Hay River (July 28/03) - When you walk into Dougie Henderson's home office it's like you've entered heaven as you imagined when you were 12.

The room is filled with hundreds of die-cast models, each lined up perfectly at a 45 degree angle and without a spec of dust. Their lure is powerful. Even now, all you want to do is play with the fire truck, or the 747 or the rail car.

As if that wasn't enough, you turn to see a five-foot-high display case full of comic books. There are at least 1,000, each encased a clear plastic envelope just begging to be opened.

The office is a museum and a play room rolled into one, and unquestionably Dougie Henderson's favourite place to be.

"Sometimes, I'll sit up at night with a drink and just read the comics," said Henderson, a 57-year-old land appraiser from Hay River.

"I don't have a lot of money, but what I make I spend. You had better enjoy yourself while you can."

Henderson understands that better than most.

Last year at this time, he was lying comatose in a Yellowknife hospital bed, on the brink of death.

He relied on machines to feed him, pump his blood and fill his lungs with oxygen. Doctors feared he might never recover, so they called his sister in Scotland and asked for permission to pull the plug.

Then, miraculously, eight days after lapsing into the coma, Dougie Henderson woke up.

Doctors told him the coma was triggered when he inadvertently mixed his heart pills with other medication. They said he was lucky to be alive.

"I give all the credit in the world to my doctor and the hospital staff," he said. "I was in a tough place for a while."

When Henderson talks about his time in the coma, it's an uncharacteristically somber moment in a conversation that's remarkably upbeat, much like man himself.

Born in Glasgow, Scotland, Henderson moved to Canada in 1966 and then on to Yellowknife in 1979 to work as a land appraiser for the GNWT.

He was transferred to Hay River in 1985. Four years later, he opened his own appraisal firm, IOWATA. That's an acronym for: I Once Was A Tax Assessor.

"I couldn't come up with a name, so I decided to just keep it as basic as possible," he said.

Henderson's quirky sense of humour also shows up in his music. He's the author of more than 50 original songs, many of which lampoon the political process.

Among his most recognizable compositions is "Housing in Yellowknife," a ditty that begins: "If you want to be happy for the rest of your life/ Never buy a house in Yellowknife/ So from a personal point of view/ Get the government to subsidize you."

One of Henderson's other crowd pleasers is "Eve of Division" -- a parody of Barry McGuire's Eve of Destruction -- that deals with devolution talks in the North.

"The Northern world it is dividing," he sings in a raspy, angry voice that is a dead on imitation of McGuire.

"Think of the fears I'm feeling today/ I'll need a passport for Frobisher Bay."

"Lots of stuff goes on up here and often the best way to address it is with a song," he says, referring to the chaos and shady back room deals that he says sometimes surround Northern politics.

"Besides, a lot of the people I sing about, actually find it funny!"

When Henderson isn't plucking his guitar, you can find him on the Internet, searching for another Classics Illustrated to add to his comic book collection, or another die-cast model.

(For the uninitiated, Classics Illustrated was a series of comics published from 1941-1971 based on novels like Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde and the Count of Monte Christo.)

"I don't collect for the sake of collecting," he says. "I collect because these things mean something to me. They remind me of my childhood, and that was a great time."

"But when I was younger, I couldn't afford models and lots of comics. Now I can," he says with a twinkle in his eye.

He's in heaven.