across the globe. When uranium and silver were unearthed at Great Bear Lake, about 400 kilometres (250 miles) northwest of Yellowknife, the hunt began in earnest.
In 1933, prospectors Herb Dixon and Johnny Baker found gold in two small lakes near Yellowknife. One year later, gold was found on the east side of Yellowknife Bay, leading to the construction of the Burwash Mine. Though Burwash did not have a particularly long life, the establishment of the mine helped put Yellowknife on the prospecting map. The long-lived Con Mine soon followed. Yellowknife became a full-blown boomtown. Southerners flocked there for both work and adventure.
By 1942, Yellowknife had five gold mines in production. After the lull induced by World War II, the Giant Mine uncovered a significant gold deposit on the north end of town, a discovery that led to yet another staking rush in the area. Before long, Yellowknife was the economic hub of the Northwest Territories; it was named capital in 1967, the centenary of Canadian confederation.
Prospectors braved the ravages of weather and loneliness for a chance at the gold the North was rumoured to hold. Here prospector Curtis Smith searches for the motherlode in the bush around Prairie Creek, Northwest Territories, 1952.
By the time the 1980s rolled around, Yellowknife’s precious-metals era had begun drawing to a close (the last of the gold mines shut its doors in 2004), only to be replaced by an even more desirable product. In 1991, diamonds were discovered a few hundred kilometres north of the city, and the second boom was on. The Ekati Diamond Mine—one of the most prolific on Earth—began operation in 1998. Today, Yellowknife serves as a hub for industry, transportation, communications, education, health, tourism, commerce, and government activity in the territory.
Coincidentally enough, my first experience of Yellowknife occurred the same year that diamonds were discovered at Lac de Gras, though profit was the farthest thing from my mind. Eager to carve out my own simple niche in the world, I wanted nothing more than the twenty-dollar weekly stipend Frontiers Foundation afforded me, as long as the organization continued to provide room and board. So after a three-day drive across some of the most remote and unpopulated regions of Canada, I glanced up from the passenger seat of a mid-1970s Chevy Blazer and saw something I never thought I’d see this close to the Arctic Circle: a skyline.
Dozens of small communities pepper the lands that stretch across the 60th parallel. Settled and built almost exclusively by the Canadian government, most of these hamlets boast cookie-cutter homes and a few roads, surrounded by thousands of square kilometres of wilderness.
Any urban dweller worth his salt will tell you that Yellowknife’s profile is a far cry from New York’s. But for me, I’ll never forget the moment I laid eyes upon the buildings of the Northwest Territories’ capital rising from the frozen subarctic landscape. Three days later I was on a flight bound for Inuvik, itself a four-hour drive from Fort McPherson. As our pickup rumbled down the gravel bed of the Dempster Highway toward our destination, my path became clear: with six months of construction experience under my belt and full of the piss and vinegar of young adulthood, I would meet the North head-on and throw all my energy into my volunteer work. And if that meant pounding nails into the side of a house as outside temperatures dipped low enough to freeze my eyelids shut, so be it.
Yet as fate so often has it, the Arctic had other plans for me.
“You’re going to meet your wife up there,” one of my Park Avenue colleagues had said to me as I packed up my things and took one last walk around the Major League Baseball office, still wondering if leaving its luxurious confines made any sense.
The odds seemed slim at best. If I hadn’t met Mrs. Right from among the eight million or so people who call New York City home, how on Earth would it happen north of the Arctic Circle? The overwhelming majority of Fort McPherson’s residents are aboriginal, from families that have hunted, trapped, and fished in the area for generations. Meet my wife? Not unless she was willing to give up a lifestyle that was completely alien to me and spend a little time in the Big Apple.
Yet meet my wife I did. Marty was a nurse in Fort McPherson’s small health centre. I remember meeting her on one of the town’s dirt roads shortly after my arrival in early January 1991. I was walking down the street with my fellow volunteers, headed back to our small apartment for a bite of lunch after a morning’s work. Marty was on a lunchtime stroll with a friend, whose new house we happened to be building.
Though I was smitten with Marty’s smile immediately, I had little idea what lurked under the mounds of clothing she wore to ward off the elements. At –40°, we all looked like pears, so one could only speculate whether someone had a nice one of these or impressive set of those. Someone once told me that getting amorous with someone for the first time up north is a bit like opening a Christmas present, except you don’t really know how much wrapping paper there is.
Wrapping paper notwithstanding, it wasn’t long before Marty and I bid a sad farewell to Fort McPherson and set out on our own adventure together, shuttling from Fort McPherson to Indonesia, Hong Kong, Singapore, Thailand, and New York City before returning to the Arctic, this time to the frozen tundra of Baffin Island. A few years later we were married on the sea ice of Patricia Bay near Clyde River, a community of seven hundred-odd Inuit residents. We chose January 21 as our date, the day the sun was set to return to the northern sky (albeit briefly) after a hiatus of more than two months.
After a year in Clyde River we moved southward to the relatively balmy climes of Pangnirtung, another Baffin Island community, but one located about fifty kilometres (thirty miles) south of the Arctic Circle. Our first child, Dawson Orion (named respectively for the Yukon town and the constellation that filled the dark Baffin Island sky all winter), joined our family on March 6, 1996.
Compared with Clyde River, Pangnirtung—or Pang, for short—was a metropolis. The place had two stores, a vibrant arts centre, and even a restaurant, to the extent that a KFC Quickstop counts as a restaurant. Armed with a new work visa and a master’s degree in elementary education (that I’d pick up in New York), I took a half-time teaching position in the local junior/senior high school, the Attagoyuk School.
Teaching Grade 9 students at Attagoyuk showed me how little I knew about northern society and culture. Here I was, trying to foist a Canadian-government-approved curriculum upon a group of people who until recently had lived off the land, a tradition they had held for thousands of years. Sure, the kids in my class, with their Montreal Canadiens caps and baggy jeans, looked like a typical group of fourteen-year-olds. But while I was urging them to memorize the parts of speech, they could have been out seal hunting or riding snowmobiles across the frozen waters of Pangnirtung Fiord—a far more enticing prospect. When spring, and nearly constant daylight, came around, attendance in my class plummeted to single digits. The local kids, I learned, had a penchant for staying up all night and sleeping all day.
And while those were simple, carefree days, Dawson’s birth forced Marty and me to consider what our future lives would look like. After months of introspection, we realized that Baffin Island—where thousands of kilometres separated us from our families—might not be the ideal place to raise a child.
So when Up Here magazine offered me its editorship, I could not refuse. It was an opportunity to take the reins of one of Canada’s finest—yet most anonymous—magazines. Published eight times a year, the magazine chronicles the ins and outs of life north of 60, and does so with an eye toward humour, irony, and intrigue. It was, and remains, one of the best reads in the country. Better yet, the offices
