Far North Of Calgary

The taxicab sits under the streetlight in the middle of the night in the middle of the afternoon. A.m. is mostly p.m. at this time of year and p.m. mostly a.m. Darkness is a virtual 24-hour constant. The engine in the cab is running to keep the heater working, and the exhaust makes giant white clouds, as if the machine were talking in a hurry in the cold. Chattering.

The driver also is chattering.

"I took a fare one time to Aklavik on the ice road," Rudy Rapo says. "A storm was beginning, but we didn't have any problems. I got to Aklavik and then I had to come home. I could see the storm was picking up, but I figured I'd be home in an hour...."

The temperature outside the cab is—30°C (-22°F). Some days it's-40°C or-50°C. The cold is dry, almost antiseptic. There is little or no wind. There is no humidity. There is no slush. There is not even an extraordinary amount of snow. This is the cold that you would find inside a freezer. The door to the refrigerator has been shut. The light is out.

"So I started driving home," Rapo says. "I had an Eskimo with me to help in case I got stuck in the drifts. I could see there could be trouble, but pretty soon I was too far out to turn back. The lights started to get dimmer and dimmer. The car stopped. The alternator was frozen solid...."

Wolves can be found two or three miles from town. And brown bears. Black bears. Moose. Caribou. The trees are from a child's bad dream—dwarfed, misshapen pines, shadows in the dark. The woods end on the far side of a hill outside town. No woods. No trees. Just snow. This is the end of trees in the northern hemisphere. The tree line.

"I started walking," Rapo says. "The Eskimo and I. We walked 36 miles in 18 hours. About halfway we saw a light on the horizon and we thought we were close to town. Saved. The light was the moon. We kept walking. Thirty-six miles in this kind of cold. My feet were frozen like cast iron. I lost all the skin on both feet. It was a miracle I didn't lose the feet...."

The town is Inuvik, situated at the far edge of the Northwest Territories at the far edge of Canada. The Arctic Circle is 125 miles to the south. The DEW Line, the Distant Early Warning system at the top of North America, is 90 miles to the north. The magnetic North Pole is to the east, so compasses are useless. The actual North Pole is 1,700 miles away. Polar bears and Soviet submarines and Santa Claus all can inhabit the imagination at the same time.

The Winter Olympics? Check the map. The Winter Olympics may be in Calgary, 1,400 miles south; winter is here.

The town is a huddle of wooden buildings on the eastern shore of the Mackenzie River delta. The population is approximately 3,500, a mix of Indians, whites and Inuit, brought together around the potbellied stove of modern technology. If all of Canada is a collection of settlements connected to each other by an extension cord stretching through the wilderness, this is the longest stretch.