AWOL

by Jennifer Barclay

  Charlie and I searched most of the afternoon for the Golden Triangle. Considered by some to be one of the most exotic places in the world, and long a centre for drug trafficking, the infamous Golden Triangle is found at the intersection of the Mekong and Ruak rivers, forming the borders between Burma, Laos and northern Thailand. Road signs were extremely poor and misleading and we got lost several times. So desolate were the roads, many of them ending abruptly into a dead open nowhere, we thought the Golden Triangle must be remote and unvisited.

  We rounded a corner and found ourselves on a gleaming paved highway full of honking horns. The first sign of the Golden Triangle was a slick, air-conditioned Japanese tour bus glistening in the sun. I was reminded of Niagara Falls. Cameras clicked incessantly at the small triangular island on the Mekong River. Pepsi and Coke competed for attention like ten-year-old brats. Posters of half-naked Thai women advertised orange pop. A little girl dressed in hill tribe garb asked if I wanted to take her picture for five baht, and pouted when I said no.

  We fled and got lost again as we headed south, drawn off the beaten tourist track onto smaller, narrower roads. After a while, we found ourselves snaking through a different kind of countryside. An emptiness seemed to clutch hold of the rolling land around us, but it wasn’t lonely or barren. The villages we passed in this new and different land were rich with details of seemingly simple and joyful lives. The people were evidently not accustomed to outsiders, and they stared, waved, smiled and laughed as we passed them on the road. A little girl ran when she saw us and hid behind a tree.

  Outside one village, some water buffalo crossing the road forced us to stop and wait. The farmer ran behind the beasts to hurry them off the road. He grinned sheepishly, embarrassed about interrupting our journey. “No problem,” Charlie said to the man with a wave of his hand.

  “No problem?” said the water buffalo herder. “No problem, no problem,” he continued to say over and over. He started laughing. He laughed so hard he doubled over and held his stomach. I wondered if this was the first time he’d actually heard an English speaker use the phrase. Perhaps he had heard it once in a movie. “No problem, no problem,” continued the man. Once his water buffalo had crossed and we drove on, I turned around to see the laughing man running toward his house, probably to tell his family what he’d heard.

  Soon after, we realized we were seriously lost. Our map was entirely useless, and it was getting dark. In the next village, we stopped to ask a boy the way to Chiang Rai, but he didn’t have a clue what we were saying. Frightened, he ran away to his house. An older man came along and didn’t understand us either. Soon a gathering of people surrounded us, the lost falangs. Repeatedly we said, “Chiang Rai,” pointed to our map, pointed ahead and then behind us on the road, trying to discern which way to go. Either the villagers didn’t know the way to Chiang Rai or we weren’t pronouncing it correctly. Then, we looked up from the map and saw two teenage boys dragging a younger boy by his shirt across the road. Proudly, they deposited him in front of us. The little boy’s eyes shone at our decrepit motorcycle. Very slowly, he said, “Where … you … want go?” The villagers had given us their prize linguist.

  The boy pointed the way back for us, and on seeing the boy do this, the whole village pointed the way back for us too. The whole village pointed. It set off inside me a surge of sweet gratitude. The handful of days we’re given on earth exploded on the road before us into a thousand shards of light. The way back would be easy to find. The way back would be paved in Judy Garland songs.

  No problem.

  Laurie Gough is the author of Island of the Human Heart: A Woman’s Travel Odyssey (entitled Kite Strings of the Southern Cross in the rest of the world), finalist for the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award and winner of ForeWord Magazine’s Silver Medal for Travel Book of the Year. She also contributes to salon.com, the Globe and Mail, the Los Angeles Times and numerous travel anthologies. She has just moved to Wakefield, Quebec, where she’s writing her next book.

  Boats are scattered in clusters, as if waiting for the tide to float them.

  002Destination: Canada

  INCIDENT

  AT RANKIN INLET

  Peter Unwin

  Stories tend not to unfold in the Arctic the same way they do in the south. The contours are different, and the outcomes are different too. At one time off Rankin Inlet, an Inuit woman in a small boat needed to relieve herself. Her husband begged her not to urinate in the water, arguing that this would offend the gods. Desperate, she called upon a spirit to help her. The spirit agreed to help but demanded the woman forfeit her life.

  In the south, there would be no deal. But in the Arctic, the woman agreed. The spirit at once transformed a nearby iceberg into an island for her convenience, and having relieved herself, she died moments later while crawling on her hands and knees on the cobble beach.

  That shining piece of rock is called Marble Island. Made almost entirely of quartz, it glows a brilliant white beneath clear skies. In 1721, a gold-seeking expedition led by James Knight, consisting of two ships and twenty-five men, landed on the island. During the course of the next two years, scurvy, starvation and mortal conflict with the “Eskemays” turned the site into one of the grimmest locations in the history of Northern exploration. The entire expedition vanished; no survivors, no skeletons, not even any graves were ever found.

  Today on the island’s western tip, whales are still flensed by men and women wielding sivaks and ulus, the gendered knives of the Inuit. Visitors approach the island on their hands and knees in deference to a legendary woman who needed to pee, and perhaps to the many others who have died horrible deaths here and whose stories have never been told.

  Twenty miles away on the mainland lies the modern settlement of Rankin Inlet. In a rock field just outside of town, a few dog carcasses in various stages of decomposition are scattered about. Some have the red plastic casing of a shotgun shell lying next to them. Scampering everywhere are the siskiit, a nervous, corpulent ground squirrel the size of a terrier, the preferred target of Inuit boys who hurl stones at them with astonishing accuracy.

  Out on the land sit several large rusted compressors with evidence of people having overnighted in them: a few berths bolted to the walls, a television antenna, three or four small windows—small enough to keep the polar bears from getting in—blowtorched out of the side. Other examples of Inuit adaptability are near at hand, including a snowmobile’s cracked Plexiglas windshield sewn exquisitely back together with wire. This sort of ingenuity is legendary in the Arctic. An Inuk in the 1950s was said to have opened the back of a thirty-five-millimetre camera for a traveller and fixed the broken timing mechanism, having never seen a camera before in his life.

  The town is named after the British naval officer John Rankin. History remembers him as the man who lied about the Northwest Passage. He swore not only that it existed at this latitude (sixty-four), but that Christopher Middleton, his commanding officer and one of history’s finest navigators, was deliberately concealing it for his own profit.

  Rankin Inlet is a windswept settlement of prefabricated buildings mounted on rocks. The wind is legendary and scours the ancient bedrock while venting itself continuously southward. There are no flags in Rankin Inlet, only half flags, the ends torn to shreds. It is said here that flags snapping loudly but straight out indicate winds of thirty-five kilometres. A snapping flag inclined upward means winds of more than thirty-five kilometres. Boats are scattered in clusters, like the houses, down by the waters of Hudson Bay, as if waiting for the tide to float them.

  Unlike the neighbouring coastal communities of Arviat and Whale Cove, which were established in the 1950s to save the Inuit from starvation following a change in the caribou migrations, Rankin Inlet began as a mining town. According to the 1998 Nunavut Handbook, the Inuit were “very hard workers and much appreciated by the mine owners.” In plain English, Inuit men received half the wages of the white miners and were required to eat in separate lunchrooms
. The mine closed in 1962. The giant shaft head that dominated Rankin Inlet burnt to the ground in the mid-1980s. Today there is a nasty, ongoing lawsuit concerning who exactly owns the rights to the land and the nickel that lies beneath the ground.

  THERE ARE NO FLAGS IN RANKIN INLET, ONLY HALF FLAGS, THE ENDS TORN TO SHREDS.

  Across the street from this abandoned mine is the Northern Store, formerly owned by the Hudson’s Bay Company, a massive prefabricated shed that sells everything from T-shirts to white rolled slabs of whale fat labelled Muuktuuk. In a small stall off the side is a combination pizza parlour, fried chicken restaurant and video store. An enormous walrus head is mounted above the videos. The place is packed with Inuit children. A few fries are getting eaten, and more kids file in and look about the room the way grown men enter a tavern.

  Inuit children are granted a freedom rare in the south. At Iqaluit, in a friend’s house, following a dinner of frozen peas, instant mashed potatoes and fresh caribou, I watched a powerful boy of five begin to push a broken stereo console across the living room floor. The women played cards and smoked cigarettes. The men smoked and watched, transfixed, a documentary on the hunting techniques of large jungle cats. They had watched this same video many times and fell into a familiar reverential silence in the moments leading up to the kill. Finally the boy, with a great deal of proud grunting, managed to shoulder the cabinet to the lip of the landing and send it crashing down the flight of stairs. The noise was deafening. No one in the room even looked up. Another time, at Arviat, a seven-year-old boy, clutching a ticket, boarded the twin-prop Saab on which I was travelling, and took a seat. The flight attendant spent ten minutes attempting, in English, to find out who he was. “Who’s your mommy?” she asked repeatedly. But the boy did not speak English, he spoke Inuktitut. After skidding sideways through ferocious Arctic “bubbles,” the plane landed. The little Inuit boy had been playing unconcernedly throughout with a plastic spoon. At Rankin Inlet he skipped down the runway and disappeared.

  Conversation among the boys and girls crowded into the only fast-food place in town is mostly in Inuktitut, although a few phrases of English filter through, “Johnny, you rich man now hey? You rich man?”

  I manage to buy a hamburger, but the accomplishment is marred by my insistence on mustard. The girl behind the counter views my request with some skepticism. She sees no reason for putting mustard on a hamburger; she sees little reason for a hamburger. There is a good chance she prefers eeqoonak, walrus meat aged three months under a rock and eaten raw, preferably from a sheet of plywood on the gymnasium floor at the community centre. After engaging in a whispered conversation with her co-worker, she eventually provides me, proudly, with salt.

  I am seated at a plastic table, eating my salted hamburger, when I notice a two-year-old with black tangled hair. She’s staring at me, either because I am one of the quallnaat, “white people,” or because I have red hair. It must be the hair. There have been quallnaat here since 1540 when fool’s gold brought Martin Frobisher and a crew of twelve boys, each armed with a jackknife, a poignard, and a Bible to fight the heathen.

  The wind is legendary, even tilting stop signs.

  The girl is quite mesmerized. She is sucking on a large Slurpee and clutching a penny in her left hand. It’s the penny that fascinates her now. She presses it between her fingers as though it were a totem possessing magical power, pulsating in her hand. Then suddenly, her focus changes. She is no longer interested in the penny; there are other people, dozens of them. She knows every one of them. The people come in, go out, laugh, step around her, over her. In the midst of this activity, the penny falls to the ground and rolls tantalizingly down the aisle.

  I’ve seen this story before. I’ve seen it in film clips and in life, perhaps even in dreams. I will get up and rescue the penny, then hand it back to her. Her mouth will detach from the Slurpee, and she will smile gratefully at me. The large man, her father, will nod agreeably. By this act, I will fit in. I will demonstrate the truth of Waugh’s dictum, “the tourist is the other fellow.” Somehow the gesture will be made more touching by the valuelessness of the coin up here, where a stale lettuce the size of a baseball costs four dollars. My role is clear.

  Instead I remain firmly seated. This is not the south, and stories do not have the same contours here. A man sits in the corner ten feet away from me; his face covered with stitches. Six weeks ago a polar bear removed the flesh from his skull. I’m told his face “was hanging off.” Apparently this is what a polar bear does: attempts to crack a man’s skull the way it cracks the head of a seal. The man’s grandmother was killed in the attack. He escaped with a boy, in a small boat. It was the third time in his life that he had been attacked by a polar bear. Now he’s eating a slice of pizza next to a rack of videos underneath an enormous stuffed walrus head.

  I watch the penny as it continues to roll down the aisle and finally stops. No disappointed wail comes from the girl. She has lost interest in the penny and turns away. The urge to intercede and do something has washed over me and passed. I’ve withstood it and done nothing. Because of that, I’m free to watch the story unfold the way it’s meant to.

  Another man starts to reach for the penny. His moves are laboured. The man suffers from a serious skeletal injury; his legs and his spine are twisted. The complex gestures required for him to unfold his legs are excruciating to watch. At one point he’s forced to use his hands to move his legs. Finally he manages to crouch down, lifting one leg awkwardly to accommodate the other. A grimace of pain flashes across his lips. He is virtually lying on the floor where the penny is. I’m holding my breath.

  The same painful gestures are executed in reverse to get himself back up. This is done gradually, in stages. Through a series of agonizing gestures, he retrieves a penny that belongs to a very little girl.

  The man rises to his feet and folds the penny in his hand. Then, with a quick look around, he shoves it into his pocket and limps from the building.

  Peter’s essays, poems and stories have appeared in a large number of publications, and his historical writing has been nominated for a National Magazine Award and two Western Magazine Awards. His first collection of short stories, The Rock Farmers, received a Stephen Leacock Award nomination, and his novel, Nine Bells for a Man, tells the true story of Canada’s largest inland marine disaster. He is currently working on The Wolf’s Head, a book about Lake Superior.

  003Destination: Cuba

  CHICKENS, GIRLS AND RUINS

  Simona Chiose

  Maurice was from Paris—all his life he had lived in Paris—but now he lived in Martinique. He had been married four times but would never do it again: “Plus jamais.” This much we knew after talking to him for maybe fifteen minutes. Paul and I were sitting at the only café on a long strip of Havana’s Malecón; the café really just a few tables, chairs and umbrellas in front of an apartment building. Maurice had rolled in with a thin, light-skinned Cuban woman. “Is it possible to sit here?” he’d asked, and they joined us at our table.

  Across the street, the sea lapped at the edges of the Malecón’s stone wall. Wind and salt had eaten the pinks and oranges off the buildings lining the boulevard, and plaster was peeling off in chunks. Faded green and blue American Buicks and Cadillacs rattled by on the wide avenue. The whole city of Havana was like that, an elegant diva wearing a stained 1930s gown to a Warhol Factory party. Cuban writer Pedro Juan Gutiérrez says Havana is popular with tourists because they love ruins. Ruined mansions that once belonged to rich landowners, their once-glittering blue pools empty for forty years. Ruined homes with crumbling Roman columns turned into private restaurants and hotels catering to foreigners with pockets full of the American dollar. To Cubans, Canadians and Americans are indistinguishable.

  Habaneros like Maurice’s girl believe that foreigners will lead them out of the ruins.

  “This girl came up to me,” Maurice said in French, and he looked over to the girl dressed in green cargo pants and a grey tank
top, “and asked me if I want to kiss her.

  “‘I don’t know you,’ I told her. And you know what she said to me? She said, ‘You have the most beautiful blue eyes!’” Maurice threw back his head and sighed. “I could not resist. I’m sixty-nine years old. How could I resist? This is magnificent. This is love in Cuba.”

  Paul, who always forgets names but rarely owns up to it, asked, “What is your name again?” as if the story had made this stranger so interesting that his name had to be stored and remembered. Or maybe he wanted to know if the name held a clue to his luck. What was this place where love just walked up to you on the street?

  THIS JOE USED TO WORK AS A UNITED NATIONS ECONOMICS EXPERT ON AFRICA. NOW HE’S RETIRED AND DRIVES A TAXI. HE LAUGHS AFTER HE TELLS ME THIS.

  Then Paul asked the girl’s name again because he hadn’t caught it when she was introduced. Neither had I, and I didn’t the second time either. So later when we talked about Maurice, we referred to her as “the girl.” Maurice called her that too. As in, “You see, with the girl, I’m not going to invite her to dinner tonight. She’s beautiful, look at her, like a model,” and here he vaguely waved his arm toward her until I nodded in appreciation at the treasure he’d landed. “But she does not interest me. I will bring my copine.”

  The copine he would bring to dinner that night was older. Maurice said they had met two years before, when he had first come to Cuba with a French aid group to deliver medicine, and had become friends. She had been a schoolteacher. But we didn’t catch her name either and Maurice kept calling her “love” or copine. She later became “the second girl.”