Visiting Charlie

Visiting Charlie

by Andrew Wetmore

All rights reserved

My first full day in my first Arctic village, in 1978, I knew little. In Inuktitut I could say my name, ask for tea or coffee, say thank you...and almost nothing else. I knew to stay away from sled dogs pegged out in a circle and to keep off the runway that ran through the middle of the village.

Oh, and I knew a bit about visiting. For Inuit houses you didn't knock on the door: if the door was unlocked you just stepped inside and said, “Inuliik?” (Are there people?) If there were, they would respond, “Aah!” (Yes!) and in you could go for your visit.

I knew visiting was important, was central to the life of a northern village. You visited even if you didn't have an errand or anything particular to say or hear. So I wanted to visit.

I particularly wanted to make a good first impression. I wanted folks to see me as an interesting individual, not just another qadlunak (big-eyebrows person) come up from the south for a while.

I had a map of the village, so I figured out where Charlie's house was and decided to go see him first. Charlie was very old and bent with age, a revered leader in the community, and he had shaken my hand when I got off the plane the day before. I thought it would send a good signal to drop in and drink tea with him.

So off I went. It was a bright, breezy summer day—something like what I would have expected for early April at home. I zipped up my jacket and tried to walk as if I knew what I was doing.

Charlie's house was of a generation of pre-fab homes that were sent up on the annual supply boat and assembled from numbered parts. The houses in this part of town were on sandy soil, so instead of a foundation, each house rested on an array of oil barrels standing half-buried in the ground. You could see under some of the houses without bending down.

Here was Charlie's house for sure: a little place with two windows and the front door on the wall facing me. There was the house number that matched the number for the house on the map, right there on the wall beside the door. Right beside the door whose sill, because everything was up on oil drums, was about three feet in the air. With no steps. “Man,” I thought to myself, “these guys are athletes.”

It's not much of an explanation, but I should explain that when I go to a place for the first time, I am sometimes rather blind to what I would know or be able to deduce in a place I was familiar with. Heaven help me if I am visiting in a strange town and my host needs me to “run down to the corner” for some supplies. Doesn't he know there's an infinity of corners in this round world?

When I was standing in front of Charlie's house, with its drawbridge effectively up, the day still lay ahead of me when it would be my task to drive the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Primate of All Canada, and two other archbishops from the meeting place in Iqaluit on Baffin Island to somewhere in Iqaluit's suburb, Apex Hill. As far as I know, at the time there was but one road between the two places. I still got us lost.

So you will understand, or at least comprehend, that I could look at this house with its impossible door and lack of porch and never think, perhaps there is a second way in. As I discovered later, indeed there was a door on the back side of the house, a door approached by a convenient ramp and opening into a sort of narthax filled with guns and a freezer and rubber boots and traps waiting to be repaired and all the things people got or left there as they came and went.

That door was even open on this fine, blowy day. I could have walked right in. Instead I stood and contemplated the lofty front door.

I could see someone moving around inside. I learned later that that was indeed Charlie, and that he was about to sit down to the task of sorting goose down that his family had collected out on the land (and some collected off geese on their way to becoming supper). He had a great big bag of down, and once he had taken the impurities out of it he would take the bag over to the Hudson's Bay store or the co-op and trade it for store credit.

I stood facing the house as if waiting for a light to turn green. I wanted to begin the process of getting known in this town, and I was afraid that if I went away defeated by this door I might never try to visit anyone again.

“If that old guy can get in and out of his house,” I thought, “then I certainly can.” So I made a plan. I would take a little run and then hop up to get my toe onto the door sill. I would grab and turn the door handle, writhe to one side as the door swung open, slip my other foot into the house as the door pushed my sill foot out of the way, and step calmly into the room.

Easy: parkour, decades before it became a thing.

About the time I took my first step, Charlie, right behind my target door, started to lift up the sack of goose down. By the time I had launched myself into the air, he was beginning to tip it so the down would pour, er, down into a heap on the floor.

I managed to get my toe on the sill and my hand on the doorknob. I had counted on the door not being locked and it was not. I twisted the knob, hauled outward, and started my writhe.

At this point a flaw in my plan became evident. Although this house had a big front door, nobody ever used it. They used the back door with the ramp and the airlock area with all the useful stuff. They so totally did not use the front door, not since the day the house was assembled from its kit, that nobody had bothered to put the pins in the hinges.

I discovered the absence of pins in mid-writhe, as I and the door undocked from the house and described a short arc that intersected with the sandy ground. The brisk breeze discovered this new path that took it through the house and came roaring in through the back door, picked up the goose down, and carried it in a cloud out the front door as if announcing a papal election.

Eventually Charlie stuck his head out the door. He looked at the dissipating down, looked at the door, and looked at me. He gave a brief nod, as if saying, “Oh, of course. It was that white guy attacking my house.”

After we got the door back in place, Charlie gave me a cup of tea. I said my five words of Inuktitut and he told me many things in return, things that I'm sure were useful and comforting.

And it turns out I had succeeded in my main mission of becoming known in the village as not just another qadlunak passing through. Before I had finished limping home, the story of my visit to Charlie's house was on the community radio station for all to hear.