Iceberg Tea

By Annelies Pool

Annelies Pool lives in a cabin in the woods outside of Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, Canada and likes to sit around, preferably in her pyjamas, and think (and write) great thoughts while her husband does all the chores. For example: how can you be spiritual when all you want is a fancy red car? Why are Northerners so possessive about mosquitoes? Why would men rather think about gas fittings than the meaning of life? Iceberg Tea, a collection of 50 personal stories about life in the Canadian North will touch your heart and make you laugh. Reading them is like sitting down with an old friend over a cup of tea.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Annelies Pool
• Release date: Nov 26, 2011
• ISBN: 9780986560002

Annelies Pool

Born in The Netherlands, I immigrated to Canada with my family at a young age and grew up in southern Ontario. I came into my own in my twenties when I arrived in Hay River, Northwest Territories, at the tail end of a cross-Canada hitchhiking journey, and stumbled into a writing career. I had all my worldly possessions in a knapsack on my back, was broke and in need of a job. This materialized as soon as the publisher of a community weekly newspaper, the Hay River Tapwe, found out that I could type — all the qualifications necessary to be a reporter. I fell in love with writing about the North and never made it back to the road. After several years in Hay River, I moved to the capital of the territory, Yellowknife. I grew up, got married and settled in an off-grid cabin, about 30 km outside of town, at Prelude Lake where I lived with my husband and my dogs for 22 years. I became well known as a northern journalist and freelance writer, serving as editor for a number of publications, including the Northern News Services newspaper chain in Yellowknife and the inflight magazine, above&beyond, Canada’s Arctic Journal. I published stories, columns and editorials in more than 30 periodicals and anthologies. The beautiful landscape of Prelude Lake nurtured my creativity and inspired me to explore more creative forms of writing. Ever since I began writing for newspapers, I had published creative non-fiction in the form of funny personal columns. In 2010, I published a collection of these columns in my first book, Iceberg Tea, under my own imprint Prelude Books. My journey from journalist to creative writer was also nurtured by NorthWords NWT, an organization that supports northern and aboriginal writers by holding an annual writers’ festival in Yellowknife, workshops and other literary events. I was privileged to serve as president and then executive director of NorthWords for five years, helping to support northern writers and being supported by them in turn. Today, I have put the off-grid life behind me and am back in Yellowknife where I enjoy such delights as water running out of the tap instead of having to be hauled from the lake; doing laundry without having to start a generator; using an electric toaster; an electric fridge; a microwave and all sorts of other appliances we didn’t know how to operate when we first moved in. In between periods of basking in my new world of luxury, I have been hard at work finishing my first novel, Free Love, the story a young alcoholic woman, Marissa, who struggles to stop drinking and build a new life for herself. I am delighted to say that Free Love was released in early 2016. Now for the next adventure, literary and otherwise ...

Book preview

Praise for iceberg tea

Iceberg tea: what a marvelous collection of vignettes for the soul! What a feast, meditation and celebration of the many lives we live in this one.

-Richard Van Camp, author of The Moon of Letting Go

This book is a must read for any city person who thinks they know the north through books, but don't. With insight and detail, Pool shows the magnificent life up in Yellowknife. What comes off at first read as quirky, funny stories about life in the bush, later shows reflective detail into the lives and loves of Northern people. Writing while out in her cabin in the Arctic woods, Annelies Pool puts Thoreau to shame!

- Cathleen With, author of Having Faith in the Polar Girls Prison

Pool blends memory with imagination as she recounts unusual everyday routines punctuated by encounters with the exceptional moments of midlife. She draws readers into the warmth and familiarity of each of her 50 compact narratives with playfully poignant prose.

- yellowknifer

Annelies has a very reflective personality and there is a sense of ongoing personal growth that runs throughout her memories. And instead of pondering heavily on those around her, she more often focuses on her place in the universe. Fortunately, Annelies waxes philosophical while contemplating more down to Earth pursuits like lottery tickets and Facebook. She's a student of Tai Chi but she also admits to insecurities.

-The Book Mine Set

iceberg tea

by Annelies Pool

Published by:

Annelies Pool

http://www.anneliespool.ca

SmashWords Edition

License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Copyright © 2011 by Annelies Pool

Contents

Introduction

The North

Love and Family

Work and Technology

About the Author

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Sometimes life surprises you and you find yourself in places you never imagined you’d be. Your heart opens and you discover unknown qualities in yourself. I grew up as a city kid and when I was young, my only ambition was to move to a larger city. I never thought I would find myself, in middle age, living in a cabin in the woods in Canada’s Northwest Territories. But here I am and it still surprises me.

I arrived in Hay River, Northwest Territories, by bus on a cold January day in 1979, after eight months of hitchhiking around Canada and working at odd jobs. I had spent most of the summer in British Columbia, working as a tennis court sweeper in Williams Lake, a bartender in Alert Bay, a forest fire fighter in Terrace. In the fall I moved north to the Yukon where I worked as a waitress in Beaver Creek. Now I was visiting a friend in Hay River and I needed another job. I also needed a place to stay because I could only afford three nights in a motel. Both materialized when the publisher of one of the two community newspapers in Hay River discovered I could type. He hired me as a reporter/photographer trainee and let me move into a rickety trailer with no plumbing, thin walls that collected frost on the inside and furniture salvaged from the dump.

For me, the job, my new home in the trailer and being in the North was another adventure, but not a life. It was a stop on the road before I returned to my real life in the city. I didn’t count on the North burying itself in my soul. I fell in love with northern stories, the northern landscape and the northern people in all their beauty and tragedy. The years went by and I continued to write about the North for newspapers, magazines and any other publication that would print my work. I forgot, entirely, to go back on the road.

In 1982, I moved to the Northwest Territories capital, Yellowknife. There, in the city on the north shore of Great Slave Lake, surrounded by the pink granite, lakes and boreal forest of the Precambrian Shield, I finally began to settle down. I grew up, got married, acquired stepchildren and dogs, and moved with my new husband, Bill, to a cabin at Prelude Lake, about thirty kilometres northeast of the city.

We have lived here for twenty years now. Our place is along the Ingraham Trail, the start of the winter road to the diamond mines which has become famous on the Ice Road Truckers reality series shown on the History Channel. I never tire of the swish of the summer wind in the birch trees, the peace of the winter world, the black bears, lynx, wolves and caribou we sometimes see from our windows, or the dazzling lake that we glimpse through the trees when we stand on the right place on the deck.

Our cabin is off the grid and beyond the reach of city services. My computer is powered by solar energy or a diesel generator when the sun isn’t shining. We haul our water from the lake in a big tank on the back of the truck and our winter heat comes from a giant woodstove in the middle of our living room. We take our own garbage to the dump and hope the house doesn’t catch fire because we are thirty kilometres away from the closest fire department.

In this wilderness I have developed the skill of sitting quietly and thinking great thoughts while Bill does all the chores. Iceberg tea is a collection of these thoughts – essays about an ordinary life nurtured by the northern landscape.

Enjoy!

The North

The night I saw Jupiter cry

It was one of those cold January nights when the stars were tossed against the midnight blue like diamonds. Well below minus thirty, the air was clear. My husband Bill and I drove to the airport to pick up his sister and her husband who had come to visit. Vancouverites, unused to the northern cold, our guests wore borrowed ski jackets and the short walk across the tarmac from the plane to the terminal building left them shivering. We wasted no time in bundling them and their luggage into our truck, then set off on the half-hour drive to our cabin at Prelude Lake.

Halfway home, Bill veered off the highway, stopped by a frozen lake and insisted we all get out.

You have to see this! he said pointing to the sky. The Hale Bopp!

We scrambled out of the truck, and huddled in the cold with our hands in our pockets, looked up. The Hale Bopp streaked against the velvet sky, its tail fanning out behind it. The night was so silent we could almost hear the comet swish. Everything dropped away and we were propelled into that timeless state where all that exists is the Universe in all its immensity.

A breeze rattled the birch trees and broke the spell. We realized we were freezing our butts off. Laughing, we piled back into the truck and as it sped down the highway, we agreed that Bill was crazy. Who but a crazy man would make his guests get out of a warm truck in the bitter cold to look at the sky? Yet all these years later, that moment watching Hale Bopp is what I remember about that visit.

Bill has been an aficionado of the winter sky ever since we moved to Prelude Lake. It’s hard not to be out here. We are away from the city lights and on long winter nights the dark wraps itself around you like a shroud. Unless you learn to see the light, blackness will settle into your soul. Bill has learned to identify the constellations and planets and he has gained an intimate knowledge of the phases of the moon. He watches the sky through a huge pair of astronomical binoculars. This always makes me laugh because when he raises them to his eyes, he looks like a bug-eyed cartoon character.

We go walking under the full moon when the trees cast long shadows in the snow. Or a quarter moon when the cold bites my teeth and the sky is alive with stars. Bill will point to the brightest star and tell me it’s Venus and even though it looks like all the other stars, there’s something magical about knowing that particular one is a planet. If we’re lucky, the Northern Lights will sweep across the sky and leave us unmindful of the cold and dark.

I am always moved by the winter sky, but never more so than the night last year when I saw Jupiter.

I was already in my pyjamas, feet up, reading before bed when Bill went out to walk the dog. He returned, raced across the living room for his binoculars, then was gone again. Seconds later, he was back.

Come and see Jupiter’s moons! he said.

Do I have to?

Yes!

I pulled my parka over my pyjamas, jammed a fleece hat onto my head, shoved my feet into a pair of Sorels and, feeling like an escapee from a dementia centre, went out. When I looked through the binoculars, I saw Jupiter with four moons trailing it like tears. I looked at the sky, then back at Jupiter, then back at the sky and it seemed like the whole sky was filled with Jupiter’s tears, icy drops scattered throughout the Universe.

I have never been able to see the sky the same way since.

When the animals speak

I awoke from an afternoon nap to find my young husky staring at me. With one brown and one blue eye, Princess usually has a startled look about her, but this time her look was deep and wolfy. Unblinking, she held my gaze for a minute, then closed her eyes, lay down and went to sleep as though satisfied with the communication. I was having one of those tormented days when the world pressed heavily on me, but her look transmitted peace and connection.

It reminded me of a series of dreams I had a few years ago that have never quite left me. I met a wolf deep in the snowy woods and fear pricked my hands when I saw

Reviews for Iceberg Tea

[vivienner_3 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

A pleasant collection of friendly, informal essays about living in the Arctic. The author lives in a cabin just outside Yellowknife, Northwest Territories. Most have been previously published in various journals and newspapers.