The Last Plane (c) 1985

Wind in the fireweed, summer time flying;

Soon, from the willow trees, leaves will be gone;

I, like the ptarmigan, see summer dying,

And, when the last plane leaves, you will be gone…

Of all the images from my youth, the one freshest in my mind, the one that most quickly recalls my childhood in the high arctic, is fireweed, provincial flower of the Yukon.

My father served in the Royal Canadian Navy, and while I was growing up, we had the opportunity to live in some wonderful, remote places that most folks never get to see, or see only as visitors or tourists.

Two of my favorite such places are Aklavik, a tiny hamlet situated on the Peel Channel of the mighty McKenzie River, and Massett, on the (once) Queen Charlotte Islands, now Haida Gwaii, about 45 minutes by air from Prince Rupert, British Columbia.

We spent two tours in Aklavik. A normal posting would last two years, but we liked the arctic and the people so much that Dad requested extensions both times we were there. It was almost unheard of for a family to request an extension of a ‘hardship’ posting, so the powers that be were only too pleased to grant his request.

Call us all crazy, but we never considered living in Aklavik a hardship. To be sure, there were some extreme differences in living there than living “outside”. “Outside”, is what northerners call anywhere below the Arctic Circle – ‘down south’ to the rest of the world.

One of the biggest differences was going shopping. When I lived in Aklavik, everything was either brought in by barge, or flown in by plane…and by everything, I mean everything – from soup to nuts and bolts, from medical supplies to kitchen pots and pans, from clothing to school supplies and engine parts.

If you couldn’t shoot it, trap it, skin it, and eat it, or chop it down to make a cabin, it had to be shipped in from somewhere else. There was no grocery store where you could buy fresh produce year round. Though Peffer’s General Store was the  place to go for licorice all-sorts and the occasional bottle of soda pop, unless you were trading for pelts, buying bulk staples (flour, lard, salt, sugar) or bolts of yard-goods (cloth), there wasn’t much available for one used to the variety of a city mercantile.