Profile of Michael Johansen

Biography

MIchael Johansen is a resident of North West River, Labrador. His column "North of Here" appears every Monday.

All articles of Michael Johansen

• Not quite instant karma
  The flashy car - blue, it was, or maybe green, or red; a sporty model like a Camaro, or perhaps a Mustang - was stopped on the side of the ...
• An unintended lesson in colonialism
  The fan purrs, cooling the magic lantern that's casting a light onto a pull-down screen in the college in North West River. (The clock says 7 ...
• Zen and the art of telephone reconnection
  Few things give a man more opportunity to reflect on life and the world around him than the act of making an appointment to have his phone ...
• Zen and the art of telephone reconnection
  Few things give a man more opportunity to reflect on life and the world around him than the act of making an appointment to have his phone ...
• Your March road report
  The older sedan parked on the side of the Trans-Labrador Highway was listing sharply towards the ditch. Both right tires were not only flat, but ...
• Preparing for the perils of foreign travel
  I started getting vaccinated less than a week before I left Labrador for Tierra del Fuego, the southernmost point of South America. The first ...
• Meeting the last good prime minister
  "O Canada, our blue and blighted land. …" Many, many years ago - in what today seems like a fairytale country - two young men stood on ...
• A thought for the other Tommy
  The name on the cover of the service record was Thomas Ricketts, but something was wrong. The file seemed kind of thin for one of the pre-eminent ...
• Good-bye to all that (and more)
  With a new Parliamentary session fast approaching and our weak-kneed opposition likely to pass any budget the minority Reformed Conservative ...
• Help for animals and hope for humanity
  Naturally, this being winter, all 22 bears are asleep. So are the raccoons, the two skunks and the one Eurasian lynx, except the lynx is not ...
• Last of the family farms
  The hay fields I once knew too well are no more. Summer after summer, back in my teenage years, I used to spill a lot of sweat doing my bit to ...
• Public transport for this millennium
  Blue water sloshes beneath your bare bottom. You shrink from the drops that leap out to touch your skin. They're coldly sterile, but still ...
• Waking up from the Olympic dream
  The police officers were few, but highly visible. After arriving in pairs on bicycles, they kept well back from the demonstration forming in the ...
• Where's the remedy for Olympic fever?
  As the Olympic flame hop-skips its way closer to Canada's Pacific Coast - now with less than a month to go before reaching Vancouver - VANOC ...
• Some not-so-psychic predictions
  It's 2010 and Canada's top psychic has had his say: we are all doomed. According to the fortune teller who predicted golfer Tiger Woods would hit ...
• Long, cold wait for a slow train
  My breath hung for a moment as a white mist in the frosty air before wafting over the shiny, empty railway tracks and dissipating into the night. ...
• Divine encounters by Coldwater
  Getting out of Toronto used to mean taking the Spadina subway to Finch Avenue and then transferring to a westbound bus, getting off right beside ...
• Bad info from the other superhighway
  Suppose the four-laned split highways - like Ontario's 401 - that criss-cross much of southern Canada are fast-moving rivers that suck cars and ...
• Railing away
  Nobody wants you to take the train. Not the Canadian you met on the plane. He says it'll take days to arrange tickets. Not his Cuban wife. She ...
• Shooting nose to spite face
  Dozens of hand-drawn pictures of caribou are posted on the walls in the hallway outside the art class in the brand new Sheshatshiu Innu School: ...
• The pleasure of solving diabetes
  It's not easy for a busy career woman to find time to exercise - and it's even harder to bring a whole community along. When Anastasia Qupee, ...
• Letters from Layton
  When a busy member of Parliament, the leader of a party, takes time to write letters to someone who isn't in his riding - or rather, when someone ...
• More about that missing map
  Parks Canada says that despite evidence to the contrary - despite no movement and a smell of decomposition - Labrador's Mealy Mountain National ...
• Missing maps and other mysteries
  The full moon rises in a lavender sky over the snow-capped Mealy Mountains and a placid Lake Melville. The other way, the sun sets inside orange ...
• The passing of a good man
  It was a brilliantly sunny, late winter day in Nain. The Labrador Inuit Association (LIA) was hosting negotiators from the Innu Nation for a ...
• The last voyages of public service
  Somewhere in the forests south of the Mealy Mountains, the final link of the Trans-Labrador Highway is being forged. Despite repeated delays on ...
• Good time had by all
  Only a year ago, the floor of Labrador's newest performing arts theatre was just a pile of sand. For the most part, except for some surface scars ...
• Processing the Lower Churchill
  Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick ... It was not a sinister sound. It just happened to be the only noise that could be heard after representatives from the ...
• Enjoying that new-school smell
  Hectic! That's what the brand new principal of the brand new K-12 school in Sheshatshiu called the first day of real classes. He had good ...
• Whether it's needed or not
  A woman walks along the beach beside my front yard in North West River. She can't help looking my way, since I'm making a lot of noise. I've ...