southbound

On Monday morning I finally left Tuk. In my last few days there I started really feeling that I have been gone from home for a long time. Most days seemed to fly by so quickly, but now it feels like the days I spent Inuvik at the end of May/beginning of June were so far away. I have been back in Inuvik for a couple of days (since Monday). I gave myself a buffer of a couple of days in case flights were cancelled for Tuk on Monday. Luckily, the weather was clear and my flight was on schedule. I have been busy here in Inuvik meeting people to give them updates on my research, tying up some loose ends, and gathering some more documents to use for my research. Amazingly, I checked off everything on my To Do list.

When I arrived in Inuvik I had a strange feeling that I could suddenly let loose. It was as if I had adjusted the ways that I dressed and acted while in Tuk and now in Inuvik (which has many more southerners around during the summer) I could be more “myself”. Perhaps I’m not making much sense to those of you reading this… It’s not as if I was pretending to be a different person while in Tuk but there were certain things that I would or wouldn’t do around many people. Maybe that is simply because I wasn’t around people that I know well, like family and old friends. Now I have some vague recollections of arriving in the north at the end of May and starting to want to just blend in. I guess that I got so used to it that there was sort of a feeling of release when I arrived at the research housing here in Inuvik. I can only imagine how I am going to feel when I arrive in Ontario and see all sorts of people walking around.

Another funny feeling that hit me yesterday was entertaining. I saw a green pick-up drive by and my immediate reaction was to think that it must be Eddie (a guy in Tuk) driving the truck because for the last 2 months the only green pick-up that I saw was Eddie’s. I looked around at other vehicles and it was strange for me to not know who was driving each of them. There were only a handful of vehicles in Tuk that I didn’t know the drivers of, either by name or face. I think that it is going to be strange for me to see cars flying by and not know the drivers (and probably only see most of them once ever).

As many of you know, this is my last day in the north. My flight leaves 11:30am and I will be arriving in Toronto around 11:00pm (for those of you thinking about travel times, I will be enroute for about 9.5 hours once you adjust for time zones). I have two stopovers so I won’t be in the air for too long at once.