Yellowknife

I was about two hours outside Yellowknife when I realized I wasn’t going to make it. I had fueled up at High Level, about 5 hours back, which was the last town I saw a roadside station. For about 300 miles, all I passed was charred trees; the enchanted forest of blackened toothpicks surrounded by a tarp of purple flowers. The enormity of the 2023 fires is insurmountable. Everywhere, everything north of Edmonton is burnt. For hours and hours, and miles and miles, and days and days.

I calculated I would make it close but not quite to town. Then, out of nowhere, appeared a red traffic light. A road crew was repairing a patch of eroded tarmac. I asked where to get gas and a worker, with an accent so thick it sounded like he was mocking Canadians, said: “Ya, right up there in ‘betcha-ko’, eh!”

Behchokǫ̀ is “Behcho's place” in Tłı̨chǫ. A First Nation town, population one-thousand, it has a gas station with a lonely pump. Inside serves as community center, city hall, and convenience store. The path there is a whoop-dee-doo of roller coaster bumps on surfaces alternating from dirt to pavement. Approaching, the first two people I saw were lumbering along the roadside, heading to town, with giant blue trash bags full of crushed cans slung on their backs.

Inside the station was huddled a crowd of 4-5 more can collectors, each waiting for the store cash register to fill with enough money for them to get their payouts for the cans. The first among them looked at me serious and said “Buy a lot so I can get paid.” His jaw cranking and eyes dilated, he was jacked on meth. I spent 60 CAD on gas. Curious, he came outside to shake my hand, ask questions, and examine the stranger. An addict, but not one who cast bad vibes, he was simply fascinated that an alien had landed on his patch of the moon.

From there it would be an hour to the capital. The Northwest Territories sprawls twice the land of Texas with a population the size of my hometown - about 45,000. If San Luis Obispo and Los Osos had a baby, they’d name it Yellowknife. Or, basically, Atascadero. It’s an odd little place, this bustling industrial town set at the end of a two lane highway that otherwise offers seven hours of forest and nothingness. I headed here for an oil change and to hit the gym, because it’s the last outpost of civilization before Whitehorse, Yukon, which is about 20 hours away. And, because, when again will I be within 15 hours of Yellowknife? Along the way I saw some spectacular waterfalls that one can walk right up to the edge without a guard rail or seeing anybody else there.

After fueling up, I left Behchokǫ̀. Near the outskirts of town stood two hitchhikers. Straight away, when they got in the van, the sweet odor of stale liquor filled the cabin. The gentleman said: “We’re going to Yellowknife.” I joked, “Well, where else would you be going?” They both laughed. The two were so soaked in booze that, if I was in AA, I would have called my sponsor to ask if smelling them meant I had relapsed. Despite that, the man, Nars, was lucid. The woman, who sat behind him on the bed, murmured to herself and occasionally joined our conversation but in a distracted way, as if the chat she was having with herself she was with someone else.

Named Narcisse, after a snake den in Manitoba where tens of thousands of reptiles emerge every year from limestone caverns to perform mating rituals, he asked if I had ever taken hitchhikers before. I told him I had; that I picked one up in Vermont and took him to Maine. That one, I told him, was named Jack and had taken care to explain to me that he was a hobo rather than homeless. Nars informed me that he made no such distinction: “We’re homeless.”

Mike was a little less skeptical of these two than Jack, or maybe he’s just getting used to it. Nars used to work in the mines until they closed a decade ago. “Too much money,” he said. I asked, “What, they made too much money?” “No,” he answered, laughing, “it cost too much money to run.” The price of mined diamonds has fallen in almost a straight line since 2012. Now, he, like everyone else there, makes a living collecting cans… or picking up other people’s litter to pollute himself.

The price of diamonds also looks about like the trend in marriages.

Nars spoke of an evening, in third person, when he blacked out, as if it had happened to another person. He tried to hang himself but woke up on the floor, disoriented, with the rope around his neck. Apparently, he had been too drunk the night before to affix it to the rafters. As if an evil spirit had done this to an innocent man, he protested, “I don’t even want to die. But this happened.” Sadly, he’s doing it to himself anyway. I was reminded of the scene in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest when Chief says: “Every day, my father, he always suck out of the bottle. Until, one day, the bottle start to suck out of him.”

Days earlier, along the road, I had noticed these cryptic banners saying things like: “Drug Dealers: Our Way of Life is Our Way of Suffering.” And now it all made sense. If you ever need to reaffirm your commitment to sobriety, just pop in for a look around your local tribal lands.

Nars looked up at the dash and saw a book splayed out there and said: “If you don’t mind me asking, did you read all those pages.” I told him I had and he said: “I only like to read true stories.” I looked at him and winked as if to say: “Ain’t that the truth.” Then he told me to drop them off at Walmart. That’s where everybody meets. Pulling in the lot I saw a circle of natives, huddled around a bottle, drawing sips of amber liquor from a jug. Each one grimaced as they took their turn. I guess that’s everyone.

My way of life is writing these.