I Hate to Leave This Beautiful Place

by Howard Norman

  I Hate to Leave This Beautiful Place

  I OFTEN THINK BACK to my Grand Rapids summer of 1964, that confusing time when, as a means of escape, I obsessively studied three or four photograph-filled books on the Arctic region of Canada—its polar bears and foxes, its sea birds and narwhals, its Eskimo (before the word Inuit was in proper use) people living in those vast reaches. Had the few months in the bookmobile launched me on a trajectory that led to the Canadian Arctic? Such connections are all but impossible to assume, of course. Life does not travel from point A to point B. A whole world of impudent detours, unbridled perplexities, degrading sorrows, and exacting joys can befall a person in a single season, not to mention a lifetime. First at McGill University, and then at Western Michigan University, I took, sometimes one per semester, courses in various subjects—philology, zoology, literature—finally earning a degree from the Folklore Institute at Indiana University. And I had to keep finding ways to pay tuition. With assistance from professors and museum directors, and a willingness to live in remote places, I signed up for postings in half a dozen Arctic locales in order to record Inuit life histories, medical histories, and folktales. Looking back, I suppose I had some vague notion of writing about all of this, but mainly I needed the money. And these were the kinds of jobs few people volunteered for. To reduce it to practical terms, it was ready work, where and when I needed it. In the end, I think it’s fair to say that nearly a decade of piecemeal Arctic jobs and traveling provided an apprenticeship in writing and thinking. The ubiquitous blessing was that I got to experience the languages, cultures, and spirit presences that verified the assertion set forth in a poem by Paul Éluard: “There is another world but it’s in this one.”

  In December 1980, I was in Eskimo Point, in the Canadian Northwest Territories. On the eighth of that month, I wrote on a page of my journal, “Today John Lennon died.” That afternoon, in the Arctic’s crepuscular light, the Inuit pilot Edward Shaimaiyuk stood next to his Cessna on the hard-packed snow landing strip, which had been sprinkled with crushed coal for traction, and said, “I’m going south to Canada.”

  Edward was about sixty years old. Leaning against his plane, he began to shout what to my ears were desperate-sounding implorations in his language, the Quagmiriut dialect spoken along Hudson Bay. It had begun to snow hard, and the snow was mixed with slanting sleet. The sky was shifting dark clouds west to east. Edward was addressing Sedna—I distinctly heard the name—who is the ancient and powerful woman-spirit who controls the sea and to some extent the air and ice over the sea. For centuries, ever since she was betrayed by her cousins and exiled to the sea bottom, she has maintained an entourage of sea spirits who do her retributive bidding, and has comported herself with severe and unpredictable moodiness, exhibiting an uncanny repertoire of punishments, some lethal, in response to the cruelty, greed, and spiritual trespasses of human beings. To say that Sedna can act in a capricious manner is to say that there are stars in the sky.

  One consequence of Sedna’s behavior is that Inuit people have a provisional relationship with her, and must constantly be vigilant not to offend. Sedna has to be appeased daily, and prayer is one way to do this. Prayers as in what Edward Shaimaiyuk was shouting—he knew she was causing weather hazardous to fly in. He was apologizing, seeking forgiveness, although I didn’t know for what, exactly.

  In its intensity Edward’s wild prayer was both mesmerizing and disturbing. He had worked himself nearly to tears. Again, I didn’t know for which trespass he was asking pardon—with humankind there were so many and they occurred so frequently—nor did I know if I should even have been looking at him. What is the proper decorum in the presence of such a dramatic and intimate petition for mercy from invisible forces?

  Meanwhile, I helped his son, Peter Shaimaiyuk, load five electric guitars and several sacks of mail into the cargo hold. The guitars were going to Winnipeg for repair.

  Yet something was very wrong here. Something was not going well. Edward was now staring at the horizon. Studying it. Looking over now and then, Peter, in turn, studied his father’s expression.

  Though he’d calmed down a little, Edward kept repeating a phrase in Inuit, and finally I asked Peter what it meant.

  “It’s my father’s biggest fear,” he said. “His biggest worry. And it’s the reason he’s not going anywhere today. He’s not going to fly, I’m sure of it.”

  “Would he mind if I knew why?”

  “It’s hard to put in English,” Peter said. “But my father believes that radio airwaves—not sure what word to use. Radio airways—frequencies—from the cities can catch his plane and pull him in like a fishing net. Sedna can cause this. And he’s very afraid of this. He doesn’t want to be pulled down to a city like Winnipeg or Montreal. He’s seen cities in magazines and doesn’t want to go there. He doesn’t want to go where rooms are stacked up on each other, like in a hotel. He doesn’t even like it that rooms are stacked up on each other in the Churchill Hotel, just down to Churchill. He goes to Churchill a lot. He’s had bad dreams about having to sleep high up off the ground.”

  “He flies up in the air, though,” I said, as if reason could abide.

  “Not the same thing to him. You won’t figure it out. Just take it as fact. It’s how my father thinks when Sedna gets angry—she’s angry today. He thinks she’ll make radios from the cities net him and drag him off course. He’ll have to land in a city and he’ll never get out. He’ll die in a city. He doesn’t have a lot of fears, my father. But the ones he has, they’re big. That’s why he’s so upset now. That’s why he’s definitely not flying today. When he gets like this I just step back. He’s my father. I’ve seen this a lot of times. One thing’s for sure, my father is not flying. Let’s get the guitars off, okay?”

  For some fifteen years Peter had a band called Nanook the Gook. The band’s name originally was Turbulence (I wonder if it came from his father’s experience flying mail planes or from some inner turmoil Peter himself felt), but they decided to change it when the Vietnam War was at full nightmarish cacophony and gook was the derogatory term used by the U.S. military for a Vietnamese person; this was the Inuit band’s satirical identification with, as Peter put it, “small brown folks.” (Nanook was the Inuit fellow who had been featured in the famous ethnographic film Nanook of the North.) The Vietnam War came to be referred to as the first television war, but in the Arctic it arrived almost exclusively by radio, via daily bulletins on the CBC.

  Anyway, I’d heard Nanook the Gook play four or five times and knew that their repertoire consisted entirely of the songs of John Lennon. Peter, who was about thirty-five, wore round wire-rimmed glasses when he played guitar and sang—no corrective lenses, just clear glass. He had ordered them after he’d heard a commercial for “John Lennon granny glasses” on the radio or seen an ad in some magazine or other. I think maybe it was in Rolling Stone, back issues of which were delivered by mail plane every three or four months, depending on the weather.

  Though the band itself would most likely never be written up in Rolling Stone, Nanook the Gook was for a time enormously popular throughout the scattered villages along the east and west coasts of Hudson Bay and inland. Edward had often flown the band to gigs. I still have a number of reel-to-reel recordings of covers of “Instant Karma,” “Power to the People,” “Woman Is the Nigger of the World,” “Whatever Gets You Through the Night,” “Nobody Told Me,” “Don’t Worry, Kyoko,” and “Working Class Hero.” The band was heavy on guitars. When I was living in Eskimo Point they had recently taken on a new lead guitarist, who was seventeen. In the recording I have of “Nobody Told Me” you can hear seagulls in the background.

  I had been employed by the Arctic Oral History Project for a third year to translate life histories and folktales. In Eskimo Point I was in the midst of transcribing and translating a single, quite complicated story, and the working title I gave it was “I Hate to Leave This Beautiful Place.” In broad outline, the story concerns a man who is turned in
to a goose by a malevolent shaman, and when it comes time for all the geese to fly south, he despairs about leaving; in fact, he falls into unmitigated grief, primarily expressed through a high-pitched wailing lament: “I hate to leave this beautiful place! I hate to leave this beautiful place!” which can be heard at great distances, echoing across the stark tundra. The man who was transformed into a goose was formerly a strong and decent fellow with a wife and two children. He was a great artist whose soapstone sculptures of animals were widely admired. He was reputed to have rarely left the village of his birth, Padlei.

  In his incarnation as a goose, the man realizes that unless he migrates with the other geese he will die. His despair at this fate intensifies the story’s universal themes of mortality, longing, home, sanity. And the story contains, with the philosophical generosity characteristic of Inuit spoken literature, and without necessarily spelling it out, a meditation on what the world requires of and imposes on an individual attempting to live a dignified existence, and how that person comes to knowledge of him- or herself through indelible experience.

  I hate to leave this beautiful place. I hate to leave this beautiful place.

  I heard the story from Lucille Amorak, with whom I met on an almost daily basis for a couple of weeks while I was in Eskimo Point. Long dead now, at the time Lucille was in her seventies. She was a wonderful poet as well as a storyteller; her poems, to my mind, represented the spoken and written word in equal measure; they had a crafted informality. Here is one of my favorites:

  My aunt held a grudge—she forgot why.

  My cousin held a grudge—he forgot why.

  My father held a grudge—he forgot why.

  Lots of things happened in the village,

  lots of things.

  People were born—people died—gulls

  were everywhere all the time—

  the beach and the big boulders on the beach

  stayed put.

  My cousin lived in another village

  and she held a grudge—she forgot why.

  I held a grudge—it was against a seal—because

  that seal nabbed a fish right off my line!

  I don’t hold that grudge anymore

  but at least I remember why I once did.

  My other uncle held a grudge—he forgot why.

  My other aunt held a grudge—it was against me.

  One day I walked over to her house and said,

  “What’s your grudge?” “I forgot,” she said.

  “It was fun holding it,” she said, “then it wasn’t

  any longer.”

  We sat down for a meal. My aunt was in

  a pretty good mood—she laughed a lot—

  I forgot what about.

  As Lucille’s family had never joined a church, her birth was never recorded, but she told me that her mother had told her she had been born in 1913. Lucille was Peter Shaimaiyuk’s grandmother’s sister. Lucille and I usually worked together from seven in the morning until noon. We sat at her splintery table in her one-room shack, located just down from the post office flying a Canadian flag. She often kept her teapot on the boil, and each morning she’d hold a piece of seal fat to the open end of a flask, and tip the flask to soak the fat in whiskey. Our work often proceeded haltingly; my skills in the Inuit language lacked considerable refinement, and yet Lucille had “a lot of English,” as she put it, which was true. We managed.

  Anyway, at about eleven P.M. on December 8 I was reading, perhaps for the hundredth time, Merwin’s Carrier of Ladders in the stockroom of the Hudson’s Bay Company store, where I had a cot and washbowl, and shaved without a mirror, all courtesy of Mr. Albert Bettany, the store’s manager since 1955. These were sparse quarters, to be sure. But I also had an electric space heater. It was about minus ten or fifteen degrees outside. Suddenly Peter Shaimaiyuk walked in, no knock on the door. “Hey, hey,” he said, “Tommy’s gonna be on the radio, eh?”

  Tommy Novaqirq was the drummer in Nanook the Gook. I sat up in my cot and switched on the shortwave, which came in loud and clear; turning the dial, I found NWT—Northwest Territories Radio. The weather reporter, who was also a news broadcaster, was named Gabriel Alikatuktuk. He alternated between English and Inuit, with a smattering of French as well. He had a wonderfully quirky manner and sometimes out of nowhere would speak in a pretty good imitation of Humphrey Bogart.

  One important feature of Gabriel’s show was that his weather report often included recriminations. Let me explain.

  Through the labyrinthine Arctic gossip routes—mail plane pilots, for instance, were big contributors—Gabriel received all sorts of information about the behavior of people throughout his listening region. The best equivalent I can think of is the crime report in the daily newspaper that serves the hamlets where I live in Vermont, and which archives the disparate incidents (mostly ludicrously petty crimes, yet some are harrowing) that occur there, such as loud talking on the street in the middle of the night, the abuse of a homeless dog, jaywalking, a mailbox smashed in by drive-by teenagers bored to tears, and so on—the cumulative effect being, Look how much small-time criminal behavior can be fitted into any given day or night. This is pretty much the same behavior—stupid, reckless killing of time—one experienced in Arctic villages, generally speaking. The difference was, Gabriel Alikatuktuk, in his weather forecast, would choose a specific perpetrator to indict as having insulted Sedna, pissed her off in some terrible way or other. This was how he would delineate the equation between the offending act and the mythological response. So when Tommy Novaqirq had gotten black-out drunk and taken potshots at a neighbor’s sled dogs, all but blinding one dog in its right eye, Gabriel Alikatuktuk got wind of it.

  “Now, word got to me,” Gabriel announced, “that this dumb-ass fellow named Tommy Novaqirq the other night shot at a neighbor’s dogs, and now Sedna is not happy, my friends, she is not happy. And there’s a freakin’ outrageous blizzard moving in on Hudson Bay from the northwest, my friends. It’s gonna blow the asshole out of a polar bear. It’s gonna wail louder than Hendrix doing the national anthem at Woodstock. It’s gonna tear into Inuit territories and have a wild time of it. So thanks a lot, Tommy Novaqirq—and I mean, if you weren’t such a fantastic drummer . . .”

  “Oh shit, Tommy’s famous for a bad reason,” Peter said.

  We were laughing like crazy. And as we listened to more of this radio riff on the relationship between human misjudgment and a threatening weather system, of the sort we’d heard dozens of times before, suddenly the radio seemed to go dead. Silence. Then Gabriel emitted a sharp, sobbing intake of breath and said, “My friends in the northern world.” He stopped again. You could hear him trying to catch his breath. There were some weird sounds in the background, too, as if somebody was breaking a table or chair, a furious ransacking. Then Gabriel said, “My friends, John Lennon was murdered tonight in the city of New York in the USA.” There was another long silence. Then: “John Lennon was gunned down. John Lennon is gone.”

  I imagined this radio message physically manifesting itself as a net floating out into the black sky full of the vastest array of stars visible from Earth.

  It took less than half an hour for the band to gather in my room—Tommy, Peter, the new guitarist named Sam Karpik, and William Okpik, a guitarist and keyboardist. They all sat in fold-out slat chairs and plugged their guitars into amplifiers attached by extension cord to an auxiliary generator. Tommy set up his drum kit. Gabriel Alikatuktuk, in his studio, started playing John Lennon song after John Lennon song with no commentary at all. Nanook the Gook jammed along with the radio. And while I did not think to write down all the titles, I do recall that during the first three or four songs played, the words were distinctly accompanied by Tommy’s fits of sobbing. Plus, everyone was getting very drunk on whiskey. At one point Tommy said, “I’m such a fuck-up,” and went off on a berserk drum solo that must have lasted ten or fifteen minutes, all the while screaming, “Sedna—pleeeze, Sedna—pleeeze!”
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  “You can’t be thinking that shooting at those dogs had anything to do with what happened down in New York,” I said.

  Tommy kicked over the drum set, threw the drumsticks at my face, and walked over and took a halfhearted swing at me, which I easily blocked, and then he sat on the floor. “What the fuck do you know about it,” he said.

  The long Arctic night continued to unfold, with whiskey, cigarettes, the radio, and very little talking. Every once in a while I’d tune in another long-distance station on the shortwave. The death of John Lennon was being talked about in so many languages it was mindboggling. It was a murder translated everywhere.

  If I remember correctly, Gabriel Alikatuktuk was broadcasting from Winnipeg. Some years later, and with no small amount of inquiry by letter, I was able to obtain a copy of Gabriel’s playlist of that night. It was typed on a manual typewriter: “Cold Turkey,” “I Found Out,” “Mother,” “Hold On,” “Working Class Hero,” “God,” “Imagine,” “Crippled Inside,” “Jealous Guy,” “It’s So Hard,” “I Don’t Want to Be a Soldier,” “Give Me Some Truth,” “Oh, My Love,” “How Do You Sleep?” “Oh Yoko!,” “New York City,” “Mind Games,” “I’m Sorry,” “One Day (at a Time),” “Bring On the Lucie,” “Intuition,” “Out of the Blue,” “Only People,” “I Know (I Know),” “You Are Here,” “Meat City,” “Going Down on Love,” “Whatever Gets You Through the Night,” “What You Got,” “Bless You,” “Scared,” “No. 9 Dream,” “Surprise, Surprise (Sweet Bird of Paradox),” “Steel and Glass,” “Beef Jerky,” “Nobody Loves You (When You’re Down and Out),” and “(Just Like) Starting Over.”