The Vancouver Sun from Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada • 15

iMEGA MOVIES jpSjlGet "HOOK" For Only You Save $6.00 AVAILABLE NOWI 4ft ft miTImM lUn nil ir on energy waste CITY EDITOR GARY MASON 732-21 66 B.C. EDITOR BARBARA YAFFE 732-2445 Saturday. July 25, 1992 SATURDAY EDITOR JOHN SKINNER 732-2141 SECTION THUMBS IKlS To the Greater Vancouver HJeP Regional District for spending $2.25 million to buy Widgeon Marsh, a regional park that won't open for several years, leaving no money in the Duaget to make needed repairs on several other deteriorating parks. I To Murray Pezim and Bob rvns O'Billovich: after trimming me d.l. Lions navroii bv getting rid of Doug Flutie and several other stars, thev watched Jheir team lose its first three games by a combined score of 135-65.

The fans those who are left thank you. si I) wI ---k'y rSS If Arctic Circle c0 QUOTEUNQUOTE "His message was that I was too smart and too female to go into this field." Auto mechanic Angie Greg- son, 18, recalls how a high school consellor tried to talk her out of developing her interest "There is a Sea Festival and there's nothing going on. There's no crowd. They keep on saying, where PA RT'ONE The constant question we is the sea festival?" a heard was: How far ud are vou Wendy Griffiths, a west-ender i who has been attending Sea Festi val for about 30 years, says the event's major overhaul didn't work. going? How north? To many people, it seemed penetrating the Arctic amounted to a test of one's virility.

The Arctic has captured the imagination of people around "Being raised Chinese, you're supposed to be a doctor or a lawyer actors are just not looked at with respect in the Chinese cul ture." AH uib vvuiiu. iiie a iiiicii yiuuai I frontier, images of tundra, THE 24-HOUR LIGHT After about three days in the far north, we grew to like the constant light. It creates a festive atmosphere, with children out playing baseball at 4 a.m.. It was strange to experience a dark night again when we returned to Van-couver. It seemed so black, so restricting.

So unnecessary. People up here are desperate for the light after a winter of almost total darkness. When summer arrives in the far north, and this part of our twirling planet re- mains facing toward the sun for months on end, the sunsets last last for five -hours and more. We had to force ourselves to go to -sleep each night. Many Inuit get in the summer habit of going to bed at about 6 DOUGLAS TODD Nobby Woo, 27, a Canadian doctor involved in brain research Sun Religion Reporter icebergs and endless terrain beckon.

In this, our first trip to the in Winnipeg, tried out for the musical Miss Saigon. CAMBRIDGE BAY, N.W.T. ISKING LIFE AND frost-bitten RH Arctic, photographer Ian 1 Lindsay and I started in pre A white woman creates an outpost of Christianity in a land where the climate and the land and some of the people are hostile 1 limb because of her white-woman's burden, a missionary from B.C. has created an evangelical dominantly white Yellowknife, NUMBERS the rough-and-ready capital of stronghold in the high Arctic, the Northwest Territories. Number of visits to GVRD which contains fully one-third thp lanrl mace nf Panaris Much to the incredulity of the locals, we a.m.

and sleeping until after lunch. In Cambridge Bay, an air-raid-style siren then travelled the sub-Arctic by car blasts at 1 0 p.m. and noon to remind the around Great Slave Lake to Fort Smith, people, who generally don't wear over more than 1 ,500 kilometres of tire- watches, what time it is. Everybody seemed to be yawning and many had coughs; they were picking up popping gravel road through monotonous muskeg, to towns populated largely by Dene Indians. Everyone asked why we hadn't flown.

Later, we did fly 700 kilometres fur colds because they were staying out in parks in 1991:6,000,000. Number of fire hydrants in Vancouver: 6,000. Number of major watermain breaks per year in Vancouver: 70. Number of calls received in 1991 by the Canadian Bar Association's 24-hour Dial-a-Law library: 57,000. Increase in value of an East Vancouver detached home in the last year: $30,000.

Of a Kerrisdale, detached home: $50,000. Average price of a detached home in B.C.: $174,000. In Saskatchewan $88,000. Percentage of the work week spent by executives or their assistants looking for missing notes, files and telephone messages, according to a study by Accoun-temps, a temporary help agency: 10.7. i.

Sources: Ottawa Citizen, Canada Trust converting thousands of Inuit to born-a-gain, Bible-believing Christianity. For her work, Kayy Gordon was recently named Northerner of the Year. The Vancouver-based Glad Tidings denomination long associated with former city councillor Bernice Gerard and the family of flamboyant ex-Social-Credit cabinet minister Phil Gaglardi now has 13 congregations scattered among every significant community of the Arctic Coast. This missionary success story, one of the few for evangelicals in the far north, has gained Gordon international fame, leading to appearances on numerous TV and radio shows, including that of U.S. evangelists Jim and Tammy Bakker.

It all began 34 years ago, when Gordon, who was serving the poor in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, felt she had to leave behind Glad Tidings' giant head church at 18th and Fraser. "The burden of the Eskimo weighed so heavily on my heart that tears blurred my vision. (I prayed:) 'Lord. Lay Eskimos upon the light too long, even though it was still very cold, and not getting enough rest. ther north to Cambridge Bay in the high No wonder they're excited.

A psychiat road from the equally well-attended Anglican church. Helen a 61-year-old Inuit respected by a variety of people, including N.W.T. government leader Nellie Cournoyer frequently flies south to the N.W.T. capital of Yellowknife to serve as acting commissioner, a position equivalent to a province's lieutenant-governor. "Kayy really has the love of the people.

I think that's what's so magnetic about her," Helen said in her cozy, cluttered living room while sewing wolverine fur on a parka for one of her seven children and 18 grandchildren. While the Magsagaks and Up Here magazine praised Gordon without reserve, some say Gordon has overstated and romanticized her missionary successes. Chapters of Gordon's books give the impression her missionary work gathered up converts as fast as a bulldozer scoops up snow. "I've learned a lot from the Inuit. But the question of being really born again is the Please see NORTH, B4 ric nurse in Yellowknife said the wards start really filling up in February.

By then winter months of constant blackness, bitter minus-60 C. cold and cabin fever have exacted their toll. Arctic. The town is above Canada's tree line in the snowy tundra, inside the Arctic circle in the land of the Inuit (whom some still call Eskimos). Over the centuries, numerous explorers died searching this frozen Arctic coast for the fabled northwest passage to the Orient.

No wonder they had trouble. Our flight to Cambridge Bay was almost cancelled because of weather. (To travel in the Arctic is to wait," the saying goes.) When we finally arrived in whiteout conditions, the wind-chill THE PRICES Large fries above the Arctic Circle: $5.25. A half-decent house in Yellowknife: Realty, Sun files. By JOHN SKINNER Saturday Editor DRAWING ROOM $275,000.

It's mainly the cost of transporting things into the Arctic that pushes prices into the stratosphere, but one also sus-' pects a healthy amount of gouging. 031 the NDPs IiSfc oPfc; Gas in Cambridge Bay: 94 cents ar: litre. A room at a Cambridge Bay inn: $1 45 for one person (we bunked in-. stead in a private dwelling). A package of 20 cigarettes: $9.

An apple: 70 cents. was pushing the temperature to minus-25 C. The ice on the Arctic Ocean was two metres thick. The Inuit were wearing parkas. And this was early summer.

We had underdressed. Welcome to the true north. A clubhouse sandwich: $14. my heart and love their souls through me, Gordon wrote about her call to the north in the first of two autobiographies, God's Fire on Ice. Named 1991 Northerner of the Year by the N.W.T.

magazine Up Here, Gordon has spent much of her ministry in this spartan town on the Arctic coast. It's a region where the small, 58-year-old Gordon, although widely admired, is not without critics. Gordon lived in tents in minus-80 temperatures, dogsleighed with Inuit hunting for reindeer, nearly died after losing her way on the barren tundra and almost drowned trekking over the treacherous ice. She battled Inuit shamans for spiritual supremacy. Her book describes the abject failure of one shaman to live up to his claim he could fly, and how a female shaman couldn't follow through on her threat to put Gordon under a curse; "Kayy Gordon is a tough woman," said Helen Magsagak, who with husband John runs Glad Tidings' renovated blue-and-white church, across the skidoo-travelled On the Arctic coast, which is clogged with ice for 1 1 months of the year, a barge can visit the towns only once annually by travelling through the North west Passage.

The barge brings crates of food, tanks of gas, all-terrain vehicles, snowmobiles, outboard motors, ply wood, furnaces, windows, fridges, insu IAN LINDSAY lation, tables, stereos. Virtually every MODERN TIMES: all-terrain vehicle carries family thing. It's arrival constitutes a party. STANLEY PARK In Adams grapple, despite discord, only yea note will ring true OO BOY, IT'S A NO-WIN situation for the Vancouver park board. Here's the board, stumbling along its JAMIE LAMB goers but anger the young and young-at-heart and gain a reputation as the kind of place where the hometown star can't give the gift of a concert in the park because the vil-.

lage elders don't want anybody having any Whichever way the board jumps Monday when it announces its decision on the concert, an enormous chunk of the population will be angry at the board. Personally, I don't think the board has any choice at all in the matter it is going to have to gamble and give the green light to Adams. I say gamble because that's what approval of the concert amounts to: a gamble that everything will go smoothly and that the music and good-times will outweigh the inevitable damage to the facility and the wrath of regular park users. The damage will be both physical and political. The parks board has been told in no uncertain terms that the majority of the public want less commercialism and more naturalism in the park.

A ticket-only concert is a commercial operation, regardless of the ticket price. The merchandising, the broadcast rights, all of this represents serious money and the park board knows it It will gamble that enough money will be made to repair whatever damages occur. Stanley Park hasn't been home to a big deal concert since the inaugural Vancouver Folk Festival, and they threw the folkies out of the park after that one. It doesn't matter whether its a polka party or canasta championship or a reunion of clog dancers, you put 42,000 enthusiasts of anything in a green space supposedly open to the general public and you've got yourself a serious logistical and political problem. There's bound to be political grief, too, over an; system devised to dis tribute free tickets.

The event will have to have tickets as it is the only method to allow authorities to control the size of the audience in a confined area such as Brockton Point. The expectation is for 42,000 concertgoers, but good weather and Adams' popularity could mean a bigger demand than the supply of tickets will allow, and if any of that demand shows up for the concert and wants to come in, security problems and bad publicity will follow. (Heaven help the park board if it comes out that board members and staff receive a portion of tickets for their own use. In the realm of politics, free tickets even to a "free" event won't sit easily with voters ever on the lookout for political perks.) But despite all the problems, despite the flak the board is going to take for roping off a section of the park for a rock concert, the board really can't sjy no. They've got a major international performer wanting to play "free" for the hometown kids; to turn down that offer would give Vancouver a horrible black eye across the coun- try, around the world.

If the concert comes off with only minor then Vancouver gains a rep as a great place with a great park and by inference, a great park board and just the kind of place you'd expect world-famous people such as Adams to call home. Turn it down and you're against music, against the young, against people having a good time in a pub-1 lie park. Vancouver would instantly be seen as New-Salem-on-the-Pacific, a place where Puritans apparently believe youth-1 ful music is heretical. Nope, despite the drawbacks and legitimate concerns, I think the park board has no choice but to allow Adams and Co. to crank up the.

volume and let it rock in theark. rocky anointed path and failing to please anybody on anything to do with its handling of Stanley Park issues, when along comes The Offer. Bryan Adams, one of the biggest names in rock music, offers a nine-hour concert extravaganza in Stanley Park. A free concert, a gift to the loyal hometown fans. Big star very much identified around the world as a Vancouverite concert on the Labor Day weekend international exposure for Jhe city and its premiere physical attraction one seriously exciting proposition.

Except of course that you put .42,000 concertgoers into Brockton J'oint and you know in your bones hat if everything goes smoothly you're still going to generate head- aches galore: damage to the park, anger from those who can't get in to the concert, bellyaches about traffic and crowds and disruption of regular park activities and rowdies and substance abuse and so on. Thus the no-win scenario: either the park board okays the concert and pleases concertgoers and ticks off regular park users and vacationers and anybody within a few kilometres of the place; or you turn down the concert and please park-.