IQALUIT
François Ouellette is an Iqaluit artist and teacher at Ecole Trois Soleil, but give him a giant snowplow pile and a shovel and Ouellette becomes a teacher and artist of another sort.
Iqaluit's mighty, majestic snow castle, built by neighbourhood kids with the aid of dutiful parents, sits quietly at night. - photo courtesy of François Ouellette
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"A couple of winters ago, I just decided to go out and have fun with my then one-year old son Thorin," said Ouellette, who built one snow tunnel that year so his son could play outdoors and avoid the frigid windchill. "Since then, my tunnel project has grown all the more ambitious with my son's growth."
This past December, in the high snow piles behind Iqaluit's IBC building, away from traffic, Ouellette dug in for his annual tunnel. He didn't intend to build an entire castle. Friends of Thorin's and other neighbourhood kids Linda, Mary-Jane and Mark Audla, Alanna Otoova and Annie Akavak started to pitch in. Before long the grand castle had several interlacing tunnels, an inner room with windows and benches, a turret, slides, steps and at any given time many smiling young faces.
"It was just a fun and healthy way to get some air, some exercise and some good smiles," said Ouellette who had only three simple rules for kids: they had to help, they couldn't destroy anything, and there was to be absolutely no farting in the tunnels.
Rules were obeyed (for the most part) until the evening of Feb. 28 when a few young adults reportedly broke a number of the castle's prominent structures.
Kent Driscoll, whose front step faces the snow castle, said he was out for a cigarette around midnight when he spotted a few teenage invaders in the snow fort.
"I shouted over at them, 'knock it off, leave the snow fort alone,'" said Driscoll. "I woke up to find that the snow castle had been damaged."
Ouellette also lamented that some people were using the kids' fort to smoke marijuana.
"I certainly don't want it being a place where kids witness careless destruction and drug use," he said.
Thankfully, the next afternoon some Good Samaritans were out at the castle, shovels in hand and hot chocolate in the back of van. Travis Cooper and Kenny Bell, who built many a snow castle together growing up in Iqaluit, helped patch up holes and rebuild the castle's turret.
It's that community spirit of hard work and imagination that Ouellette said is the raison d'etre for the simple snow castle.
"All you need is to decide to go out, look around and let yourself have fun of discovering where that might take you," he said.
