to celebrate. The water was rising fast and, without cribbing, the surrounding earth would soon begin to slump into what would certainly become a huge and muddy crater. Lloyd, Ben, and I quickly manhandled into place the cylindrical wooden crib I had built and slid it down the hole. We didn’t have
running
water but it was water that could at least be carried into the house as needed.
For the toilet, I dug another pit over which I erected a sturdy privy made of freshly milled, sweet-smelling cedar. I lovingly crafted the seat from a piece of splinter-proof maple, sandpapered until it was, as Lloyd admiringly put it, “smooth as a baby’s bum.” As was the custom, I cut a crescent moon through the door so the occupant could see out and give warning of prior possession to other customers.
Some years later my privy gained fame of a sort when Pierre Berton, then a columnist for the
Toronto Star
, revealed that I had found some discarded store dummies and rescued two nude female half-models which were more or less intact but in need of tender loving care.
Farley took them home to Frances but she absolutely refused to give them house room so he set them up in his backhouse, where they became permanent residents. They sat, one on each side of the throne, and were the cynosure of all eyes – including mine
.
On September 13 I finished hanging the front door of a house that was basically an empty shell. There were three rooms: the kitchen-cum-bedroom; an even smaller one earmarked as a bathroom if and when we got running water but which meanwhile served as a carpentry shop; and a relatively spacious room, eighteen by twenty feet, dominated by the huge fireplace. This
was
truly our living room. We ate there; read there; listened to music on a tinny little battery radio; and, in one corner, I tried to write.
There was no electricity, no telephone, and no furnace. Though the fireplace provided more than enough heat, it consumed wood like a Mississippi steamboat. The kitchen boasted our only luxuries: a refrigerator that, improbably, kept things cool by burning propane gas, and a propane-fuelled cookstove. A great deal of work remained to be done, inside and out – but not just yet. We had run out of money so it was necessary for me to switch hats again. I dusted off my battered typewriter and tried to reconnect with Dudley Cloud, to whom I had last written in May and from whom I had heard nothing since.
October 17, 1949
Dear Mr. Cloud:
This day a fire burns in the fireplace of our new home and we have a half-bottle of inferior rum with which to celebrate the end of our servitude to the Great Brown Beast – the house. It is finished – well, partly – and it only remains to pay for it
.
I won’t bother you with excuses for my long silence and apparent failure to act on your request for an outline of my Eskimo book.… I have thought long and hard about it and now have time to put those thoughts on
paper. I also have the stimulus – financial – and it is pressing. I will have an outline in the mail by the end of the month but I must warn you, in order to support bodies and souls I will quickly have to produce potboilers for magazines, but will not allow them to interfere with the main chance
.
I have recently had word about the Ihalmiut. A polio epidemic that swept the eastern arctic this summer has, for all practical purposes, written finis to their history as a coherent group. The handful of survivors will probably be transplanted to the coast, where they will merge with the so-called civilized Eskimos. It will not be many years before these people of the deer are quite forgotten. I wish to God I could have had ten years with them
.
My book about them could be in the form of a story, a sort of “profile” based on the life of Pommela, the old man who has been their chief shaman – sorcerer – during their final years. The central theme would concern itself with the impact of the white race on this man, on his
running
water but it was water that could at least be carried into the house as needed.
For the toilet, I dug another pit over which I erected a sturdy privy made of freshly milled, sweet-smelling cedar. I lovingly crafted the seat from a piece of splinter-proof maple, sandpapered until it was, as Lloyd admiringly put it, “smooth as a baby’s bum.” As was the custom, I cut a crescent moon through the door so the occupant could see out and give warning of prior possession to other customers.
Some years later my privy gained fame of a sort when Pierre Berton, then a columnist for the
Toronto Star
, revealed that I had found some discarded store dummies and rescued two nude female half-models which were more or less intact but in need of tender loving care.
Farley took them home to Frances but she absolutely refused to give them house room so he set them up in his backhouse, where they became permanent residents. They sat, one on each side of the throne, and were the cynosure of all eyes – including mine
.
On September 13 I finished hanging the front door of a house that was basically an empty shell. There were three rooms: the kitchen-cum-bedroom; an even smaller one earmarked as a bathroom if and when we got running water but which meanwhile served as a carpentry shop; and a relatively spacious room, eighteen by twenty feet, dominated by the huge fireplace. This
was
truly our living room. We ate there; read there; listened to music on a tinny little battery radio; and, in one corner, I tried to write.
There was no electricity, no telephone, and no furnace. Though the fireplace provided more than enough heat, it consumed wood like a Mississippi steamboat. The kitchen boasted our only luxuries: a refrigerator that, improbably, kept things cool by burning propane gas, and a propane-fuelled cookstove. A great deal of work remained to be done, inside and out – but not just yet. We had run out of money so it was necessary for me to switch hats again. I dusted off my battered typewriter and tried to reconnect with Dudley Cloud, to whom I had last written in May and from whom I had heard nothing since.
October 17, 1949
Dear Mr. Cloud:
This day a fire burns in the fireplace of our new home and we have a half-bottle of inferior rum with which to celebrate the end of our servitude to the Great Brown Beast – the house. It is finished – well, partly – and it only remains to pay for it
.
I won’t bother you with excuses for my long silence and apparent failure to act on your request for an outline of my Eskimo book.… I have thought long and hard about it and now have time to put those thoughts on
paper. I also have the stimulus – financial – and it is pressing. I will have an outline in the mail by the end of the month but I must warn you, in order to support bodies and souls I will quickly have to produce potboilers for magazines, but will not allow them to interfere with the main chance
.
I have recently had word about the Ihalmiut. A polio epidemic that swept the eastern arctic this summer has, for all practical purposes, written finis to their history as a coherent group. The handful of survivors will probably be transplanted to the coast, where they will merge with the so-called civilized Eskimos. It will not be many years before these people of the deer are quite forgotten. I wish to God I could have had ten years with them
.
My book about them could be in the form of a story, a sort of “profile” based on the life of Pommela, the old man who has been their chief shaman – sorcerer – during their final years. The central theme would concern itself with the impact of the white race on this man, on his
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