One Snowflake in a Blizzard

It’s easy to feel isolated on this Backroad when a heavy snowfall dumps a foot-and-a-half of snow overnight making our road impassable for several days, and an Arctic outflow sends the temperature plummeting to –11 degrees Fahrenheit (-40 with wind chill factor). We have no telephone lines, no cell phone towers, and our emergency battery/hand-crank radio receives only one station, CBC Radio One. When we turn on the radio and hear nothing but static, we know the power is off in Kitwanga, knocking even CBC off the air. So much for the emergency capabilities of our radio to keep us informed! Our satellite connection to the Internet is our lifeline, our connection to the rest of the world out there… especially now. After the big snowfall, I strapped on snowshoes to trudge a short distance to our satellite dish to dust off the accumulation of snow. I stepped onto the snow and immediately sank 18-inches into the soft, powdery stuff. My progress to and from the cabin looked more like a ploughed trench than a snowshoe trail. But we got back online and I uploaded new postings to our two blogs. It is times like this that I begin to wonder if anyone is even reading what Bob and I write. Are we just throwing words into the wind? The communication pipeline is filled with news, entertainment, information of every sort, millions and millions of websites, chat rooms and personal blogs. Unless someone posts a comment or sends an e-mail, we have no way of knowing if what we are putting out there is worth the effort; or if our words are lost, only to accumulate on the Worldwide Web with all the others. Not unlike one small snowflake in a blizzard - a blizzard of words and images.

... P. L. Morningstar
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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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Tracking

Today turned out to be a bright, sunny day so in the afternoon we decided to go for a walk and see if we could find evidence of the wolf and moose that we had seen yesterday. It had been relatively warm yesterday but was now several degrees below freezing so we really weren't sure what we would find.

First we found the distinct tracks of the moose where it had crossed the meadow in front of the cabin. Then out on the edge of the road we found wolf tracks. Big guy, at least 5 inches across on the fore paws. Most probably the wolf we had seen last year that Morningstar photographed, and the one we caught a quick glimpse of yesterday. We followed the mixed prints west along the backroad and eventually found where each had come out of the woods and finally gone their separate ways back into the woods.

Then we passed the spot in the road where a beaver and the road maintenance crew have been going head to head. Last fall the beaver dammed a culvert that runs under the backroad, creating a nice little lake that covered a good portion of the road. The road crew came along and cleared out the culvert. The beaver rebuilt his dam… water covered the road again. The road crew came back – put a metal grate across the culvert. Even better for the beaver. This continued until we left on a two-month road trip across the country, so we had no idea of what we would find today. Well, it looks like the beaver is winning the battle. He is on the other side of the road now and there is evidence of his recent work – fresh chips, and pointy stumps. In the spring when the snow melts, I’ll bet water will once again cover the road.

On the way back we decided to look in on our own beavers at the pond adjacent to the cabin. We didn’t see any activity, but we did discover more wolf tracks, crossing the ice near the beaver lodge and continuing into the woods directly behind our cabin. Now we have a better idea about what has been holding Yu-Ling's attention at the back window these last few nights.

... Bob Weimer

Moose Track

Wolf tracking Moose...

The Cabin

The moment I saw this cabin, sitting at the end of a dirt track that curved across an open meadow. I knew this was home. Nestled in a grove of evergreen, it was dwarfed by the jagged peaks of the Seven Sisters Mountain, four of which are over 8,200 feet. Bob and I looked at each other and agreed, “This is it!”

The cabin was hand built in 1987 by a recently arrived immigrant from Germany. He came with his young wife and two small children. It took him two years to complete the cabin. It seemed that he was in no hurry, explaining to us that fishing, hunting, trapping, and exploring always got in the way of work. I’m not sure his little family felt quite so cavalier. During the warmer months they lived in a tent, and during the winter they lived in a nearby vacant cabin that someone had offered to them out of concern for the children. Talking with the children who are now young adults, there are undisguised bitter feelings about their early years of isolation and hardship. In spite of that, anyone seeing the cabin can appreciate that it is a labor of love and craftsmanship. It is built with cedar logs selectively cut from the local forest. The method used for joining the logs is called Swedish cope because of its origin. The log bottoms are cupped with a gutter adze and trimmed along scribed lines so that each log fits snugly upon the log below. This construction is very sturdy and provides an airtight seal that sheds moisture extremely well.

The two-story cabin’s inside measurements are 20-feet by 24-feet, for a total of 960 square feet. The large open room downstairs serves as kitchen, dining, and living room, with our bed tucked into the back corner, and a partial wall that provides privacy for the bathroom with claw foot tub. The upstairs room that once was the children’s domain has become our work area and library. There are windows everywhere, giving us views of mountains, meadow, and forest. The first summer we were here, I sat at the writing desk that looked out over the meadow and watched as a black bear climbed into the crabapple tree, balancing on multiple branches and stretching to reach apples at the end of spindly tips. Amazing – such balance and agility – but there was also a very surprised look on his face when he fell out of the tree with a resounding thump!

The second-floor stair opening measures only 30-inches by 22-inches, which presented a problem when we had six big pieces of furniture to move up there. Solution? We took out the front windows on the second floor, hung a heavy duty pulley and line over the top beam, attached one end of the line to a sling that held the piece of furniture, the other end was tied to the trailer hitch on the Jeep. Bob stood on a ladder to guide the furniture past the log butts and I was at the wheel of the Jeep. Together we successfully got the furniture upstairs, although a little surgery was required to get the loveseat through the window.

Interior view of cabin.

Ooops!

A little surgery is required.