WEBEQUIE, Ont. — Eric Jacob sprinted to his pickup truck following an abrupt late night call. A seldom-seen shipment of large appliances had been strewn across an icy lake after a truck toppled on the winter road to his isolated reserve in Ontario’s Far North.
Determined to salvage the valuable inventory of the reserve’s only store, grocery manager Eric rounded up some buddies to make the four-hour round trip to fetch the damaged ovens and refrigerators and deliver them to the 840-person community.
“We did that all night,” he says. Fortunate to have any job on the poverty-stricken Webequie reserve, Eric is in an enviable position, one with security and benefits. And he takes it seriously.
Starting as a stock boy nearly 20 years ago, the 38-year-old climbed the ladder to become grocery manager at the Northern, the lone retailer on the reserve, which sells everything from milk to dining tables, at about three times what they would cost in Thunder Bay, a two-hour plane ride south.