Late Nights on Air (10 page)

Gwen got bounced—out into the midnight woods. And there, night after night, through the month of July, she improved. No one was watching, few were listening, the light was entirely different. Alone in the announce booth, she turned off the overhead light and operated in the jewel-like glow of the little diodes and vu meters. She used headphones, since Andrew McNab wasn’t around to chide her about announcers being addicted to the sound of their own voices, and thus she heard herself close by, not ricocheting around an empty room and careening out over empty wastes, but here, in the dark warm woods that resembled in a wonderful way the darkness backstage.

One night in the basement she found a little sound-effects door. Constructed of wood and about the size of an old-fashioned wall telephone, the wee door turned on a hinge and had a bell and a door knob of regular size. With Andrew’s permission, she brought it upstairs into her snug little booth, where the control board was carved out as if to accommodate a well-filled belly. Sliding her wheeled chair into its embrace, she operated switches and pots, rolling to the left or right to work the turntables on either side, or to reach the standing rack equipped for reel-to-reel tapes and sound cartridges, the latter carrying station ID and music stings: press the square green button to start the cartridge and the yellow button to stop it. In the privacy of her late-night show (in her mind she called it “show” with apologies to Harry), which displaced the network from midnight till 1 a.m., she tried out the sound-effects door, shutting it hard on songs she didn’t like and opening it wide on its squeaky hinges to welcome singers she enjoyed.

She gave herself a new name. Stella Round. And used it on air.

She experimented with sound. “Can you identify this bird?” she asked into the night, playing a persistent, rather eerie bird call she’d recorded through an open window in the early morning hours, not expecting an answer and not getting one either. She recorded Eleanor’s impish, girlish, delighted laugh. She recorded a Venetian blind clicking in the wind and Bill Thwaite typing in the newsroom. Ella barking and a raven answering. Then she organized the sounds in a formal way, like music. A phrase, then a repeat of it, then a new sound, and a repeat, then back to the beginning, looping around her neck
the long necklaces of dark-brown tape that she moved about and reinserted.

Jim Murphy, listening at home, phoned her at the station. “Let me air that what’s-it, that sound thing again in the morning.” Okay. But let her do some fine editing first.

At the old Studer, working with grease pencil, razor blade, splicing tape, and a few take-up reels, she made seamless joins between ambient noise and particular sounds, like a shoemaker leaving behind a flawless shoe for the morning.

With time she’d grown more accustomed to the bracing experience of the microphone. It no longer felt like plunging into cold water—in and out—before towelling herself off. She could stay in much longer. A burka for the shy, the nighttime announce booth. A dark tent that covered her up as she crossed the wide desert of late-night radio.

IT WAS HARD TO SAY
when the larger suspense began. At first, like almost everyone else, Harry had thought there wasn’t much Judge Berger could do. His inquiry was window dressing and everyone knew it. But then Harry realized that the denigrators were missing the point. It wasn’t Berger’s job to decide whether or not a pipeline was to be built, but what conditions should be imposed if construction went ahead. Those conditions could be minor or they could be major. At stake was something immense, all the forms of life that lay in the path of a natural gas pipeline corridor that would rip open the Arctic, according to critics, like a razor slashing the face of the Mona Lisa.

Harry and Berger were the same age. In fact, although he hated to admit it, Thomas Berger was a year younger. Harry had met him and sized him up as casually formal, serious, unconceited, tireless, aware that he was facing the biggest challenge of his life and not about to blow it (the way Harry had), the sort of man who listened, the sort of man women couldn’t get enough of. Harry came away impressed and nothing ever happened to make him less impressed. Berger was doing more to bring the issues of the day to the fore than anyone else he knew.

Now, voices that had never been on the radio had their chance to speak. Plain-spoken, same-spoken, tentative yet clear, young and old, in translation or speaking English, usually soft, sometimes strident, native people were convincing Judge Berger that the land gave them life, it was their flesh and blood, they were born and raised on it, they lived and survived by it, they loved and respected and belonged to it, as had their ancestors for thousands of years. Louis Caesar of Fort Good Hope, Lazarus Sittichinli of Aklavik, Fred Widow of Willow Lake, John Steen of Tuktoyaktuk, Jane Charlie of Fort McPherson. Up and down the Mackenzie River Valley the message was overwhelmingly the same. The past had never gone away, had no intention of going away.

The testimony wasn’t unplanned (the native organizations were active in every settlement, urging everyone to speak out and speak with one voice), it wasn’t left to chance, it was
almost
unrehearsed. Roy Fabian of Hay River told Judge Berger “there’s very, very few white people that will be friends with native people. Any of these white people that are friends with native people, it’s like a pearl in a pile of gravel.”

Tom Berger was a pearl. He listened with grave, courteous, uncommon openness, being a careful speaker himself, and one who took his time. Reporters questioned him about his seemingly infinite patience, his ability to listen for hours to highly technical presentations on the one hand, and to meandering life stories on the other. He explained that from each speaker he tried to learn something new, and indicated that he felt at home with the way native people talked. If the Dene had nothing to say, they didn’t say it, and the not
saying could go on for a long time. “You often just sit there looking at the river.”

Berger’s distinctive voice became familiar to everyone in the North. Those who heard it would recognize it immediately, no matter how many years had gone by, his firm, thoughtful, soft-spoken voice soliciting expert testimony about the social, environmental, and economic impact of the pipeline, but also the opinions of anyone who would be affected by what would be the biggest project ever built in the history of free enterprise, if it went ahead. Every evening the opinions, arguments, voices were carried by all the stations in the Northern Service in the hour-long coverage prepared by the
CBC’S
special team of six reporters working in English, Dogrib, Slavey, Hareskin, Loucheux, Chipewyan, and Inuktitut. “Let me put it this way,” Berger would explain in his unhurried, tempered fashion, “we have never before in our country had an inquiry before large-scale frontier development was undertaken. So this inquiry is unique in the Canadian experience and really unique in the experience of any industrialized country in the West.” And he invited everyone in “this vast Territory where we have people of four races speaking seven languages” to be a part of history in the making.

Although based in Yellowknife, where lawyers for the pipeline companies and the native organizations set out their formal positions, the inquiry would travel over the course of two years to settlements up and down the Mackenzie Valley, to communities on the Beaufort Sea and in the Yukon, and even to major cities in southern Canada, since at issue was the future of the northern wilderness, alternately considered a last frontier
by developers and an indispensable homeland by the native people, but undeniably one of the last wonders of the earth.

With July came the smell of smoke in the air from distant forest fires. Trees and ground were tinder-dry after weeks of unbroken warmth and no rain.

Harry walked the thirty minutes home in the evening, his dog, Ella, bounding along beside him as she had in the morning when he’d gone to work. They followed Franklin Avenue to Old Town, then crossed the causeway to Latham Island, and the walk gave Harry time to ponder the struggle taking shape on his own small turf. A fancy new
CBC
station was in the works, to be built on the southern edge of town and to house the new regional television venture, with radio taking second place. In a few years
TV
would reach beyond Yellowknife to every remote settlement in the Arctic and produce a generation addicted to instant gratification—the final death knell, in Harry’s opinion, for native language and culture. But did it have to be that way? He knew he was fighting a rearguard action, but so was Berger, and so were the settlements voting in favour of prohibition to turn back the tide of drunkenness and abuse. Harry couldn’t stop the new station from being built, but he could champion radio as more flexible, more forward-thinking, far cheaper than television, and a natural home for northerners.

Most of the time, when he turned into his driveway, his neighbour Louise Corrie was sitting on her stoop next door, smoking her pipe. Louise in her bandana, her brown stockings and ankle socks, mukluks and low rubbers, old skirt and blue
jacket. Black Louise, she was called, for her various illicit activities, making home brew for one, and certainly she had a steady stream of visitors, mostly men, at all hours of the day and night. But what she seemed to like best was to sit in the sunshine on the spot of lush green grass directly in front of the door of her shack. Harry would see her there and think “pigeons on the grass, alas,” since gulls would land and pick about, drawn by the food she scraped out of her pot. This was where she’d sat on the morning a few weeks ago when she’d opened a can of paint and to Harry’s wonderment and delight painted her brown cane completely white.

Harry went inside, made himself some supper, fed Ella, and then listened to Dido’s voice on the sly. He’d made a tape of her reading the community announcements on Radio Noon, and though he tried to ration himself, still, every night her voice filled his house. It wasn’t true that he never tired of it. He tired of it as one tires of even a beautiful song. But to reach that point took a lot of listening. There was a moment when she announced a call for local “thespians” to audition for the drama society, and she giggled, for all the world like a lamb kicking up its heels.

Late one night he phoned her. “I thought of dropping in to see you.”

She was silent on the other end of the line.

“Silence,” he said.

“No. It would be nice to see you. But tonight isn’t a good night.”

The next night, by chance, he happened to see her without being seen. Restless, he’d whistled for Ella and they’d gone out into the light-filled road around eight o’clock. Louise and her
lopsided friend, Andrew, were sitting in front of her shack, Louise with her pipe, and Andrew lopsided, they said, from his habit of throwing himself in front of moving cars in the hope of collecting on the insurance, but never without a huge, goofy, good-natured grin for Harry, or anyone else, who greeted him.

Harry had nothing in mind except following the narrow road to the gently rising hill that overlooked Rainbow Valley at the end of the island—from the hill he’d be able to see the valley and the big lake beyond. As he walked along, he passed the snug, well-designed home that belonged to the daughter of George Whalley. Farther on, also on his left and in a clump of trees, was Father Fumoleau’s little house, the political priest who’d spent years documenting the history of Treaties 8 and 11 to prove the natives had never extinguished their claim to the land. Harry stood just above the priest’s house and looked down at the multicoloured little dwellings that gave the valley its name. Officially, it was Lot 500, fifty-six unsurveyed and unserviced acres set aside for the Indians, the people who’d lived on this land for hundreds, if not thousands, of years and now managed on the scraps tossed their way. Harry shifted his gaze to the vast, shining waters of Great Slave Lake.

It seemed to him that spiritual changes come like a gust of wind on a quiet day, blowing a door open or blowing it shut. He was thinking about Eleanor, who’d told him she was going to church again, and he knew she was reaching out for something and it touched him, but he felt more in tune with his mother, who had tried to pray for her sister’s recovery from a stroke and suddenly realized there was no point; no one was
listening. His mother had been a better mother than a minister’s wife, a wonderful mother, really, despite her threats to feed him ground glass and arsenic if he didn’t eat what was on his plate. Well, she should have lived here, he thought, where arsenic was all too plentiful from the milling of gold. For years rumours had circulated about native children eating snow and dying of arsenic poisoning. About children eating the plentiful red berries near Giant and Con mines and getting sick. About horses in the very early days drinking the spring runoff water lying about in puddles at Giant Mine and dying in the autumn, and of a similar fate befalling the cows that were brought north in the late 1940s by a Mr. and Mrs. Bevan.

Harry was about to turn around and head back to the fork in the road, following it to the less occupied side of the island, when he saw Eddy and Dido come out of a faded blue house down below. They crossed the road together and got into Eddy’s white truck. The other day he’d watched Dido scratch her head with a pen. She’d run the end of the pen through her thick hair at the back of her head, repeatedly and from different angles, like the long handle of a comb, languidly, unconsciously. After she left her desk, he went over and picked up the pen and held it to his nose, pathetic man that he was, trying to smell her hair.

But now he turned and walked fast to get himself around the corner and out of sight. What were they doing there? he wondered. Dido and Eddy.

The curving road on this side of the island was lined with trees, the few houses were hidden, or not so hidden, and most of them occupied by white northerners, a somewhat anxious
breed, he’d always thought, composed of transients, newcomers, long-timers, old-timers, pioneers—they were the rungs on an ascending ladder of possessive pride about one’s stamina and attachment to the North. Who had Dido and Eddy been visiting? he wondered. And why?