Polar bears, it seems, like lettuce and radishes.

I've been helping an older lady of my acquaintance, Jess, with her Canada pension application. The government keeps sending her demands for documents, most of which she doesn't have. I've called Ottawa three times for her so far. Once I got a snarky bitch. Who insisted on talking to poor Jess. "Well, is Jess there?" the S.B. demanded, when I had explained why I was calling. When I said yes, she said, "I have to talk to her." Jess listened with a bewildered look on her face for a minute or so, and then said, "I don't understand", and handed the phone back to me. Another operator, on another day, was super-helpful and patient but didn't have a clue where Nunavut is located. She guessed northern BC at one point.

We've been trying to track down documents -- but Jess and her husband were married, she tells me, "Eskimo-style". No certificates. She didn't know him, when they got together it was because her family and his family decided it between them. In fact, she was away at school when the plans were made. I asked her if she was ok with that. She looked a bit confused, and so I said, "Was he cute?" She giggled at that point and said, "Oh, yes, very cute."

One of the forms Jess was sent, a declaration of common-law relationship, required his signature. As he's been dead since the early eighties, this meant another call to the pension office. When I explained to Jess that the pension office had helped me to find and print out a different form, because we'd never be able to get his signature, she laughed and put her hands together as if she was praying, and then looked up at the ceiling, saying, "Please come down and sign my form."

But anyway. We got talking about polar bears. Jess says she has lived in the Arctic all her life, sixty years, and she's never seen a polar bear. And when she was a girl, her family lived out on the land, down at Bathurst Inlet.

Paper I made. Letters are a bit askew, I notice.

I emailed a friend about a month ago, and told her about my trip to Iqaluit. I told her how wonderful it was to fly across the Arctic in the small plane. She didn't write back until yesterday. And then her email said that she hadn't answered because I made her feel that her life sucked...

Envy's a funny thing. And friends are too. I've hesitated over time to give my envious friend my weblog address, and I've never been entirely sure why. I mean, I know that people read this, people I've never met, and yet my parents and my best friend don't. I've been writing an online journal of one sort or another since 1999 (it used to be Diaryland but they kept locking me out) and yet I'm selective about my audience. Every now and then I need to complain about my mother, and I can't do that if she's reading my journal. And my friend, although she's my closest friend, needs to be exclusive. She wouldn't like me having a readership... (all six of you)

What am I trying to say?

There are some people whose attention makes me edit what I'm saying. These people, I email or phone them, and the messages are geared towards them. Because they would read things into the content that I'm not putting there.

What if you could write a novel and stipulate on the front cover: Only people who understand me and can read this work objectively, without finding hidden messages to themselves, can purchase this book?

We took our ATV and borrowed our neighbour's, and headed off for Starvation Cove. Me, Miguel, and Rachel. Kirsten's in Toledo visiting a friend and Ian's at cadet camp in Whitehorse.

It was a great trip, although kind of long. In the picture above, we are waiting for the tide to go down so that we can ford a small river without drowning the ATVs. That's me in the red hat.

We were sitting around having coffee about 1pm, waiting for Miguel's friend Allen to decide whether he was coming with us. I should add that the trip was his idea, as he claims to have caught 10 huge char at Starvation on Friday. The phone rang. Thinking it was Allen, we let Rachel answer it. It was my work. Asking if I could come in for 4. I said yes, because I hate to say no, but we weren't happy. We ended up going and driving around to find a guy who sometimes guards but doesn't have a phone. In the course of looking for him, we found a girl who also sometimes guards, and she said she'd go in for four. If I promised to go in and take over from her at midnight. So by then it was 2:30 -- we had about nine hours for our trip.

Although I drove a snowmobile this winter, I've only driven an ATV once. With Miguel on the back complaining. I don't think he should become a driving instructor. It turned out that without him sitting behind me it was a lot easier, but I still wasn't terribly fast. So it took us quite a while to reach the river, and then we had to wait an hour or so for the tide to go down. Four hours all told to reach Starvation Cove.



At that point I told him he had an hour to fish, because if it was going to take us four hours to get back, we needed to leave at 8pm. On his last cast, at 7:55pm, he caught a nice-sized char and then we packed up to head back, in a light drizzle.

However. The tide had continued to go out, and we thought it would save some time to cut across the first bay.



At the end of the bay, the mud got us. We were stuck, both ATVs and when I got off I sunk in the mud to the tops of my rubber boots. Put Rachel on the red machine and got her to press the gas while we pushed. It was just like Wile E. Coyote, the mud came splashing up from the wheels and covered us from head to toe. And then when the machine started to move, I found my feet were stuck and I fell face first into the mud. Came up spitting mud, but that one was out and on the shore.

The yellow one was harder. It's heavier, I think, and was probably deeper in. We were still struggling with it when two guys roared up on their ATVs and said to me, mildly, "Having fun?"

"Oh, yeah," I replied. I think I must have looked like the swamp thing, but they didn't laugh. They just got out a rope, and we got out our rope, and we pulled the yellow machine out. The older of the two told Miguel he had gotten stuck in just that spot once, when he was alone, and it took hours to get out.

The mud hardened, as I drove home. But it was a quicker trip, the return journey. Rachel and I arrived home at 10:15, (Miguel had put his camera down at one point and had to go back for it, so he was about ten minutes behind us) and I set about having a shower so that I could go to work.

And then, the miracle. The girl who was guarding called and said she was GOING HOME and I wouldn't be needed for the night shift, as the detainees had been let go. And I think for the first time this year, it was Saturday night and there was no-one in cells. I figured I'd go to sleep and they'd call me out, but at 7am I woke up in bed.