Kawawachikamach

Oh man. Still defrosting from this trip to the Naskapi Nation. Kamil(l)e had been staying with me a few days, so I'd spent minimal time preparing for the trip. Sunday morning we got up at 4:30, I tossed her in a cab to the airport an hour later, shoveled some clothes into a suitcase, then tossed myself into a cab at 6:30 and was on a train headed for montreal by 7:30. The following morning I met Rabih, David and Balgovind at the terminal as we waited for our Air Inuit flight to depart at 7am. We flew straight north, with a brief stopover at Quebec City. As we approached Schefferville, we flew over long stretches of yellow lichen-coated land, spiky little green and yellow trees divided by hundreds of little lakes and rivers. I had expected a more barren landscape, but the aerial view was stunning.

We landed around 10:30am and headed straight for the McGill Research Station, where we dropped off our stuff and became acquainted with the two very large and friendly dogs. An awesome little house--very co-op-y, full of pictures and mementos from students in the 70s and 80s. There used to be a huge iron mining operation in the area, and McGill conducted some sort of geological surveying at the time. But the mine was shut down in 1981-82, when it was declared unprofitable, and Schefferville effectively became a ghost town. Most of the white people left and money stopped flowing into the area. The research station has languished since then and feels partially stuck in the past.

From there we headed down the road to Kawawachikamach, to the Naskapi's band headquarters, where there were some network issues to resolve. Rabih and David installed a squid cache, got it up and running, and then we wandered back over to Schefferville for lunch at Bla Bla's. Everyone spoke French and/or Naskapi.

The evening wound down with a wonderful meal cooked up by Oksana, a history/science teacher at one of the two local schools who also maintains the research station and hosts random passers-through like us. The food situation worked out very well because Baugovin and David were also vegetarian. I had been worried about food (note PR's comment, "What will you eat out there, don't they just eat blubber??") and it was nice to have power in numbers with those guys. After dinner Rabih and David headed out with the spectrum analyzer to look for interference they thought was disrupting the satellite signal.

The following morning, up again at 5:30, the four of us and Barry, the Naskapi computer tech, drove out to Menihek, a tiny little settlement by a dam. HydroQuebec wanted internet and voip installed, and we were there to relocate a dish that had been put up on a previous trip (in June?). It was cold and extremely windy--I was wearing two pairs of pants, two shirts, two sweaters, two thick jackets and I was STILL freezing. Plus I looked pretty awesome staggering around like a giant puffball with wires hanging out of all my pockets. Headphones around my neck, a microphone in one pocket, recorder in another, camera dangling in front of me, notepad sticking out of another pocket. Ridiculous.

One day of hanging out on top of the Menihek dam, with the wind whipping unimpeded across the water, was plenty to wear everybody out. I took a break from watching Rabih and David in the afternoon and went for a walk. I followed the train tracks and watched the sun set across the water. Light rain fell intermittently, and rainbows popped up everywhere. We were staying with the hydro workers in a trailer-ish dorm, and we spent the evening sitting in the tiny dorm lounge, drinking and talking politics, religion, everything into the wee hours. It was very freshman-year. The following morning we woke up early and headed out for pre-dawn fishing at Balgovind's prodding. It was cold and we didn't catch anything, but casting the line out into the water and yanking it around so no fish would dream of biting was quite enjoyable.

Then it was time for breafast. I did a couple more radio interviews and B and I drove back to Schefferville.

I announced that the only disappointment of the trip was that I'd wanted to see a bear, so B and I drove around looking for some. We hadn't seen any in the forest as we drove back, so we swung over past the trash dump to see if we could spot one. No luck. But the osprey were out in full force; We saw several nests perched on the power line poles. We saw one osprey challenge another one that was sitting in a nest, and at one point the seated osprey took to the air and they chased each other, getting into an aggressive stand-off mid-air.

Back in town Ba;govind and Melissa, a Naskapi who also runs the computer center, and I went for lunch. B wanted me to try poutine, a Quebec specialty that consists of french fries smothered in gravy and cottage cheese. (or some sort of curdled cheese. or some white squishy kernels that we were told was cheese.)

Life in Kawawachikamach and Schefferville seems pretty rugged. There are fewer than 1,000 Naskapi out there and, even though it's beautiful and a good hunting area, it's so incredibly remote that flying is tremendously expensive because it's so hard to transport fuel up there. My plane ticket I think cost $1900 Canadian. There's a train that runs up twice a week, on Mondays and Thursdays. If you want to order Chinese food, you call up the restaurant in Kuujjuaq, a slightly larger town further to the north, and they cook it up and put it on the train, and you get it a day or two later. For a special occassion the Naskapi sometimes order KFC from the south and it arrives on the train within a couple days.

Wednesday afternoon I boarded my flight back and that was that. I sat next to a geologist who spoke minimal English, and he humored me as I struggled through a conversation in French. He had spent his life repopulating the rivers up way, way north, at Kuujjuaq and Nunavit. He flew up for a month every year, spent time with the Inuit, and seeded the streams with char. I mentioned to him that the Naskapi had noticed that climate changes were changing the migration patterns of the caribou, which was problematic because their whole culture and lifestyle revolves around hunting caribou. He looked unimpressed and said that the Inuit up north were experiencing the same changes to the migratory circle of the caribou. But the Inuit had set up a GPS tracking system and could easily look up where the caribou were heading. Right. Of course they do, what was I thinking?