Midnight Sun

Every night at midnight, the purple clouds came out to dance with the blushing sky. Personally, I felt the sky was being a bit coy with its blushing and other dilettante behavior. I mean really…, blushing at the sky’s age? Still, it was pretty to see the phenomenon again after years away from Whitehorse working in the south. I’d been up there before of course. I worked my way through university with a summer job in Whitehorse as a vehicle mechanic. I mostly worked on the long-haul transports that got so badly beat up on far north “roads” like the Dempster Highway to Tuktoyaktuk; that was a wild ride at the best of times!

So the sexists among you are wondering how a chick like me got a summer job as a grunting grease monkey in a town on the edge of the world. I grew up working on all kinds of engines in my parents’ commercial garage, so I knew more about internal combustion than many of the twenty-year veterans behind the other ratchets. The Yukon connection came from a High School teacher who had family up there in need of skilled employees for their transport business. Et voila, the land of the midnight sun.

I’d never be a Sourdough, there’s no way in Hades I could take a northern winter with its months of night! My present consulting job in the mining industry gets me up north for a few days now and then in the shoulder season and the short days of late spring or fall are intimidating enough for me, no thanks on any offers to stick around. (There was a really cute park warden who gave me the tiniest pause, but he wasn’t that cute!)

Summers on the other hand… The golfers go bonkers when they go up there and get tee times like 11:00 PM and 1:30 AM, it’s a real treat to watch them grin and fondle their balls in anticipation. For me, I get a charge out of watching the sun come around to the west and pretend it’s going to go into hiding behind the mountains before starting to slide right back up into that blushing sky. When I get the chance, I prefer to get right out of the city in the late evening and go for a hike or just a bask by one of the zillion lakes. The big hill with the airport on top of it is tucked right up to the town and leans over it from the west so, with the exception of late June, downtown Whitehorse is in shadow at night anyway.

The particular trip I’m talking about here was in May and it was still pretty cool, especially at night. It was unusually cloudy for that time of year, hence the purple blanket trying to get the sky to tango or watusi. My company wanted me to liaise with some engineers from a Chilean company looking into purchasing some mining rights we owned. The Chileans were a bit of a surprise. They were familiar with Patagonia, so they weren’t freaked out by the midnight sun; in fact, they said they hadn’t seen a winter in four years.

“Do you miss it?” I asked the short one.

“Do you?” he responded cheekily.

After a pause I replied, “I just had one, so my heart doesn’t really grow fonder for winter, no.” These guys turned out to be a general disappointment overall. I’d been hoping to get them up to speed over a few hours but, surprisingly for South Americans, they hadn’t done their homework and needed a lot more basic local geography before I could get down to the nitty gritty details of the tracts in question. I think I knew more about Southern Chile than they did about Northern Canada! It took three days to get them to where I needed them to be before I could dig into the actual sales pitch our team had worked out in Calgary and my frustration must have been pretty obvious by the end of the third day. Memos to the home office were almost as purple as the midnight clouds trying to cop a feel of the sky’s ass in a slow dance.

On top of that foolishness, it was a tradition in our operation that potential clients are shown a good time during the off hours. Whitehorse is a surprisingly rockin’ place for such a small town, and these guys were used to frontier towns at home so I should have been able to expect rowdy behavior. However, they turned out to be duds. I got them out to one dance club on the second night but for the most part all they wanted to do was go back to their rooms and read. Read! Books no less! Mining engineers are supposed to know how to party, but these sad sacks went limp after 6 PM. To add injury to insult I broke the bottom off of my only pair of high heels leaving that joint. The place had a traditional western boardwalk out front (for atmosphere I guess) and I got my heel caught between boards and over-compensated when I tried to lean through getting unstuck.

You can’t imagine how relieved I was to wave goodbye to those guys at the end of the week. The only thing they’d woke up for all week was the prehistoric animal models at the Beringia Centre. Well, okay, the place is pretty cool. I had one more night to watch the purple and blue waltz up above and I made the most of it by getting well and truly out of town with a good two hour’s drive. I pulled off the road at a lookout high above the Yukon, the river winding its way to Dawson before heading into Alaska and the Bering Sea. The sun sparkled diamonds on the fast-moving water and the forest undulated its blanket over the surrounding hills almost to the peaks of the low mountains north of Whitehorse. That one purple dance was worth the trip.

The next morning, I was in the lobby under the obligatory moose head and in front of the obligatory Mountie statue (it actually looked more like a stuffed animal than the moose did!) when a carbuncular kid came in from the street and walked right up to me where I sat surrounded by my luggage. “You call for a cab lady?”

I looked at him over the obvious signs of pending travel at my feet and sighed. The only good parts of this trip had been while I was alone with the sky and clouds so why start enjoying human company now. “Indeed,” I said.

He caught the tone and his eyes narrowed. “Let me help you with these.” He bent over and picked up the largest suitcase and I softened to him a little. With the job market the way it is now, if you can’t get work up there you should be considering shopping for a burial plot so I shouldn’t have been surprised my driver looked like he might be too young for a driver’s license. I just hoped he didn’t have exams coming up or he might have to drive with one eye and read his textbooks with the other. Fortunately, it’s not a long haul from downtown Whitehorse up to the airport.

I grabbed the smaller case and my backpack and followed junior to the cab out front. After we stuffed my gear into the trunk (can they make these things any smaller nowadays?) I hopped in the back and cracked a window a little, Opie had apparently forgotten to shower this morning. Then we sat.

“My flight's not for a while yet but I’d like to check in and get comfortable fella. Can we get going, please?” He’d been decent about the luggage so I spoke with as congenial a tone as I could muster. There was an embarrassed cough from the front seat but otherwise he said nothing. His pushing of the starter button grew more and more frantic, so I leaned forward. “Uhhh, what’s up Doc?” I thought I’d try for light-hearted since bitchy wasn’t really necessary with this frazzled kid.

He looked over the bench seat at me. “I’m sorry Ma’am (Geez, how old did he think I was?) but it won’t turn over. I don’t understand it; it was running fine a minute ago!” He tried again. Nothing.

“Huh’n, it’s not even clicking, is it?” He looked at me again. “You know anything about cars…,” I glanced at his license on the sun visor, “Phil?”

“I can drive them…, if they’ll start.” He looked a little unsure of even this claim.

“Okay, pop the hood and I’ll take a look,” I told him.

He blanched, “I can’t do that Ma’am. (Again with the Ma’am, I’m twenty-six!) Let me call my dad and he’ll send a tow truck.” I don’t think he was being sexist, kids these days have things figured out, but he was unhappy about a customer getting her hands dirty.

“Pshaw,” I used my best Pirates of Penzance accent, “I am the very model of a modern major mechanic Phil. I used to fix the big rigs on the other side of the highway up by the airport. Let me take a look.” I hopped back out and tripped the latch for the hood. “Okay, try again.” Nothing but crickets. “You got a hammer or something?” I asked him. I swear another zit was growing on his chin as we spoke poor kid was so frazzled by then.

“No, Ma’am, but there’s a real tire iron in the trunk. My dad owns the cab, and he hates those little crank gadgets they give ya with new cars to do tire changes.”

“That’ll do. Call me Jackie, Phil; I’m not ready for the wheelchair just yet.” He looked confused but popped the trunk.

I found the tire iron in the trunk. Good on dad, this was the real deal, perfect for smashing windows and killing itinerant zombies. Luckily, I was in jeans and a sweatshirt, no glam traveler am I, so I slid under the cab to try my next solution. The solenoid was where it should be, tucked up beside the generator to the left of the oil pan. It’s a bloody awkward place to swing anything longer than… well you know what…, but I managed to get a few good whacks in on the hard Bakelite outer casing of the starter switch. This trick had worked for me several times in the past. There’s copper bushings in there which have to spin in order to generate the needed charge and sometimes on these old jalopies they can freeze up or get jammed. A few good knocks often loosens them enough.

I slipped out from under the cab. “Try again Little Buddy,” I was starting to get real chummy with old Phillip. Nothing. “Crap,” I sat on the lip of an ornamental planter in front of the hotel. The long absent bellhop poked her nose out and asked if there was a problem.

“Naw, just dancing with the clouds, dear,” I replied. She skittered back into the lobby; I can have that effect on people.

“Off like Peter Pan,” said Phil. He was starting to endear himself with me despite his uncomfortable situation.

I snickered and a purple light bulb lit up in my head, clearing away the clouds in there. I snapped my fingers. “The pixilator, I bet the pixilator’s clogged,” I said to Phil. “Has it been serviced lately?”

He looked like I’d taken his chair away as he was trying to sit down. “Uh, I don’t know what that is Jackie. Can we do anything about it?” He was becoming more sorrowful by the second so without answering him I turned to the front of the car and looked for the pixie dust reservoir right away. This was the most ridiculously easy fix I could ever have asked for and I’d only forgotten about it because these older vehicles sometimes had a manual cleaner built in which late model cars didn’t need. Yep, there it was beside the windshield washer reservoir. A little bulb squeezed a bit of the washer fluid through a venturi and into the pixie dust line. When the pixilator failed to light up, a kill switch on the starter solenoid tripped and the machine was as dead as a simile at an accountants’ convention…, until the line was cleared that is!

“Give her a tickle, Phil,” I called to him from behind the hood. The old engine ticked over, and we were ready to go. I hopped back into the cab and she lifted off the ground smooth as you could ask for, not a creak or complaint.

“Phew! Thanks so much Jackie. What’d ya do to it?” Phil was palpably relieved. I explained the problem as we glided in the ten-foot-high lane, the cab floating like a baby in slumber land on its blue-green cushion of pixie dust. When we got to the airport he turned and looked at me a little abashed. “You know, I’ve always been uncomfortable about the dust. My Ethics teacher showed us a video of the production farms in equatorial countries and it was hard to watch.”

I had a little time, so I decided to try and ease his mind a bit. “The pixies aren’t suffering really Phil. They look like little winged humanoids but that’s all; they’re no smarter than the other dragonflies and they don’t mind being cooped up like they are in those pens. If we didn’t harvest pixie dust for transportation needs we’d be in deep trouble by now. Without the pixilators our combustion engines would need to be as powerful as they used to be and would be spewing out greenhouse gasses and crap that would poison the world for everyone and everything, including the pixies. When the lithium wore out we had no choice. Don’t get hung up over the pixies; they don’t know any better.”

He didn’t look convinced. “They looked like they were playing tag or something in that video. Do dumb bugs play tag?” I had to admit that I liked this kid.

“No, dumb bugs don’t play tag, but they don’t need to keep the economy turning over either.” I tried to give him an extra-large tip as I piled my luggage onto a trolley, but he would have none of it. “I’ll keep an eye out for you next time I’m up this way kid. Stay frosty!”

“Oh, very funny,” he retorted.

I checked in and watched my luggage disappear through those nerve-wracking slots they have behind the check-in kiosks. Whatever arcane journeys our property takes backstage at airports it’s never easy watching the things leave your sight, is it? I grabbed a coffee, pulled out my phone and plopped down in the waiting room. And waited. There were no announcements so after waiting and then ultra-waiting I finally got grumpy enough to approach the gate counter forty-five minutes after we should have been airborne. “Hello Mark, (His name was on his tag, I’m not clairvoyant) will we be boarding soon?” Mark was almost as young as Phil and looked like he wished Scotty would beam him up.

“I’m sorry Ma’am (I rolled my eyes but held my tongue) but they’re (It’s always someone else) having a little technical problem with the aircraft and they want to be sure everything is working perfectly before you leave.”

“Commendable,” I deadpanned. “Any idea what the problem is, I’m a mechanic myself.” So I fibbed a little, sue me.

He sized me up once more before replying, “Oh, it’s just a clogged intake in the number 2 pixilator. It’ll only be a few more minutes.”

I sighed.