Canadian means what.

Recently a few of my friends were featured on CBC Radio's The Current, on different days for different reasons.

Today I mobilized people in Winnipeg to find me a ticket to the Constantines show before it sold out.
I also took three flights down and around from Fort Severn First Nation on the Hudson Bay in Northern Ontario (where we have plenty of snow already, mind you) to Winnipeg, mostly so that I can vote in person on Monday in the battleground riding of Elmwood-Transcona in Canada's federal election.

Tonight I pulled out some thermals to go drink around a fire outside in below zero temperatures with the best of friends.

Tomorrow morning I'm helping people move things, even though I don't want to, because I don't know how to say no. (I'm sorry for even mentioning my resentment.)

In a few days I'm taking off for a quick trip to the British Columbia Rocky Mountains.

I also once worked as a dog handler for a sled dog operator and at a fishing lodge.

So I suppose I'm Canadian through and through. Whatever that means. And whatever the election result on Monday, I'll still be here, doing my thing.

And so will you.

Think about that, and think about what you want from this place. Think critically, every day, about everything.

It's true that we can do better. Somehow, I believe that we will.

 

Somewhere between Sioux Lookout and Winnipeg.

Flying machines.

I fly a lot. I've been working in remote northern locations in Canada on and off for nearly a decade, these days more on than off. This has often meant that to get to where I need to go planes are involved. Float planes, regular planes, smaller planes, bigger planes, planes in seemingly various states of disrepair. I've also found myself in the last few years flying for school, for internships, for visits, to various places around the planet. 

While I'm not in the air as often as some folks, I do make at least two or three flights month. It's easy as a tall guy to complain about hard angles and the cramped seat room that causes those angles to leave dents in my knees and kinks in my neck. Pair that with the asinine way in which airports are run and it's easy to forget how truly incredible it is to leap off the ground in a flying machine and coast five or six miles above the Earth to wherever it is you're headed next.

Somehow human flight has become normal. 

And so every now and then, particularly on beautiful flights where the clouds and the light are just right, I like to make a point of appreciating the fact that I am in the sky. Because that shouldn't really get old.

Somewhere between Thunder Bay and Toronto.

Getting there and back.

When heading toward town from the Fort Severn airport, after crossing a single-lane bridge, visitors are greeted immediately to their right by an airplane propeller and a ship's anchor propped up on a pile of rocks. The anchor was dragged in from the coast and the prop is off a DC3 that crashed right in the middle of town during heavy fog in 1975. I like to think the makeshift monument represents the remoteness of Fort Severn and the risks involved with travel North of the Wall.