First off, my long absence is not because I don’t care about my (mostly imaginary) readers. No really! I just haven’t had internet access in my house since May. So without further ado, I’d like to present the great update of what the hell I’ve been up to since then.
I spent the summer in a little town called Carmacks, way up north in the Yukon. I’m from Whitehorse, the capital of the Yukon, so it’s normal for me to return for the summers. However, Carmacks is a whole different world. The Yukon can basically be divided up into two sections: Whitehorse, and the communities. Whitehorse is a reasonable approximation of a city. It has its own peculiarities, but it has some 24,000 people and a decent airport, so it remains connected to the Outside. (for my non-Yukon readers, Outside is the local term for anywhere that’s not the Yukon. See previous caveat about peculiarities.) The communities are very different from Whitehorse. The largest is Dawson City, with about 1200 year-round residents. After that there’s a handfull of little towns scattered through the wilderness with a couple of hundred people each. Carmacks is one of those little towns about three hours north of Whitehorse if you’re driving anything close to the speed limit, which most people don’t unless they get stuck behind the great lumbering bulk of an RV.
Carmacks has a store, two gas stations, three restaurants, a bridge, a nursing station, a swimming pool, a police station, a school, an airstrip and a fire centre. I was the summer student at the fire centre, which resulted in some pretty cool experiences, as well as some I hope to never have to repeat. I got to fly around in helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft, spend time in the two district lookout towers and drink beer/go fishing with my boss. I also had to chase bats around my house with a broom in the middle of the night though, so I think it evens out. As the winter gets longer and colder, I’ll no doubt start getting nostalgic about the summer so you’ll get to read actual stories, but right now I have other things on my mind.
Over the course of the summer I came to the conclusion that if I didn’t go after my pilot’s license right now and with great determination I was never going to get it. Life would get in the way, as it usually does, and flying would remain an unfulfilled dream. This freaked me out badly enough that I have since scrapped my plans to go back to school this fall and instead am scheduled to start flight training next week. When I moved out I swore I was gone forever, which just goes to show you should never make grand sweeping declarations like that, because I now find myself living with my mom again for financial reasons. Flight training ain’t cheap, and she also happens to live just up the hill from the airport. I am desperately in need of a job, the acquisition of which is my project for tomorrow. I’ll let you know how that goes.
That’s pretty much the quick and dirty version of what’s going on in my life right now. I plan to return to semi-regular updates now that I have net access again, so stay tuned for tales of flying adventures and random bitching about whatever happens to be irritating me at the moment.
-Svea