Dave Bidini - Midnight Light: A Personal Journey to the North

To write is, in some metaphoric sense, to go North.

To go North is, in some sense, to write.

Robert Kroetsch, A Likely Story

Its a shame to leave this masterpiece

With its gallery gods and its garbage-bag trees

The Tragically Hip,

Looking for a Place to Happen

A mong the capital cities of Canada, Yellowknife is easily the least celebrated. No one has ever written a popular poem or song about the place. No one can pronounce, nor remember, the name of the regions emblematic flowerthis is, literally, true, since its the Dryas octopetala, although its floral grouping, the subshrub, is almost too fun to sayand no famous hockey or baseball or soccer player has come from here, even though many players were born in smaller places. No one ever started a bar fight because the Ingraham Trail or Somba Ke Park or the old KFC across from the Independent grocery storeall local signpostswere insulted. No one has ever defamed incumbent mayor Mark Heyckwho, when asked on national television one New Years Eve if he had a message for Canadians, shouted, People live here!and no eco-terrorist has ever scribbled down the name of the towns main intersection50th and 50thas a place to stage an attack in an effort to draw attention to mans abuse of the natural world, a crusading principle that wouldnt make sense in Yellowknife seeing as many of the citys wooden homesbrick being too expensive to importfit into great unyielding shards of steep, 2.7-billion-year-old Canadian Shield granite like arrows of cardboard into a bookcases shelving (Yellowknifers also live in long, narrow trailersa.k.a. modular or manufactured homesplunked on undiggable permafrost while a whole shoreline section, called The Woodyard, consists, more or less, of shacks). No matter where you stand, your feet are sloped at an angle, the product of dinosaur-hump-like terrain that rolls into two pronounced bodies of waterBack Bay and Yellowknife Bay, and its attendant wine-gum-coloured houseboatson the northern arm of Great Slave Lake. To echo a Cape Breton drywaller who swayed next to me at a urinal one night at the Black Knight, a British identikit downtown pub: Nothing in this town is fookin level, as good a slogan as any for the largest settlement close to the Arctic Circle437 kilometres south, to be exactand the people who live in it.

I first came to Yellowknife in 2014, twenty-five years after setting out as an itinerant musician in the 1980s. Those early, epiphanous journeys yielded a parcel of albums and a handful of books, after which I strutted about the land declaring myself an authority on this type of travel, carving tracks through endless prairie towns too small for a single horse and ocean hamlets smashed flat one season only to rise the next. I felt like Id been everywhere, man, but I hadnt; not really. While Id visited Iqaluit and Dawson City and Whitehorse, Id never been up there, which is how people in the Territories describe the white ribbon across the top of North American maps, found beneath a paper crease still crisp at the fold.

I told myself that ignoring Canadas neglected northern middle was probably a matter of logistics, but getting to Yellowknife and the Northwest Territories isnt especially challenging. A plane will take you there and you can drive, too, provided youre willing to shuttle eighteen hours north from Edmonton through Hay River. After arriving at the airports baggage carousel for the first timeId been invited to read at the citys NorthWords literary festivalI stood atop an enormous coloured floor-tile map of the Territories vast regionas big as Alberta and Saskatchewan combined, or twelve Belgiums, if thats your preferred metricand wondered if I knew anything at all. What if the Northwest Territories was everything Canada wasnt? What if people spat out maple syrup, hated hockey, and considered Mr. Dressup a fraud? Perhaps my entire sense of Canada would go to hell, and maybe thats why Id never gone there. I wondered who the real fraud was.

NorthWords ended up being one of the strangestand thus, bestliterary festivals Id ever attended. Save for a handful of writers from elsewhere, it eschewed the temptation of imported authors in favour of local scribblers, many of whom had never been published. This was partly because organizers couldnt afford to fly guests so far north and partly because very few publishers lobbied for their writers to read in a tiny market with zero influence on the tastemakers of Canada. In this and many other ways, the location and conditions of Yellowknifenorth of 60 and minus 45 down 50th Avenue in the wintertimeacted as a kind of filtering agent. Those who visited traversed great distances through multiple airports for as much as it cost to get to Tunisia, and those who stayed did so because the North doesnt ask questions of its visitors (the average stay for newcomers is five years, which is to say, five winters). In this sense, the Northwest Territories is a microcosm within a microcosm. If Canada is a country of vast spaces pinned with the occasional city, the Northwest Territories had but one major centre whose population had dwindled in the twenty-first century, owing to the declining mining industry. Its a small busy place within an enormously empty place, so whenever anyone arrives, theyre noticed. Theyre talked about in the supermarkets and Elks Club, and within five minutes, everyone knows their name, where theyre from, and why theyre in Yellowknife (also, whether theyre single. They are usually single). In the early days of the town, the local paper published a Whos Leaving? Whos Arriving? section. Getting to know people was the least of anyones problems.