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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Winter

ISSUE 42 Winter 2011

online content:

also in this issue:

  • Getting Plowed

    by Selena Ross In this exclusive investigative report from Montreal, Maisonneuve exposes the bid-rigging, violence and sabotage at the heart of an unlikely racket: snow removal.
  • In the House of the Lord

    by Andrea Bennett The Jackson Avenue Housing Co-operative and the religious battle raging in one of Canada's poorest neighbourhoods.
  • After Jack

    by Nick Taylor-Vaisey Last May, Jack Layton led the NDP to the greatest victory in party history. Now that he's gone, will the party be able to maintain its momentum?
  • [see full issue contents]