Nickel Belt News
Volume 58 Number 11
Friday, March 16, 2018
Thompson, Manitoba
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Volume 63 • Issue 33
End of summer update: Street paving and water system renewal progress Book a way to preserve and pass on memories of growing up in Churchill
Photos courtesy of the City of Thompson Beaver Crescent, Deerwood Drive, Lynx Crescent and Thompson Drive North are at various stages in the repaving process as the end of construction season inches closer with the arrival of September. Three months have that the grass has a chance awaiting the completion to ensure that residents of and summer. ater renewal side, Accurate passed since Maple Leaf to get established. of some minimal sidewalk nearby streets had someMaple Leaf Construc- HD corrected all deficienConstruction arrived in A second group of roads work as well as milling and where close to home to tion crews are off for four cies from last year’s work Thompson to begin work are at least halfway done. paving. park while Beaver Crescent days from September 1 in Deerwood and completon six kilometres of local These include Beaver CresThompson Drive North and Deerwood Drive were through Labour Day be- ed water main installation roads, several of which are cent and Spruce Road, is in the early stages of being worked on. Work on fore returning for their work along Juniper Drive all but complete. which still need another its scheduled work, with Staghorn is scheduled to next 10-day work rotation in June and July. They have Caribou Road, Elk Bay, layer of asphalt as well as curbs having been put in begin once Beaver Cres- on September 5. Once they been working along WestFox Bay, Lynx Crescent and some driveway, curb and along the north side lane cent work is completed. are back, they will be work- wood Drive since July 15 Juniper Drive between Oak sidewalk tie-ins. Coral between Quartz Street and The other road that ing on Beaver Crescent and construction is finished Street and Spruce Road are Crescent is also mostly UCN Drive. Curb work hasn’t seen any work done first before moving on to up to Sauger Crescent. the most substantially com- completed, with some curb still needs to be completed is Juniper Drive between Deerwood Drive, Staghorn Accurate HD is currently pleted of the roads worked base work, one layer of as- along the south side as well Spruce Road and Selkirk Drive, Wolf Street and working towards Char Bay on this year. Apart from a phalt and curb restorations as milling and asphalt pav- Avenue. Repaving this Coral Crescent and then and was nearing the interfew driveway touchups and remaining. Nelson Road ing before the construction section of road has been finishing off with Nelson section of Westwood and tie-ins, all that remains is has milling and base work season ends. postponed until 2024 in Road and Thompson Drive. the western end of Pintail back-of-curb restoration as well as driveway tie-ins Only two of the roads order to give the ground Base and sidewalk crews Crescent as August came to work, which includes the and asphalt paving yet to scheduled for restoration time to resettle following will be in Thompson next a close. It is expected that filling in of topsoil and be done. Deerwood Drive this year haven’t had any the many excavations that week, followed by the work will continue into eargrass seeding. This work still requires milling, base work done yet. One of them were done as part of water asphalt crew the weekNickel of Belt ly or midphoto October order News by IaninGraham will probably be scheduled work,northern asphaltdirector and driveis Staghorn mainher installation work in September to complete all of what was Addictions Foundation of Manitoba Gisele deMeulles hasDrive, writtenwhich a book about experiences growing up, mostly in11. Churchill. for next spring to ensure way tie-ins. Wolf Street is was left until last in order the area earlier this spring On the water and wastew- planned for 2023. BY IAN GRAHAM For all the harsh weather to write things that you have ‘Oh, I’m just as bad, right?’ was not a very safe thing swallow when people say EDITOR@THOMPSONCITIZEN.NET
Though she’s now written a book about her experiences growing up in Churchill, Addictions Foundation of Manitoba northern director Gisele deMeulles said writing wasn’t something she always thought she would do. “In my youth I never felt good at writing,” she said. “But when I moved to Thompson to get into the school of social work, at that point I had to write for university and realized, ‘Holy, I’m not bad at this, right?’ I certainly developed a lot of skill in university and came out of there with a very strong skill in my writing and confidence in my writing. I write very clear and that’s it. It’s there. Some people say it’s kind of blunt or direct. I don’t tend
to figure out. It’s pretty clear when I get through.” DeMeulles said she wrote her book, titled Whispers in the Wind: Stories from the North - Life in Churchill for a couple of reasons. “I just sort of thought, you know what, this history, this stuff that’s in my head, it’s going to be gone if I don’t write it down,” she said. “My kids are not going to get it if I don’t do it and it’s something I’ve always wanted my mom to do. My mom’s an elder and she’s an artist, she’s got so many wonderful stories because she always tells her stories at Parks Canada in Churchill and I’ve always hounded her, ‘Please, just put it on tape, I will write it for you because your story is going to be lost,’ and she’s never done it and I thought,
I have all these stories and I need to capture them for my grandchildren really because they will be lost if I don’t.” She also has a reputation as a storyteller herself. “I had such a varied history and I would tell people stories and they would go, ‘That’s not true, is it?’ I’d go, ‘Yeah it’s true.’ They’d go, ‘You didn’t do all that, did you? You’ve got to be really old.’ I was like, ‘No, actually I did all that before I was 27,’ and they went ‘What?’” Looking back, some of those experiences are things she might not do again. “I did some pretty bizarre stuff like fuel hauls into the high Arctic at -35,” said deMeulles. “It didn’t dawn on me until after. That was a very dangerous thing to do. Being on a plane full of fuel
to do but I jumped at it. I thought that was exciting until the plane landed and they started throwing the fuel off and I realized, ‘Holy cats, I was probably sitting on a bomb.’” Another thing that spurred her on was the hard times facing Churchill since the Hudson Bay Railway suspended operations north of Gillam last spring. “It used to be a really thriving large community and it’s just dwindled down to such a small population now,” deMeulles says. Though she’s not there any longer, her parents and her sister and other family members still are. “My cousin owns the hardware store there,” she says. Because of that, deMeulles finds it hard to
that Churchill residents should just find somewhere easier to live. “To say, ‘Those people choose to live there. They should just leave,’ is quite simplistic. It’s quite disrespectful. If we were in the same boat in another area I think we would scream about that so why don’t they have the option to do that? I think right now they’re feeling like they’re pawns in a political game and that’s really sad for them because I think the people of Churchill really want to thrive. They’ve built their worlds there. How would we feel if someone came to you and said, ‘I’m sorry, you have to leave your home community and we’re going to displace you somewhere else and all your loved ones and your history is gone?’”
and the dangers of polar bears, deMeulles said if it had been viable she would have moved back to Churchill in a heartbeat. “I miss the shoreline, I miss the rock, I miss the polar bears even though they’re very dangerous and I really miss the Hudson Bay,” she says. “When I go back home, standing on the Hudson Bay looking out on the bay, it just gives you an incredible sense. You feel so small and you feel great.” Now that she’s got one book under her belt, deMeulles says she may try to produce another. “I have another book in me,” she says. “It’s a darker story, more about personal growth and struggles. Maybe in the next five years it’s something I’ll focus on doing.”