life enfolds

The ground floor departures lounge at Thunder Bay’s international airport (so designated solely thanks to Minneapolis) shelters a colourful assortment of migrants. Everyone here is oriented north: old kookums wearing kerchiefs and wrinkled grins, burly workers for the Musselwhite mine, Blackburied consultants and of course a couple of heavy-lidded lawyers, ties prematurely loosened under layers of suit jacket and down. It’s hot and I’m bothered, after two straight days of periodic announcements regarding flight 920’s having taken on a further delay (still, as one veteran reminded me, why would anyone want to fly when the pilots don’t?). Finally, we’re ushered forth, with the caveat that if it’s still too icy to land in Sioux Lookout they’ll have to bus us in from the next best option. But it still looks like Fall on the shores of Superior – we walk towards the little plane on dew-slick tarmac, two Anishnabek men ahead of me pausing to gesture up into the rose-grey morning, where a long V of geese is slowly opening in flight. One of them looks back at me and chuckles, us plumeless passengers standing in mute and mutual appreciation of that other fluency. We cram ourselves into the narrow fuselage, and a few hours and two airstrips later I am disgorged into winter.

Smoothly executed, this court circuit would have been parsed out over three days, but fog and a foot of snow have compressed it all into one frantic afternoon. The school gym’s booked for floor hockey at six, so we take no more than a necessary few minutes to peruse someone’s Rubbermaid full of moccasins before the judge shrugs on his robes and proceedings begin. The gallery of locals has already taken full advantage of the movable seating arrangement to push their chairs back against the far wall, enforcing a divide that needed no extra illustration. We do our business in whispers in the corners, or faux-authoritative monotones near the microphones. Kids whistle and shriek on the snow-slopes just outside.

My point here, though, is not the hurried and ragged travails of another court trying to get through another list of cases, but the poignant normalcy of the context this hampered system operates within. My court work done rather early, I spend the rest of the day in another client’s mom’s kitchen, sharing veggies and dip over the pages of his case’s evidence. Eventually our eyes cross and he takes me around to meet some family, the huge supercab shuddering over snowy ruts and shaking to the strangely relevant lyrics of Tupac Shakur. In sixty minutes we’ve pulled up to one uncle, two cousins and a half-sister, been waved over by a grandma who spoke no English (and her grandson no Ojibway), said hi to mom and swung past the airport no less than five times. We’ve delivered two bags of storm-delayed mail to the closet post office, flung four old summer tires up out of anyone’s way, and helped grandpa haul his store’s supplies from charter plane to plywood shelves. Milk, meat, eggs, candy. Laundry powder, toilet paper, soda pop, flour. Many hands blur the work. “When the lake freezes good – should be one, two more weeks – then I’ll take him out to get the wood”. One evening-thin slice of three generations of a single, normal, remarkable family practicing the difficult, precious alchemy that we’re all, in our various ways and places, intimate with. My client drops me off for the runway again, and we’re gone.