Minds of Winter

by Ed O’Loughlin

  The ice-road curved around a low cape to reveal lights strung along a bluff like an artificial horizon. Fay stared at the lights gratefully, restoring her balance.

  ‘Tuktoyaktuk,’ Nelson said needlessly. ‘End of the road.’

  It was the first time he’d spoken since he’d stopped the car for that wrong-headed lemming. That was fine with her: he was her driver, not her guide, and she guessed from his clothes and his way of talking that he hadn’t had much education. He was a tall man who walked with a stoop. His stubble, almost a beard now, was a shade of red she hadn’t seen before, like fresh-cut copper wire. He might have seemed handsome if he could have looked her in the eye.

  ‘Shit,’ he announced suddenly, and braked hard. The lights of the village blinked out, all at once, as the car hit something very hard, bounced, then flew upward at a sharp angle. But Fay, grabbing the dashboard, had the paradoxical sensation of falling: ahead of her, the land seemed to drop steeply towards a dark ocean, now only yards away. There’s no way we can stop before we splash into it. With a presence of mind that surprised herself she grabbed for the door handle: if I can get out before the car sinks I might still survive.

  The ground disappeared, and the car seemed to fly through the air before landing again, this time without bouncing. Now the sea was where the sky should be. The sea was the sky, she realized. Perspective had failed her again.

  ‘Snow ramp,’ explained Nelson apologetically. ‘From the sea ice up to the shore. In this light, with everything white, it’s hard to see until you’re right on top of it. Kind of makes your head swim, right?’

  ‘We were going very fast.’

  ‘Sorry about that.’ But he seemed a little pleased with himself. ‘It’s a good job we’re in this Equinox and not my old Ford. I doubt her axles would have taken that whack.’

  He wants to talk about cars now. ‘I suppose not,’ she said, and turned her face to her window. They were on a street of sorts, in a sort of village. A few dozen wood-frame houses were scattered across the flat tundra, brightly painted and plastered with snow. Curtains glowed and stove-pipes smoked. Plywood sheds, dead trucks and bits of odd gear peeped from the snow that lay deep in the yards. A dog came out of a lean-to kennel and watched the car roll past, its breath curling around it. There were cables everywhere, strung crazily between the houses and propped up by poles. Off to the south, on the edge of town, two red lights blinked in and out of existence between the last row of houses: the tail lights of a snowmobile, or maybe a truck. Apart from that and the smoke from the chimneys, Fay saw nothing that moved.

  ‘Now that we’re here, where do you want to go?’

  She could already see the military radar station east of the settlement, low in the sky, a white sphere on a gantry. It glowed in the lights that shone at its base. Two other radar domes sat beneath it, growing from the ground like puffballs in a bog. A single red light, unblinking, shone in the darkness above it. I’ll get to you later, she thought. I mustn’t seem too eager. ‘Do you know where we could get something to eat?’

  They were passing an old sailing boat set up on timbers as some kind of a monument. Its mast and its rigging were coated with ice. Across the road from it stood a little wooden church with a Roman steeple at one end and a Byzantine dome at the other; a tarpaulin covered the roofless schism between them.

  ‘There’s the Northern Store, I guess. They’ll sell you a burger or a pizza. But it’s no kind of restaurant.’

  ‘You know this place well?’

  ‘I drove up here once before. A few days ago.’

  She was happy to leave it at that. But he must have felt a need to explain himself. ‘I was looking for work, but there isn’t any. There used to be, when they were doing the energy exploration, but it’s all on hold now, on account of the government wouldn’t pay for a pipeline, and now the price of gasoline has dropped. And there’s all this new shale gas in the south.’

  He braked beside a roadside monument. It was shaped like three human figures with their hands in the air. ‘That’s the marker for the northernmost point of the North American road network – at least in winter, when the ice-road is in. In summer you can’t drive any further north than Inuvik, and you have to come up here by plane or boat. But now they’re building a new all-weather road between here and Inuvik, to link up year-round. That’s why you couldn’t get a room in town, I guess.’

  ‘When the new road is built there’ll be no more ice-road in the winter?’

  ‘I guess not. But this place will still be the end of the line.’

  The Northern Store was a windowless vinyl box set on a metal frame above the permafrost. It stood, Fay guessed, on a spit of land beside a harbour, though with all the snow and ice it was hard to tell for sure. A couple of snowmobiles were parked beside the store, their engines still running, the exhaust vapour pooling in the still evening air. They left their own motor running and climbed the steps that led to the side door. At the top Nelson stopped to smoke a cigarette. They stood in silence for a moment, looking over the ice-bound harbour, its snow criss-crossed with old snowmobile tracks. The radar station loomed larger here; it seemed to be standing on a spit of its own on the far side of the harbour, away from all the homes.

  ‘That thing over there – that’s a radar station, is it?’

  He sucked smoke and freezing air. ‘Distant Early Warning.’

  ‘And it’s still in use?’

  ‘I guess so. The Russians are still out there, or whatever else they’re watching for.’

  ‘Distant Early Warning.’ She let the phrase sit there between them. It was getting colder, too cold for a haze. To the south, the refracted rays of a sub-Arctic day silhouetted the little dome-shaped hills that rose from the tundra. Those are pingoes, Fay thought. She’d read about them in her guidebook.

  ‘You want to go over there?’ he said.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  He tossed away his cigarette. ‘You want to look at the radar station?’

  ‘Oh.’ She pretended to consider it. ‘Do you think we could? Is it not army property?’

  ‘It’s automated and unmanned, and I don’t see any fences. And I don’t know what else there is to look at up here.’ She saw his teeth in the red stubble. ‘You’ve come a long way just for lunch.’ He put his glove on the door handle. ‘It won’t be the best lunch you’ve ever had either. Not that I’m fussy.’

  When they’d eaten their microwaved burgers and wiped their fingers clean with napkins they went back to the car. Nelson drove Fay slowly around the settlement, then turned eastward on a track across the tundra. The lights from the Distant Early Warning station were to their left; I’ll get to you last, thought Fay.

  They passed the little airport, its flare path extinguished, its two-storey terminal lightless and dead, then carried on beyond the last houses. Mothballed trucks and drill rigs stood in lines in a snow-covered lot. Further on there were rows of prefabricated dormitories from the golden days of exploration, elevated modules with airlock doors and lightless slit windows, jacked up on steel rams and joined by sealed tubes. They looked like moon bases, or undersea habitats.

  Soon they ran out of track and turned back towards the settlement.

  ‘You ever see the northern lights?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Let me pull over and switch off the lights.’

  She zipped up her coat and put on her gloves and walked around the back of the car, past the gurgling exhaust pipe, to join him on the driver’s side. To the south, but high in the sky, a gauzy yellow band of light curled and straightened and curled again like weed in a slow-moving stream. It stretched from one horizon to the other, a wandering cousin to the Milky Way. Seeing the aurora for the first time, Fay understood its fascination: it was moved by a wind that did not come from earth.

  ‘You can get other colours,’ he said. ‘Green, blue, sometimes
red.’

  ‘Could I ask you a favour? Could you turn off the engine for a minute or two? It won’t freeze up if you do, will it?’

  He killed the ignition. The silence crashed over her like a cold wave. She settled back until she was leaning against the side of the car, the chill of the metal burning through her clothes. The stars were so fierce that she feared they might hurt her.

  A second band of light had formed beside the first, roughly parallel to it, spooning its curves. Directly below it, a couple of miles away, a pingo glowed in the light from the sky; its dome relieved and revealed the tundra’s desolation. These are the Barren Lands, she thought. They go like this all the way to Hudson Bay and beyond. People disappear in them and are never seen again.

  She listened for the fabled hiss of the aurora. There was a vehicle moving in the settlement, and she could hear the moan of a generator. When Nelson shifted his feet they crunched through shallow drift snow, and then a lighter rasped and she smelled fresh smoke. The air was cold and hard as steel. She couldn’t feel her feet.

  Nelson gave a whistle, so loud and so shrill that she jumped in her shoes. Black shapes peeled away from the snowy waste in front of them and rose into the air. The stillness was torn by the cries of angry ravens.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  He seemed startled by her anger. ‘I’m whistling at the lights. They say up here that if you whistle at them they’ll start dancing.’

  ‘Oh . . . Is that what they say?’

  The aurora was if anything paler than before, slower in its evolutions. She pointed to where the ravens were settling again, fifty yards away, on a mound of dirty snow. ‘What are those birds doing out here?’

  ‘This must be the dump.’

  The cold had worked its way into her coat and was clamping her kidneys. She had to clench and unclench her gloved fists to keep her fingers from freezing. Inside the car it would still be quite warm. But she would stay out here a minute or two more, watching the aurora.

  ‘In Norway they believed that you should never whistle at the lights,’ she said. ‘I read that somewhere. They thought it makes them angry. They’ll swoop down and take you away.’

  ‘That’s not what they say up here.’

  ‘Try whistling again.’

  The ravens squawked in protest, but this time they stayed put. The lights, unheeding, continued with their self-absorbed proceedings. To Greenlanders they were the souls of lost children, playing in the sky. Fay had read that in a book. But she kept it to herself.

  ‘You still want to look at the Distant Early Warning base?’

  The radar station stood on a rise at the end of a promontory half a mile east of the town. To reach it, they had to drive along a spit of land not much wider than the road itself with the frozen sea on either side of them. The wind had licked the snow into a stucco pattern. To the west were the lights of Tuktoyaktuk, to the east nothing but stars. This close, Fay could see the other buildings in the complex – a small hangar or garage, an office or workshop, a couple of small huts. The windows were unlit. It would have been bigger back in the early days, she thought, when it was still manned, and her grandfather had been here.

  ‘I guess we can go all the way up to it,’ said Nelson. He glanced at her sideways. He was driving very slowly.

  ‘Why not?’

  Their headlights swept across the geodesic radar domes. Fay saw them flare in the beams then die back to a glow. Then, a moment later, they lit up again, but less brightly this time. She was still trying to figure that out when Nelson slowed the car.

  ‘There’s someone behind us.’

  Fay turned, saw headlights on low beam. ‘Would anyone live out here?’

  ‘I doubt it. The station’s unmanned.’

  The vehicle behind them did not seem to be moving very fast. ‘What shall we do?’

  ‘This road’s too narrow to turn without maybe getting stuck in the snow. There’s no room to let them pass. We might as well go on up to the radar station and wait for them there.’

  There was a clear space, a sort of courtyard, between the two lower domes and the workshop. Nelson drove into it, made a half-circle and stopped in the middle, pointing back the way they’d come. A sign on a wall, illuminated by a caged bulb, declared that this was military property and that trespass was a serious offence. Nelson dimmed the lights and sat waiting, his hands between his knees, as the other car pulled into the yard and halted in the entrance, blocking their way out. Now Fay could see lights mounted on its roof and ‘RCMP’ on its hood.

  ‘Shall we get out and talk to them?’

  ‘Cops don’t like that. They want you to stay in your car unless they tell you to get out.’

  A spotlight flicked on and dazzled her. She was still holding her eyes, trying to regain her night vision, when a gloved hand knocked on the window.

  The policeman stood a little to the rear of the door where he could see her better than she could see him. She wound down the window.

  ‘Hello,’ she said. Then, from force of English habit, ‘It’s very cold, isn’t it?’

  He wore a muskrat hat which matched his brown moustache. Both were filmed silver from his frozen breath. ‘Did you read the signs?’

  ‘I did, yes. Sorry. Just a minute ago. When we got here. We didn’t know we weren’t allowed to come out here. We just wanted to take a look.’

  He leaned closer to study her. ‘You’re from overseas?’

  ‘I’m from England.’ She smiled apologetically. ‘I’m here on holiday. Just travelling around Canada. I didn’t think there’d be any harm just having a look.’

  ‘What’s your name, madam?’

  ‘It’s Morgan. Fay Morgan . . . I can show you my passport.’

  ‘Please do.’

  He took a torch from his pocket and looked through her passport. ‘You said you were English. This passport is Canadian.’

  ‘Yes. But it’s new. I was born in England, but my mother was Canadian. I thought I’d get a Canadian passport when I came on this trip.’ She smiled at him. ‘So they’d have to let me in.’ He showed no reaction to her joke. So she found herself doubling down on it. ‘Besides, who knows? If I like it up here I might stay.’

  He handed her passport back. ‘You’d be welcome. But it gets pretty cold.’

  He leaned down to the window so he could look across at Nelson. ‘What do you say, Mr Nilsson? You’ve been up here long enough to know that this is government property.’

  Fay saw the expression on Nelson’s face, half suspicious, half puzzled. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘We weren’t going to get out or anything. We were just having a look.’

  The policeman stared at him a moment more. He had dry grey eyes. ‘You hear about old Moses Isaac from Aklavik? He had to go into hospital in Inuvik last week. Must have been a couple of days after I sent you to see him.’

  Nelson shifted uncomfortably. ‘Oh yeah? That’s too bad.’

  ‘At his age, he might not get out again. But they’ve got a really good seniors programme in Inuvik, so maybe it’s for the best. He can sure talk still, but it wasn’t right him living on his own in Aklavik.’

  ‘I guess not.’

  ‘Did he help you with what you wanted to know? I told him he should talk to you.’

  ‘Pretty much.’

  ‘Well, if you need to talk to him again, go see Eunice at the hospital. She’s in charge of the seniors’ programme. You can tell her Sergeant Peake sent you.’

  The sergeant turned to Fay again. ‘To be honest, Ms Morgan, I’m not too worried if people want to take a look at this place, but when I saw your lights I had to check on you. The Americans own half of this facility, and they can get uptight about visitors. So please don’t take any pictures.’

  ‘I wasn’t going to. We’re heading back to Inuvik now.’

  ‘You s
taying at the Mackenzie or the Eskimo Inn?’

  ‘Northern Villas. The others are full.’

  ‘I’ll bet they are. There’s construction people everywhere because of the new road.’ The sergeant took a step backwards and beckoned to the police truck. It moved up beside them, unblocking the exit. Fay couldn’t see the driver. The sergeant tapped the roof of their car to formally release them. ‘We’ll follow you back down the track. Have a safe trip back to town.’

  The police truck followed them past the airport, through the settlement and right to the edge of the ice-road. Then it stopped, its lights perched above the frozen ocean, seeing them on their way. They drove on until the lights of the settlement were blocked by a headland. Then Nelson looked at Fay.

  ‘Do you mind if we stop? I could use a smoke.’

  We could have done this back in the town, where it wasn’t so dark and so lonely. But perhaps he has his reasons. He seems shy of that policeman.

  Nelson got out. Fay sat for a few moments, thinking things over, before she joined him. It was beyond cold now; even the aurora had frozen. If I didn’t have this car, she thought, if I took off these clothes, I’d be dead in a couple of minutes. The glaring stars, the diamond grain of the galaxy, confirmed her situation: she might as well be floating in space.

  ‘Could I have a cigarette, please?’

  He had already half finished his own cigarette, but he took out another. Between drags she put her hands together and blew into her palms to stop her fingers freezing. The smoke made her light-headed, almost ill. She decided to ask him.