Late Nights on Air (20 page)
Gwen’s breakfast was everyone else’s lunch; she got into the habit of joining Teresa in the Gold Range café around noon. One day, when Eleanor was with them, Teresa split her egg roll down the centre, poured the sweet sauce inside, and said, amused and mischievous, “Love is like a Chinese menu. It’s not a question of meeting the one and only. There’s infinite choice. All you have to do is pick.”
“Listen to you,” said Eleanor, who shared Teresa’s side of the booth. Teresa leaned into her, capsized by mirth.
The café was busy and warm, dank with steam and grease and cigarette smoke. A framed photograph, “Lunchtime Atop a Skyscraper, 1932,” on the wall: workers with lunch pails in their laps, balanced on a high beam above New York City. Teresa’s relaxed work ethic meant for longer than usual lunch breaks and later than usual hours to make up for it. That suited Gwen, who didn’t begin her shift until 6 p.m.
This was the day when Teresa let drop quite casually that she used to volunteer at the gay crisis line in Vancouver. “A
thirty-five-year-old woman called up,” she said, “and I suggested we have coffee together. I told her don’t worry. I’m an ancient Chinese washerwoman. I won’t come on to you.” Teresa recognized the look on Gwen’s face, the slight shock, and added with a small smile, “I try not to hide anything about myself.”
A pause. Eleanor said, “That’s what I love about you.”
For Gwen, Teresa’s revelation brought her birthday party into focus. She remembered Teresa’s trembling hands after Eddy claimed Dido for himself, and realized she’d been right about something, after all, just wrong about the someone.
Eddy came in, and with him came not Dido this time, but his Dene friend. The two men passed the three women and nodded. Eleanor greeted them by name. “Eddy. Paul.” They took a booth at the very back of the restaurant. Eleanor said, “Paul came to our northern support group to explain the native land claim.”
Teresa’s face had darkened. Suddenly she looked every inch her age.
“I wonder if
you’d
come one night,” Eleanor said to her. “We’d love to hear your views.”
There was something wonderfully innocent and generous about Eleanor Dew, thought Gwen on her side of the booth as she watched her kind, lived-in face become animated with the issues of the day. Eleanor filled Teresa in on the northern support group formed by Dido and Eddy, a workshop of like-minded whites who wanted to discuss the native land claim, understand it better, support it publicly, offset the usual white ignorance and mistrust of native rights. The North of Sixty Support Group, they were calling themselves, and it wasn’t
meant for journalists, she said with an apologetic smile for Gwen, just ordinary people in town. “Well, Dido’s the exception. There’s just a handful of us. We meet once a week in my trailer. There’s a teacher. An architect. There’s the United Church minister. One woman’s a nurse. There’s a painter. There’s me. We’re tasting the pleasures of radical thinking,” she said with a gently ironic smile, “going to the root of what Eddy likes to call present reality. But it’s good. Paul spoke to us a few weeks ago,” indicating him with a movement of her finger, “I found it interesting, helpful.”
Teresa said, “I know Paul Julien.” She pushed her plate to one side. “He’s a cousin of mine.” The food she hadn’t eaten would go into the garbage cans behind the restaurant and be squawked over by the flapping, theatrical ravens.
“We deserve a land claim settlement,” Teresa said. “We deserve to have control of this country. But Paul’s what I’d call a man on the prowl. He’s bad news.”
Late one night, Gwen, wearing Dolly, stood in the middle of the street, head craned back, marvelling, listening. She’d finished her shift and put on her borrowed finery, the mysterious loan, as she chose to think of it, that had fallen into her lap from the amazing sky. A sky that on this night towards the end of October was filled with a moving white fog, which began to shimmer and ripple downwards in long, shaggy icicles, then sideways in draperies of pale green and violet—a huge, heavenly version of the gas flame of a jeweller’s torch shooting out to the side and shifting in colour from white to blue to
green to orange. If she’d been outside the city, somewhere in the arctic wastes, she might have heard the northern lights swish and whisper as everyone said they did, Dene, Inuit, trappers, prospectors, everyone except the dreary scientists.
Earlier the same night, there had been earthly fireworks of a milder sort on Latham Island. Judge Berger was holding a community hearing in the hall a hundred yards or so from Harry’s house. These community hearings, as distinct from the formal hearings in the Explorer Hotel, were casual and open-ended, continuing until everyone who wanted to speak had spoken. It was Berger’s contention that every person who lived in this part of the world had a right to say what he or she felt about a pipeline.
Harry sat at the end of a row of chairs, listening to a smart, young Yellowknife doctor utter a series of warnings about the next southern invasion of the North. Look at Alaska, the doctor was saying, where the Alyeska pipeline was built
after
a land claims settlement with the native people, and even so, the effect has been catastrophic on rates of suicide, divorce, alcoholism, mental illness, violent crime: a horror story, and we haven’t heard the final chapter. Here, said the doctor, the natives don’t
have
a land claims settlement. So what’s going to happen? For three winters a few of them will be hired as part of a big pipeline force and they’ll receive high wages. Then what? They’ll drift south looking for the same wages, they’ll drift into unemployment and welfare in Vancouver or Winnipeg or Toronto, and the North will have lost its best young men just when the Dene are trying to establish their right to self-determination. Young native women will be enticed and sexually exploited by transient white labourers
with lots of money and easy access to alcohol and no thought for the consequences of their actions. “Who is going to pay for all this?” he wanted to know. “The pipeline company? The oil company? The people of Canada? These people may pay the dollars; we already know who is going to pay the price in human misery.”
The little hall was bright with lights and cameras. The possibility for spontaneous, unscripted drama made these informal hearings of special interest to journalists. Nothing went unnoticed.
Harry saw Eddy and Dido at the back, their coats over their arms. Lorna Dargabble sat in loose disarray at the end of a middle row. Berger, in jacket and tie, was at the front, seated at a small square table, a pedestal mike directly in front of him. On his left were the transcribers, getting down every word that was spoken. At another table were representatives from both pipeline companies, who were there to answer questions. Behind the judge, and tacked to the wall, was a huge map showing the proposed routes for the pipeline, there being two proposals, as Berger took pains to explain in his opening remarks. The one that was 2,200 miles long had been put forward by an international consortium (Arctic Gas). It was to bring gas from Prudhoe Bay, along the north slope of Alaska across the Yukon to the Mackenzie Valley, then pick up Canadian gas from the Mackenzie River Delta, and in a single pipeline bring it to markets in the south, Canadian and American. The other was an all-Canadian proposal (Foothills Pipe Lines) to bring Canadian gas from the Mackenzie Delta south to Canadian markets only. This one was eight hundred miles long. Arctic Gas claimed their bigger venture would be
more economical in the long run, and gas would cost less than it would if the Foothills project went through. “Well, that’s the argument between them,” said Berger, setting himself apart from the companies even as he explained their intentions to the audience of about seventy people. No matter which pipeline project went ahead, he said, there would be thousands of men needed to build it and it would take years to build. And if a gas pipeline was built, an oil pipeline would surely follow. It was logical, then, for his inquiry to address not just the impact of a gas pipeline, but all the development that would come thereafter. Listening to him speak, Harry appreciated just how much Tom Berger had managed to turn his inquiry into an exercise in democracy, informing, questioning, teaching, listening. “I hope you’ll feel free to speak up and tell me what’s on your mind,” Berger would say to the local people at these informal hearings, “just as if there were only yourselves and myself here tonight.”
After the doctor finished speaking, a pilot for one of the small charter companies in Yellowknife went to the microphone, a man skeptical about the value of the inquiry, who referred to “the proposed, and it would seem from all accounts, inevitable pipeline.” He said he’d welcome the boost to the economy, the extra business, but he felt depressed about what was bound to happen to the relaxed and easygoing town he loved.
After the pilot, Eddy got up to speak.
Teresa Lafferty had come in by then, and was standing at the back, curious to hear what these townspeople had to say. She wouldn’t speak herself until Berger brought his inquiry to her hometown of Fort Rae the following summer. She
wanted her relatives, her grandmother especially, to hear her voice added to theirs; she wanted them to be together on that historic day. Then she would say that what the pipeline companies were asking for was enormous and what the people were asking for wasn’t much at all. It wasn’t asking a lot to have the land claim settled first. If the pipeline should burst, what would happen to their traditional hunting grounds, to the animals and all the food they depended on? My people don’t have any money at all, she would tell the judge, and I don’t think they care to make money. The only ones who stand to benefit from a pipeline are the big oil companies and southern Canada and the United States. I’m afraid of the pipeline, she would tell him. I’m afraid for the elders, for all my relatives, for their traditional way of life, and for the land itself.
Tonight Teresa looked around at the mostly white faces and wondered where these people came from—where you came from being the question put to everyone in the North (everyone except the Indians, she thought). From outside, but from where outside?
Harry was motioning to her, asking if she wanted to sit down, and she took the chair beside him. Then Harry was holding his glasses, closing and opening the frames as he listened to Eddy.
“A Dene friend of mine,” Eddy was saying, “told me he’d been to Vietnam too, and I thought he was joking. But we drove out to Fort Rae, and I wonder if you know this, Judge, that seventy miles from here there’s a place they call Vietnam. Crappy houses, broken windows, dust and dirt and misery. Fort Rae isn’t much, but part of it’s so bad they call it Vietnam.
A real skid row. So what I want to say tonight is that I think you have good intentions, but good intentions aren’t enough. Some friends and I started a northern support group to add our voices, in a very small way, to the call for social justice for the native people. We called ourselves the North of Sixty Support Group. Then a couple of weeks ago a few rednecks, I can’t think of any other word for them, stole our name, registered themselves legally, and set about printing ads in favour of the pipeline. What can you do against people like that?” Eddy addressed his question to the audience at large. Then said to Berger, “You’re an employee of the Government of Canada. You’re part of the system. I’ve been living here for over a year, I’ve got a white boss, most of the folks I work with are white. That radio station I work at—it should be Dene-run. This inquiry should be Dene-run too. They’re the majority, they should be in charge. But it’s never going to happen, not by having nice, polite meetings.”
Teresa shifted her embroidered parka in her lap. She thought, In a year he’ll be gone, back to where he came from. All the white people went home eventually.
“Look,” he gestured with both hands, his jaw working with suppressed anger, “you’ve already had some Dene witnesses say they’ll lay down their lives to stop the pipeline and the whites all squawked about it.
They’re threatening violence
. But I’m saying there’s already violence. The conditions in the settlements. That’s a form of violence. Why aren’t the whites up in arms about that? Why aren’t they up in arms about the underhanded disrespect and backroom wheeling and dealing that does violence to goodwill and good intentions? So I want
to go on record as opposing the pipeline and supporting the Dene taking control by whatever means necessary.”
There was a smattering of applause. One of the native reporters raised his fist and grinned with glee, one rabble-rouser congratulating another. Dido saw Harry Boyd tug on his ear, left-handed, good-hearted, ineffectual Harry. But Eddy was right. The world was divided into the majority who wanted to believe everything was okay and the radical few who knew it wasn’t and were galvanized by that fact. Eddy had energy and so did she. She had an immigrant’s energy and impatience and sense of purpose, and so did Eddy. Privately, they were both coming to believe you had to do something drastic to stop corporations from violating the land. Something to convince them the North wouldn’t be a safe place to put their money.