T A B L E+T A L K When you're on vacation, do you avoid traditional tourist locations? Take the road less traveled in Table Talk's Wanderlust area R E C E N T L Y Mayan dreaming By Douglas Cruickshank Mind-bending visions in the Yucatan (01/06/98) History and hallucination By Jan Morris Gdánsk stands as a symbol of enduring truth -- and stirring resurrection (01/05/98) Wires and buyers and scares -- oh my! By Don George Some questions about the year in travel (12/24/97) Christmas in Syria By Louis CasaBianca Christmas in Syria: The tale of an unexpected gift (12/23/97) Passages By David Downie "Enchanted Liguria" Mondo pesto: Liguria's green cuisine (12/22/97) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Browse the Wanderlust feature archive - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Your virtual travel agency - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -		T H E +I N U I T +O L Y M P I C S ++|+P A G E+2+O F +2 The irony of 24-hour daylight is that it happens where you need it least. Polar towns provide the longest days in the world and very little to fill them with. Igloolik has no restaurants, bars, movie theaters or museums. (Graffiti on the town water tank: "What to do?") Games week is an exception. Every night there's a community event: harpoon throwing, drum dancing, a whipping contest (empty pop cans standing in for sled dogs). Tonight it's bannock-making. Bannock is a Scottish quickbread, introduced, along with jigs, tea and tuberculosis, by whalers in the 19th century. Bannock-making is part of the Good Woman contest. Before Inuit women won the right to pull heads and twist fingers, their participation in the Northern Games was largely limited to Good Woman competitions. "The Good Woman," to quote official Games literature, "is chosen for her skills and talent (seal-skinning, bannock-making, caribou-cutting, etc.) rather than her looks." The schedule says 7 p.m., but it doesn't say where. Someone suggests the baseball diamond. People up here are laboring under the delusion that it's warm outside (it's 40 degrees) and have scheduled most of the evening activities outdoors. People are on the baseball diamond, but they're not making bannock. I'm not altogether sure what they're doing. A batter has hit a fly ball, and a catcher has caught it. Rather than return the ball to the pitcher, the catcher chases the batter and throws the ball at him. The batter returns to the sidelines. He is apparently out, or perhaps just sore. The man standing beside me says it's a combination of "Northern" and regular baseball. "How many strikes?" I ask him. "They're still trying to decide that." The Inuit are not big on rules. Earlier, I asked a Games official how many people there are on a Northern baseball team. He replied that it didn't matter, so long as "there's lots of people." One of this evening's teams appears to be a bit short. "Where are the outfielders?" I ask the man next to me. He ponders this quietly. "They're not out there. I don't know why." The bannock contest, it turns out, is over at the outdoor skating rink. As it's summer, there is no ice in the rink, only gravel and dirt. Igloolik's skating rink looks very much like its baseball diamond, which both look very much like the lawns, the hotel grounds and the beach. Women are hunkered down in front of portable Coleman stoves and great hulking icebergs of Crisco. The winning sample is passed around. It's sort of a round, oily biscuit, or round, biscuity oil. I seek out the judge to ask how the winning entry tastes different from the others. "I don't know," he says. "I haven't had any." "So how do you know hers is the best?" "She finished first." In a land with no timber and $1-an-ounce propane, a Good Woman is one who can make four batches before the fire goes out. Julie Oolayou is the Flo-Jo of the Inuit Games. She's broken three records and is about to break another, the One-Foot High Kick. Clarification: "One foot" refers to the number of feet with which you kick, not the height of the kick (unless you are a visiting spastic journalist, in which case it refers to both). The high kick is one of the few Inuit games that require equipment. As a rule, Arctic nomads tended to shun athletic endeavors that necessitated hauling racquets and shoulder pads across the tundra. What little equipment is used tends to be things you'd find lying around the igloo. Under the equipment heading for Parka Rotation, for example, the text reads simply, "big parka." Traditionally, the high kick target was hung from the ceiling of the igloo. Here, it hangs from a wooden high kick stand, a simple, spindly gallows, like what you draw to play Hangman. Oolayou removes one shoe and one sock, revealing an ankle bracelet and an Edmonton Oilers rub-on tattoo. She takes three easy strides, crouches and springs, clearing seven feet the way other people hop a curb. Next up is Oolayou's rival, Leona Nakashuk. She spits on her sneaker soles. She eyes the target, a small sealskin seal hanging at eye level. In the stands, an old man begins chanting songs of the elders. Rattled, Nakashuk breaks her advance. "Anaq!" (This is a word in Inuktitut, the Inuit native tongue. It means, "Shit.") Six minutes and as many false starts go by. There seems to be no time limit. This doesn't surprise me. Where day goes on all night and night is six months long, time is a fuzzy concept. Ask someone how long it takes to cross the bay by motorboat, and he'll answer you in gallons, not minutes. I ask games coordinator Angie Luciani if the lack of time limit has to do with the Inuit concept of time. Actually, it has more to do with the Inuit concept of planning. "There's supposed to be a three-minute limit," Luciani says. "But nobody brought a stopwatch." To understand the Knuckle Hop, it helps to have played Bloody Knuckles. To be sure, strength and skill are required -- you are hopping on toes and fists with your body flat-out rigid in between. But what is key here is that you are landing on your knuckles. With no gloves. On a wood floor. The Knuckle Hop, says acting official Gabriel Nirlungayuk, "is about how much pain you can endure." The most coveted seats, therefore, are the ones with a view of the nurses' station. I watch as a succession of grimacing men run up and plunge their fists into bowls of ice water. Their knuckles are dotted with round raw nicks, as though someone went after them with a potato peeler. There is no Women's Knuckle Hop. This is either outrageous sexism on the part of the men, or outrageous good sense on the part of the women. I can't tell you much about the closing ceremonies, as they're being held in Inuktitut. The mayor is giving a speech, and the audience has taken the opportunity to chat with their friends about the polar bear spotted outside town and the rumor that star athlete Kristine Ootova has a hickey beneath her scarf. It is unclear whether this has to do with the popularity of the mayor (low) or the popularity of speeches (very low). (Earlier this week, a visiting politician stopped his speech to reassure his straying audience that he was "almost finished, OK?") The mayor passes the ceremonial blubber lamp (Baffin's answer to the Olympic torch) to the mayor of Hall Beach, site of next year's games. The Inuit Games are officially closed. A group of athletes pushes aside the folding chairs and the High Kick seal and breaks out a box of basketballs. SALON | Jan. 7, 1998 Mary Roach is Wanderlust's polar correspondent; her last piece was on Antarctica. She also writes for the New York Times Magazine, Vogue, Discover, and Islands. Have you ever seen a spectacle like the Inuit Games? 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