In the ‘Land of the Midnight Sun’

St. Vital

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 15/05/2024 (856 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Margaret Sulymka tells a compelling story about her two summers spent out in our Far North.

After raising three sons as a farmer’s wife, driving a school bus, and spending 40 years as food manager in several hotels, Margaret decided to retire at age 64.

But a week later, in May, she accepted an exciting invitation to serve as head cook at a fishing lodge on Great Bear Lake in the Northwest Territories.

The group took off for the whole summer in a noisy, low-flying twin Otter first to Great Slave Lake, with its clouds of mosquitoes, before switching to a DC-10 for the larger Great Bear Lake, a boat ride and, finally, camp.

Grizzly bears had spent the winter rearranging things, breaking into storage bins and even gnawing at mounted fish. After over a week’s clean-up and preparations, Margaret got to work. Each week brought 35 guests and a staff of 40 — guides, meal servers, household workers, maintenance, and pilot — with only one young person to help Margaret prepare the food.

I asked whether any Indigenous people working there.

“Except for the owners, pilot and myself, almost everyone else working there was Indigenous,” she replied.

Margaret said her workday lasted from 5 a.m. till midnight, what the meals consisted of, and how she was able to accommodate all the hurdles. For example, when the weather unexpectedly turned the fishermen back to camp for lunch, she would magically produced soup and sandwiches; she baked nine loaves of bread each morning but when someone asked to take some home, she replied “No — Saturdays only.”

The windows were covered with dark drapes to keep the heat out. But she could grow a crop of green onions in one month. A check on Google showed that sunflowers grew 14 feet tall in July, 1941, when temperatures in the area reached 104 F (39C).

These American guests ate well: prime ribs, Arctic char, with cocktail gatherings Thursday night. Friday’s dinner dessert was baked Alaska, flambéed with good brandy, with the lights turned off. It was a fitting highlight of her two years of intensive labour in a part of Canada we have little opportunity to explore.

Where does the midnight sun set during the mid-June solstice?

Wikipedia says: “North of the Arctic Circle, it circles the heavens in an oblique loop from east to west, grazing the horizon at midnight due north. You wait for it to drop out of sight, but it begins to rise again.”

At Great Bear Lake, just south of the Arctic Circle the sun does dip slightly below the northern horizon and briefly creates dusk, but loosely all of the Northwest Territories is referred to as The Land of the Midnight Sun.

Thanks for a riveting story, Margaret.