I always knew that lying on a spine board for a two and a half hour drive to town would be uncomfortable, but I never thought I’d hear this one:
“Please let me up! C’mon, man! I’d rather sit up for five minutes than ever walk again!”
Allright, this one happened to the next station south, but it’s way too good a story to pass up. A couple of weeks ago, a friend of mine was dispatched to an MVA near Fort St. John. A pickup towing a trailer through heavy fog had missed the stop sign at a rural intersection with the Alaska Highway, sailing right through and colliding with a gravel truck. When the crew arrived, the scene was a mess, and detailed information scanty, so they quickly checked the trailer for dangerous contents. Finding it empty, they got to work. Details of the accident began to emerge, and the nature of the trailer finally filtered down to the crew: it was a tiger trailer, only recently empty. Meanwhile, a disconcerted farmer was watching the goings-on from a nearby horse pasture. Confident that he didn’t own any stripy, whiskered horses, he pulled his truck around the field to get a better view. Far from being a threat, the tiger found the countryside charmingly reminiscent of his native Siberia, and contented himself with pouncing and rolling in the grass. Curious about the possibility of a truck ride, he walked up to the farmer and waited to be let in. The tiger’s owner, who had arrived shortly after the accident, suggested putting the cat in his car, but conservation officers and RCMP voted against. Kitty eventually got his truck ride, but it was in a humane bear trap, and he must have spent it praying patiently for another gravel truck.
“So is that a puke stain or several-days-old moose blood he’s lying in?”
“Oh, you never know what happens around here.”
My good friend GP, one of the three crazy medics of Fort Nelson, happens to be the son of Trapper Ray, the local legend who used to run a trap line near Liard River, and once mounted a vigorous campaign to save the fur spiders, an entirely fictional local species that nonetheless garnered much concerned support from tourists to the Northern Rockies. There were once fur spider crossing signs on the highway, I have myself seen a “Save the Fur Spiders” fridge magnet, and legend has it that a proposed hydro dam was left unbuilt so as not to intrude on their habitat. Anyway, as you might have suspected, GP has a number of excellent stories from his previous life in the North, and I thought this one, flushed out by a discussion of the imminent closing of the Cache Creek landfill, was worth publishing:
“Yeah, there actually used to be a landfill near where I lived, but they closed it because it attracted too many bears. Basically, we’d just back the pickup in, throw out the garbage, and try to leave before the bears figured out we were there. And then sometimes, there would be two in the back of the truck, going through the garbage before we even got out.”
An exerpt from yesterday’s traffic report for the Northern Rockies:
“…sanding in progress, and watch out for buffalo on the highway from kilometre 800 to the Liard River.”
Yesterday, we flew into the tiny native middle-of-nowhere village of Fort Ware. To get there, you head out over the rockies and straight on til morning, or until this huge green valley appears out of nowhere in the middle of outlandishly snowy mountains. To lose altitude quickly enough to land, you have to dip into the smaller Kwadacha valley and ride it in. The first thing you see when you get out of the plane is the graveyard, where the dead are buried above ground in little houses. We met the snowmobile with the patient at the end of the strip, and got back in the air. On the way to Prince George, I learned a few things about Fort Ware life:
“So what do people do for a living in Fort Ware?”
“Hunting, bingo, camping, going to school, working.”
I asked about food:
“I do not like to eat beaver. I do not like to eat rabbit. But groundhog, moose, elk, deer, I like.”
I asked when a significant family event had happened last summer:
[Shrugging] “Oh I’m not sure. It was when the river was high… so I’m not sure.”
“What lake is that?”
“I forget the name. It’s a manmade lake. There’s a village under it somewhere. My grandparents used to dogsled along it to get supplies.” [Worth mentioning that this lake is about 150 km. long]
I also found out that most of the people in Fort Ware speak at least a little Sikanni, and there are a few elders who don’t speak anything else.
The other day, Geordie, Matt and I were eating supper with Geordie’s girlfriend, who’s from Seattle, and hadn’t previously been much north of Vancouver. Various remarks were made about the high fat content of the meal. Here’s Matt’s explanation: “Yeah, welcome to the North. We try to put on the fat so that … [takes another bite of sausage]… if we ever get lost in the woods, and one of us dies … we can light him on fire to stay warm!”
Had a pretty good couple of days last week, but didn’t get to post for a while. First thing Sunday morning, my partner and I headed out on an all day pair of flights. We landed just in time to scream off to an accident 45 minutes south of town, but the other two cars had beaten us there, so we turned around and called it a day at the 14 hour mark. First thing the next morning, we headed via helicopter to an accident 197 miles north on the highway, to rescue the trapped driver of a 36,000 lb. load of dynamite, but we were turned back at the mountains by a sheer wall of snow being whipped around by a 50 knot wind, and the ground ambulance from the Yukon had to take the call instead. To round it all out, I nearly worked enough hours yesterday to get suspended. Now this is what I signed up for.
Doctors up here are a different breed. It seems like half of them are South African. “Why do they all come here, though?” I once had the naivete to ask. “Because they get killed there.” Oh. Right. In Fort Nelson, there are usually two doctors in town at a time, one of whom is often a nomadic locum doctor on the latest stop on the small town medical milk run. Between the two of them, they run the walk in clinic and the hospital, from maternity ward to laughingly-so-called ICU. They even do some veterinary duties on occasion, as the nearest vet is 200 miles south. Our current locum, who’s usually a farmer, was telling me some tales of impromptu animal medicine when he came out with this one:
“The only anaesthetic I have on the farm is my gun.”
[Contemplative, farmerlike pause]
“It’s pretty effective though.”
Overheard in a rig camp cafeteria, here’s a pretty good hint at some of the ways roughnecks spend time off: “Yeah, I just hate going out with his crew, cause none of them have drivers’ licences, cause they’ve all got impaireds, eh? You know, I bought a $70,000 truck so I could ride in style, not you.”