“We Shall Arrive Soon” True North Writing Contest

It was an unexpected surprise to find out that my short story, “We Are Fuel” was chosen as a runner-up in the Communitech True North Writing Contest. (Special thanks to Erin Bow for selecting my work!).

I’m excited to be part of this Canadian event, and after a quick peek at the site for the True North Conference that spawned this contest & is happening this week in Ontario, I became even more excited.

(Spike Jonze and Charlie Brooker, in case you’re reading this, I’m thinking what you’re thinking and I happen to be taking a screenwriting course this summer. Also, I have way more ideas. )

Anyway, ego aside…the story is rooted in a fantasy of mine. I had a hard time figuring out how exactly to make a narrative out of the idea. Once I was able to concretize some scenes, it was only a matter of keeping it concise and balancing scene & summary. But that’s a lot of craft nonsense, not the kind of stuff that intrigues a (generic) reader. The fantasy itself is much simpler.

One autumn, two summers ago, my wife & I packed up our daughter, dog, and Boler, and hit the road, northbound from our central Saskatchewan city. Our destination was an off-grid cabin northeast of Yellowknife, Northwest Territories. I drove the entire way. I soaked in northern Canada—and as I’ve mentioned before, I find myself seeping into a landscape as I drive through it.

And there’s a lot of it to drive through. Our path from the boreal forest tree line just south of Cold Lake, Alberta, to the southern shores of Great Slave Lake, took us through ~1,000 kilometres of solid forest.

As you arc around the western side of Great Slave Lake (i.e. the only side you can drive) the terrain changes. There are still forested patches, but you are now clearly starting to get into a subarctic landscape. Here, disheveled as I was for many reasons besides three days on the road with a nine month-old, was where I fantasized about what Mid-Canada could look like.

The idea of Mid-Canada captured the imaginations of a few influential Canadians in the 1960’s. And because the National Post published a story the very day we were driving through High Level (the proposed capital of Mid-Canada), my imagination was also set ablaze.

The idea obviously never came to fruition. Trudeau (the OG, nor the JR) was Prime Minister, and I don’t think it would be controversial for anyone outside of Ontario & Quebec to hear that he had a certain favouritism, even as the federalist he is remembered as. Trudeau turned the proposal down. The True Northern Nation never came into being. Personally, I think it was a matter of bad timing.

Driving the Mackenzie Highway, I imagined the sporadic footprints branching off the road being slightly more than just substations or communication towers. I imagined ways that we could learn how to live in sustainable northern communities—the kind of communities we will inevitably have to start establishing as we move further north to escape heat or drought brought on by climate change.

But of course, for people to live in a place, there has to be work. But of course, there is the internet. Does it matter where anyone lives anymore, if they work on the internet? The importance of place for people will be based on desired lifestyle. I would bet there are already more than a few like-minded people who would be perfectly okay with creating a self-sustaining community in the north. I imagined neo-hippie Silicon Valley designers, the kind who dance naked at Burning Man, living in high-tech dwellings that you can’t even tell are there amidst the black spruce.

And the internet doesn’t need to be entirely intangible. Why waste all that energy refrigerating servers in California when we could use the natural climate on the forehead of the globe? Why not house servers in retrofitted mines once they’re abandoned? As delivery technologies get better—as we learn to manipulate quantum entanglement, or quantum teleportation—where we put the hardware may start to matter less.

The story’s crisis came a little later, when I learned about the solar storm of 1859 (or, the more personable ‘Carrington Event’). A solar storm sent a blast of electromagnetic activity that created an Aurora borealis that was visible near the equator. Humanity wasn’t so dependent on electricity and satellites then. It was a pretty light show…although telegraph systems did fail. Apparently, in 2012, a similar solar event occurred. The blast narrowly missed earth.

Another Carrington-class solar storm is bound to happen. With our current systems, we wouldn’t stand a chance. The real irony is that those who are currently disadvantaged by little to no access to the internet or to power will be the people who will be the most adapted. You, reading this on your computer/tablet/phone/Google Glass, will probably be as hooped as me.

Then again, that’s all the way in the future. Still in the realm of fantasy. Still science unable to escape fiction. And it might not even matter to me. Maybe I’ll be camping roadside on the Mackenzie Highway, propane stove hissing as I read The Gruffalo with my daughter. All I’ll know is that I won’t need my headlamp to read anymore. And that I probably won’t have to worry about driving back south.

Read the story, “We Are Fuel” here!