Northern Exposure Redux

Long before I headed north to live, I enjoyed watching the TV series Northern Exposure, set in the fictional town of Cicely, Alaska. Cicely was an isolated community of colorful characters and misfits, who even in their eccentricities managed to form a supportive bond with each other. Now that I live in these northern latitudes, all I have to do is look around to find those same kind of unique individuals that entertained a television audience with 110 episodes over a period of five years.

There is of course, Eric’s Garage in Kitwanga where the same group of guys have been meeting for coffee twice a day for years. Then there is “Chris the Swiss” who lives just down the road from the garage. He came to Canada from Switzerland 58 years ago but still speaks with a Germanic accent. He has lived in Kitwanga for 38 years, raised his kids here… “But they’ve all moved away” and his wife is gone. He has a barn and a few cows, “It’s something to get me up in the morning,” he says with a shrug. He also butchers wild game for people and runs a backhoe for hire, which he used to dig the water line that runs from our creek to the water turbine. Every time he sees us he waves a hand in friendly greeting.

Then there was Ken, the 7-feet-plus Jack-of-all-trades. I say “was” because sometime during our cross-country trip this fall, he closed shop and left town. In his mid-fifties, he had done a little bit of everything; lived on a sailboat in the Desolation Sound, did some logging and panned for gold. He was well spoken and bright. He owned – or managed – the Bulldog Towing Company, auto salvage, truck repair, used car sales, and the local U-Haul franchise. Used car sales sounds a bit grand for the tiny row of five cars in varying degrees of decrepitude that used to line the chain link fence. They were a lot like what we used to call “island cars.” They didn’t look too good – a little rust here and there – but they ran, most of the time anyway. Ken and his employee, “The Mexican,” salvaged auto parts from wrecked cars and used them to fix up old clunkers. When they got one up and running, it went into the “Used Car Lot.” It could take up to a year of salvaging parts to get one car ready, but time doesn’t mean a whole lot here.

“Dumpster Dan” isn’t here any more either. He used to oversee the public dump just outside of town. A small man with dark eyes and hair, he had a wonderful French-Canadian accent, and his dog loved to chase after the eagles, ravens, and rats that competed over the piles of refuse. “Dumpster Dan” is either in jail or on the lam – depending upon whom you talk to at any given time. Either way, it doesn’t look good.

Then there was the obituary I spotted in The Northern Connector – a free newspaper that arrives in our mailbox once a week. We usually use it for fire starter, but this time I opened it and saw a headline that read, “Northwest loses a character as Mighty Moe passes away.” Mighty Moe, whose real name was Maurice Beaudoin, was born in 1934 in Swastika, Ontario. (Yes, there really is such a place. It was named after the Swastika Gold Mine staked in the autumn of 1907.) He got into acting at an early age “after an injury hampered his ability to do school work.” No mention of the kind of injury, or where he did his acting. The article continues, “While living in Ontario he trapped and was a prospector before joining the merchant marine in the 1950s, a career that took him around the Great Lakes.” From there he came to northern B.C. to work in an asbestos mine in the Cassiar region, then bought a trap line, and slowly got into the tourism business at Cotton Lake. “Officially it is known as Cotton Lake. But to the man who lived beside the lake just off Hwy37 north of Dease Lake for years it was Lac de Mighty Moe and the resort he ran was Mighty Moe’s Place.” I guess he was quite the promoter… when speaking about an event that was to take place at the resort, he admitted, “It’s really just the second one but I call it the 10th annual canoe race because people take it more seriously.” After 25 years at Mighty Moe’s Place, he moved permanently to Terrace in the mid-1990s when he, “lost his resort through circumstances never fully explained.” But that didn’t stop him from promoting tourism. “For several years, Beaudoin camped out at the highway rest stop between Terrace and New Remo, decorating his aging blue pick-up truck in flags and stuffed animals. There he’d talk to tourists…” until the Dept. of Transportation blocked off the entrance to the rest stop. His final years were spent at the Willows Apartment Complex, but he still drove around town in his pick-up and dropped in often at the Happy Gang Centre (Senior Citizen Center). Oh yes, and he briefly hired himself out as a male stripper. (Mighty Moe photo credit: Dustin Quezada/The Northern Connector)

Latest local news? The Kitwanga Coffee Cup has hired a “Pastry Chef” from Kansas. Northern Exposure redux? Of course, I guess that makes us part of the cast of characters too.

... P. L. Morningstar
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