Tag Archives: Hudson Bay

93. 2-stroke

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What’s your favourite smell? Freshly mown grass? Fresh coffee? That smell when you nuzzle your face into a baby? Why is it your favourite smell? Do you know?

I was sitting at my desk yesterday morning, the window open to cool the house down before the heat of the day kicked in. That’s when the smell came tumbling in and nostalgia stroked my face like a feather. One of the council workers was strimming the strip of grass that runs the length of my street. And there it was: The smell of exhaust from a 2-stroke engine. There’s comfort in that smell for me and it’s deeply entwined with so many good memories.

We’re living on Carina of Devon. Me and Julian and the girls. The smell of a 2-stroke engine is us leaving Carina to head off on an adventure in the rubber dinghy. Maybe it’s all of us, going ashore to explore a new place or to wander up a river that’s too shallow for Carina‘s draught. Or I’m on my own, the freedom of having the outboard tiller in my hand, setting out to go for a solitary walk or to go shopping or do the laundry. Or it’s Julian, taking the girls across the Rio Guadiana to school. Or it’s all the other yachties we met over the years, the smell and sound of a 2-stroke outboard motor signalling their arrivals and departures from their anchored yachts. It’s adventure and freedom.

Strip that layer away, and I’m living in Arviat. It’s summer, with open sea and lake-pocked land. I have my own quad bike and I zip around town in the near 20-hour daylight, picking my friend Crystal up at 3am, so we can go check the fishing net we’re sharing for the summer, or meeting Frank at 5am to go beluga hunting. His quad has Arden’s boat trailer attached on the back, so I hop on and reverse the quad into the sea under Frank’s guidance; he offloads the boat, as I park the quad and trailer. Or I’m out along the road to the dump, or the road past the reservoir, at twilight or after dark, speeding along way too fast, sometimes alone, sometimes not. In my mind, I’m a badass. In reality, probably not.

Strip that layer away, and I’m living in Arviat. It’s spring, and I’m at the floe edge with Arden. We’ve come by skidoo; him driving, me sitting in the qamutik (sled), facing back towards Arviat, back towards the direction we’ve come from, to shield myself from the powdery snow blown up by the skidoo runners. I’m surrounded by the immense beautiful whiteness of the west coast of Hudson Bay. We’ll stop when we get to the floe edge. Arden will talk to me and teach me, I’ll try to remember everything; we’ll drink tea and eat the bannock Theresa has made for us.

Strip away that layer and I’m at home in Ballygibbon. I could be 10 or 20 or 25. The 2-stroke exhaust is Daddy mowing the lawn. It’s the ease and efficiency of the first petrol-powered lawn mower after years of a small, manual one. It’s me spending summer evenings following Daddy round the garden – at 10 or 20 or 25 – just for his company and the important things we have to talk about – Gaelic football and films and music, a bit of politics and other sports.

When I catch a whiff of 2-stroke exhaust, it doesn’t conjure any one of these times in my life in particular. Rather, it mashes them all up, and loosens something in me, a knot unravels, and a feeling of belonging rushes through my veins. Now, I am here, with a view out my window that’s as green as I could ever have hoped for. And a new layer is added to my love of that smell.

91. Too far away

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I remember the phone ringing down the hall. Mammy got up from the kitchen table to answer it. ‘It’s for you,’ she said, coming back to sit down. ‘Someone from Canada.’ I walked down the hall to the table by the hall window and put the receiver to my ear.

‘Hello?’ I said.

‘Huvi?’ came the reply. Frank. Dear Frank. My friend, my teacher, my hunting buddy. One of my primary research participants in Arviat, it was Frank who had taught me to skin and butcher caribou, and to get it right by doing it over and over; Frank who had taught me how to drive a boat amongst pods of beluga whales in the shallow waters close to shore, so he could harpoon them from the bow; Frank who put me on polar bear patrol while he collected the arctic char that had swum into his fishing net; Frank who I spent hours and days with, far inland on our quad bikes, out at sea at first light. He and Martha welcomed me into their home, made me tea, fed me biscuits and bannock, took me out on the land and to their cabin with their daughters. Frank made me laugh and made me think. How at ease I felt in his company.

And now, he was on the phone. He on the tundra, on the western shore of Hudson Bay; I in the Bog of Allen, in the middle of Ireland. And the distance between us seemed vast. Vaster than the Atlantic Ocean, and maritime Canada and the width of Hudson Bay that separated us. All that we talked about with such ease when we were together dissolved now across the expanse.

He asked about the weather and I told him. But what was Irish weather to him? What was the Irish autumn, with leaves changing colour and falling off the trees, the rain and the mud, when he lived in a place with no trees, where autumn meant the ground covered in snow and the sea gradually turning to ice, travel by boat giving way to skidoos. My autumn meant nothing to him and, from this distance, his autumn was starting to dim for me.

I asked what he’d been doing and he told me where he’d been seal hunting the previous day, who he’d gone with and the other hunters he’d met when he was out. I smiled as he spoke. In my mind’s eye, I could see where he’d been and who he’d been with. I had been there with him, and with his brother-in-law Arden, just a few weeks earlier.

He asked what I’d been up to. It was September and in Ireland there was only Gaelic football in the air. How could I tell him about the match I had been to on Sunday? About the crowds, the excitement, how important football was to my life here? Or that the turf was home and there were still a couple of loads to be thrown in the shed. My voice sounded strange in my ears as I tried to talk to him about my life here.

I’d lived in his world and loved it. He was interested in my world, but had no experience of it. The ease we felt in each other’s company was made jagged by the cultural distance that now lay between us.

We continued to speak on the phone occasionally and I got to spend another summer with him a few years later. It’s a few years now since he passed away. I wish I had been better able to bridge that distance when he called.

Snow memory

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I remember this time of year about a decade ago. We were living in rural Cambridgeshire, about four miles from Cambridge. It had snowed heavily overnight and the flat southeast English landscape was blanketed in white. I couldn’t wait to get out of the house and go for a walk. I left by the back gate and headed across the fields. The land around our house was owned by Trinity College, one of the Cambridge University colleges. It was heavily cultivated and, although the fields were accessible, walking was restricted to signposted tracks or to field perimeters. As I walked, the sky grew more overcast and it started to snow again. After twenty minutes I was well out of sight of my house and the quiet country road on which we lived.

Instead of the joy I had anticipated feeling at being out in the snowy landscape, I felt unease. This walk along the familiar hedgerows was one I took regularly, and it was not uncommon for me to encounter a hare or a deer. Indeed, on this particular day I found fresh hare prints in the snow. But, somehow, I felt decidedly uncomfortable. I was on a circular walk and at this point I was equidistant between going on or turning back.

I was aware that I had quickened my pace and I was perspiring under my winter clothes. I had the sensation of being a hunted animal as I kept furtively glancing around. Suddenly, the reason for my fear became clear to me – polar bears! There, in the bucolic, highly-managed, symmetrical landscape of rural Cambridgeshire, something had subconsciously brought me back to the Kivalliq. It wasn’t simply the snow. I had been in the snow at least a couple of times since I had last lived in Arviat, and I hadn’t feared an encounter with a bear. But that day, there was a certain quality to the light, a certain texture to the air that tricked my brain into thinking there might be a bear around.

Despite being in a landscape where the largest carnivore I could possibly encounter was a badger, I found myself feeling the way I had that spring day seven or eight years earlier when I had walked out to Huluraq. Arviat was more than a 40 minute walk behind me and all around was the flat west Hudson Bay landscape, where the undulating snow-covered land reached a snow-covered finger, Huluraq, out onto the frozen seascape of Hudson Bay. As I turned to make the slow snow-hampered walk back home I saw two sets of prints in the snow – a mother polar bear and her cub. My blood ran cold. I was unarmed – although I doubt that, armed, I would have stood any better chance. I had no idea how old the prints were. They looked fresh enough, clearly defined and without an accumulation of blowing snow.

The walk back to Arviat was the longest of my life. I expected at any moment that the last sound I would hear would be the fluey-sounding grunt of a mother bear coming up behind me, turning me into a meal for her cub. I walked as fast as my cumbersome clothes and boots and the terrain would allow me. There had been other encounters with bears, some where I’d felt threatened and some where I’d felt awe and gratitude for being in the presence of such a creature. But no encounter was as frightening as that non-encounter that day near Huluraq.

And then, years later, what should have been a pleasant walk across a snowy English landscape turned into an anxiety-filled power walk, as I raced to escape from my subconscious fear. I realized at the time how ridiculous I was being and I forced myself to slow down, relax, bring myself back into the moment. But in a very short time I found myself once again anxiously speed walking towards my little chocolate-box English cottage.

I’ve often thought of that snowy day in Cambridgeshire and the subtle sensations that caused my mind and body to subconsciously make connections between past and present. We all subconsciously make these connections all the time as our senses trick us into time travel. The smell of a 2-stroke engine immediately transports me to the west coast of Hudson Bay; the theme music to BBC Sports Roundup puts me back in the busy little kitchen of my childhood at 5pm on a Saturday evening, me, my cousins, our parents, aunt and granny and the smell and texture of fried bread; tin-foil wrapped ham sandwiches take me back to the Canal End of Croke Park.

It’s not simply memory or nostalgia. Rather, it is a triggering of the senses that awakens reaction, muscle memory, feeling, sensation, emotion. Perhaps it’s the closest we get to time travel as we are transported backwards through time to catch glimpses of what were, perhaps, the moments that defined us. We may not have known at the time but those would be the moments that would remain, imprinted on our souls.