The Country Mice

The hamlet of Pangnirtung

Friday

The sun shone all night. Oh, there may have been the occasional shaded hour between midnight and two in the morning, but overall the sky was bright and clear. In an uncharacteristic moment of foresight I’d brought along eye shades, collected along the last few years of train and airline trips. Thank goodness.

Eggs for breakfast, brown toast, peanut butter, jam and coffee.

“You like eggs?” asked Hannah.

“Yes please.”

“Okay. You make.”

Got it.

As we munched our toast and looked outside into the sun, Hannah asked what we’d like for lunch and for dinner.

Anything is fine.

Anything? You eat everything?

Oh, yes.

You no vegetarian? Because I hate vegetarian.

Definitely not vegetarian.

Hawaiian pizza for lunch and for dinner, arctic char, a great orange slab on our plates, along with rice and salad.

Liliana ate it all, bless her heart.

Following our breakfast we set out to explore the hamlet. Pangnirtung sits on the shore, almost literally, of the Pangnirtung fjord, a deep crack in the granite that makes up Baffin Island. To the west is Cumberland Sound, currently jammed with ice and thus stalling any passage of ships – tourist and supplies, more on that later – and to the east is Davis Strait, the body of water between Baffin Island and Greenland.

Every glance up and down the fjord fills one with a sense of wonder. At first the hamlet does not seem particularly attractive. Wooden houses, set on stilts, dotted along a maze of pitted and dusty gravel roads, snowmobiles set aside until the snow returns, four-wheeled ATVs, parked trucks, the occasional sleeping dog, secured by a long rope.

But after walking and a few hours of familiarity, the layout of the hamlet and its relationship to the water all begin to make sense.

The roads connecting the homes span out concentrically, as though a stone were thrown in the water and the rings reached back out to the land. That ease of formation gives everyone quicker access to the main roads that run near the water, connecting the government offices, the clinic, the library and the stores.

And so we set off, out Hannah’s kitchen door, down toward the water, turning at the cemetery, in search of the grocery stores, of which there are two: The Arctic Inuit Co-Op and The Northern Store.

The Co-Op is familiar to anyone who’s visited these stores in the Canada’s countryside – Beausejour, Langley, Halifax. The Northern Store is a similarly general-type store, and there’s probably a difference between the two, one not yet discerned by me.

Both stores carry groceries, fresh meat, milk, tires, paddles, soft drinks, chocolate bars, fabric, bullets and dog food.

The prices are exorbitant — $6 for a soft drink, $9 for a jug of milk, $17 for a box of cereal, $52 for a Costco-sized bundle of toilet paper.

Food arrives in one of two ways – the sea lift, which means containers (such as those carried on a train) stuffed with goods in Winnipeg, shipped to Montreal, loaded on to a ship, and a month in transit to the north, or by air – Montreal to Iqaluit to Pangnirtung. The sea lift is cheaper (one container of 24,000 kgs is $4000 to transport; the equivalent weight would cost $200,000 to transport by air) but the air lift is fresher. So generally groceries come in by air, as even crackers would be close to stale-dated by the time they arrived. More cost to the consumer, less waste by the stores.

No surprise, the cost of food comprises the bulk of living expenses in Pang.

One former Haligonian said that when Amazon offered free shipping, the plane would unload 150 boxes of goods every day. Ah the glory days.

Home for a supper of arctic char, salad, rice and boiled vegetables. The char is like a drier salmon, pretty and orange, and salty/savoury. Liliana puts it away like a trooper, but I see concern in her eyes.

Hannah has offered to make sandwiches from the leftover char for our hike tomorrow.