Sixty Degrees North (11 page)

The air was heavy and humid as I wandered about the streets, and a hint of thunder trembled through a black
cloud in the west. A few spots of rain fell, but the pavements dried as soon as each drop touched the ground. Early in the afternoon I picked up a map from the National Park office and continued to walk, circling the town centre and exploring its edges. At some time in the mid-twentieth century, in a moment of cack-handed inspiration, many of Fort Smith's streets had been given names that not only strained towards geographical and cultural ‘appropriateness' but were also, quite inexplicably, alliterative. Prior to that almost all roads had been anonymous, and in the minds of many residents most remain so. But now, officially at least, at one end of McDougal Street are Woodbison Avenue, Wilderness Road, Whipoorwill Crescent and Weasel Street, while at the other are Park Drive, Paddle Street, Portage Avenue and Pickerel, Poppy, Pine and Polar Crescents. Some of the names are sickeningly twee, such as Teepee Trail, while others are reminiscent of another place entirely – Primrose Lane could have wound its way through a tale by Beatrix Potter, but here it is a rough gravel road leading out into the forest, where a carved monument hides amid the trees to Edward Martin, ‘the best woodcutter of the north'.

I returned in the late afternoon to the corner of Breynat and McDougal and sat down on one of the benches there, watching the cars and pickups go past. It was not long after five and the brief homeward rush had begun. Ignoring the traffic, ravens strutted at the street's edges with a nervous arrogance, calling to one another from pavement to telegraph pole to cathedral roof. A breeze brought dust and cool air up the road, dragging the evening behind it. I stopped and listened a while longer, focusing my ears on the dull white noise that hung like a mist in the air. Beneath the urgent cawing of the ravens, and beneath the sounds of the street, was a thin whispering on which all the other noise was built. That whisper was the river.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Fort Smith was still a very long way from civilisation. In western Canada, the Klondike gold rush had led to a massive influx of people. The Yukon Territory had been connected to the outside world by railway, by telegraph and by economics, but change had not come so quickly elsewhere, and trappers, traders and missionaries were still virtually the only non-native people living above sixty. Things were beginning to change, though, and the pace of development would quicken over the coming decades. Increasing quantities of food, trading goods and machinery were carried through the Fitzgerald-Smith corridor, particularly after the discovery of oil at Norman Wells in 1920, uranium at Port Radium in 1930 and gold at Yellowknife in 1934. The fortunes of Fort Smith were inextricably linked to those of the Territory itself, and when the American army arrived in town in the early 1940s, major changes were under way across the north.

During the Second World War, the United States took on two major building projects in Canada. The first was the Alaska Highway, passing through British Columbia and the Yukon, which the army completed with immense effort in just eight months in 1942. The road cut a 1,700 mile slice through a part of the country few had ever visited, and it made regular land access to the north a reality for the very first time. The second project was the Canol (Canadian Oil) road and pipeline, between Norman Wells and Whitehorse. Equipment and supplies for that project had to be carried through Fort Smith, and the increase in traffic required an upgrade of the portage road from Fort Fitzgerald, which the army undertook. The work also necessitated a winter road to Hay River, on the south shore of the Great Slave Lake. These projects, along with the air bases the army constructed at Smith and elsewhere, changed the north forever. The region would never again be so isolated from the rest of
the country. When the Second World War came to an end, the population quickly began to rise.

Canada's north is woven together with the stories of people who've chosen to leave the south behind. A considerable percentage of the non-indigenous population were born elsewhere, and they bring with them a profusion of histories. Some come here to escape the frantic pace of the south; others come to find work, or quiet. Some stay only a short time; others never leave. But these people bring to the north an instinct towards change. They help to create a sense of a place not yet complete, a place still in the making.

One such immigrant is Ib Kristensen, who has spent more than forty years in Fort Smith. On a warm afternoon I sat with him outside North of 60 Books on Portage Avenue, the shop and café that he and his wife Lillian opened together in 1975. We sipped our coffees and watched as his sheepdog ran to greet each visitor to the store. A few ragged clouds moved overhead, throwing thin shadows onto the grass around us. Ib leaned back in his seat, his white hair and beard neatly trimmed, his glasses perched comfortably upon his face. He smiled as he spoke of the half-lifetime he'd spent in this town. ‘I'm very fortunate to have found this place,' he told me.

In the winter of 1959, after a stormy Atlantic crossing, Ib and Lillian arrived in Halifax, Nova Scotia. They had $400 in their pockets and not a word of English in their mouths. Remembering how he felt on that cold day, more than fifty years ago, Ib shook his head. ‘How on earth did we get here?' he laughed. Just a few months before, the couple had walked into a Canadian government travel bureau in Copenhagen and sat down to watch a film about Vancouver. They'd made up their minds to leave Europe, but hadn't yet decided where they would go. ‘I didn't feel there was enough room for me in Denmark,' Ib explained. In that film they saw a place with more room than a person could ever
need, more room than a person could even imagine. The pair signed their emigration papers that same afternoon.

From Halifax, the Kristensens travelled west by train through the vast belly of the country. They crossed from the Atlantic to the Pacific coast, arriving in Vancouver, which would be their home for the next eight years. Ib was a bookbinder and typographer, and Lillian a weaver, and both found employment in the city. But Ib's work would later take him back east, to McGill University in Montreal. There, the Kristensens and their two sons spent the end of the 1960s. But the stay was not an entirely happy one. Quebec nationalism was on the rise, and with it came an increasing military presence in the city. ‘I grew up in the war,' said Ib. ‘I didn't want to see a uniform ever again.' And so the couple looked north. They wanted a place where they could live together as a family and as part of a community, and in 1971 they chose Fort Smith. They purchased an old log house for $500 and the land it sat on for $1,000. Ib took a carpentry course at the college, and they made themselves a home.

By the time the Kristensens arrived here, Fort Smith had either become a victim of northern development or its beneficiary, depending on your view. Its former roles, as entryway and de facto capital of the Northwest Territories, had both come to an abrupt end during the 1960s. In the early years of the decade a road and railway had been built all the way from Edmonton to Hay River, bypassing Fort Smith and effectively making its portage route redundant. Then, in 1967, the Canadian government decided upon an official capital for the Territory, and ‘luckily', as Ib puts it, ‘Yellowknife got that'. While a few government jobs did and do remain, the focus shifted elsewhere, and the town's responsibilities disappeared. Almost overnight it changed from a bustling gateway to a place without purpose at the end of a long dirt road. Things could easily have ended, but they didn't.

Ib Kristensen is an old man now. He talks slowly, with the composure of someone who's considered his words long before he's spoken them. He smiles broadly and often, with a warmth that is both generous and genuine, and he talks of this town as though there were nowhere else he could be. There is a place for everyone, he told me, and this is his place.

When Lillian Kristensen died in 2004, Ib decided to retire and sell North of 60 Books. He joined me there as a fellow customer (albeit one who was welcomed with a hug by the current owner). As we sat speaking on the lawn, Ib recalled the freedom and potential he found here in the early '70s, when Fort Smith's future was uncertain. Those who shared this town felt a responsibility to create the kind of place they wanted to live in, the community was a thing to be moulded and improved. And that sense, of somewhere unfinished and bristling with possibility, has not yet faded away. ‘There's an immense opportunity to do things in a place like this,' Ib said. ‘If there's something you want to do and there isn't anyone else doing it here, you just start. If you want that kind of freedom, it's still here.'

When the portage route along the Slave River became redundant, everything changed. No longer was this town a key staging post on the road to the north; no longer was it held aloft on the tide of northern development. Instead, the country's eyes looked elsewhere: to Hay River and Yellowknife and Whitehorse. And the town turned too – away from the river, and away from the flow of people and money that had given it life. Fort Smith turned towards itself, and became, to borrow Wendell Berry's phrase, ‘the centre of its own attention'. This was once a transient-hearted gathering of service providers on a portage route to the north. Like a commuter town, its focus was always on the elsewhere. But today this is not the case. Today Fort Smith is that most precious of things: a community that recognises and values
itself as such. It has an inward gaze and a preoccupation with the local that both requires and reinforces a genuine acknowledgement of interdependence. That acknowledgement is crucial to the nature of the place.

We live in a time of great division and alienation, in which ‘social networking', a parody of community, is passed off as a viable alternative or replacement for it. To recognise the interdependence of people upon each other – of people who share a place – is the fundamental act of community. And it is, today, a radical act, a willing and deliberate entanglement that ignores the siren cry of solitary freedom. The places where this is still the dominant way of living are, for me, places that foster hope. Not the hope that we may go backwards, and try to live as our grandparents lived. But rather, the hope that what has been diminished in this past century – the wisdom and intimacy of community life – may not be entirely lost. Fort Smith is such a place, and the reasons it remains so are primarily geographical.

Where economic factors allow, communities are strengthened by remoteness. In Shetland, small islands such as Fetlar, Out Skerries and Fair Isle have maintained a kind of togetherness even as they have battled depopulation, job losses and other threats. In part this is due to the inherent centeredness of islands, but it's also an issue of simple practicality. In places such as these, recognition of the community is not really optional. Any other way of living would be destructive. Remoteness exposes the vulnerability of a place, and it makes clear the absolute dependence of people upon each other.

Fort Smith too is an island, surrounded not by water but by an ocean of trees. And it is certainly remote. Hay River is the closest settlement of any size, and a 350-mile round trip is, happily, too far for commuting or for regular shopping excursions. With the exception of those few who fly back and forth to Yellowknife for well-paid jobs in the diamond
mines, Fort Smith's citizens are largely contained in Fort Smith and in the neighbouring hamlets of Fort Fitzgerald and Salt River. The community that's developed here, for that reason, seems very much like that of a small island. People recognise that they are indebted to each other, and that such indebtedness is not a burden. There is, too, a kind of levelling that leaves few observable social divisions within the town, and the relationship between ‘European' and indigenous Canadians is generally good. (The population here is mixed quite evenly. Around one third are Dene, a group of northern First Nations with languages in the Athabascan family; one third are Métis, aboriginal people of mixed European and First Nations descent; and one third are ‘white'.) For those who choose to accept the constraints of geographical remoteness and to stay put, a connection necessarily develops with the
here
, and that connection can grow into a deeper, broader engagement. Such communities are never perfect, but they strive in the right direction.

It was early afternoon. The hot, sticky day thickened and grew heavy. A dark warning grumbled above the forest, and everything hung silent for a moment. There was a pause like a breath inhaled, then held, and the pressure rose as though from the ground itself. The air seemed to stiffen around us like a tourniquet. And then the storm opened. The first fat raindrops fell in a clatter, then a roar, punching the dust up from the street's edge. Then came the thunder, raging into the town. Rain descended in great, gasping sheets, punctured by lightning. The ditches, which earlier seemed needlessly deep, were full and overflowing in minutes. Everywhere was water.