I Hate to Leave This Beautiful Place

by Howard Norman

  Nanook the Gook left the stockroom of the Hudson’s Bay Company store at about seven-thirty the following morning. Gone sleepless, by eight I was again working with Lucille Amorak. She had been suffering from pneumonia, which had been diagnosed at the small hospital in Churchill; Edward Shaimaiyuk had flown her there and back. Edward was given antibiotics and told how to administer them to Lucille.

  As a result of her condition, Lucille was noticeably short of breath and occasionally wheezy, which infused her renditions of “I Hate to Leave This Beautiful Place,” as I had come to refer to it, with a punctuated sense of urgency, sentence by sentence—at least that is how it sounded to me on the tape recordings. When she raised her voice for emphasis, or when she shifted into one character or another, she often had to clear her throat and sometimes stopped to catch her breath. She occasionally had to stop for a nap in the middle of a work session. It got to the point where Lucille simply could not continue, even at severely reduced hours. But it was enough. I was fortunate to have a lot of help with the transcription and translation from her husband and two nieces, who went over the story and the vocabulary lists. Finally, on December 21, we closed up shop.

  But that morning of December 9, the world seemed haunted by radio, as the CBC, the BBC, and stations out of Vancouver, Amsterdam, London, Buffalo, and other locales continued to report the aftermath of John Lennon’s murder and played his songs. I asked Lucille Amorak if she had ever heard of John Lennon, and she said, “I heard about him from Peter. He played me some songs. He sang me some songs. I asked if this John Lennon would be visiting us, and Peter said no, he wouldn’t be.”

  Before I left Eskimo Point, Peter announced that he needed to get down to New York and stand for a while in Central Park near the Dakota apartment building where John Lennon had been shot, “maybe even find some people to play Lennon songs with.” He had never been to a Canadian city before, let alone out of the country. He had gotten hold of a map of New York from the library in Churchill and drawn a circle around Central Park.

  The ability of Nanook the Gook to make a living was restricted by the long winters—people in the far north didn’t travel much until late spring. Still, the band made a little money, and Tommy had previously saved some—“not much, but enough” to sponsor his journey to New York. I did not know the nature of his finances in detail, but he had his mind made up. Tommy had asked the rest of the band to go with him, but nobody else had any interest, and this caused a rift. I was scheduled to leave from Churchill on the Muskeg Express to Winnipeg; I knew that weather interfered with the train schedule and was prepared to wait at the Churchill Hotel. I remember hearing Peter say, “Sedna is really pissed off these days, eh?” Anyway, I was willing to sleep high up off the ground in the hotel.

  But the day before Edward flew me to the Churchill landing strip—a brief jaunt for him, really—Peter insisted that I walk with him about a quarter mile out of Eskimo Point to a frozen marsh. It was cold as hell and I was fighting off the flu and hadn’t thought it too wise to accompany him, but he was carrying his electric guitar and a small amplifier with a battery wrapped in packing material to protect it from the cold, so my curiosity was up. I had no earthly idea what he had in mind and did not ask.

  When we reached the marsh, a few ravens flew off and I looked out toward the center of an iced-over open area and saw a snowy owl; it was a big owl and did not move at all, except for a slight flutter of its wings and a subtle head-bobbing, its eyes not blinking but opening and closing with signal mysteriousness. The owl was almost camouflaged by the snow and snow light. Nonetheless, once you saw it, you could glance away and locate it again, because it had not moved an inch.

  No words were exchanged between Peter and me. He removed the battery from its wrapping, set the wrapping down on the frozen ground, and put the battery on top. He plugged the guitar into the amp and the amp into the battery. He tuned up and made the guitar whine and echo, and he sang the opening bars of “Whatever Gets You Through the Night,” and I mean blasting it out over the tundra. Amid the piercing music the owl shifted only slightly and tucked its head deep into its breast and closed its eyes. This struck me as sad and comical and another of those things I cannot put words to.

  “. . . through the night, all right, all right.” Peter had a voice that made Bob Dylan seem like Pavarotti, but what did it matter? With desperate, joyful abandon he shouted, “I got my Eskimo freak on!”—wildly gyrating in classic rock-star style, wailing. He was torn up inside, is what I thought. And I had never seen, up to then or since, tears actually fly from someone’s face. When he finished the song, in an exaggerated way he bowed to the owl and said to me, “I’ve played for this fellow eight or ten times, you know.”

  I had heard that for well over a year Gabriel Alikatuktuk blamed the worst Arctic storms on Mark David Chapman, the sick creep who had murdered John Lennon, though he continued his tradition of blaming Inuit people for trespasses and violations, too. (In fact, it was on his radio broadcast that I first heard assertions about air pollution causing climate change, which agitated Sedna almost beyond imagining.) I never saw Peter again, but did learn that he eventually made his way to New York in December of 1981, in time for the first anniversary of John Lennon’s death, and got to play Lennon songs with musicians and singers in Central Park across from the Dakota. Edward said that his son had “got all caught up” in the city for the rest of that winter. Early in the summer of 1982, Peter had traveled by bus and apparently for days on foot to Flin Flon, Manitoba, and from there his father flew him back home to Eskimo Point. Edward said that almost immediately upon his son’s return, “spirits started using him.” I did not understand the full context of that phrase, but I knew it referred to malevolence. The way Edward put it was, “Peter was done in.”

  Though I once entertained the idea of writing a musician’s biography of Peter, the fact is that for years I had no notion of his situation or his whereabouts, nor did I seek any of it out. I can only claim the slightest knowledge of his life after I saw him play “Whatever Gets You Through the Night” on that bone-chilling bright day outside of Eskimo Point. But when I returned to that village a few years later, one of Peter’s cousins suggested that I walk to the old Eskimo cemetery and find Peter’s grave. Naturally I did that. On his grave marker, a simple wooden cross, with his name and the years of his birth and death, it read: Nobody Told Me There’d Be Days Like These.

  I ended up writing a reminiscence based on journals I had kept in the late 1970s when I was working in Churchill, Manitoba, and had met one of the most inimitable personages in my life, a woman named Helen Tanizaki; the book was called In Fond Remembrance of Me. Helen introduced me to many of the things that have sustained me since: Japanese literature; an appreciation of the way the skewed order of events and uncanny narrative strategies and —wildness of incident in Arctic folktales—organized one’s emotions in a different way than Western, beginning-middle-end stories did; and the habit of keeping a notebook and journal, which may sound obvious but wasn’t to me at the time. And Helen was the first person I had ever known who was tossed and turned by self-inflicted theosophical arguments—a mixture of Buddhism and what she called “handmade” theories of predestination and the afterlife, things like that. She didn’t have much longer to live—she had stomach cancer when I knew her—and spoke of her haunted preoccupations with an honesty and directness I had not previously experienced. I don’t want to sentimentalize our few months of proximity to each other—she was working in translation, too, at a much higher level than I was capable of—and I tried very hard to tell things straightforwardly in In Fond Remembrance of Me—but forty-some years later, her belligerent and graceful sensibility and her spiritual intensity provide a template for what is possible in a life.

  You might say that my time in the Arctic was an apprenticeship, for writing and thinking and even for attempting to keep certain aspects of the past as close at hand as humanly possible.

  In late spring of 1
981, I went to yet another Eskimo village, Pangnirtung, in the Northwest Territories, to record folktales. Suffice it to say that I was pleased to have the employment, given the fact that I still had no career to speak of and was financially at loose ends. My Pangnirtung notebook was titled “Horizon/Fear,” because the stories I worked with there were about threatening entities—horrendous spirits, malevolent weather, terrifyingly strange beasts—appearing on the horizon. Simply put, the repertoire of spirit beings seen on the horizon in those folktales was truly prodigious and disturbing.

  What was especially breathtaking in these stories were the currents of anxiety, the intensification of panic, and the acceleration of events that were caused by the first sighting of such harrowing spirits.

  In one folktale, when a ten-legged polar bear is seen on the horizon, a number of marriages suddenly take place. In another tale, when it is determined that a giant ice worm is navigating toward a village, a number of murders are committed, all in a single night. In yet another, when the horizon roils up dark clouds that speak in vetriloqual echoes—that is, the clouds seem to be speaking from places other than the ones they are occupying—a number of pregnancies are abbreviated and children are born months before they otherwise naturally would—healthy children born into a world in extremis. In another folktale, a spirit being with arms that look like awls is reported to be traveling toward a village. In hearing this news, most everyone living there falls victim to a kind of radical arrhythmia—not only do people’s heartbeats suddenly accelerate and then just as suddenly become alarmingly slow, but hearts literally “toss people about the village” as if a wind were blowing from inside their bodies.

  Eventually I translated eight of these “Horizon/Fear” stories, but as it turned out, I left Pangnirtung before my assigned linguistic work was completed—for two reasons.

  First—and such an experience is difficult to describe—the stories got to me. Their plots began to take hold of me beyond all my powers of resistance, to the point where I began consciously to avoid looking at the actual horizon—just while walking between houses, for instance. It takes a great deal of willfulness, or fear, to not look at the horizon in an Arctic landscape, especially in a place like Pangnirtung, with its harbor containing flotillas of newly formed ice in all their sculpted shapes and sizes, out where dark birds disappear, where the light shifts its tones hourly, where whale geyser-spumes hang in wavering columns of mist for up to ten minutes after the whales pass by, like signatures composed on the air. One probably should not be in a place like Pangnirtung if one does not wish to take in the horizon, is the conclusion I came to. The horizon, where the rest of the beautiful world resides. Avoid that, and you start to go too far into yourself.

  The second and far more compelling reason I fled Pangnirtung was that, during what turned out to be my final week there, I experienced a number of exceedingly unpleasant, often physically violent run-ins with an angakok—a shaman. The world of Arctic shamans has enough ethnographic complexities to fill volumes; still, it has to be experienced to be believed. This particular fellow did not have a name, at least I never heard him called by one. He was perhaps fifty or fifty-five, stocky, with a face deeply lined both latitudinally and longitudinally, especially in certain precincts of his forehead. He had a gouged, almost grotesquely cauliflowered left ear and dark reddish-brown skin with splotches of lighter brown, each of which seemed to have been outlined in ash. His right eye was filmed over. To put it directly, he cut an alarming figure.

  He had a habit—or a scare tactic—of uttering a phrase first in Inuit, then in broken French, then in English, all more or less sotto voce, as if speaking to two other people who resided inside himself. He wore boots with no laces, frayed thick trousers, two shirts under two sweaters, all beneath a parka. He had lots of snowy-owl feathers haphazardly festooning his hair (as if transforming himself from an owl into a human being, or vice versa), which was filthy and matted. He also wore a kind of necklace that consisted of half a dozen small transistor radios tied together with twine. (I remember thinking back to Edward Shaimaiyuk’s vigilance concerning the possibility of radio waves netting his plane. I even—and I realize now this thought contained no small measure of myth-based paranoia—wondered whether this angakok was one of Sedna’s lackeys.)

  This angakok hated me from the get-go; it was impossible not to comprehend this. How did I know? Because when we first encountered each other in front of the village’s convenience store, he said, “I hate you.” I may well have been a surrogate for every Caucasian who ever set foot in Pangnirtung throughout history, and could fully understand that anger. Still, this was our first exchange.

  From the moment he had arrived in Pangnirtung (“from somewhere out on the horizon,” as one of my hosts put it), he took my presence as a portent of severe weather—and possibly of starvation—in the offing. He immediately began to speak of me in this light. He loudly declared his indictments in front of the convenience store, somewhat in the manner of a crazy person on a city street declaring the end of the world. He smoked cigarette after cigarette (he chewed and spit out the butts) and rattled his transistor radios. I was told by more than one citizen of Pangnirtung not to take his actions personally, but how could I not? Such in-your-face assaults cannot be made less frightening by placing them in the context of historical rage—at least I was not capable of that. It was all expert psychodrama and left me shaken to the core.

  “This fellow hates anyone who isn’t Inuit,” an elderly woman told me. “And he hates most Inuit people, too.” Hardly a comfort, but at least it clarified things a bit.

  Some people advised me to try to ignore him; others suggested that I leave on the next mail plane out. Both made sense. My host family was kind, generous, and provided a comfortable room to sleep in, but I definitely understood my outsider status—this wasn’t new to me. Generally speaking, after this angakok arrived, the village went about its daily business, except that this raving maniac was there. On a number of occasions I saw him standing near the counter of the convenience store, windmilling his arms, shouting incomprehensible things (though maybe not incomprehensible to the spirit world) in a language that only in part consisted of Inuit, or even French or English, words.

  On other occasions I would see him standing off to one side of the store, smoking a cigarette or a pipe, scrutinizing me. And one time he shouted, “You have to eat food. I eat weather.” This strange locution imposed the same kind of arrhythmia on me that I had heard about in one of the “Fear/Horizon” folktales, or at least that’s what it felt like. I had to get out of there fast.

  I wanted to fulfill the terms of my employment, though, and had to deal with this fellow in some way, so one day I walked up to him and said, “Leave me alone. I’m not here much longer anyway.” His response was to turn on every one of the transistor radios, which seemed in good working order, but because we were in Pangnirtung, far out of all but shortwave radio range, all he could produce was static. Therefore his necklace became an orchestra of hisses and scratches. Then he stubbed his cigarette out against the shoulder of my coat.

  “There is another world, but it is in this one,” wrote the French poet Paul Éluard. With this angakok, I definitely was in another world. I could hardly claim any deep knowledge of Pangnirtung, but I did know that throughout the Arctic people believed that shamans were capable of causing illnesses, and in turn were paid to demonstrate their ability to cure those illnesses—a perverse strategy that had apparently worked for centuries. I could see that the angakok harassing me was indeed respected, or at least feared, for proven reasons; he scared the hell out of me. One other thing I knew was that angakoks often had a direct line of communication to the spirit world. In other Arctic communities I had witnessed elderly people paying shamans to petition certain presiding spirits for luck and good health, and to deliver family news to ancestors in the land of the dead.

  I tried another scheme. I approached my nemesis, who was smoking his pipe near the conven
ience store, and offered to pay him to fly to the moon and stay there until my work was done. I was told by three different people that this particular angakok was quite capable of flying to the moon.

  He jammed his thumbs up into my nostrils and pushed me so hard that I stumbled backwards. This was shockingly painful. I took this to mean that my request had been denied. He said, “You walk backwards well. Why not walk backwards home now.” I told him that my home was thousands of miles away. He said, “Start now before the bad weather.” Later I was told by a bystander that I had misinterpreted what the angakok had muttered. What he actually said was, “Start now before I bring in bad weather.”

  In Pangnirtung I worked with storytellers in the morning and spent the afternoons transcribing tapes, getting help with vocabulary, filling notebooks, and walking around town and its outskirts. I especially enjoyed visiting the cemetery, where simple white crosses were bowed daily by wind off the sea. Every time I visited late in the afternoon, I saw an elderly woman dressed in winter bundling who would walk from cross to cross, setting them upright again, tapping them down with a hammer.

  Though I never asked, I assumed this was her daily task, perhaps self-appointed. What is more, she was the only Inuit person I had seen being accosted by the angakok. I observed him walk up to her in the cemetery, mumble something, and push her down. She rose to her feet and spit at him. This struck me as a scenario borne through the ages—it could have happened a hundred years ago, or two hundred, or a hundred years from that afternoon, a timeless confrontation with no discernible reason behind it, though I did not know what personal history there was between the old woman and the angakok, nor whether it had anything to do with her association with the Christian cemetery. No matter. This angakok was a nasty piece of work. He had arrived at Pangnirtung a menace and built on that daily. I saw this unfold.