Ebb and flow. Pressure and release. Obscurity and clarity. Dependence and freedom. Mundane and holy. Libby then and Libby now.
Libby Whittall Catling has lived a life of contrasts. Her old life, marked by order, dependence, expectation, judgment, and trauma, stands as a stark juxtaposition to her life now – living off the grid and on the land in Fort Reliance, NWT.
Whittall Catling, a published author and News North columnist who attended high school in Inuvik in the 1970s, left her home of 23 years south of the border in 2008 to return to the North.
After a transient childhood plagued by bullying and lifelong struggles with anxiety – she left a lot behind.
“I really hated everything and everyone and by the time I was 22 I joined this strict, very abusive church and went to the States ...” Whittall Catling wrote in an email.
“It was a lot of hard years until I turned 48, when I had an epiphany that I had the right to be happy, too.”
That moment of clarity, made clearer still when a neighbour told her, “life isn't a dress rehearsal,” set Whittall Catling's new path in motion – one that would cross ancient caribou walkways, meet the shimmering open waters of McLeod Bay and bring her closer to herself, nature and peace.
In 2011, three years after returning North to the territory's capitol, Whittall Catling met Roger, now her husband, in Lutsel K'e, where she was working as an income support worker. Whittall Catling, who was living in a “little shack with no electricity” at the time, was met at her door by Roger, who had stopped by on his snow machine with an offering of lantern oil.
From there, Whittall Catling moved to be with Roger – a seasoned veteran of life in the bush – at his cabin in Reliance in August 2011.
But whatever she was searching for – far from the crowded clamor of the many cities she bounced to and from as an “army brat” – she didn't find it immediately.
“For the first number of years, it was the loneliness of not being around my women friends. I used to be very co-dependent.”
But, after making “remarkable strides” in overcoming the isolation of the bush, something changed. She surrendered herself to the “beautiful present moment.”
“(The lake) freezes up by December and stays one massive solid ice sheet a meter or more thick until beginning to melt in May. The dichotomy is that the ice is alive; frozen molecules which expand and shrink as the temperature fluctuates. The loud booming sound of this great sheet of ice cracking is accompanied by deep growling as the expanding ice piles up upon itself. The outcome of all this ice movement is crystal clear aquamarine ice ridges that go on for miles …” – the Mundane and the Holy.
No longer afraid of “the silence ... the darkness” or of being alone, Whittall Catling found comfort in the simplicity of a land detached from conventions, rules – and religion.
“Out here in the wilderness, I feel separate from the messy life I had and can step back and try and understand it. I can breath free from expectations,” Whittall Catling wrote. “In my garden I can forget about all those hard times of striving for religious perfection and just live ...”
Through self-sufficient gardening and mastering the “art of doing nothing,” Whittall Catling slowly shed her past and the baggage that clung to it.
With every moment of enlightenment, every new skill learned and every step closer to finding herself, cracks formed along the heavy, oppressive veneer that kept Libby from being Libby.
With every reclamation of herself and her past, she boomed and crackled; she broke free from a long-carried weight. A fog gave way to – crystal clear – clarity. Like the ice ridges awakening from a winter slumber, Whittall Catling had awoken, too. She was free.
“Freedom far away from all the people and expectations and pressure of perfection (officer's kid, perfect housewife, Sunday school teacher), freedom to find out who I am as a person,” Whittall Catling wrote.
In a life marked by perpetual motion, one constant has remained: Whittall Catling's enduring love of words.
As a child, she loved writing from her memories and would pour over old history books. Her affinity – and way – with words went with her to Reliance. So, too, did her knack for capturing the awe-inspiring photos of the North.
“Everything I do is instinctive. My writing, my photography . I love good words and I love beautiful things. I try to replicate what I love,” Whittall Catling wrote.
Her desire to detail and share her experiences in the bush – hunting moose, joining a cooperative gardening group, learning to use a chainsaw at 52 and paddling down the Taltheilei Narrows – lead her to publish slices of her unique life as a columnist for News North in 2012.
“The things I was seeing and experiencing out here in the wilderness were in no way normal for most people in the world and I wanted to document and share the experience,” stated Whittall Catling.
In March 2017, with the help of financial backers including the NWT Arts Council and department of Industry, Tourism and Trade – and a push from people telling her to compile her work – Whittall Catling published a collection of her columns, from 2012 to 2016, entitled the Mundane and the Holy.
In 126 pages, Whittall Catling puts her new path onto paper, marrying her day-to-day work with thoughtful introspection. A tour of an abandoned trading post on Police Bay captures the stillness of a once-bustling commercial area; the end of tourism season brings silence and reflection; long winters make the small things – the smell of wood smoke and dried herbs – count. Anecdotes become lessons. Each entry is a transcript of Whittall Catling's dialogue with the land, each page is an answer to a question posed by the bush. With every word, she calls back – sometimes knowing the answer, other times finding comfort in not knowing.
Whittal Catling has also penned a children's book, 2014's the Twelve Days of Christmas, and plans on publishing at least two more. A “brutally honest” book about her experiences growing up in Canada through from the 1960s to the 1980s, she said, is also a possibility. Whittall Catling was awarded 2015's columnist of the year by Saskatchewan Weekly Newspapers Association Better Newspapers Competition.
Now, with Roger logging 45 years of hunting wolves on the Barrenlands, he and Whittall Catling are looking to move on from their cabin in Reliance, which is currently up for sale. But Whittall Catling is at peace with the change.
“I am trying not to be attached to anything. Buddha said it and I have found it to be true. Attachment only brings suffering,” she wrote.
In an excerpt from of “the Mundane and the Holy,” a friend gives Whittall Catling a handful of traditional loose leaf tobacco and tells her to pray.
“I threw the tobacco in the air and wished that I could go every place the wind carried it,” the text read.
For Whittall Catling, her wish came true.
“It was the land I was searching for. My whole life I wanted to live in the bush and be away from people and in tune with nature, but somehow I got funneled into this fake life where I was so unhappy. I finally broke free.”