Not Easy Being Green by Susy Gage

Author:Susy Gage [Gage, Susy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bitingduck Press
Published: 2015-02-22T05:00:00+00:00

18

From: [email protected]

From: [email protected]

To: [email protected], [email protected]

cc: [email protected]

Subject: helllooooo out there

Hey,

How come you guys don’t email me back? Lori, I thought you prided yourself on having answered every email promptly since 1991. Don’t make me nervous, here.

Walter, if they’re both dead or in prison, let me know so I can quit and move to Hawaii. Actually, I might do that anyway. Any faith I had in the human race has been destroyed by seeing the depths to which Canada can sink.

Finally got out of Sqalid, but now we’ve been stuck for over two weeks in a place so much worse that my feeble efforts will not describe it. When we first left, I was so relieved to escape the squalor that I didn’t notice the encroaching desolation. Not a tree, not a flower, not a blade of grass, not even much snow—just bare brown tundra all the way to Desolute.

It was foggy and windy when we landed, and when I asked about the metal carcasses littering the ground, the pilot informed me casually that they were crashed airplanes. Suddenly those three days in Sqalid didn’t seem so bad after all, and I thanked him effusively for waiting until the weather was “good” to get us up here.

Yes, it was a nice day in Desolute. Only single digits below zero, winds barely in excess of 100 km/hr, and a fine precipitation falling that I don’t believe is anywhere on our known phase diagram of water. Lori, you’d be intrigued to know that this is where Canada’s weather comes from. They pack it up and send it on down straight from the Pole.

After three days, we saw the sun set forever… well, anyway, at least until next April. This final sunset wasn’t much of an event, though, given that a heavy dense overcast has a tendency to obscure the alleged movement of this formerly so-familiar celestial body. Never mind scurvy—I’m working on rickets next.

All the flags are in tatters here, a testimony either to the north wind or the state of patriotism. Desolute is the farthest north permanently inhabited community in Canada—basically the government rounded up 200 Inuit and pays them to sit here and be Canadian. This is in case the evil Danish army decides to try to claim the frozen north for its own (What’s the difference between the Danish Army and Ted Kennedy? Kennedy actually killed someone…). These poor souls live about 3 miles from where we landed, which was just beside a hangar set up for the scientists and their gear and experiments.

Besides paying for signs in four languages and living quarters for token Canadians, your (meaning *their*) taxes also pay for the upkeep of this hangar, all its communication gear, and the lodgings for the researchers to study the all-important Great White North. The “hotel” of sorts is a flat blue-and-red building with a double entryway in which you leave your boots and your extreme-weather orange suit. They told us because it was “warm out” we didn’t get an orange suit unless we were going out on the pack ice in a snowmobile (fat chance).

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