Moose Factory Journal

Well, at 9 AM the temperature is up to 9 degrees (above.) We have a momentary respite. The Church Van died. It dutifully pumps all its engine oil out on to the ground. Cars are not supposed to do that. I’m grounded. But it’s warm enough so that I will rather enjoy the walk.

Last night about twenty of us met with The Bishop. That was after a delightful supper – cooked by many. I had threatened to do the whole thing myself – whereupon volunteers came out of everywhere to avert catastrophe.

Today Iris’s furniture is supposed to arrive. (Iris, our new Curate.) Tomorrow, I have a wedding rehearsal. Saturday brings the wedding. On Sunday we have the Annual Meeting. Only problem on that one is that the copy machine won’t work until it gets a new cartridge. Chaos rules!

The temperature at 5 AM registered 20 degrees below. It’s now 10 AM. We’re at 28 below (Fahrenheit.) On Wednesday we are supposed to see 11 degrees above. We shall see.

The gathering last night was very good. There were well over a hundred people. The service took an hour and a half. Elsie took my remarks and organized them (in Cree) according to her sensibilities – none of which was lost on the (bilingual) congregation – to their amusement. The bakers of St. Thomas’ did well. The choir did well. At the end of the service Christ The King fielded about thirty urchins who belted out a song for everyone and brought down the house.

It was tough getting up this morning. For the first time, since I’ve been here, I wondered if I was too old for this job. I think part of this has to do with a full day ahead. Tonight we have the annual ‘Week of Christian Unity’ Service over at Moosonee at the RC cathedral (Christ The King). It will be fun. I will preach. I actually am ready – more or less. I faxed a copy of my notes yesterday to Sister Una (for her critical approval and for the Cree translator.) She rejected the first draft – as too long. I have heard nothing about the second draft, so I guess it’s ok; it’s a page shorter. I told her I never use notes, anyway, when I preach. They get in the way. That didn’t help much.

Monday brings a study session, mandated by the national (Canadian) Church on homosexuality and The Church. I have no idea what Canadians – or First Nation People – think about all of that and have no idea who/what will show up tomorrow evening. On Wednesday, The Bishop and a Committee on Stewardship show up – for supper and for a meeting here at The Church. Unless I can pawn off some of the jobs, I cook. Brave Bishop! On Thursday, Iris’ furniture shows up. I play janitor. On Friday, Iris shows up. I play Rector. (Iris is our new Curate, ordained to the – transitional – deaconate yesterday.) Friday and Saturday bring wedding games. Then, a week from today, on Sunday, is Annual Meeting. (It SHOULD be in January, but this was the best I could do – given the lack of data on our finances.) Then I’ll slow down – I hope.

A cousin in England alerted me to the existence of a film – ‘Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner’ – about and produced by the Inuit to the north of us. I ordered it from Amazon and likely will have something to say about it when I see it. The film has a homepage:

www.atanarjuat.com

The page, even by itself, is worth looking at.

It’s been cold for several days. Cold…. In the thirties.  Below zero.  Fahrenheit.. Today (at 5 AM) it’s warm. One degree above zero. We’re back to shorts and T-shirts. Almost. Gwendolyn is back to her old self.

To catch up…. I did my first run to Moosonee on the Expressway last week. Generally the quality of the road was superior to Boston’s Southeast Expressway – which is not saying much, I know. There are places where the road heaves, and you have to be careful about all of that. But here we have no potholes. We just fill the holes with snow. Driving on sheer ice sounds dangerous, and it probably is. I was doing an adventurous 30 mph on the road. Everyone else was doing about 50 mph. I have heard of no wrecks – yet. I am told that all the accidents happen with and because of the skidoos. They know no law.

Our new Curate – Iris – moves in to the Old Rectory next week. The place actually has become respectable – almost. Bobby and others did some incredible work in a short time.

My beautiful new E-Mac collapsed (again).  This time, I am told, it was because I installed two (maybe three) applications that really didn’t want to be on the same machine together. One was an ftp (file transport protocol?) application – the thing I use to move files on and off the web. There’s nothing new or esoteric about these applications. They’ve been around for years. The other application was a new (to me) application from Norton, called ‘Internet Security’. It’s supposed to protect the machine from all that maliciousness out there while you’re online. The machine now is online, on a demand basis, 24 hours a day. I figured I couldn’t be too careful, so I got the package. In about a week I realized that I had no operating system left, but I didn’t know this until all the email, address, and calendar files had been destroyed or rendered unrecoverable; that was all in ‘Entourage’ – the application from MS in their ‘Office for the Mac’.

I figure that the labor required to rebuild the disk amounted to 18 hours – probably more like 24. It took several days. I had to check every piece of software for an update; and they ALL had updates. I had backed up my data, so I lost nothing (except the contaminated files.) So, …. If you haven’t heard from me for a while, it’s probably because I have lost your address. Also, I lost my calendar. I’m loading addresses and dates again as fast as I get them.  AND, I’m using Apple’s mailer, address book, and calendar software – not MS Entourage. (Apple’s mailer and address book back up more easily, anyway.) AND, there are no Norton products on this machine. AND, I back up every day – to Apple’s server as well as to one of the peripheral hard disks. We’ll see how that works.

Isolation in these northern communities clearly was a fact of life in previous years. Remoteness has a way of cutting you off from everything else in the world. And the life of the local community is the only life you know. There are advantages to that, particularly when you want to learn from the culture and live within it. That was what I was looking for when I came up here. I wanted to get a good look at and feel for what I had superficially observed many years ago.

Of course the culture is changing, as outside influences move in. What I see now – and what I have tried to observe in previous pages – is the transition going on in the aboriginal culture. In a way the different generations each reflect a different culture. The Elders are the folks I knew in the Seventies. People my age also remember those Elders – were raised by them – and have adapted (variously) to new influences. The kids today are facing a world that does not yet exist and for which their ancestral past will be variably useful.. They are learning skills that are unimaginable to their Elders, and they are less conversant with some of the skills of their ancestors than even this outsider who once was a ‘canoer’.

In one respect Moosonee and Moose Factory are anything but isolated. Now that high-speed Internet access is here, the outside world sits on the desktop. As I write I am listening to WBUR (Boston University’s FM Station.) Bostonians are moaning about the cold; Bostonians don’t know what ‘cold’ means. I can get all the stations I used to listen to. I can peruse – at my leisure – pages from the different newspapers. And there’s music!  Everything that’s out there is here.  We could never get high-speed Internet access into the Building at Seamen’s Church Institute. In one profound respect, therefore, the Rectory at Moose Factory is less isolated from the rest of the world than was my office in Newport.

Gwendolyn has a new lease on life – and probably has understood every word I’ve said on the phone trying to organize her assassination. Locals tell me her problem is the barometer. When it falls, she collapses, because, when it falls, they collapse. Everybody gets depressed and does nothing.

More dog stories…. Another theory for why the lead dog is always a female: she goes into heat now and then. The guys are anxious to know just exactly where she is on that subject, and they spend all their working life trying to find out just exactly what is going to happen next. They run just as hard as they can to catch up – always close, but never quite close enough. And they are too dumb to understand why. So, joyfully, in high hopes, they pull the sled. (Think about that, the next time you see a dog sled race….)

One guy dog, however, was brighter than all the rest. That was Solomon. Solomon’s owner – after many years of driving dogs – finally retired. When he retired, he knew he had to get rid of his dog team. There was only one way. He had to shoot each dog – alone and one by one. He was a decent man, and he did the job himself. He did decide to keep the lead dog, but the others he dispatched — until he got to Solomon, who was the last remaining. He took Solomon to the place where he was going to do that dirty deed. Solomon then lay down and covered his eyes with one paw and his snout with the other paw. THAT was too much. Solomon lived out his entire natural life in luxurious retirement.

I made the rounds this morning, asking who would like to murder my dog. No one is happy with the concept. There is a vet who comes into Moosonee now and then. I might just luck onto that option, if the crisis doesn’t come too soon. The one sure option – and the one I like the least – is to call the local constabulary. I’m sure they’re used to doing the chore. I can’t bear the thought.

Yesterday the heavy trucks started to roll! The Expressway is in business. Freeze-up started sometime in November. And now it is complete. The Island is done with the fuel (and everything else) crisis. And I, on some bright sunny day, will screw up the courage to take the trip myself. The last few days have been crisp – going down to 20 below. It’s now five degrees above (all Fahrenheit.) That’s cool enough to keep the road in business.

Iris Montague just completed her visit of two days. She will be Curate here in February and will live in the old Rectory. This trip was her introduction to The Island and to the old Rectory.  The old Rectory needs a thorough clean up and repairs. We now have good hope that we will be up to date by the time she gets here. I had heard chilling reports about the condition of the building over the past few weeks, and I had not been in it until yesterday. It really is not all that bad. In retrospect, I should have been housed there. …Just my kind of place…. Torn curtains and missing floor tiles amuse me.

Gwendolyn has good moments and bad moments. On the best moments she can do all the stairs – up and down. On a bad moment she can do nothing. Mornings usually are the worst of times.

Gwendolyn can no longer go down the stairs in the Rectory. She can go up – but not down. Somehow, she does the front steps, sometimes. Her infirmity may be episodic, but I doubt it. The arthritis has been creeping up on her for over a year. And this time around, I don’t know when it will get better, if it gets better at all. I already have started to ask around about how one can euthanize a dog up here – not all that easy, if you want to be gentle about it. I am determined that she won’t suffer; I don’t think she has been in any real pain so far, but her quality of life is deteriorating rapidly. Gwendolyn was thirteen years old in late November. She has been with me since she was six weeks old. She has lived with me on a sustained basis longer than any other creature — dead or alive.

Last night Worcester, Massachusetts, was two degrees cooler than Moosonee Airport. Freeze-up is going slowly.  The heavy trucks still cannot go over the ice. That means: no bulk (thrifty and convenient) deliveries of fuel. The old Rectory is out of oil (by which it is heated) and gas is rare. The new Rectory, where I stay, is heated by electricity. That’s great, as long as the lights don’t go out.

We will start up a Sunday Afternoon Service at the Elders’ Home this coming Sunday. Right now we’re planning on a once-a-month Service.

For your reference: Newport, RI: 38* F; Ellsworth, ME: 27* F; North Bay, ON: 19* F; Timmins, ON: 5* F; Moosonee, ON: -5* F.

Now that Broadband really IS here, I have the BBC (or WQXR or WGBH or WBUR – or any of a bunch of others) chatting or fiddling away in the background. This is my first experience with high-speed computer/internet access. Up here it’s a necessity if you want to keep up on world and/or USA news. Regrettably The NY Times does not make their electronic edition available for the MAC platform – yet.

I have done NOTHING this week, rested up from the previous 10-20 days.

I HAVE tried – for several months – to get a credit card – so that I can charge in Canadian dollars and pay in Canadian dollars. I DID get a Northern Stores card – with a limit of $500. That took some doing. Northern Stores does not accept checks – of any kind. I flatly stated that if they wanted my business, they would have to figure something out, and that worked. I also applied to SEARS, but that application seems to have disappeared. SEARS? I’m amazed. I applied twice to Bank of Montreal for a MasterCard; I have my checking account with them. Nothing happened on that front, so I called them. NOW they tell me, only because I asked and insisted on an answer, that I have to have established a credit history for ***at least*** a year, before they will THINK about making a decision about whether or not they want to issue me a card. I could tile my floor with the credit cards I’ve received (unsolicited) in the USA. Fortunately I thought ahead and spoke with my Visa and Amex people in the States before I came up here, and those cards and accounts have followed me up here. (And they’re making money.) THEY don’t have a problem with a Canadian address, and Amex will accept payment in Canadian as well as US dollars. They may be all I’ll ever use. It IS different up here. Advice to those who may spend relatively short periods of time in Canada: Get your banking and credit business established before you leave the States. You could be dead before anyone north of the border wants to bother with you, and the American connections may be the only thing that will work. For whatever reasons the credit agencies up here seem unable to import credit histories from the US.