice, but I got good enough to make them answer almost every time I called them.

As I walk back to my hotel, the northern lights dance and weave over my head. I have seen them several times on this trip, from my hotel balcony, but never so bright. The lights of the big city of Yellowknife (pop 17,000) had dimmed my view from the hotel. But here by the lake on the edge of town they are spectacular.*

What a wonderful place this is!



*(I do not have my good camera or a tripod with me, only a point & shoot, so I did not take the northern lights photo above. But it is very close in colour and pattern to the lights I saw that night.)

North of sixty

Ignore my whining about winter in my recent posts. Today I am going to rave about it. Seriously. It is cold, very cold, and there is fresh snow on the ground. But I am revelling in it! Look at me over there on the left, smiling in the snow. No, I have not gone mad.

I am in the arctic. In Yellowknife, Northwest Territories. Where winter is not just endured, it is celebrated!



So to enjoy the winterness of this brilliant day in Yellowknife, I went where the locals go: on the lake. Yes ON it. Great Slave Lake. Where I watched kite snowboarding.



There were folks walking dogs, skiing, playing on snowmobiles, and flying regular kites on the lake. And visiting the art gallery. That's right, the art gallery in an ice castle. ON the lake.







The windows are made of ice.



I had a lively discussion with the creator, caretaker, and curator of this ice castle art gallery, the "Snow King", A.K.A. Anthony Foliot. He told me his ice architectural skills began when he was growing up in Northern Quebec, and neighbourhoods would compete with each other to make the best snow structures.When the ice is thin on Great Slave Lake in November, he saws out bocks to make the windows in the castle.





So, I had great time today time in the snowy cold. In March. Who'd have guessed it!Oh, and please, while I love all your comments, I ask you to refrain from making fashion fun of my over-sized parka with the real fur hood (ick). It's government issue. I'm working you see. Except for a few fun hours today.

Happy Queen's day

This is the beginning of a holiday weekend in Canada. For those who do not live here, let me explain. It is not a celebration of happy gay men as my title may lead you to think. No, it is in honour of our head of state's birthday. Queen Lizzie. It falls on the weekend closest to May 24. Although that is not Lizzie's birthday at all, it is old Queen Victoria's. Liz may be queen and all, but she doesn't get her own day.

We treat this weekend as the unofficial beginning of summer. Cottages are opened up and aired of their winter mustiness, gardens are planted, boats are washed and waxed, decks are power washed, the first camping trips of the season are taken, and much beer is drunk. But unless they happen to attend the movie starring Helen Murrin this weekend, no one will actually think of the Queen at all. In fact, most of us call this "the May 24 long weekend," not Victoria Day. I read that in a recent poll, less than 10 % of young Canadians even know the Queen is our head of state. There are no parades, speeches, or even square dances this weekend honouring the monarch. Well, except maybe for the butterfly. But not for Liz. In Eastern Canada, there will be a few fireworks marking the day, but here in the west we save our fireworks for a really important occasion, Halloween.

It is not clear to me, and to many Canadians, why we cling to the monarchy, and the Commonwealth. There are no benefits, and the Queen wields no actual power over us. Perhaps it is just inertia and reluctance to challenge tradition. Or unwillingness to give up a long weekend dedicated mostly to quaffing large amounts of Molson Canadian Lager.

I'll drink to that.

Today's dream travel destination: Buckingham Palace, where Vicky's birthday is likely not celebrated by guzzling lager in the sun.