Yellowknife

"At the sound of the loons, she automatically pressed record and stood listening to birds that mated for life, their beautiful mad laughter. What held her eye, however, was the look of her hand on the microphone. So weathered and chapped compared to the silver-metallic stem she was holding carefully, no rings on her fingers to click against the metal and transfer to the dark spool of her tape, her equipment solid and unchanging and Japanese, her veins purply under the roughened, reddish-brown skin." -Elizabeth Hay, Late Nights on Air

Gwen Symon lives for the day when she can produce a radio drama like "Death in the Barren Ground," a story she'd heard as a young girl about the Englishman John Hornby who starved to death in the Barrens in arctic Canada in 1927. After learning that Yellowknife's "one-thousand-watt station" doesn't do drama, Gwen must adjust to station manager Harry Boyd's decision to put her on the air as a newsreader. Gwen joins a station of eccentric personalities: a sultry Dutch beauty named Dido Paris who fancies herself the apex of the radio world; Eleanor Dew, the sensitive receptionist; temperamental Eddy; middle-aged photographer Ralph; and Harry, who fell in love with Dido the first time he heard her voice over the airwaves and whose devotion to his station is bested only by his dream for more. In the wake of a series of tragedies, unsure of their futures in Yellowknife and on the radio, Gwen, Eleanor, Ralph, and Harry embark on a canoe trip to trace the path of Hornby's fated trek through the vast, frozen Canadian wilderness.

In the 1970s, when Hay's novel is set, the town of Yellowknife in Canada's Northwest Territories (NWT) was a relic of premodern vanity, of the time before highrises and shopping malls and four-lane arterials when you could stroll up the hill and see nothing but rivers and lakes and undeveloped frozen tundra in all directions. Yellowknife lies just 250 miles south of the Arctic Circle, and though it averages a brisk -16 degrees Fahrenheit every January, there is something ethereal in the sky's perpetual glow, the "constant light [that is] like endless caffeine."

Ten thousand people inhabited the rocky enclave on the shore of the Great Slave Lake, the deepest of its kind (2,010 feet) in North America. By 2006, the population had nearly doubled. As the NWT's capital city, Yellowknife now accounts for approximately half the population of the entire territory.

The tundra surrounding the capital is entirely stippled with miniature lakes and an aerial view in winter shows the landscape as 440,000 miles of white with frozen blue pinpricks so close and infinite that it seems you could hop from one to another for all eternity without ever setting foot on solid ground. Yellowknife is isolated but not desolate. It has bars and cafes, hair salons and heritage museums. It hosts music festival and ice sculpting contests and dogsled races. It has modern automobiles and magazine offices. It is an arctic sentinel, guarding its caribou and polar bears, its musk oxen and snow owls, from the gritty fingertips of those who seek to exploit.

But most of all, most of all it is a place of solitude and redemption, where second chances come in the unexpected form of a job playing music and reading poetry on late-night radio.