Comfort and Joy

I just went to my door because I thought I heard a knock. There was no one at the door, but there was a truck with flashing lights in front of my house. When I peeked out I saw that someone was delivering furnace oil and the knocking sound was the driver beating the ice off the pipe to my oil tank. The oil comes in on the ships during the short ice-free season in late August and early September. If that runs out, then more is delivered by military aircraft. I have meant to write about this from the beginning, but somehow the minus 40 temperatures and Christmas has placed this particular aspect of my life in Clyde River in a higher priority. In a land of permafrost it is utterly amazing to me how things run in these arctic communities. As the owner of two houses on a rocky island in Nova Scotia I am only too well acquainted with issues like home heating, sewage disposal and the acquisition of water ( I have two wells). Here, everything is so easy for me. I know that when I see the flashing lights of the trucks, that someone is delivering water, emptying the sewage tank or delivering oil. The houses here don't have basements because of the permafrost. Many, including mine, have crawlspaces underneath that house water and sewage tanks. I never have to make any arrangements, this all happens automatically. We haven't had much snowfall lately, but I notice that the snow removal guys are still very busy (in the dark) moving mountains of snow from former plowing efforts and relocating them down to the bay shore. I have come to associate the different trucks and their flashing lights with a feeling of well-being and comfort. Electricity comes from the local power plant. Some of my students have had job placements there, so I was able to get a tour. Back in Nova Scotia, the woman staying in my house wrote last week to say that there had been no electricity for a few days and the house was so cold "it was warmer inside the fridge than in the house". Go figure. I have been toasty warm up here.
Clyde River has been celebrating the Christmas season in its traditional way with indoor and outdoor games every day and a feast and church services on Christmas Eve. It has been fun to participate in some of the activities. The weather has been really cold since just before Christmas - wind chill of around -43. Tomorrow, there is supposed to be some snow and the temperature rising to -12!!!! I hope that happens - it would be nice to get Reba out for a decent walk.
Christmas vacation is proceeding as planned. I am making my way through turkey leftovers and a stack of books. I just finished reading The Long Exile by Melanie McGrath. This is the unbelievable story of some Inuit people who were relocated to the high arctic by the Canadian Government in the 1950's. They were removed from their communities and their families and dropped in the unfamiliar arctic desert as a way for the government to deal with the problem of arctic sovereignty. The detail and description are so vivid that I found myself actually holding my breath through some parts. I stayed up most of the night last night finishing it. What a luxury to stay up all night reading with no commitments for the next day. I am sure that the book was immensely more real to me because I was reading it here. I was so transported by the story of how these people survived that ordeal that I was always in shock to look up from the book and hear the furnace coming on again and see the lights and the fridge full of food and my snoring pets and then step outside from time to time in the minus 40 temperatures and try to imagine none of those comforts and almost no tools for survival. I am sure that nothing up here will ever look quite the same to me.