Iqaluit: abandonment of free will

I've been a resident of Iqaluit for over two weeks now.

Initially, getting off the jet, for some unexpected reason, I had this feeling that Iqaluit was going to be massive, or forever sprawling or something, even though I knew it wouldn't. It did stretch on quite a ways, but eventually the road stops, and I was kind of affected psychologically by the limitations. Even the Road to Nowhere ends (predictably in the middle of nowhere.) I will completely attribute the feeling to the fact that I've never disembarked from a jet in a city smaller than Yellowknife, which just seems bizarre.

And not that I feel marooned on Baffin Island, but I have never been able to say that I cannot leave somewhere on my own accord. I can't just drive away. There are no roads out of here. There is no escape route. 

Did I abandon free will by getting off the plane?

* I probably did months before that *

And is it a contradiction if I voluntarily gave up my own free will?

Iqaluit is an interesting spot.

This place is like Yellowknife was when I was but a wee l'il fella. One in ten streets is paved. There is no landscaping. There are big shipping containers sitting in front of apartment buildings or in backyards and some clever Iqalummiut (what citizens here are called) have converted them into sheds. There are no real layouts for streets, buildings just seem to lay haphazardly on lots. There is a fear of the mistrustful outsider.

Just like the mischievous days I spent lost in imagination, kids play in the streets, on pipe boxes, in creeks, in piles of discarded metal, everywhere, at all hours.

There is a sense of community that is lacking in most places I've ever visited. Yellowknife is still clenching it, but it's slipping with each new homogenous, blasted out development in Frame Lake. Yellowknife doesn't seem so frontier any more. It seems kind of domesticated, potty-trained, like the Bumble in Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer, after he has his teeth removed by Herbie the dentist.

* don't get me started on the pop culture wussification of my namesake *

I don't think it's all bad, but Iqaluit still has a bit of the wild west feel to it. It still has claws. It's not nerf.

And the kids are growing up real here. Kids aren't rewarded for being cute. They aren't coddled. There is no micro-managing, interfering, magazine-reading parenting going on here. Kids are learning for themselves, in groups, first hand. And it's easy to tell by the way they interact with their parents that they aren't treated like subordinates, but merely shorter humans. They are spoken to as people, and not like an insulated, developmental project, as I've seen in the south, with parents leading them around on leashes.

Was that weird?

Oh, and the sunsets have been redonkulous... Every night, from my patio, they get better and better...

Herbiberous