Alison Lennie steps out of her house into the cold.
It's twilight and the cold is on. Eyelashes change color. The exposed skin goes numb in five minutes. The cold causes car engines to strain, which slows the chemical reactions inside the batteries.
She knows all of this because she grew up here, 120 miles north of the Arctic Circle. 25 minutes before she has to leave, she turns the key in her car.
Driving through Inuvik at night is difficult because of the layers of ice and snow. blobs in parkas are hard to recognize if you pass them. The air is still as the moon is full.
Ms. Lennie slams the door behind her as she pulls her truck into the parking lot of the recreation center.
They look up at her from the round tables as she removes her layers of clothing. Her girls. They were waiting for her.
Heather Mair, a sociologist at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, began a survey of female curlers in the Northwest Territories of Canada and found that many of them said curling had helped with their mental health.
During the dark months of the year, when the sun barely crosses the horizon, people leave their houses. Pulling out was not an option for women who curled.
They know they need to leave.
The Northwest Territories, with a population descended from Indigenous and white settlers, have a lot in common with Canada's damaging colonial history.
Ms. Lennie is the daughter of an Inuvialuit man and a white woman who moved to the Far North as a nurse. She said that her father was sent to a residential school at the age of 7 because he used his native language too much.
Silence stayed with him as an adult.
She said that you grew up in a system that taught that.
She can't remember anyone talking about mental health when she was a child. She said that children growing up around addiction and violence are paying for what happened to their parents. She has pictures of the dog tags that her uncle and grandmother were asked to wear.
She couldn't wait to go back to the south. She disliked the traffic and the pollution. She used to be near the water. Her husband, who is from Tuktoyaktuk, was not welcome in the city.
She said something about the dark months pulls people together.
Inuvik has one stoplight. A dive bar with a reputation for rowdiness. There are two restaurants. There is no movie theater.
Tannis Bain is with Ms. Lennie. In the winter months, family life settles into a pattern. Ms. Bain's children leave for school in the dark and return home in the dark.
She said that sometimes you would be inside.
The world was narrowed by the coronaviruses. There wasn't any small talk with neighbors in the store. She began to notice that she wasn't interested in meeting new people.
Ms. Bain said that she had to snap out of it.
Ms. Lennie takes note of the other women when they seem to be struggling. She talks to them in a friendly way about keeping each other accountable.
Sometimes I feel like I don't get out on the ice because it's so warm inside. I signed up for a team and said I would.
Ms. Bain has three daughters. It feels like a huge effort for a 15-year-old to go to the recreation center four times a week after school and work.
She is completely immersed when she gets onto the ice.
She said that she was so focused on curling that she didn't think about anything else.
A team of teachers from Ontario are going against a team of curling players.
The Ontario women are dancing and celebrating when they score. They are new to curling and to Inuvik, which one of them describes as a little slice of heaven.
Ms. Lennie is the same person she has always been. It is serious. It was focused. There was no dancing.
She said that it was fun to win and make good shots.
In a game of curling, two teams of players slide granite orbs across a long sheet of ice, competing to see which team has its rocks closest to a button.
Ms. Lennie is the team's skip, or captain, which requires a constant focus on strategy. Her babysitter is texting her. She wishes she could just play. She has to stay a rock ahead tonight.
The ice is different because the regular ice makers are not in town. It is a game of chance. The women from Ontario surprised themselves by scoring two on the first end. It looks like a tie.
Two of the other team's rocks are in the ring, six inches apart, and Ms. Lennie is staring at a problem. She needs to use one stone to knock both of them out of the house.
She releases it and it is all physics. It hits the first, and bounces off it with such force that it careens into the other, and both of the other team's rocks slide out.
There is only one turn left for one of the teachers from Ontario. It is not easy for eight women to stare at a shot. Ms. Shuett takes a deep breath and throws, hoping to connect to anything that will break up the other team's shots.
Ms. Lennie watches as the shot goes to the left, and then she sees a nub on the ice. She scatters her team's stones.
Ms. Schuett is in disbelief.
She said that she would never be able to do that again.
It isn't enough to change the outcome of the game. It is just another night of small-town sports, under fluorescent lighting, in a recreation center surrounded by tundra.
They will talk about what happened with that rock. The women are touching each other. They drink beer.
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