Howard Norman - I Hate to Leave This Beautiful Place

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.