The Archetypal Walrus

This may not be how we like to envision ourselves, but this is how, collectively, we act. Life in the North sometimes makes this very clear. While I was up in Bristol Bay, I didn’t take what I needed, I took what I could get — just like everybody else. Sometimes I got skunked, but other times I made out like the proverbial bandit. Like a hyena or an oil company, I suffered through the lean times, but when there was prey to be had, I gorged until, belly distended beyond anything you’d have thought possible, I could hardly move.

Today, settled comfortably on Vancouver’s west side, I can finally afford to pay someone else to do my plundering for me: ikea, Chevron, the Department of Fisheries and Oceans; it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that my clothes no longer reek of diesel and fish guts, and I never have to make another one of those hopeless four-time-zone phone calls to a distant girlfriend who I know is with somebody else. I’m also spared the unbelievably depressing atmosphere of the post-conquest, post-plague, postmodern native village. I don’t have to look at the blackened eyes of the lone prostitute flown in to service the visiting fishermen at ten-minute intervals. And I don’t have to spend my weekend searching for the hasty graves of boys murdered by their skipper. Or listening to the sound of bullets whizzing over my head as my own skipper empties a fifty-round banana clip into the seals that are cruising our fishing nets while we haul them in. Or trying to persuade some coke-addled Yupik dude not to load his plastic flare gun with shotgun shells.

Now I get to spoon with my wife in a king-size bed, instead of with a man called Bullet in a cramped gillnetter bunk.

Still, as much as I like living in the South, there are some things I’ll miss about my time among the Extractors: the sensual, citric pleasure of Del Monte stewed tomatoes straight out of the can; the thrill of seeing my first airplane crash, or discovering what a couple of sticks of tnt will do to a refrigerator; that heady sense of lawlessness that made almost anything seem possible. But who really wants to hear about slumming in the heart of Arctic darkness when that’s what so many of us are trying to avoid ever having to think about?

Today, I am, through my actions if not through my preferred self-deception, joined in solidarity with my fellow North Americans as we barrel through the world’s resources, half asleep at the wheel of our continental suv. To my neighbours, I appear well-adjusted and socially conscious: a recycling husband who makes three-figure pledges to Médecins Sans Frontières. A taxpaying father who, if given the choice between protecting another country, another species, or his own children, would blindly choose his offspring every time. A hard-working writer who doesn’t fret too much about the real costs behind the cheap prices he pays for imported goods, because he feels entitled to them. Just like he felt entitled to the tusks of the archetypal walrus. Just like the animals we claim not to be.