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For a hundred thousand million years, the people of Inuvik Canada have patiently endured the black of winter and been forced to love each other. They take census of all their blessings and give each other precious nicknames. 

Peter Amos is also called Peter-the-Drunk because the people of Inuvik can't believe he’s so happy. I once showed them our basket of recyclables and asked who was depleting the borscht wine while pointing in a whisper and nodding that it was probably the hippie 

Sitting on the top of the world, one could throw a football to three different continents. The sun hides for 28 days because the creator of the Earth went away slumming and he left this planet bending backwards waiting for a second dance. 

While it’s true that nothing good last forever  we can still try to prolong the serenity known by our ancestors. We had tranquil games of Russian Roulette last for days; sometimes hours. 

For 28 days in the dark, the families of Inuvik make posters and cure beluga jerky. They prepare for the forty nine or so tourist which will fill the town coffers with paper money that wasn't shipped over from Ottawa. The families have survived generation upon generation by joining snow tunnels and holding raffles. When the raffle/human-sacrifice game ends they practice native singing. When the throats are dry from singing they take out long needles and sew kuspuks 

It's a tradition of metamorphosis and renewal. A tradition of sacrifice that allows the people to believe that they have earned their place at the top of the world. 

Except, Peter-the-Drunk has been found to be dancing on the bunkers between storms. He laughs as he fights the howling wind and places tiki lanterns where there should be guide poles. He unrolls a large plastic tarp which is meant to protect the sea plane. Peter-the-Drunk spreads out this tarp all over the snow with some boards he stole from the lavatories meant to separate the boy’s stalls from the girls’.

We have only heard rumors of what is up there. Some say that Peter T.D. has made a plastic pier, distributed the weight by inflated reindeer organs  He has a bucket of silt he dried over the summer. He pours the bucket which he dried back in June using a concave mirror. He spills out precious sand. The sand which should be used to avoid slipping on the boardwalk in March. Everyone sprains their ankles in March.

He uses powder coconut milk, the neighbor’s vodka and has the audacity to ask for a straw. Some say the man has fashioned little umbrellas from toothpicks and cray paper. They say he has figured out a way to run conduit and wire. They say that Peter is half naked in the polar night, lounging upon a Chase Chair under the glow of a UV bulb, that he is trying to entice our young people to think of January as a season of some great romance!

Peter Amos probably suffers from Fetal Alcohol Syndrome because he dances weird. He probably should have been left on the tundra between census counts. There are stories of she-wolves who would have helped the boy to a meal but the laws are ever changing and we need a real mortician to tell the government that he’s traveled off. 

Now all the young people are climbing the ladders, giggling, Dare I say GIDDY in the town’s darkest hour. They play reggae music between the storms and gyrate their hips. They try to kiss each other and become tongue locked in the frost because one teenager is always hiding a breath mint. That’s all it takes to be tongue tied. 

I try to wake the elders. The matriarchs who once believed in selective breeding and four weeks of advent. Mrs. Tanqueret says that the ice caves will collapse under the shake of the limbo line. Mr. Macay believes that we will have to restart the generators with purified walrus blubber once the petro gives out and all the children have gotten drunk, smoked their fatties and demanded more polar parties. 

At these times we surround Widow Amos who once sent her son to California as a student. She sent him out with our caribou pelts, she sent him with our finest recipes for musk ox soup and instructions for proper goiter rubs… but what did it count for? They sent the boy back with bad ideas, uncut hair and tan lines. We all knew, because I told them, “That child is addicted to the light!”

Immediately all those under thirty or forty wanted to try long hair. Some made “extensions” out of beaver trim and fastened them to their heads with our precious Bobby Clips. We had to come up with a town rule that no one would have their California Hair too close to the fire in August. That is, “No dancing, prancing or circling the flames if you want to wear extensions.”

He also came back with a can of hairspray. I think I mentioned that he suffers from Fetal Alcohol Syndrome and the sugars are necessarily found in womb bourne pockets of his brain. Peter let everyone use his Sex Hat hair hardener which was pressurized in a long purple can. It used to be called hair spray before the federal ban. The Sex Hat was like an angry genie in a bottle until someone pressed the white tip down. The Genie came out and promised spikes and bangs and all manner of updo which would not fit into a tobalog, a fur trapper hat.

Silly? No. We all like silly. This was an offense so great that we didn't offer Narwhal for Hannakah this year. We couldn't string any Christmas lights because Bob Marley was blasting out of the Peavey Sound “woofers” and the circuit breaker heats up like a whore each second Wednesday eve. 

There were people suffering from dry lung and couldn't get their CPAP devices to pressurize their naval cavities. We had to go to sleep like puppies in a pile always with someone snoring at seven in the evening, waking up at three in the morning or sometimes two. Their drum circle playing Bobby Mcferrin songs. Their boisterous games of snow snorkeling, where someone hid our large fishing lures below the top. I swear they didn't find them all in their snorkeling. Can you imagine how small our spring fish bake will be without the proper lures?

Ok. Maybe Peter got my wife to leave our bed after 22 days of the blackout conditions. I’m not saying she is attracted to the smell of burning skunk, the way that the Top Side people can hand roll chimichangas in a blizzard – I'm just saying that we have to do something soon or no one is going to keep a very good wife. 

Also, I think Peter is dealing crystal ICE now. Reggae is obviously a gateway genre to voodoo music. Voodoo becomes Haitian hipster and everyone knows that the sounds of the Caribbean will lead the youth of Inuvik all the way to Cuban Gangsta Rap! I saw a special on this when I flew to Yellowknife and watched the BBC on the motel television.

I did not take all of small shampoo bottles at the Motel 6 but left some for the next stranded traveler with marmalade gel in their hair. It turns out that marmalade is not the best hair product if it is not removed in a fortnight. This is also the reason my head looks like the Japanese islands. There’s a patch so far south, beneath the right ear, that I now refer to it as Oki-No-wa.

Mambula, my precious wife, my companion by right of wrestling the ancient chief,.my woman by Inuit Takanski Tradition,  my guide into the spiritual realm and process administrator for the Northwest Territory Clerk. — I don't think Mambula is coming back down. It’s a hell of a sight to see a three hundred pound woman in a fluorescent thong. I fear that if she tans in the darkness for too long that the mounties will call in an air strike because the Chinese Espionage balloons reflect like that. The old tales of exterestrial life reflect like that. There are plankton in the seas of Lod Angeles that reflect like that!

She might be deported. 

She maybe… already under their Rastafarian spell, believing that people stay warm by hugging tight instead of working so hard that the core body temperature is impervious. My Mambula is a fabulous hugger. We cannot wait till the northern light. 

Also… it is my fault that we have produced no children. She knows that I have a bent uvula.  I have been trying for years to catch her an orphans when I travel but orphans are scarce in the northern latitudes because everyone has thousands of acres to pass down.

Sometimes I wish I didn't care so much about sane living and Dark Day traditions. I mean, it’s fun to fumble around on Thursday's Lights Out after the meal we call dinner party. To go and hug a stranger, to become one with the night who knows no color or height. You can just mumble in the cave and hide your voice print. There are fellows who say that the Thursday Light has defiantly repaired their familial relations because everyone gets grumpy in close company. 

Now it’s literally two days, just another 47 hours before the Inuvik Sunset Festival is set to begin. We have all the fireworks made from buckshot, the shards of oxidized iron filings taped into our cardboard toilet paper holders. We have made fuses from kite string and fat. There’s no reason to blast “Who Let The Dogs Out” by the Bahu Men. People shouldn't celebrate early because…

… tt’s tradition.

“Tradition is a guide and not a jailer,” wrote William Somerset Maugham. 

I know because I used the Citizen Band radio to alert the Americans that the Russians were coming. I alerted the Chinese that British drugs were arriving in Inuvik for those beautiful Opium Dens which ran out of product the last time Mao cleaned house. Is exporting evil to communist still a crime? I forget. 

In two days we will have a great party on the top of the world. The conditions are right for the aurora borealis. Energized particles traveling at 50 million miles an hour, violently clashing against the magnetic field of the Earth. They all want to destroy our little.piece of planet, just like Peter. 

Because it was Peter-the-Drunk who gave everyone hairspray. It was Peter-the-Punk who said it was nice to be like everyone down there at the bottom. 

Well, he got his wish. I just seen what happens when a dime size ozone hole expands. It’s like slapping someone's cheeks when they are full of water. It's like the end of the artic, the end of king penguins slipping down blue glaciers. It is the end of tourist without mylar coats, the end of the Roman Goddess of Dawn (Aurora) blowing her emerald light show. I don't even think we can get British Columbia to send us some Molson for the things which Peter started have a nasty way of making everyone sober. 

Big hair!

Fluorocarbons are the genie’s trade.

I got your big hair in the cubby of my pocket.  I swear he can use it to make more extensions if he’ll just return my wife. 

I’m so lonely up here.