Howard Norman - I Hate to Leave This Beautiful Place

What was especially breathtaking in these stories were the currents of anxiety, the intensification of panic, and the acceleration of events that were caused by the first sighting of such harrowing spirits.

In one folktale, when a ten-legged polar bear is seen on the horizon, a number of marriages suddenly take place. In another tale, when it is determined that a giant ice worm is navigating toward a village, a number of murders are committed, all in a single night. In yet another, when the horizon roils up dark clouds that speak in vetriloqual echoes — that is, the clouds seem to be speaking from places other than the ones they are occupying — a number of pregnancies are abbreviated and children are born months before they otherwise naturally would — healthy children born into a world in extremis. In another folktale, a spirit being with arms that look like awls is reported to be traveling toward a village. In hearing this news, most everyone living there falls victim to a kind of radical arrhythmia — not only do people’s heartbeats suddenly accelerate and then just as suddenly become alarmingly slow, but hearts literally “toss people about the village” as if a wind were blowing from inside their bodies.

Eventually I translated eight of these “Horizon/Fear” stories, but as it turned out, I left Pangnirtung before my assigned linguistic work was completed — for two reasons.

First — and such an experience is difficult to describe — the stories got to me. Their plots began to take hold of me beyond all my powers of resistance, to the point where I began consciously to avoid looking at the actual horizon — just while walking between houses, for instance. It takes a great deal of willfulness, or fear, to not look at the horizon in an Arctic landscape, especially in a place like Pangnirtung, with its harbor containing flotillas of newly formed ice in all their sculpted shapes and sizes, out where dark birds disappear, where the light shifts its tones hourly, where whale geyser-spumes hang in wavering columns of mist for up to ten minutes after the whales pass by, like signatures composed on the air. One probably should not be in a place like Pangnirtung if one does not wish to take in the horizon, is the conclusion I came to. The horizon, where the rest of the beautiful world resides. Avoid that, and you start to go too far into yourself.

The second and far more compelling reason I fled Pangnirtung was that, during what turned out to be my final week there, I experienced a number of exceedingly unpleasant, often physically violent run-ins with an angakok —a shaman. The world of Arctic shamans has enough ethnographic complexities to fill volumes; still, it has to be experienced to be believed. This particular fellow did not have a name, at least I never heard him called by one. He was perhaps fifty or fifty-five, stocky, with a face deeply lined both latitudinally and longitudinally, especially in certain precincts of his forehead. He had a gouged, almost grotesquely cauliflowered left ear and dark reddish-brown skin with splotches of lighter brown, each of which seemed to have been outlined in ash. His right eye was filmed over. To put it directly, he cut an alarming figure.

He had a habit — or a scare tactic — of uttering a phrase first in Inuit, then in broken French, then in English, all more or less sotto voce, as if speaking to two other people who resided inside himself. He wore boots with no laces, frayed thick trousers, two shirts under two sweaters, all beneath a parka. He had lots of snowy-owl feathers haphazardly festooning his hair (as if transforming himself from an owl into a human being, or vice versa), which was filthy and matted. He also wore a kind of necklace that consisted of half a dozen small transistor radios tied together with twine. (I remember thinking back to Edward Shaimaiyuk’s vigilance concerning the possibility of radio waves netting his plane. I even — and I realize now this thought contained no small measure of myth-based paranoia — wondered whether this angakok was one of Sedna’s lackeys.)

This angakok hated me from the get-go; it was impossible not to comprehend this. How did I know? Because when we first encountered each other in front of the village’s convenience store, he said, “I hate you.” I may well have been a surrogate for every Caucasian who ever set foot in Pangnirtung throughout history, and could fully understand that anger. Still, this was our first exchange.

From the moment he had arrived in Pangnirtung (“from somewhere out on the horizon,” as one of my hosts put it), he took my presence as a portent of severe weather — and possibly of starvation — in the offing. He immediately began to speak of me in this light. He loudly declared his indictments in front of the convenience store, somewhat in the manner of a crazy person on a city street declaring the end of the world. He smoked cigarette after cigarette (he chewed and spit out the butts) and rattled his transistor radios. I was told by more than one citizen of Pangnirtung not to take his actions personally, but how could I not? Such in-your-face assaults cannot be made less frightening by placing them in the context of historical rage — at least I was not capable of that. It was all expert psychodrama and left me shaken to the core.

“This fellow hates anyone who isn’t Inuit,” an elderly woman told me. “And he hates most Inuit people, too.” Hardly a comfort, but at least it clarified things a bit.

Some people advised me to try to ignore him; others suggested that I leave on the next mail plane out. Both made sense. My host family was kind, generous, and provided a comfortable room to sleep in, but I definitely understood my outsider status — this wasn’t new to me. Generally speaking, after this angakok arrived, the village went about its daily business, except that this raving maniac was there. On a number of occasions I saw him standing near the counter of the convenience store, windmilling his arms, shouting incomprehensible things (though maybe not incomprehensible to the spirit world) in a language that only in part consisted of Inuit, or even French or English, words.

On other occasions I would see him standing off to one side of the store, smoking a cigarette or a pipe, scrutinizing me. And one time he shouted, “You have to eat food. I eat weather.” This strange locution imposed the same kind of arrhythmia on me that I had heard about in one of the “Fear/Horizon” folktales, or at least that’s what it felt like. I had to get out of there fast.

I wanted to fulfill the terms of my employment, though, and had to deal with this fellow in some way, so one day I walked up to him and said, “Leave me alone. I’m not here much longer anyway.” His response was to turn on every one of the transistor radios, which seemed in good working order, but because we were in Pangnirtung, far out of all but shortwave radio range, all he could produce was static. Therefore his necklace became an orchestra of hisses and scratches. Then he stubbed his cigarette out against the shoulder of my coat.

“There is another world, but it is in this one,” wrote the French poet Paul Éluard. With this angakok, I definitely was in another world. I could hardly claim any deep knowledge of Pangnirtung, but I did know that throughout the Arctic people believed that shamans were capable of causing illnesses, and in turn were paid to demonstrate their ability to cure those illnesses — a perverse strategy that had apparently worked for centuries. I could see that the angakok harassing me was indeed respected, or at least feared, for proven reasons; he scared the hell out of me. One other thing I knew was that angakoks often had a direct line of communication to the spirit world. In other Arctic communities I had witnessed elderly people paying shamans to petition certain presiding spirits for luck and good health, and to deliver family news to ancestors in the land of the dead.