Howard Norman - I Hate to Leave This Beautiful Place

In the autumn of 2006, I visited Robert Frank in his Bleecker Street apartment in Greenwich Village, a few days before we held an on-stage conversation at the New York Public Library. I had brought him an Inuit drawing of a spirit hut composed by an artist in Eskimo Point. We listened to a Bob Dylan album, went to dinner on First Avenue. When we returned to his upstairs workroom, he rummaged around in a filing cabinet until he found a folder labeled “Pangnirtung.” He removed three photographs, signed and dated them, and offered them as a gift to me.

I was moved by this spontaneous generosity. I looked at the photographs and mentioned that I recognized a house in one of them, which had a poster of a tiger in the window, a tropical beast in the Arctic, open-mawed with sharp teeth showing. We both recalled Canadian flags displayed in other windows. I said that Pangnirtung was one of the bleakest places I had ever been in, yet the people, with a few exceptions, were quite hospitable. Robert Frank said he remembered seeing the complete weather-bleached skull of a whale in the graveyard. That evening in his apartment, we spoke mainly about Pangnirtung. He had fond memories of the place. He had especially liked the graveyard. “It’s beautiful there, don’t you think?”

Two days before I left Pangnirtung on my second visit, the band formerly known as Turbulence, formerly known as Nanook the Gook, and now called Night All Day, came to town. Edward Shaimaiyuk had flown them in. The only member of the original group remaining was the drummer, Tommy Novaqirq, whose radio indictment back in 1981 was still vivid in my memory. By my estimate, Tommy was nearly forty years old now—“an aging rocker,” he said self-mockingly. He looked more than a little the worse for wear. He was quite surprised to see me, not only because ten years had passed, but what was I doing in Pangnirtung anyway? When we got the niceties out of the way, he said, “Well, yeah, people just kind of run into each other up here, don’t they?”

The band traveled light. They set up their minimal equipment — instruments, speakers, and microphones — in a kind of warehouse space. Their performance drew about two dozen people of all ages. There was some makeshift shuffle-dancing, some drunkenness, and a few teenage girls who wanted to travel with the band. “Not too many people in the room,” Tommy said later, “but we had the music cranked up loud so everyone in Pangnirtung could hear it, eh?”

At the outset of the performance, the lead singer mentioned that Tommy was the only original member of Nanook the Gook and that they had CDs for sale. Then Night All Day launched into the first of five consecutive John Lennon songs, and I thought, So strange — all these years, the repertoire hasn’t changed at all. But after a brief intermission a young Inuit guitarist (I never learned his name) began a medley of stunning vocal imitations of the most popular Canadian artists: Neil Young, Joni Mitchell (his version a little too falsetto, but still splendid), Robbie Robertson, Gordon Lightfoot (performed with notable mockery), and a heart-wrenching rendition of the McGarrigle Sisters’ “Heart Like a Wheel.” During the second intermission I told the young guitar player that with the exception of Gordon Lightfoot, those were some of my favorite singers. “You being the one European in the room, no big surprise there, eh?” he said, laughing, and I laughed, too. “But me too, I love them singers, but they ain’t the only Canadians with talent.”

Late in the evening, I sat drinking rotgut coffee with Tommy in a small room adjacent to the post office, just the two of us. His facility with English was much improved since I had first met him. He told me he was still living in Eskimo Point and now took care of his two daughters; his wife had left him for good. He filled me in on the other original members of Nanook the Gook, especially about the fate of Peter Shaimaiyuk and his time in New York City, where he had been arrested and jailed for running out on a hotel bill. There was no particular reason for him to reminisce with me, except the fact that I’d asked questions and he didn’t seem to mind answering them; back in 1981 I had been just another “come-and-gone-type visitor” to the Arctic. He did become more animated when we spoke about the night John Lennon had been murdered. “It was bad for everyone,” he said. “Bad for everyone. Still is. Them songs don’t get old, though, eh? I feel beat to shit, but the songs don’t.”

For a while we listened to music and news on the post office’s shortwave. “Radio from the cities,” he said. He closed his eyes and dozed off in his chair. I sat watching him sleep. His electric guitar — he played both guitar and drums — was propped against the wall, plugged into a small speaker. I thought back ten years, trying to recall what he looked like. And then he nodded off for about an hour — expert, it seemed, at sleeping in chairs. When he woke he pulled out a flask, took a deep pull, and said, “You remember Mrs. Amorak at all? Lucille?”

“Of course I do. I think of her often. I know she died.”

“Oh, yeah, that’s true. She crossed over into the old Eskimo place, like we say. So did her sister and brothers. Natural causes — nobody fell through the ice or nothing.”

He smiled. “Want to see a picture of my daughters?”

We exchanged billfold photographs of our daughters. “Mine were taken by a cheap camera,” he said. His daughters were six and four.

“They’re so beautiful,” I said. “Lucky they don’t look anything like you.”

“Yeah, right right right, ha. Their mother’s down in Winnipeg. One-way ticket, eh?”

“Sorry to hear that.”

“But Lucy Amorak. I put some of her poems into songs, and some parts of the stories she told, you know?”

“I’ve got all of her poems, Tommy. I read them all the time. I don’t talk about it much, but I read them.”

“Listen to this.” He picked up the guitar, adjusted a few dials, tuned it, and tore into some Eric Clapton — style licks for about a minute, then sang: “I like the wind in my hair, I like the sun on my face, the airplane’s waiting on the dirt runway, but I hate to leave this beautiful place.” More guitar for a couple of minutes, then the refrain: “This beautiful place, this beautiful place, this beautiful place. I hate to leave this beautiful place.”

IN 1990, THE SECOND FULL summer in our 1850s farmhouse in Vermont, everything I loved most happened most every day, with exceptions. For one thing, I ran a fever of between 99.5 and 102 for nearly three months. A doctor in Montpelier said of my condition, “I’m not alarmed. Probably it’s a strain of flu. Or a low-grade infection. But tests proved inconclusive. Overall, though, you’re able to function normally, right?” I didn’t quite know how to answer. Also of concern that summer, my older brother was on the lam again and telephoning at odd hours, trying to get me to smuggle him over the Canadian border. And another thing: our well went dry. And another: a resident kingfisher at a beloved sawmill pond about ten minutes’ drive from my house was exhibiting a progressive malaise. This was strangely disturbing. I visited this pond almost daily. On the cover of my journal I’d written “Kingfisher Days.” I kept suspecting my fever of imposing a kind of unreality, also radical shifts of mood. I’d purchased three different brands of thermometers, perhaps hoping that one would render me fever-free.

According to my journal, it was three P.M. on June 22 when my brother telephoned. I took the call in the kitchen. My wife, Jane, had a diagnosed flu. She was listening to NPR and not in bad humor — it was just very hot outside. Our daughter, Emma, a little over two years old, was taking a nap. She had a slight flu as well. It was difficult to separate the heat and humidity of the air from that of the body. The region was suffering a drought; so far, fifty-nine days without rain. “Look, buddy,” my brother said, “I’ll ask about other things later. But right now I have an urgent situation. What’s that noise I’m hearing?”