The Milk Run

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This update follows the busiest and most "interesting" (if one could call it that) week of my life, so in order for me to organize my thoughts in anything resembling a coherent train of thought, this update will be in a slightly different format than the previous ones. What follows is my account of my first ‘Milk Run’, aptly named because we stop at almost every house.

This will be a long one...

Day 1
Monday, June 14

The first day of this long week began normal… so normal that we had a full day at the office before even loading up the plane. However, I knew that I’d be working some ridiculous hours when I signed up for this gig, and it’s not like bitching about it would change anything. It’s funny, coming to work in northern Ontario: I’ve worked longer hours than I ever have until now, but it doesn’t feel that way. Even on the longest days of fieldwork it just kinda feels like I’m back on Outward Bound, only this time we get to sleep in cabins.

We end up using a different airline this time, Air Bravo, although travel in the same Pilatus as we did with Wasaya. We pack it to the brim with our equipment and coolers for a week’s worth of water samples and head to the first stop on the milk run: Lansdowne, also known as Neskantaga. The flight leaves a bit late, but in the month or so that I've been here we've yet to have a flight leave at the schedules time, another of the benefits of flying charter as it's not like they can really take off without us. As the Air Bravo pilot said to us, "takeoff time is whenever you guys feel like taking off."

We arrive in Lansdowne, and unpack our stuff. Although we are up here for so long (and actually have a third, as one of our consultants is coming with us again) we only have the ‘normal’ amount of food for a few-day-long trip, as more will be sent up near the end of the week. Luckily for us all the monitoring wells are on-site for this location so without wandering into the bust we can locate the wells and do some preliminary monitoring before hitting the hay.

Day 2
Tuesday, June 15

I have quickly learned that by taking this position with Remotes, I have rendered futile my attempt at weaning myself off of coffee. When your day starts bright and early with your hands down a well, green tea just doesn’t cut it. We begin similar work to what we did in Sachigo, and after an hour the monitor-purge-sample routine becomes almost second nature.

Our stay in Lansdowne also involves some soil samples, and unlike the Bio-Cell at Bearskin we are actually trying to determine the extent of contamination. What this means is that now we actually have to dig. I get to try out a wonderful device known as a ‘hand-auger’, which is basically a foot-long drill bit on the end of a stick that I get to twist into the ground to pull up samples. All in all, it makes for another long day out in the sun/bugs (again, I douse myself in ‘bug dope’ and they mostly stay away). On top of sampling, we also have to start up the groundwater remediation system, basically a pump that pushes groundwater through a series of filters and carbon-drums in order to extract any oil or other contaminants. In a job at a previous environmental company, I had actually spent a lot of time making these sorts of filters so it was nice to see them actually in use.

Another task of ours at Lansdowne was to take noise readings, but we weren’t able to do this. The operator (which for every site is a member of the community who takes care of the day-to-day operations), Abe, came by but instead of running the plant for us he was only able to deliver bad news: someone close to him had taken their life. Suicide, especially among younger people, occurs with epidemic proportions in the north. Just like everything else up north, this is something I'd heard of in southern Ontario but never given much thought to... it is more than a bit unnerving to think that there are place sin Ontario where suicide attempts are almost commonplace. I’ve seen a few communities now (and the occasionally-depressing sights that lie within them), but this sad news serves as a reminder that while the work is becoming more familiar, I still have absolutely no idea what it’s like to actually live up here. It's also not like this is something that has surfaced recently: suicide in remote communities has been recognized as a major problem for years.

The Lansdowne staff house is right next to the airstrip, and throughout the day we bear witness to plane after plane of friends and family pouring into the community. We try to stop work or work out of site) whenever a plane comes in, so as not to disturb the grieving family and friends. According to Abe the deceased girl leaves behind a young daughter; hopefully she will find someone here to take care of her. As I’ve stated before, my only exposure to the north growing up was Outward Bound and the odd camping trip… in retrospect I can hardly think of a memory of everyday life in Canada that wasn’t, at the end of the day, easy. I’m still trying (and to a large extent, failing) to wrap my mind around how such dire circumstances could exist, nevermind how they could exist in Ontario. Adrian put it best when he stated that it really makes you thankful for being born where you were.

Day 3
Wednesday, June 16

Wake up, pack up, get on another plane. Such is the start to my Wednesday. We were worried that the previous day's bad news would result in a complete shut-down of the community (similar to what kept us from going to Sachigo when we'd originally planned) but because the station and staff house in Lansdowne are a few mils from the town, we were able to carry on.

We have a long day ahead of us, and it doesn’t help that (contrary to our time in Sachigo) it is sunny and boiling hot. We fly first to Webequie (pronounced Web-uh-kway) to take more samples, and end up going on a groundwater treasure hunt. Some of the flush-mounted (i.e. ground-level) monitoring wells had been buried by construction activities so we literally set out with a metal detector and a shovel in order to locate these hidden wells. Just when I thought I’d figured out the routine up here, I end up wandering through the bush weaving a metal detector around and listening intently to its whirs and clicks. It takes more skill than you’d think… buried nails, garbage, even my steel-toed boots all gave me false positives.

Eventually we locate everything and can get down to the sampling. The sun is hot and the bugs are bad, but we work through another long day and sample what we need to and hop back in our trusty plane for the next destination, Wapekeka . Unfortunately this means going from one of the largest and newest staff houses at Lansdowne to one of the smallest, so small in fact that only three of the four bedrooms are actually in the house proper, so if we'd had one more person with us they would have been sleeping in an attachment to the boiler room (unless that fourth person happened to be Hydro staff, in which case our consultant, Carl, would have been sleeping in the boiler room). It is a bit cramped and we are more than a bit tired but I can now say that I have never enjoyed a cold shower more than at the end of that day.

Another interesting thing about life up north - about half of the sites are on Eastern Standard Time (which we call "Thunder Bay Time") and the other half are an hour behind- we try to stay on EST to keep things simple but it can be a real hassle since each house may be set to one time zone or the other, so we always have to refer back to which time zone we are in. Of the places we stopped during the milk run I don't think I could even tell you which ones were in which time zone.

Day 4
Thursday, June 17

With three of us purging wells and taking samples, we manage to fly through our work at Wapekeka. we finally get a bit of time to relax, and end up waiting for our plane (the pilots hate this because if they have to wait for us or we tell them to hold like we did in Webequie, they get paid to sit around the staff house and watch TV). A nice big breakfast and a morning of sample-taking later, and we're off to Kasabonika.

More 'treasure hunting' is required at Kas, and although it means I get to play with the metal detector some more it turns out less successfully than at Webequie. Construction at the station has destroyed many of the wells, and others are buried so deep that the detector can't find any traces of them. There are enough left to gather a fairly representative sample however, so we take what we can.

Later that night we try our luck fishing both Adrian and I brought rods). Jerry, the operator at Kas directs us to an old bridge that is supposedly right above a great walleye spot.

This bridge, man you guys should have seen this bridge.

This bridge, vital for connecting the community to (among other things) essential areas such as the air strip and the dump, was the ricketiest most busted-up bridge I have ever seen. This thing was so unsafe I think it gave me cancer. Nails were loose and strewn about, boards were loose, broken or in some cases absent altogether. I was afraid to stand on this thing, and yet the locals would fly their massive F250 trucks over this thing without blinking an eye or slowing down. We end up getting skunked fish-wise, although I did manage to get a nice view of the northern Ontario sunset. I can't think of a better way to sum up the north than by saying that you can watch a beautiful sunset over a beautiful pristine lake while standing on the most broken-down and neglected piece of infrastructure you've ever laid eyes upon.

Day 5
Friday, June 18

The last day of a long week, for me anyways. Adrian is staying up north over the weekend to make sure everything gets done, but won't need my help so after a quick stopover in Deer Lake, it's just one last turbulent plane ride before I'm back in Thunder Bay.

This whole week we've been carrying the food with us, but since a new shipment is coming up on the plane, we go through the familiar exercise of packing up any leftover food to leave at Kasabonika.
With the plane on its way and a long day ahead of us, we don't have time to take the food to the nursing station as we've previously done, so we ask the local agent Jerry if he knows anyone who is low on cash or food. His response: "Oh yeah, there's one family I know- they spend all their money on drugs eh, and don't look after their little kid, only a few years old -- saw him eating out of the garbage the other day." Needless to say, this spurred us into action. We began throwing all the food we could find into boxes and crates and even held the plane as we drove it into town (with Jerry's help).

Despite the fact that all of these remote communities are "dry" (our planes can occasionally get searched for booze/drugs), all that stuff find its way up here. We'll be out taking water samples in the bush and stumble across more than few empty mickeys, beer cans etc. According to Jerry, this family in particular is addicted to Oxycontin, which is strange seeing as how I imagine Oxy is fairly tough to come across in Toronto without a subscription. Apparently women are employed to smuggle it up because, as Jerry put's it, "you can search a woman outside, but not inside." He is even able to point out the house of the main smuggler in town as we drive by (Adrian always says you can tell who the bootleggers are because they have the nicest trucks), and states that the police are aware of what he does but they "are waiting for him to slip up."

Even after we drop off the food (and Jerry), the topic of conversation inevitably turns back to the family and little boy that we'd just found out about. Adrian, who in his 10 or so years of working up north has seen it all, offers up his view: "Guys like that (the parents)... they aren't born all fucked up like that -- one or two of them maybe, but not all of them. You gotta keep in mind, somewhere down the line something happened to them, something we don't understand, that made them get like that."

Unfortunately, this is the reality up here... Yes, it is beautiful and yes, there are a lot of great things up here that you can't find anywhere else, but there is also widespread poverty and epidemic levels of suicide and drug abuse. I haven't posted pictures of the worst things I've seen up here (having only been up north for a month) but there are times it can get pretty depressing. You often can't drive more than a few hundred metres without seeing some kind of abandoned vehicle at the side of the road, be it snowmobile or truck or boat, and in some areas it seems like there is more junk strewn throughout the community than is piled in the dump. As a budding biologist (and someone currently employed to try and clean this place up), it is disheartening to see the environmental consequences of the social problems facing the north. We spend days at a time researching, setting up, and monitoring these multi-million dollar environmental remediation systems, but once you take one step outside that Hydro fence, anything goes. In almost every community I've been in I've seen fuel tanks leaking straight into lakes, piles of broken waste drums tossed into the forest, broken-down vehicles stuffed into wetlands... there is a whole other set of rules up here governing the protection of the environment, and those rules pretty much state "do whatever the hell you want." The TSSA or Environment Canada might be able to do something, but as Adrian says, "Why would they? All it'll do is cause a shitstorm."

Don't get me wrong, it is not always bad up here, and of course the state of each community is different, but at the worst of times northern Ontario feels like a third world country. Hell, I'd been told exactly what to expect up here and that I would be culture-shocked to shit but it really doesn't make it any less depressing. The honest truth is that if you guys back home (or me a few weeks ago) woke up here one day, the heart of Canada is the last place you'd think you were.

Sorry for the downer of a derail -- if it helps, just keep in mind that for at least a few days that little kid was eating cereal and cheeseburgers and pizza and ice cream.

If there is one recurring motif that has been present in all the little "revelations" I've had during my time up here (barely a month into the six I'm spending up here), it's that I'm way luckier than I thought I was. I'd always known I was lucky for being born a Canadian, but it's painfully obvious now that "lucky" and "Canadian" are anything but synonymous. Another thing that constantly amazes me is how often I find myself caught off-guard. It's not like I came up here blind, I had heard and read just as much about the problems facing the north as anyone else. I knew all about the social problems and substance abuse and state of the economy up here. If anything I'd been exposed to it more than the average person because of the occasional overlap between my environmental work and First Nations relations. Hell, I'd been directly warned by my more experienced coworkers that I would witness third-world like living conditions. But it really is different to see it in person. Adrian's advice: "Some of this stuff man, you just can't think about it- it'll make you sick."

There is a book I read once (and a great PBS documentary for those with less time) called Guns, Germs and Steel. It was recommended by one of my Botany professors whom I'd idolized at the time, but that's beside the point. The author, Jared Diamond, goes on in length about how the three items in the title have influenced the history of the world and are ultimately responsible for the wealth of some parts of the world and poverty of others. In what I can only describe as one of the most amazing feats of science I have ever seen, Diamond theorizes that simple geography is the unifying mechanism behind all these forces, influencing natural and cultural evolution quite literally fro the ground up. He draws the conclusion that the ancestors of the wealthy nations were no 'better' than those of the poor, they simply had the advantage of geography -- it was where they were born that determined their status as rulers of the world.

Despite the obvious parallels to life in the north, it is actually another point of Diamond's that I wish to make here, one emphasized best in his documentary of the same name. The second item of the title brings Diamond to a hospital in Africa, where he recounts how the shift from living in widespread and vast areas to dense populations let disease wreak havoc through the native Africans. It's here he does something remarkably uncharacteristic: he completely breaks down. The sight of a nursery full of sick and dying babies is too much even for someone who has spent years studying exactly what is in front of him. He states: "There's a difference between understanding something intellectually and experiencing it firsthand. In my book, germs were one of the three main forces of history, and it's impersonal, and it's still different and it hits me to be in a place where germs are in action." I'm starting to figure this out as well.

What's even more remarkable about all this is that except for short excursions, I haven't really spent any extended amount of time in these communities. Everything I've seen so far has been seen through the eyes of someone who spends most of their time safely behind the padlocked and barb-wired fences of the Hydro compound, or out in the bush. Even with my head down and eyes firmly focused on the work in front of me, it's hard to ignore everything that's going on here. I'm sure there is far more I'm not seeing, both better and worse. I guess that's really what the north is like for someone from "the City" -- you can get so caught up in the natural beauty, the outdoor work, the fly-from-place-to-place lifestyle and then all of a sudden you will see or hear something so depressing that you can't get it off your mind.

To end on a positive note, Diamond ultimately concludes that geography isn't necessarily the be-all and end-all determinant of who is rich and who is poor. He thinks that we have the knowledge and technology to learn from history and "break the mold", if we so desire. I have no idea what either "breaking the mold" or "desire" in this sense may entail, but at least it's a nice thought.

7pm on Friday night and I end up unloading my stuff at the Thunder Bay airstrip. Along with my own junk I've got a couple coolers of water samples to send off to the lab but the plane was mostly empty as Adrian and Carl had to stay up north for the weekend. I don't know if the lack of weight on the plane made a big difference (or maybe the pilot was in a hurry to get home on a Friday evening) but the flight back was the bumpiest yet. Bob is waiting for me with the truck and takes me out for a coupe of much-needed cold beers. One thing about working up north in the "dry" communities is that you can spend a 12-hour day out in the sun or the rain or the bugs (or all three) and you don't have a nice cold beer to come home to.

The chance to chat and decompress is much appreciated. 5 days of plane-hopping and long work hours has worn me down... I don't see how the other guys can handle 10+ days of it. Bob reveals that I've now got a bit of time to stay in Thunder Bay which, after the week I've just had, is more than welcome news. The week or so before Canada Day often doesn't contain any flights up north since most people here take off to add some vacation onto the long weekend, and personal plans of my own the following week will mean that I won't be partaking in any trips that week either. I did manage to pry one exciting bit of news from Adrian before leaving those guys in Deer Lake, however: July will likely contain a trip to Fort Severn, the northernmost community in Ontario and probably the community I have most been looking forward to visiting. Keep posted for that one, I'm sure there will be lots of pics.

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Photos

Gear for a week
Lansdowne - A week's worth of crap

Our new buddy
Lansdowne - This little guy greeted us at the door

This is how you clean groundwater
Lansdowne - a groundwater remediation system

You kill it, you fill it
Lansdowne - The log book for the truck

The 'burbs
Lansdowne - on the outskirts of the community

Free Snowmobile
Lansdowne - one of the many abandoned vehicles you'll see at the side of the road.

Path to Webequie
Lansdowne - Lake crossing (or ice road) to the community of Webequie

Public Transit
Lansdowne - The sign by the boats: "Use at your on risk."

Team Hydro
Lansdowne - Adrian and I, heading to Webequie

Lakes, lakes everywhere
Webequie - the view from the airstrip

The hunt is on.
Webequie - hunting for hidden wells with a metal detector and a shovel

Break time!
Webequie - broken-down trucks make pretty good benches.

The lake
Webequie - one example of the untouched wilderness you an find right off of the main road

Back to work
Webequie - heading back to the air strip

Welcome to Wapekeka
Wapekeka - the welcoming committee

The town
Wapekeka - driving through the community

Playtime's over?
Wapekeka - this was the first community where we saw more little kids than adults.

More of the town
Wapekeka - one of the main roads

Kasabonika Sunset
Kasabonika - the sunset over the lake

The road to Kasabonika
Kasabonika - the town