Postcards from the Edge Episode XI Part VIII

So I recently had, in medical terms, my very first truly brown pants episode. Those terrifying moments when you’re watching someone die right before your eyes and you’re trying valiantly to do something, but you’re not sure they’re gonna make it. I had my first difficult shoulder dystocia. For those who don’t know what that is, that’s when you deliver a baby, and the head comes out, but the shoulders get stuck inside. Babies can die in that position, halfway being born, nearly being able to provide huge amounts of joy to parents, and then expiring on their way out of the womb. It took me three minutes to get that child out, and I had to sit down for a minute before I could finish with the rest of the delivery cause my knees were shaking so bad. And then I went out to my car to cry before I drove myself home. It’s still giving me shivers.
On the other hand, I went bison watching on the highway a few weekends ago. There’s a bison sanctuary about a six hour drive from Yellowknife (didn’t go that far), but a lot of bison roam freely by the highway. So I set out to go see some… and you know what? I did. Two of them, chewing their cud (do they have cuds?) by the side of the highway, not even blinking when tractor trailers were zooming by. They are quite impressive beasts, quite big (bigger than my car) and dangerous looking, in the way that you wouldn’t want to be trampled by one. So that was neat…. Considering that in our neck of the woods, the most impressive animal you are likely to see is a woodchuck or a raccoon flattened by some vehicle, that was pretty neat….
This past weekend was the big annual folk festival up here: Folk on the Rocks (you can check it out at www.folkontherocks.com) … Sloan actually came up to play as the headliners. I was volunteering with the musicians’ gear lock-up, so I got to meet some of the musicians, which was kind of neat. It’s kind of weird how you see people on music videos and stuff, and when you meet them, they really do kind of look like what they look like on TV. It seems intuitive that you would still look like yourself, even if you’re not on TV, but it’s still strange…. However, what I found more interesting was all the throat singers who came to perform cause I LOVE throat-singing… it’s hypnotically beautiful…. and neater still, they had performers from different parts of the Arctic, demonstrating the regional differences in throat-singing, as well as a group from Eastern Mongolia, who themselves have developed their own method of throat-singing…
Traditionally, in Inuit and Inuvialuit cultures, women do the throat-singing in pairs. It was a method of entertaining themselves while the men were out caribou/seal/polar bear hunting for food. The pairing off allowed a kind of game, with the woman being able to outlast her singing partner being a semi-‘winner’. It was actually outlawed by Christian missionaries and almost disappeared as an art form, however, it has been gradually finding a new renaissance over the past decade or so, with a few young women taking it seriously as an art form… finally found some CDs with throat-singing, so I’ve been blasting it in my apartment… um, it’s eclectic, at best, so I don’t think many of you would be banging down my door to have a dance party, however, if any of you are ever interested in listening when I return…
Love you all!
julia