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Houseboat Days

Tim Querengesser; photographs by Fran Hurcomb June 22, 2009 The bliss and perils of life on Canada’s northern waters.

LIKE BUNGALOWS MATED TO BARGES THEN AIR-DROPPED into meters-thick ice, the thirty or so houseboats on Great Slave Lake outside Yellowknife are a metaphor for the town itself: here gleaming and polished, there mottled, ramshackle and jerry-rigged.

Popping up in the late 1970s, these homes on the water attract misfits, transients, bohemians, artists, tramps and libertarians. You come to Yellowknife when you don’t quite fit in the rest of Canada. You move to a houseboat when you don’t fit in Yellowknife.

Living on a lake in winter, however, requires that every extruded nugget of your existence be ferried …

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Tenth Anniversary: Spring

ISSUE 43 Tenth Anniversary: Spring 2012

online content:

also in this issue:

  • Face the Music

    by Tim Falconer How can someone who passionately loves music also be a terrible singer? Tim Falconer takes up voice lessons—and discovers the surprising science of tone deafness.

  • The Big Job

    by Deni Y. Béchard As a teenager, Deni Y. Béchard went to Vancouver to live with his father, an ex-con with a penchant for telling tall tales. He met a man desperate to forget the past.

  • The Homesickness of Astronauts

    by Johanna Skibsrud "She felt a great sadness. She would remember next to nothing of this, even soon."
  • [see full issue contents]