I’m standing on Arctic tundra at the exact centre of Canada, wearing a stranger’s jacket, bearing a pebble from Parliament and whooping with glee with a helicopter pilot, a videographer, two Inuit guides and a dog named Diesel. Amid a metropolis of mosquitoes, I dig a Canadian flag into the moss at the coordinates and set down a canister, dated July 1, 2. My assignment was to reach the centre of Canada, and here I am: 6. A commercial airline, bush plane and chopper have flown me 1,3.

Winnipeg. Although the nearest community of Baker Lake, Nunavut, boasts a sign naming it the geographical centre of Canada, locals don’t know who put it there, and another billboard reading “Centre of Canada” stands at the midpoint of the Trans. Canada highway in Taché, Man. To determine the exact centre of the country, I asked the president of the Canadian Cartographic Association. Discovering that it falls in untracked tundra meant Maclean’s simply had to go. In June 2. 01. 5, I sent an email to Boris Kotelewetz, a bush pilot in Baker Lake: “Hi there, I’m a journalist from Maclean’s magazine, and I have a very unusual question.” I asked Boris, owner of a charter company, Ookpik Aviation, to help me travel to the nucleus of the country, on a shoestring budget, to launch the countdown to the 1.

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I don’t know if you fully realize what you are getting yourself into, Meagan,” Boris wrote to me. It’s a hell of an idea if you can manage to pull it off.”After a year of planning, Boris, 7. Nick Iwanyshyn in his Otter bush plane—and to absorb the flight costs himself, including the fuel. It’s like the Canadian spirit is asleep somehow and we need to wake it up,” he later explained. I think we have the greatest country. They need to be reminded.” Also: “You bugged me long enough about it.”Boris Kotelewetz loved the challenge to get us to the centre of Canada; ‘I don’t know if you fully realize what you’re getting into’Baker Lake’s airport has one gate; its residents share one postal code. The community, population 2,1.

Inuit, primarily employed in the mining industry. Most people live in subsidized housing but the town is not a reserve, as Nunvaut has none; the whole territory belongs to the Inuit under a land claim. Dogs or mixed- breed wolf- dogs are chained to houses. Residents fish for char, trout and grayling, chiselling through 2. In July, children play outside after midnight in 2. After Boris moved to Baker Lake from Ottawa in 1. Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, which bought crafts from the Inuit to sell to Canadians and Americans, he became so close with the locals that his boss, wanting more emotional detachment in employees, said Boris couldn’t stay.

Watch me,” he replied, and built his own house, married an English woman who has since passed away, and graduated from “the school of hard knocks.” He befriended members of the Group of Seven, who visited the region to paint. He later became a pilot, transporting geographers and mineral prospectors. He was a man of the land, recalling a 2. Baker Lake to Yellowknife. He chatted about woolly mammoths at lunch.

He told me cities remind him of termite mounds. I need to be around the creatures I share this planet with,” he said. Loading the bush plane the morning of June 3. I panicked. I’d lost my plaid flannel jacket, my strict patriotic dress code. I scrambled to a boutique up the road, where manager David Ford said he didn’t sell the style but owned one himself. He left the shop, taxied me to his house—in a neighbourhood called Chinatown, for its eastern location—and produced a jacket from his workshop. Maclean’s Meagan Campbell aboard the Otter, in a borrowed plaid jacket.

Map in lap on the plane, Boris buckled himself into his passenger seat. Also on board with us: Nick, a Mountie in his iconic red garb, two guides in their sixties named Joan Scottie and Hugh Ikoe, and Diesel, a dog trained to bark at grizzlies. Pilot Alan Gilbertson briefed us, sealed the doors and declared, “All right, let’s go fly.”En route to Canada’s heart, we scanned veins of water, skins of ice, brains of rock. You see where you are?” Boris asked. Keep this with you.” For the 5.

Baker Lake, I stopped cheese- grating my bug bites with my fingernails and digested the beauty below. Watch Down Under 4Shared. The tundra resembled cracked tectonic plates. Lakes emerge in between, and icebergs converge like the Cheerios effect. In airplane lingo, “touch and gos” mean rolling the wheels along the ground to see if it’s safe to land. At the centre of Canada, it was not. There are some big rocks in there, Boris,” the pilot warned via headset.

What do we have here?” he said out loud. Here’s some with some potential. It’s a little lumpy on the one end . . . That looks like it’s somewhat doable . . . no, that looks soft . . . how’s everyone holding up back there?”Joan was tucked into fetal position, her knuckles bulging from clutching the seat. Diesel wheedled into Hugh’s lap. I winced as a wing nearly skimmed the ground. Boris was cucumber cool. Impromptu Plan B was to land 3.

Finding Canada’s centre When we discovered our nation’s geographic middle was not where everyone thought it was, we had to go there. The spirit of Canada guided.

The Starfield Resources operation shut down in 2. The company’s abandonment and restoration plan for the site stated in 2. Depressing shelters, sprawling roads, mouldy fridges, soggy Harvest Crunch in boxes: “Look at the mess!” Joan cried, having grown up on this very land before its exploitation.

This was home. We lived here. We hunted here.”Guide Joan Scottie inside the Baker Lake Lodge. Abandoned, or “orphaned,” mines are a common phenomenon in the north, as companies avoid the expense of removing equipment and toxic waste, including arsenic and cyanide. While Natural Resources Canada considers better solutions, clean- ups currently fall to taxpayers. The “custodial department” of Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada has $2. Inuit living in overcrowded conditions.

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I expected to settle for this junkyard as my final destination, maybe walk a minute south to lay the geocache on the ground. But Boris wouldn’t concede. He flew back to Baker Lake with the pilot and Mountie (Boris knew all four officers in town and invited one to accompany us), where he would call a friend at an operational uranium mining company, Kivalliq Energy Corporation, to shuttle us to our exact coordinates the next day—by helicopter. Bizarrely camped somewhere between Mother Nature and modernity, we carried bear spray and a rifle in case of grizzlies and wiped Diesel’s snout of bloody mosquito bites, but also lounged on Ikea beds in the shelters and drove down to a lake, in an abandoned truck Hugh had hot- wired, to get water and catch trout. Joan, 6. 8, with few remaining teeth, snacked on her packed crackers with cheese dip and later snapped photos of her dinner plate for Facebook. I have lived two lives,” said Hugh, her 6. At first I lived a very primitive, Stone Age life.

Now I live a very technological life. We’re stuck in the middle.”Hugh Ikoe, an Inuit guide living in Baker Lake, Nun., talks about his experience in residential schools while waiting in a shelter at an abandoned mineral exploration camp near Ferguson Lake, Nun. As children in 1. Kivalliq region, shortly after Farley Mowat published a book about Inuit starvation in the area. Though the government originally assigned numbers to each “eskimo,” Joan and Hugh were named under a later system dubbed “Project Surname,” which substituted names for numbers.

Hugh and Joan were placed in a residential school in Churchill, Man., and Hugh was forced to go to college in Winnipeg, then assigned to work as a machinist.