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Illustration by Drew Shannon
When I tell someone I lived in a remote Arctic hamlet in the Canadian Northwest Territories their eyebrows go up and their head crooks quizzically to the side. To my own surprise and everyone else’s I did – for five years. I worked and even had a kid there.
I was fresh from teachers’ college on the West Coast, when I started browsing northern teaching jobs. As the screen displayed offbeat location names, WhaTì caught my eye. The sound of those dainty syllables evoked the last frontier caught in a snow globe: the erasure of anything familiar and the start of a new story. Those who knew me, didn’t think I’d go through with it. Until I did. The promise of adventure was irresistible, so I accepted a job teaching middle school within the week. I had a gut feeling that WhaTì would change my life and that I would carry a part of it with me into the future.
WhaTí [wah-tee], a tiny fishing village of 500 people, lies 400 kilometres below the Arctic Circle, and about 200 kilometres north of Yellowknife. Winters last from October to April. The hazy colours of dusk linger all night in the summer.
Soon my boyfriend and I were taking pictures under a stuffed polar bear at the Explorer Hotel in Yellowknife, baring our teeth for the camera. I realized I had traded traipsing the metal grooves of city escalators and the geometries of concrete sidewalks in office heels for lumbering on snow-dusted paths in my bulky Bogs boots and a balaclava.
When you drive into WhaTí, the first thing you might see is the town dump adorned with tattered stuffed animals perched on the fence to ward off scavengers such as black bears and ravens. Then you will round the naked ground that makes a fire barrier on a gravel slope leading to the lake where my co-workers and I walked our dogs a gazillion times, wary of wolves. If you are a keen observer you might notice in the trees by the road an unusual shrine that consists of an old school desk topped with a plastic St. Mary, yellow ribbons and rosaries hanging off the branches. It’s a good luck landmark honouring the largest alder tree in the area.
Stay a while and you’ll hear the howling songs of Husky mutts owning the dirt roads. You will see locals in joggers and tennis shoes, hoods over baseball caps, cabins and trailers on stilts, light pillars, sun dogs, electric aurora borealis after dark, wolves and foxes in the yards. Some of this you might encounter on your daily walk to work. All of this belongs to the Treaty 11 Tlicho Nation of the Denendeh.
My new daily ritual became paying close attention to my landscape: mounds of chipmunk caches, a growing squirrel penthouse made of looted bright pink cabin insulation, the smell of fox urine in rivulets on snowbanks, the rounded backs of black bears roving in the thicket, tracks left by big dogs or possibly wolves, ravens quarrelling over the bits of fur I released from my dog brush into the wind.
Up there, geography is an enchanted text for a city dweller. The winding snow paths are scrolls, glittering with the language of snow crust. Dark, thin sheets of ice called nilas spoke of fresh freeze or a new thaw. Ice jewels scattered on glassy shores told us which way the wind whistled through. Sometimes, sastrugi appear: sharp, irregular ridges like exposed bones, brushed by wind and snow until the land resembles the jaws of monster pike.
What do people imagine about living in the Arctic? Maybe they conjure what I used to think. The doomed Franklin Expedition; feral Polar bears running amok; temperatures of minus 40; all snow and no trees. Or the ubiquitous meme of Jack Nicholson as a deranged human icicle at the end of The Shining.
I admit that I used to ask myself how I decided to go there. I’m not especially outdoorsy, I don’t fish, and I don’t enjoy winter sports. I enjoyed the singularity of a place far from what I had known. Isolated, harsh, yet thick with community blood and character.
In the five years that my partner and I lived in WhaTì, we gained lifelong friends, a marriage, a dog and a daughter. We lived through COVID, through power outages, compulsive online shopping (kudos to Aritzia and Indigo for shipping to a PO box) and seeing students transform from pudgy kids into lanky teenagers. How the taste of boreal caribou steak hints of its last, grassy meal. I learned the two-step of a Tlicho drum dance. I learned how to make a fire and set up camp in a whiteout. I learned that you won’t die if you flip over on a skidoo.
When we finally decided to leave it was because our daughter outgrew a place without toddler activities, reliable child care or restaurants. It’s been a while since we moved: I still catch myself missing padding around our community school’s carpeted halls in socks and eating off the breakfast cart with my students. I fantasize about going back when my daughter is older.
WhaTi changed us: We now live in another small town with long winters. My daughter has her own Bogs. Though the snow is plentiful and slow to melt, we stay warm because, like WhaTi, this place has heart.
Aldona Dziedziejko lives in Rocky Mountain House, Alta.