I Hate to Leave This Beautiful Place (12 page)

Though the band itself would most likely never be written up in
Rolling Stone,
Nanook the Gook was for a time enormously popular throughout the scattered villages along the east and west coasts of Hudson Bay and inland. Edward had often flown the band to gigs. I still have a number of reel-to-reel recordings of covers of “Instant Karma,” “Power to the People,” “Woman Is the Nigger of the World,” “Whatever Gets You Through the Night,” “Nobody Told Me,” “Don't Worry, Kyoko,” and “Working Class Hero.” The band was heavy on guitars. When I was living in Eskimo Point they had recently taken on a new lead guitarist, who was seventeen. In the recording I have of “Nobody Told Me” you can hear seagulls in the background.

I had been employed by the Arctic Oral History Project for a third year to translate life histories and folktales. In Eskimo Point I was in the midst of transcribing and translating a single, quite complicated story, and the working title I gave it was “I Hate to Leave This Beautiful Place.” In broad outline, the story concerns a man who is turned into a goose by a malevolent shaman, and when it comes time for all the geese to fly south, he despairs about leaving; in fact, he falls into unmitigated grief, primarily expressed through a high-pitched wailing lament: “I hate to leave this beautiful place! I hate to leave this beautiful place!” which can be heard at great distances, echoing across the stark tundra. The man who was transformed into a goose was formerly a strong and decent fellow with a wife and two children. He was a great artist whose soapstone sculptures of animals were widely admired. He was reputed to have rarely left the village of his birth, Padlei.

In his incarnation as a goose, the man realizes that unless he migrates with the other geese he will die. His despair at this fate intensifies the story's universal themes of mortality, longing, home, sanity. And the story contains, with the philosophical generosity characteristic of Inuit spoken literature, and without necessarily spelling it out, a meditation on what the world requires of and imposes on an individual attempting to live a dignified existence, and how that person comes to knowledge of him- or herself through indelible experience.

I hate to leave this beautiful place. I hate to leave this beautiful place.

I heard the story from Lucille Amorak, with whom I met on an almost daily basis for a couple of weeks while I was in Eskimo Point. Long dead now, at the time Lucille was in her seventies. She was a wonderful poet as well as a storyteller; her poems, to my mind, represented the spoken and written word in equal measure; they had a crafted informality. Here is one of my favorites:

 

My aunt held a grudge—she forgot why.

My cousin held a grudge—he forgot why.

My father held a grudge—he forgot why.

Lots of things happened in the village,

lots of things.

People were born—people died—gulls

were everywhere all the time—

the beach and the big boulders on the beach

stayed put.

My cousin lived in another village

and she held a grudge—she forgot why.

I held a grudge—it was against a seal—because

that seal nabbed a fish right off my line!

I don't hold that grudge anymore

but at least I remember why I once did.

My other uncle held a grudge—he forgot why.

My other aunt held a grudge—it was against me.

One day I walked over to her house and said,

“What's your grudge?” “I forgot,” she said.

“It was fun holding it,” she said, “then it wasn't

any longer.”

We sat down for a meal. My aunt was in

a pretty good mood—she laughed a lot—

I forgot what about.

 

As Lucille's family had never joined a church, her birth was never recorded, but she told me that her mother had told her she had been born in 1913. Lucille was Peter Shaimaiyuk's grandmother's sister. Lucille and I usually worked together from seven in the morning until noon. We sat at her splintery table in her one-room shack, located just down from the post office flying a Canadian flag. She often kept her teapot on the boil, and each morning she'd hold a piece of seal fat to the open end of a flask, and tip the flask to soak the fat in whiskey. Our work often proceeded haltingly; my skills in the Inuit language lacked considerable refinement, and yet Lucille had “a lot of English,” as she put it, which was true. We managed.

Anyway, at about eleven
P.M.
on December 8 I was reading, perhaps for the hundredth time, Merwin's
Carrier of Ladders
in the stockroom of the Hudson's Bay Company store, where I had a cot and washbowl, and shaved without a mirror, all courtesy of Mr. Albert Bettany, the store's manager since 1955. These were sparse quarters, to be sure. But I also had an electric space heater. It was about minus ten or fifteen degrees outside. Suddenly Peter Shaimaiyuk walked in, no knock on the door. “Hey, hey,” he said, “Tommy's gonna be on the radio, eh?”

Tommy Novaqirq was the drummer in Nanook the Gook. I sat up in my cot and switched on the shortwave, which came in loud and clear; turning the dial, I found NWT—Northwest Territories Radio. The weather reporter, who was also a news broadcaster, was named Gabriel Alikatuktuk. He alternated between English and Inuit, with a smattering of French as well. He had a wonderfully quirky manner and sometimes out of nowhere would speak in a pretty good imitation of Humphrey Bogart.

One important feature of Gabriel's show was that his weather report often included recriminations. Let me explain.

Through the labyrinthine Arctic gossip routes—mail plane pilots, for instance, were big contributors—Gabriel received all sorts of information about the behavior of people throughout his listening region. The best equivalent I can think of is the crime report in the daily newspaper that serves the hamlets where I live in Vermont, and which archives the disparate incidents (mostly ludicrously petty crimes, yet some are harrowing) that occur there, such as loud talking on the street in the middle of the night, the abuse of a homeless dog, jaywalking, a mailbox smashed in by drive-by teenagers bored to tears, and so on—the cumulative effect being,
Look how much
small-time criminal behavior can be fitted into any given day or night.
This is pretty much the same behavior—stupid, reckless killing of time—one experienced in Arctic villages, generally speaking. The difference was, Gabriel Alikatuktuk, in his weather forecast, would choose a specific perpetrator to indict as having insulted Sedna, pissed her off in some terrible way or other. This was how he would delineate the equation between the offending act and the mythological response. So when Tommy Novaqirq had gotten black-out drunk and taken potshots at a neighbor's sled dogs, all but blinding one dog in its right eye, Gabriel Alikatuktuk got wind of it.

“Now, word got to me,” Gabriel announced, “that this dumb-ass fellow named Tommy Novaqirq the other night shot at a neighbor's dogs, and now Sedna is not happy, my friends, she is
not happy.
And there's a freakin'
outrageous
blizzard moving in on Hudson Bay from the northwest, my friends. It's gonna blow the asshole out of a polar bear. It's gonna wail louder than Hendrix doing the national anthem at Woodstock. It's gonna tear into Inuit territories and have a wild time of it. So thanks a lot, Tommy Novaqirq—and I mean, if you weren't such a fantastic drummer . . .”

“Oh shit, Tommy's famous for a bad reason,” Peter said.

We were laughing like crazy. And as we listened to more of this radio riff on the relationship between human misjudgment and a threatening weather system, of the sort we'd heard dozens of times before, suddenly the radio seemed to go dead. Silence. Then Gabriel emitted a sharp, sobbing intake of breath and said, “My friends in the northern world.” He stopped again. You could hear him trying to catch his breath. There were some weird sounds in the background, too, as if somebody was breaking a table or chair, a furious ransacking. Then Gabriel said, “My friends, John Lennon was murdered tonight in the city of New York in the USA.” There was another long silence. Then: “John Lennon was gunned down. John Lennon is gone.”

I imagined this radio message physically manifesting itself as a net floating out into the black sky full of the vastest array of stars visible from Earth.

It took less than half an hour for the band to gather in my room—Tommy, Peter, the new guitarist named Sam Karpik, and William Okpik, a guitarist and keyboardist. They all sat in fold-out slat chairs and plugged their guitars into amplifiers attached by extension cord to an auxiliary generator. Tommy set up his drum kit. Gabriel Alikatuktuk, in his studio, started playing John Lennon song after John Lennon song with no commentary at all. Nanook the Gook jammed along with the radio. And while I did not think to write down all the titles, I do recall that during the first three or four songs played, the words were distinctly accompanied by Tommy's fits of sobbing. Plus, everyone was getting very drunk on whiskey. At one point Tommy said, “I'm such a fuck-up,” and went off on a berserk drum solo that must have lasted ten or fifteen minutes, all the while screaming, “Sedna—pleeeze, Sedna—pleeeze!”

“You can't be thinking that shooting at those dogs had anything to do with what happened down in New York,” I said.

Tommy kicked over the drum set, threw the drumsticks at my face, and walked over and took a halfhearted swing at me, which I easily blocked, and then he sat on the floor. “What the fuck do you know about it,” he said.

The long Arctic night continued to unfold, with whiskey, cigarettes, the radio, and very little talking. Every once in a while I'd tune in another long-distance station on the shortwave. The death of John Lennon was being talked about in so many languages it was mindboggling. It was a murder translated everywhere.

If I remember correctly, Gabriel Alikatuktuk was broadcasting from Winnipeg. Some years later, and with no small amount of inquiry by letter, I was able to obtain a copy of Gabriel's playlist of that night. It was typed on a manual typewriter:
“
Cold Turkey,” “I Found Out,” “Mother,” “Hold On,” “Working Class Hero,” “God,” “Imagine,” “Crippled Inside,” “Jealous Guy,” “It's So Hard,” “I Don't Want to Be a Soldier,” “Give Me Some Truth,” “Oh, My Love,” “How Do You Sleep?” “Oh Yoko!,” “New York City,” “Mind Games,” “I'm Sorry,” “One Day (at a Time),” “Bring On the Lucie,” “Intuition,” “Out of the Blue,” “Only People,” “I Know (I Know),” “You Are Here,” “Meat City,” “Going Down on Love,” “Whatever Gets You Through the Night,” “What You Got,” “Bless You,” “Scared,” “No. 9 Dream,” “Surprise, Surprise (Sweet Bird of Paradox),” “Steel and Glass,” “Beef Jerky,” “Nobody Loves You (When You're Down and Out),” and “(Just Like) Starting Over.”

Nanook the Gook left the stockroom of the Hudson's Bay Company store at about seven-thirty the following morning. Gone sleepless, by eight I was again working with Lucille Amorak. She had been suffering from pneumonia, which had been diagnosed at the small hospital in Churchill; Edward Shaimaiyuk had flown her there and back. Edward was given antibiotics and told how to administer them to Lucille.

As a result of her condition, Lucille was noticeably short of breath and occasionally wheezy, which infused her renditions of “I Hate to Leave This Beautiful Place,” as I had come to refer to it, with a punctuated sense of urgency, sentence by sentence—at least that is how it sounded to me on the tape recordings. When she raised her voice for emphasis, or when she shifted into one character or another, she often had to clear her throat and sometimes stopped to catch her breath. She occasionally had to stop for a nap in the middle of a work session. It got to the point where Lucille simply could not continue, even at severely reduced hours. But it was enough. I was fortunate to have a lot of help with the transcription and translation from her husband and two nieces, who went over the story and the vocabulary lists. Finally, on December 21, we closed up shop.

But that morning of December 9, the world seemed haunted by radio, as the CBC, the BBC, and stations out of Vancouver, Amsterdam, London, Buffalo, and other locales continued to report the aftermath of John Lennon's murder and played his songs. I asked Lucille Amorak if she had ever heard of John Lennon, and she said, “I heard about him from Peter. He played me some songs. He sang me some songs. I asked if this John Lennon would be visiting us, and Peter said no, he wouldn't be.”

 

Before I left Eskimo Point, Peter announced that he needed to get down to New York and stand for a while in Central Park near the Dakota apartment building where John Lennon had been shot, “maybe even find some people to play Lennon songs with.” He had never been to a Canadian city before, let alone out of the country. He had gotten hold of a map of New York from the library in Churchill and drawn a circle around Central Park.

The ability of Nanook the Gook to make a living was restricted by the long winters—people in the far north didn't travel much until late spring. Still, the band made a little money, and Tommy had previously saved some—“not much, but enough” to sponsor his journey to New York. I did not know the nature of his finances in detail, but he had his mind made up. Tommy had asked the rest of the band to go with him, but nobody else had any interest, and this caused a rift. I was scheduled to leave from Churchill on the Muskeg Express to Winnipeg; I knew that weather interfered with the train schedule and was prepared to wait at the Churchill Hotel. I remember hearing Peter say, “Sedna is really pissed off these days, eh?” Anyway, I was willing to sleep high up off the ground in the hotel.