Realities; 9; The Idea of North

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I'm sorry of Tundra and Tiger countries, they call it, which constitutes the Arctic and sub -artic of Canada. I've read about it, written about it occasionally, and even pulled up my parko once and gone there. But like all, but a very few Canadians, I guess I've had no direct confrontation with the Northern Third of our country. I've remained a necessity and outsider, and the North has remained for me a convenient place to dream about, spin tall tales about sometimes, and in the end, avoid. This program, however, brings together some people who have had a rather direct experience of the North who lived and worked there one time or another, and in whose lives the North has played a very vital role. There's a geographer and anthropologist named Jim Lotz. There's a government official, Bob Phillips. There's a sociologist, Frank Valley, and a nurse, Betty Ann Schrader. There's also a fifth character, and there in lies a story. I'm a bit of a railway buff, I guess, and I've always been fascinated

with the stories that are told about one of the most celebrated trains in Canadian railway law. The train that's called the Muscage Express runs from Winnipeg Manitoba to Hudson's Bay to Port Churchill in Hudson's Bay. In fact, a thousand, fifteen miles, two nights a day, like eight box cars, three coaches, two sleepers, lounge, and diner, I suppose. And a couple years ago, I struck out a conversation with a man who was something of an intimate of this train, his name was WV McLean, but he's more affectionately known as Wally along the line at all the sightings where his bunk car gets parked. Wally McLean is a surveyor, and in the course of a day -long conversation where he first met, he tried to explain to me the metaphorical significance as he saw it of his profession. He sort of parlayed surveying into a literary tool in the same way that Pargolui Borger manipulates mirrors and finds Kafka badgers beetles. And as he did so, I realized that his relation to this craft which has, as it's subject, the land enabled him to read the signs of the land and enabled him to find within the particular a suggestion of the infinite and

vice versa, I suppose. So when we got around to organizing this program and to trying to correlate the views of our other guests, I asked Wally McLean to serve as our narrator and to tell us just how in his view we could best attain an idea of North. Well, the only way I see this happening is in an extended ride north. When I say that, I mean a long time ago, terrible, trying, trip, perhaps to Churchill. By way of Thompson going and coming, past Ilford and Gillam this long, almost trans -Siberian experience that we now

face. And for those that face it perhaps for the first or second or third time, there's almost a traumatic experience. They feel awe. This is going to become impossible. It may not be now, but it's going to become. And yet they're able to do little or nothing about it. What, finally, you ask, is Dona -Moz? Well, here's my guess. What really happens is this. The train is about to leave the pa, say, a specific point. And if 510 miles away North and East is going to be Churchill a day later, and what does the person do on leaving the pa? Do you know what happens? He sits there in the daycoach. The news is just ahead of them. And these people, the conductor and the breakman and so forth who are accustomed to this are sort of making nothing of it. He sits there wondering, oh, this is going to be forever. It's already been a day. Now it's going to be

another day. And what about this one? Before long, he's going to have to, perhaps, say hello and, you know, pass the odd word to his fellow man. And indeed, it isn't long before, well, we've heard what he has to say, why, for the first time, he's going north with what? Well, with the army, with the Navy, with the Air Force, with these initials that he always throws at you, DPW, what's that? Oh, Department of Public Works. With DRNL, what's that? What is it? Defense, research, Northern, Lavard, Greece? What's that? Well, you're studying the Northern Lights then. Wow, wow, wow. Now you can listen for a while. Because why do any of us know about the Northern Lights? Well, like, I think quite a large number of

people who end up in the North, I sort of got there by mistake. I strayed in there. I think my first attempt to go north was when during a summer vacation when I was at university in England, I thought about going to Iceland, not too sure why. And instead, because I made a mistake about the fair, I end up in Morocco. I'm a jogger for by training, and I have this belief you see that jogger as a people who have no sense of direction, just as sociologists to people who don't like society and economists are people who can't really manage their own money. Though some evidence in the North indicates they have a pretty good time with the public purse. I came to Canada after I'd been in West Africa for a year. I came to Canada again, my so many other immigrants, because I couldn't get a job in England. I came to Ottawa to place my services at the disposal of the federal government, and the federal government had other ideas. So after working in a few dead -end jobs in Ottawa, advertising and coffee -writing and all things, I applied to McGill and was encouraged to go north to the McGill

Separatic Research Laboratory to do some field work for the thesis. The thesis was on soils and agricultural possibilities in the Nauble Lake area. Be cute. There isn't a great deal of soil, and as far as I can make out there are no agricultural possibilities. This is what's known as negative evidence in science. And I began to get the impression that the North is a land of very narrow, very thin margins. Man, of course, is a biological and probability of the best of times. If you wanted to design something that could live on this earth, you wouldn't design a man. And in the North, in many respects, we're at our sort of greatest and our most protest. He's sitting there sort of away from the madding crowd that's standing up and down the aisles, and actually he's trying to sort of isolate himself because, in fact, shortly, he will be isolated for a long period of time in the lonely north. Just about the time that I was finishing off my thesis on Nauble

Lake, the phone rang, and Dr. Spendoorvik, then with the Department of Geography at McGill, asked me if I'd like to go north on an Arctic expedition. And, of course, being English, I said yes. There are several traditions of Arctic expeditions. The English tradition is where everybody puts 50 pounds in the part and, sort of, highest husky dogs from Greenland, and it was on Boveral and Ogletine and this sort of thing. And then there's the American tradition where you have a massive before operations report, and a massive after operations report, but very little in the middle, I was to undergo an American Arctic expedition, and I used the term undergo as of an operation, advisedly. So, Spendoorvik, for me, I said, do you want to go on an Arctic expedition? And I said, well, certainly. And I was even, sort of, tickled to death, to find out that we're going to pay me for this. Memory, of course, tends to cast a call over our worst and best experiences, but looking back at this, this is one of the experiences of my life. A group of men isolated each trusting the other, and each respecting the other. A small community in isolation.

And it's not just, sort of, touch to the old nostalgia. It's a feeling of having participated in something very meaningful, personally and professionally. You know, when the young fellow told me that it was taking off, I forget what he was taking, probably philosophy. He said, this was the myth of Cicifus. As a matter of fact, he list, but I didn't, I think. And the fact is that he had quite a time with it, and here was some wretched, who was it, a king? Was it a king? Yes. A king of Greece, a prince? Well, it might have been a prince. And here he was, rowing this confounded rock up to the top of this precipice for some reason or other. Then he let gravity take over, and there it hit the bottom. Then he did the same thing again, no doubt with a larger rock. I went back to the North with an American expedition to Northern Ireland. This was to the ice shelf of Northern Ireland, even further north than I'd been

in 57 and 58. Now, this was a fairly ghastly experience. I always remember that on the Canadian expedition, we'd eaten dried meats and this sort of thing, and we'd enjoyed ourselves, you know. Somebody says, well, you know, when you go on these active expeditions, don't you start missing women? Well, after about the first month, then you start talking about food. Remember once I had American private first class with me as an assistant, at least I think he was working for me, and they dropped one of the tracks, and they also very kindly dropped us some lettuce and tomatoes, and I said, my goodness, look at this. French vegetables, and he said, no salad dressing. Anyhow, the whole thing was a shambles and a mess. The scientific results were minimal. The whole experience was rather frustrating and disagreeable. Of course, it may have been me, I accept this about the North, and I was worried about whether it's you, or whether it's the country, the other people. Well, is this a surprise? No, it's no surprise at all. The person that makes the trip or off, and of course, is going to realize that before long, he's going to be up

against himself. Not against his fellow travelers, no. So much, but he's going to have to be up against his own sad self. I'd always sort of wanted to work with people in the North. And in 1960, I transferred to the Department of Northern Affairs and National Resources as a community planning officer the first thing I was asked to undertake was a study of the squatters of White Horse. These were a group of people who ultimately, at least in my own work, turned out to be a key to the way that the North is viewed in Canada and where the North can lay and has developed. Well, somehow the sameness of a trip in and a trip out is part of this endless feeling that we are up against this myth, this business of having to do things for no apparent reason. Fine, just say to yourself, well, which of these people I've seen now, am I going to

say hello to? Well, it isn't as though you've lasted that long. You said a lot of half a dime, maybe 15. But you had no intention to sort of establish what does that thing call it? Rappar, with anyone in particular. Now you find it necessary. Is that funny? You find it necessary? Why, in fact? Well, I did this study and I came back alive, shattering the myth of the wicked squatters who wouldn't talk to anybody from out of the way. Of course, they hate out of the North. They just loathe out of it. I guess my love affair with the North went back about all more than 15 years. I was in the East Block then, as a young officer in the Department of External Affairs. And in the course of my work, I'd gradually sort of bore into me. But Canadians were well, if not throwing away their North for a massive potage, at least being supremely oblivious to the responsibilities we had to the people there. And I suppose oblivious to the resources, the wealth that we could get from it. We just didn't care about the North. There was a great sort

of tyrannulious. And I got kind of frustrated about this and naturally more and more anxious that we and the government should do something about our responsibilities in the North. And I came back and came back alive and brought back the list of the people and from that time on I was entitled to call myself a Northern Expert. Again, the joke about the word expert being derived from two words, ex -meaning formally and spurred meaning a drip under pressure, is by no means inappropriate in the North. Really as a matter of fact, you can't talk about the North until you've got out of it. So the definition is not all that incorrect. Well, the end of 1953 was the beginning of the sort of administrative revolution in the North. Not everything started then. A lot of things had started before and a lot of things were far from starting. But at least there was the folks at the department and it was decided to make a new investment in the North. Well, then I did a series of what you call quick and dirty studies. I was up in a new Vic and I wrote a wrong report with a very large number of recommendations. Again, this is powerful, the course

in the North. You come from Ottawa, you go in the North, you write a report, you make a list of recommendations, you bring it back to Water and nobody pays any attention to it. It wasn't an easy decision. But eventually I decided that I would sit for a competition for a job in Northern Affairs. And therefore in 1954, on April Fool's Day if the truth were known, I moved over, changed my life as you might say, and then did something serious about the love affair with the North. In 1962 to 1966, I spent the summers in the Yukon. I mounted a Yukon research project, started wondering about the future of White Horse, started looking at the future of the Yukon. Then from there, the future of the North, the future of North America, and the future of the world, I sort of kind of stopped there. This brought me literally, oh blessed man, in contact with Buckminster Fuller. He had to tell somebody, this business, about his research and his hopes, and he's a young fellow and so forth and so on. You don't want to,

oh, smash his dream before it has dimensions, see? The world we're in, and certainly what sort of a world we're moving into. The other thing, of course, about the North, is it is a normal society that is a great stress laid on the messages past. Because he's got one of these social scientific minds. I feel embarrassed telling him or suggesting to him that there's something more than figures and quantitative things and measurable things that enter into the whole picture of how you get along with yourself, or if you get along with yourself. It seems to me that a man by the name of Pascal, years back, said that most of mankind's troubles would be over with, or done away with, if he would stay in his own room. At the time, I thought this was such a self -evident banal, a sort of, well, silly thing to say, that I gave it a little thought, but then

on looking back, perhaps after a few decades, I thought to myself, how indeed true this is. Can a man get along with himself, usually, in this solitary life of the Hermit North, or the solitary life of any place where he secludes himself? Well, I didn't think he was exempt of the Go North. Many people who knew me thought it was, they couldn't see my point at all. They didn't think it was a country for a woman, especially for a single woman, because they thought about the social life there and thought that when a woman reaches a certain age, she should be far more concerned, was trying to trap a man, then was making a career for herself, or was trying to face the world by herself. I think it takes a strong person to live in the North and really to be a part of it and to find satisfaction there. When you're living in the big city in the South, you can

always retreat when you fail in your relations with society, you can just go away, and nobody really knows the difference. You can't go away when you're in a little village, a thousand miles from nowhere, and a couple of weeks from the next plane, high in the Arctic. You can only live with the knowledge of many other people. You can say I'll take the weekend off and I'll go to the next motel, and I'm not a bit disturbed. This is impossible. It's all sorts of curious things happen. In some ways, you may have gone to the North to get away from society, and you'll find yourself far closer to it than you've ever been in your life. You know your neighbors intimately, you know each walk they take down that little 500 yard road. You know what their problems are because they're bound to talk to you about them and they don't, they'll go nuts, just as you will go nuts, when you don't talk. It just isn't possible to escape from gossip, for instance. We at Coral Harbor knew what was going on at Baker Lake or at Eskimo Points, or Drankin' and let's not buy official communication, but because it all came more or less, but a great point. It was absolutely

impossible to keep anything from anybody, even if we had a party then you had done in Winnipeg. And yet the kind of people you have chosen as your friends and associates in that particular village, and that sort of desert island of the North, if you like, are not people that you've really chosen at all. You get a conglomeration of white people in the North and you don't choose to live with them. You go there and you'll find them or they come and find you. Sometimes you'll find yourself rather pathetically perhaps persuading yourself that this is great. And you'll sit on a Saturday night and like kind of coach that you'll see in every village of the North from Baffin Island to McKenzie Delta. They're all identical in the government houses. And

you'll get in a sing song with a traitor and his wife and the priest or the other missionary, the policeman, and so on. And you'll sing the same sort of songs, whether in Baffin Island or the McKenzie Delta. And you'll exchange the same sort of gossip about so -and -so who's just moved from this story to that or Dr. So -and -so who's probably coming through in the next flight ten days and so on. And you convince yourself that this is really the life, that there's a kind of precious intimacy about all this. I didn't have to go to somebody in Coral and say, I'm lonesome or I'm depressed. I just had to go and visit them, play a game of chess, whatever they wanted to do. And right away there was a sense of sharing this life. What could realize the value of another human being? You're excluding the rest of the world that will never understand and you've made your own world with these other people. And probably what you will never know and what nobody else will ever know is whether you're kidding yourself or not. Have you really made your peace with these other people or have you made a peace

because the only alternative to the peace is a kind of cracker? I was in many respects solitary, but in a strange way the North has made me more sort of gregarious because the North does show you exactly how much rely on your fellow man and what the sense of community means, the sense of community in the North and making the South is a matter of life and death. North of 60, for instance, you start wondering about French Canadian, English Canadian, German Canadian, anything like that. You know, Canadians tell remember a friend of mine who was a very French Canadian separatist nationalist. Well, when he got lost in the North once, his rescue note was written in English. The thing about the North, of course, in personal terms, is that in the North, you feel it's so big, it's so vast, it's so immense, it cares

so little. And this sort of diminishes you. And then you think, my God, I am here. I've got here, I live here, I live, I breathe, I walk, I laugh, I have companion. I found that the wide open spaces concept, isn't quite what it's cracked up to be. Now, I felt that I had real walls around me. There weren't any out there, the walls were those of my own making. I felt cooped in in the wide open spaces, because I was so afraid to get lost. That the environment around me, while being fast from the physical sense, one could see theoretically for a thousand miles, there was nothing in the way to block your view, it was surrounded on each side by dangers, dangers, for instance, of getting lost. This was, to me, the biggest danger of all.

There's a wonderful cliche, which I hope, I may be forgiven for mentioning once more, that a nation is great only as long as it has a frontier. Now, we've got that frontier, other people are nostalgic, having to dip back a hundred years to find their frontier and to curiously become part of it. We've got it, and we, we have a very, very small percentage of our population who really take advantage of it in a specific physical way. But for a lot of the rest of us, it is a sort of frontier in much more than a physical sense. Now, this does something to the Canadian character. It means we've got a kind of civilization that does not conform to the rest of North America. Here is a place where non -conformists really can find a sort of haven, a very great deal of real estate where the non -conformists can live and flourish. The kind of person who goes to the North is rather odd, and if you're a smart, you'll go on looking for this

kind of odd person. I'm afraid it's not very romantic, you know, my wanting to go up there to find myself or to lose myself or all these various reasons that people give for going into the North. The fact that there in North gives them some extra cutles, I guess they feel what a sacrifice I'm making for Canada up here. But perhaps I'm a bit cynical. I don't go for this kind of stuff. But you do get a deliberate building up of a kind of cult of personality. You get lots of people attempting to create a style of their own to be known as characters. And this is wonderful. I'm all for it. And some people say, well, it's hypocritical. I don't know the heck with that. People should have styles. You get a lot of these old timers, especially. Well, I mind the time when I, you know, 40 days without food and so on. This becomes part of the front and the stance

that nothing can shake us. And we are down to earth people. And it's a cup of tea in your hand. And many of you stick your head in the door. And if I had a bottle of the last bottle and no plane coming in for six months, I'd still split this bottle with you. Because this is the way we are in the North. There's a lot of that going on. That is just some extent. The stereotype, all like most stereotypes, people get to believe that this is the way they are. Even if that's not the way they were when they first went in. They come to believe this, you know, pure and delo. And others point out you come to believe in your own role. Well, there's no question about this. But there's such a thing as being a hermit by choice rather than being a hermit sign necessity. Now, it all depends on whether you think that you are answering a challenge or escaping from yourself. Are you in fact escaping in any real way by retreating north or by retreating perhaps in any direction? You know, I like to think of

myself as part of Shakespeare's, what was that? Sweet are the uses of adversity, you see? I like to think that when I'm stuffed away up north and some for a long place, where there's not a section house, or there's not perhaps more than the odd wolf or dog team within a long distance, I like to think that I'm getting along with myself, not only that I'm getting along with myself, but that I understand the problems that are, or not the problems that I create, you see? I think we all create in our own problems and if we haven't got some to discuss, that we would sooner be kicked than remain unnoticed. Well, we're not going to sit. You know, the smell is...

It's very hot. How many people sit in the bus? It's the most awful place. There's very interesting photo in north, which showed children in Alaska on the Cusco Quim, looking at a television set for the first time, and what they were seeing on the television set were themselves. They had a closed circuit rigged up. I suppose, you know, in Einstein's term, is space is curved, and we ever get our eyesight up, or our missiles up, or our messages up. You know, maybe we'll sort of be seeing the back of our heads. I think this is part of the north. It's important, like with the gold seekers. I remember an old sweet who probably didn't have an even red -robert service, and he spread some gold out for me. They keep their little nuggets, and he said, take some gold, and I said, I can't take your gold. He says, no, he says, it's not the gold. He says, it's the find in

the gold. And I think the north is processed, the north is finding, and no, not so much finding, so much is seeking. My experience with the north has enriched me immeasurably. I've enjoyed it, I've liked it. I've done some very foolish things there. I suppose that any perceptive person who wanders about the north and gets to know the northerners a little bit is bound to have some of his old illusions shattered. If his illusions are based on the kind of romantic approach that we traditionally got from the books and the school room, the stories I mean about the lovely eskimos and their gleaming white egg loaves and how life is simple and unspoiled, unchanged, and so on. Well, that kind of life is really ugly, ugly, ugly. And you can't have all your illusions about the charming, old life when you go up and see the tuberculosis and when you see the wretched health conditions, the wretched living conditions and speakable sanitation.

When you see the racial distinctions between a sort of white master race and the lesser breeds that have always been kept just a little outside the law. I'm not blaming anybody for this. And my side blame is all collectively. But there's a lot in that romantic tradition that in my mind was pretty ugly, judged by today's standards. Yes, it did seem like a very romantic place to me and this was one of the reasons why I wanted to go north. Because considering a place romantic means that one doesn't know too much about it. I had read a great deal about it and it sounded very, very romantic to me. And I suppose in a way I wasn't influenced by this. And when I arrived, it was a cold September day. It was snowing in Coral Harbor and there was absolutely no one there to meet me. I stepped off the plane and then there were a number of rugged -looking men with beards wearing heavy pockets and

boots. And here was I, this frail little girl from Winnipeg who came to the north to help the Askemobs. And at that moment I think I was more in need of help than anyone else. I felt absolutely lost. I don't know. I think that it's something like marriage, I guess. A person who romanticizes or idealizes his girlfriend, right? And refuses to, quote, see reality as his parents say, but look, your teeth are falling, it's on. A person refuses to see this and insists on marrying the girl who discovers after a while that the parents were right, perhaps. And so he gets disenchanted, right? I must be out of my mind to come to this place. What will I do here? What is my purpose? Am I really doing the right thing? And that was a little shaken. I seriously contemplated going back on the plane and flying south. I was frightened by the

bleakness of the country and the vastness of it. There was just nothing around and that partially shattered my romantic illusions of the north. I've seen people who are disenchanted with the north simply withdraw and concentrate in some activity like collecting guns or stamps or whatever and sort of withdrawing into a cocoon and just going through the motions in almost a ritual way and seeing other people who have turned against their employers or against the government, for instance, and say, well, if it weren't for them, everything would be all right and hit out at Ottawa. That kind of thing. Other people turned against those that they came to help and would be stupid Eskimos, they're still in a stone age and so on and so on. You get this variety of reactions. And the most common one, of course, is simply to take off. Well, I think I'll try Africa or some other place where the people need me. When I came south, I felt I had it. I'd been at Coral Harbor for many months with all the break and this was just too much for me. I felt that I wasn't able to work effectively.

I just didn't want any part of the north any longer. But now, looking back on it, I think I would like to go north again. Because although there are many disadvantages, people do mean something there. You're just not one of so many who walk on the streets like in a big city. Sometimes I've been lonely or in a city than I ever was in the north. It's moved on in ugly ways. I'm not suggesting everything about the new life in the north is good. Heaven knows there are ugly problems. The alcoholism has talked about a lot. It's probably talked about more as a disease and a symptom. And it should be talked about as a symptom of the contradictions in society. Alcoholism has a lot to do with this sort of protest. The articulate protest of those whose voices were one sound about their place in life. That's ugly. We are moving

forward. When I was first associated with the administration of the north, one of our sort of heartbreaking tasks was to add up how many Canadian citizens had starved to death in that season. And we used to all keep a sort of chart in the wall of the starvation and hope to heavens that the curve would go down. Well, thank heavens with all the ugliness that there is in the north today. Let's remember that that chart is showing a downward curve. In fact, I think it's some years since we've had outright starvation in the north. But we used to say in the early days of the new administration that our work with an effect shows signs of success. One for the first time, an Eskimo stood up and said, no. First of all, it seems to me that in the north we're seeing one of the final planes

out of those two great dreams of man, Eldorada or Utopia. Both Eldorada and Utopia were always located in parts unknown. I mean, it's very difficult to sort of think of Utopia down in Toronto, for instance, with all two deference to Toronto. We know too much about it. We have too much of an understanding of the reality. But north of 60, it's still empty. It's still, in many ways, the land of the possible. And so we have the story of either a, the rich north, the vast treasure house of literature, which, you know, like making me in Dorothy Park has turned sort of full up. Or be the vast, great, empty, useless desert. To me, the north is so Canadian. André Seekreet mentioned this about a window on the future, potential future. He's writing in 1937, well before most Canadians walk up to the reality of the north. I've seen the shape of a possible future in the north, and quite frankly, it scares the hell out of me. I am indeed

a northern listener there. And the pity of it all is, I'm not always able to select what I want to hear. I hear what other people inflict upon me, you know, the noise, the noise of civilization, and its discontent. No matter what we do to try and escape, unless we select and understand and use what we hear, we are lost indeed. Not just lost listeners, but indeed lost people. I do believe that being able to select, I do believe that, and be able to reflect on that selection, makes you more than the mere analyst that most of us claim we are. You see, I think the world is ridden with analysts. I think it's agridden with self -appointed people that cut society apart and say, well, this part is worthless and this part is something else. In detaching and in reflecting and in listening,

I suppose I'm able to synthesize to have these different rails meet in the infinity that is our conscious hope. Let's not kid ourselves. The North isn't going to be made up in future years of gigantic plastic bubbles surrounding Arctic villages with a cloak of warm air. And it isn't going to be modeled on at least what's represented as pretty highly scientific, rational northern towns of the Soviet Union. It isn't going to have the sort of flow of economic life of an Alaska, which is so largely based on a defense industry. I think the North and the future is going to look appallingly like the rest of Canada, and that's great as far as I'm concerned. It's going to look like suburbia. All the things that we deplore about suburbia, the silly western ranch styles, I would think these towns, these communities, would be built for the maps, so not for the suburbs of Toronto is worth the communities or not,

not the present time. Once we get the jumbo jets, we get a few of the world's ill sorted out. I would expect that in the summer, the North would become the last outfield playground. It's going to be a good idea, which the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Governments pursuing that all of a sudden, all the wagons are going to line up along the 6th of the paddle out when they're going to have a land run. We're going to have to adapt from what's been developed for the rest of North America and the rest of the world. Now these adaptations are often quite considerable, but with the club's houses and hospitals in the North, just to show that it's like the rest of Canada. My feeling is, if it's like the rest of Canada, why should anybody go there? The North? Alaska, North West Texas, Newcombe, lie between three densely populated areas, North America, United States, Southern Canada, China, Japan, Northwest Europe, and right in the middle of the club is this vast outdoor recreation area. This would be a place where people can actually come and enjoy this. This is

recreation, recreation, which has to be a loan to be quiet in the North, which we desperately need in this reserve and civilization. In the town, man, I'm afraid. It has to be a loan to be quiet, the ones friends in the North can afford, so that's what they get. I wonder if things are really going to change that much in the future. We're not going to do really dramatic things like spending $100 million for a whole new approach to community living up in Resolute Bay. We're not going to build the kind of Arctic version of habitat around Tuck to Yachtuck. We're not going to do so because that isn't quite the Canadian way, as well as for the very practical reason that the first government that suggests such a $500 million expenditure is going to find that the Treasury Board removes it from its next year's estimates in the first cuts. No, the general process of Canadian development, I think, is going to carry on in the North. We're going to do things that are dramatic in a way. We've already done

things that are dramatic in the sense that we've had oil wells being drilled and the most inconceivable of places virtually in the shadow of the pool. That's dramatic all right, how many Canadians know about it? How many Canadians even know about such a dramatic story as running a telegraph line down that whole Mackenzie River, done in silence while we're still looking at sixth -run movies about how they did it in the American West. Yee gods we've done things in the North. But what we're not going to do in the North is things which in the Canadian context are a bit funny. I would say our school kids are up there as jumbo jets and learning biology by sort of looking at things and walking around learning botany through the souls of their feet and the geography, and this is strike -through -sponsored calling. The North could be a kind of laboratory where we could, because we're an appletist, take on time and involve people in solving these complex problems of social change, many of the problems of the underdeveloped world because that's how to bring a very high -level science technology into what we are pleased to go primitive

areas and our primitive people and how to do it in situational, don't harm our head people. This is a very important thing by the cash nexus in the North, far more than the South. Because so much of the North is financed by public funds which are scrutinized by current public funds that are in strong competition with funds for things far near all the local subways. This alone is a strong factor in dictating towards conservatism and approach in design. Now, whenever an architect draws something that's really imagined and bright and so on, this doesn't really necessarily bring us much closer to a new approach in the North. What really counts is not the architect's comment. It's the politician's comment. It's the administrators' comment. Above all, it's the taxpayer's comment. And I'm talking about the North. But from all I'm talking about the

common problem. I'm not talking about what happens in Vladivostok or what happens in Furbeth or what happens in Inurvich. I'm talking about common problems and I'm admitting because they are that we know so very little about this space -shab Earth. And in the North, we can find out so much this sort of quest around our auto. It's so phony, it's so unreal in a sense. It's so anti -Northern. The North is universal. It's a universal environment. The North makes you look at things on the public scale. In any case, this

man has just told me that this is what he's about to do. Now then, I have to answer in kind. Surely I have to tell him how I can get stuff to my own. Now this is a little hard, isn't it? Because here's a man that's got to live with himself. You must treat him tenderly. You can't let him have the North all in one barrel, so to speak. So what do you say? Well, what do you say? I suppose you sort of try and become truthful with yourself. This is tough. It's so nearly impossible that it takes all these miles and all this understanding and perhaps a need for human company. I'm just guessing, this is hard to get at. Now, most of us have got a built -in sense of direction. This need to have nothing to

do with North or with any direction that is physical. We all have a gyro compass that gives us inner direction or a sense of possible purpose. Certainly a sense of awareness that we don't properly understand ourselves. Now, this gyro compass I talk about is directional in this way that it points us to a direction but it rarely recognizes the land. Very often, we travel in two ways. We travel either by pinpointing at some point in our journey, something where we could say, oh, we've been there. We know this place. We go from the known securely to the unknown. So you begin by saying, oh, well, we did at least

some of us thought that this was a challenge. Well, back. Well, surely it's a challenge now. I mean, this is the first time he's been on these rails that run North. Oh, yes, you say. But then the challenge was different then. A few years back, certainly in human memory. People thought that this, well, what we call our North, presented a real challenge. What would form did they take? Ha, that form. As if everything must have somehow form that you can sort of put in words. This is hard. This is hard on you. He must notice that you're struggling a bit, eh? But what you're really saying, then, is something like this. That there was a time when the

challenge was, uh, understand. But what challenge then? Oh, well, here you have to take it easy. A certain William James, then, perhaps at the turn of this, the 20th century, said that there was no moral equivalent of war. Well, well, I read that. There's no moral equivalent, said William James. No moral equivalent of war. That is that there's nothing like war for providing something for you to be against. Apparently, very few of us can afford to be for something. Apparently, all of us can be afford to be against something. All right, then. So I can tell this chap, this research chap, uh, hitting North for Churchill, that, uh, that we can all be fellow men

when we know what we're against. But what are we against in this situation where we're rolling North, these endless miles of steel, the clickety -clacket of rails, the punctuated monotony of the telegraph wires outside the daycoach window, this and that, that make us at least fellow humans. Well, we're, I'm almost, uh, I'm almost sort of, uh, I find it impossible to get this over except to say to this chap who is bound to listen because the miles are bound to stretch out, and the night is going to fall. Endlessly, it seems, there's going to be a little place called Pikwitane, a mile to fourteen. And you'll wonder why the train is standing in this long, at that lonely spot. And the darkness of night is going to surround him, and then we're going to back up, and he's going to be twice perplexed. And in order to answer his

perplexity, I'm going to say, we're a common enemy of both of us, whether it's now or yesterday, or forever. You know, I suppose the common enemy is, uh, mother nature, mother nature. Oh, this is for us. He's willing now to be a fellow traveler in my, uh, of my imagination, eh? So I go on to say that the north is the ward, that you can afford to be against mother nature, if only humans make it possible. Well, he asks, uh, what's wrong with that? What's good about that or bad about that? I said, there was a time. Believe me, in living memory again. Well, when humans used to combine against mother nature not, not only because they had to, but because in a sense, there was a cleanness, a

sureness, or a deafness about coming up with mother nature. That is lacking in our rootless pavements. In our rough, oh, big city anonymity. You know, always shrinks from listening. He's got to listen, though. He remembers the train is barely pulling out. How many hours there are left in his mind? I have no idea. But, uh, perhaps he has any idea either. Well, now, of course, I get into a complaining room shortly after this. He looks at me questioning me and my patients, and my patient comes with myself. He runs up. And, uh, I say, I ask, but that's, as I say, the north of close. No longer do humans combine to define, or to measure, or to read, or to understand, or to live with this thing we call mother nature. Our number one

enemy, instead of being mother nature, is, of course, human nature. It's crept stealthily from the south, not necessarily by steel. All these long and endless miles that we've sort of passed. And now it's infecting. It's infecting the north with a contagion that's, huh, I don't know what to, what is life? I don't dare tell us personally. That it's, that it's that bad. I just indicated. He's a nice fellow. You know, I don't want to destroy his dream. Also, I don't want to smash my own, which is a paper thin of time. So, we're up against this William James. And the Marley villain of war, the equivalent of this war now is now the north. This William James that wrote in Harvard this many years ago, whatever he did, I suppose he meant, really, that

not war, the moral equivalent for us is going north. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know.

I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. This is PBS, the public broadcasting service. Thank you.