“Nomad’s Land”: Banks Island, NWT, Winter, 1975

The date is January 28, Anno Domini MCMLXXV. I am somewhere in the middle of Banks Island, the fifth largest island in Canada, and the westernmost land in the Arctic archipelago, Canada’s answer to the Russian gulag. This place is cold, really cold. It is so cold that metal equipment snaps in two. Engines operating at this temperature, which is around -40 Celsius ( or Fahrenheit: when it gets this low it does not matter which you use ) sound incredibly shrill, like a buzz saw. This is definitely brass monkey country.

This is my first day on the job. I am a juggie on a seismic crew- Party 542, and the company I am working for, United Geophysical, is engaged in oil exploration for Elf, the French national oil company. I came prepared for the dead of an Arctic winter, when the sun does not make it over the horizon until the beginning of February. But my feet are frigid, and so I stomp up and down to try to keep the blood circulating. I tell my workmate Johnny, an Inuk from Holman Island, that these are my ‘Arctic stompin’ grounds’. He gives me an ear to ear grin, but I am sure he does not understand.

I was hired by the seismic firm in Calgary, the heart of Canada’s oil patch. To get there from my home in Montreal I drove two thousand miles in one of those drop-off cars where they pay you to drive the car, rather than you paying them. With the two hundred dollars I had to extract from the used car dealer I was delivering the car to ( “No money, no keys!”, said I ), I bought a complete set of Arctic work clothes, and tried to get a decent night’s sleep in an overheated, run-down Calgary hotel. I was awake all night, wondering what lay in store for me, on this, my first foray north. Up to this point, I had studied the Arctic, but this was virgin territory for me. I felt pretty confident I could cut the mustard, but it was all rather daunting nonetheless. My radio alarm went off at 0430 hrs; the cheery announcer puts the outside temperature at -30 Celsius. At around that temperature, exposed skin will freeze in less than a minute. I quickly jumped into my long underwear and down-filled gear. I imagined myself as an astronaut preparing for a moon flight at Cape Canaveral. I was ready for anything the Arctic might throw at me. Anything, that is, except permanently cold feet.

Our chartered Electra left Calgary’s industrial airport at 06:30 hrs. At Johnson Point on Banks Island, six hours flying time and two thousand miles later, the thermometer on the makeshift hangar reads a bone-chilling -57 degrees Celsius, not counting the wind chill. The man sitting next to on the charter plane up to the Arctic was a grizzled old Arctic hand who kept his welder’s cap on during the entire flight. He was missing a finger, and so I asked him about it. It turned out that he had lost it from frostbite during a horrific plane crash at Rea Point a few years previous. Most of his Panarctic Oils Limited teammates, numbering approximately two dozen had died a wretched death. Apparently they had survived the impact of the plane on the frozen Arctic tundra, but froze to death before a rescue crew could get to them. Rule number one about Arctic air travel: always dress for success, meaning be prepared for the worst, even if it is stiflingly hot inside the cabin. Luckily for him, my erstwhile friend had his parka on that fateful day the plane went down, as well as his moon boots, though not, it would seem, at least one glove. Hearing the story of the man without a finger shortly before our arrival in this midwinter land of darkness, I had one last swig of booze ( the Arctic work camp I was headed for was ‘dry’ ), and made the sign of the cross.

That was yesterday. Today, my first full day on the job, is quickly turning out to be a lesson in the dos and don’ts of an Arctic seismic camp. The wind is howling around half a dozen tracked vehicles huddled in a circle around a van with sensitive equipment inside. The vehicle engines have to be turned off so as not to interfere with the testing of the seismic instruments inside the van. No engines means no heat; hence, I go outside to try to get warm. But to my shock horror, a man is swinging the van door wide open, and starting to scream at me. “Shut up, for fuck sake!”, he says, standing there in a T shirt and jeans, boot laces dangling, and head and hands bare. All of a sudden, it seems like the dream I had long had of travelling to The Land of the Midnight Sun is turning into a nightmare. What, I ask myself, ever possessed me to come to this desolate part of the world, at a time of year when the sun never rises, and to a job where you never get a day off, unless the temperature goes below -40 degrees? ( That’s the point where centigrade and Fahrenheit just happen to converge ). The short answer to that question is that I had written my MA thesis on the Arctic, and the only way I could think of getting to see it was to get a job that would take me there. Anything else would have been prohibitively expensive. It was a formula I was to apply time and time again in the course of my wanderings. I also enjoy doing manual labour, and seismic work seemed like it was something I could do reasonably well, without any prior training. Finally, the pay was extremely good, enough, I hoped, to put me through the first year of my Ph. D. in Switzerland.

Right now, however, all I can think of is my chance of surviving eight weeks in this god-forsaken place. This must surely be the land god gave to Cain. made it a full eight weeks in one of the most hostile environments on the face of the globe. Eight weeks may not seem like a lot of time, but in Arctic time it is an eon: by way of example, whereas a normal seismic crew at that time consisted of a complement of twenty-eight people, during my stint a total of one hundred people came off that company plane. This was our Gulag, our way of serving time. We talked of “goin’ in” and goin’ out, and asked “How long are you in for?” or “How much time before you go out?”. Just one hour in this kind of atmosphere, packed together like sardines, eating, sleeping, working together twenty-four hours a day in frozen darkness, can turn even the hardiest soul into a cowering puppy, hightailing it back down south.

How did I manage to survive the climate, the snafus ( and there were many ), the loneliness, the lack of privacy and the isolation that were to come? The short answer is, I kept my nose clean, and, like the Arctic dwarf willow, I kept very close to the ground. Through all the mishaps and inconveniences, I never complained, at least not openly, because rule number two about frontier oil exploration is that if you complain you are out on the next plane, because bitching is bad for the morale of the group. Mind you, there were times went I felt like howling at the moon. Like the time very early on in my tour of duty when my workmates and I were standing outside stomping up and down trying to get warm ( the heater in our Nodwell tracked vehicle had broken down for the first of umpteen times ), only to be told by the assistant chief of the seismic team, peering out from the seismic ‘recorder’ where all the instrumentation was kept, to keep still because we were ruining his seismic readings. This was a very hard lesson for me to learn in the North: that machines and profits come before people, and that safety and the welfare of workers take a back seat to the bottom line.
Time is money in the Far North, and anything that stands in the way of “The Machine” is dispensable. The Machine just keeps rolling on; it does not matter who is running it or greasing it, only that it gets greased and does run. This explains why there was such turnover on the crew: the company would not change the rules, so the only thing that could change, had to change, was the personnel. It costs a fortune to operate in a frontier area such as Banks Island, even if exploration expenses are a tax write-off: the cost of getting equipment, fuel, vehicles, ATCO trailers for offices and accommodation, food, etc. in there is astronomical. Everything has to be flown in from the south aboard Hercules aircraft.

These Hercules aircraft, or “Hercs” for short, are the workhorses of the Arctic. Made by Lockheed and propeller-driven, they are used by civilians and the military alike. With their tail-end loading function, they are great for getting cargo on or off. On one occasion I helped prepare a makeshift runway for a Herc that was bringing in supplies for our camp. I was told that from here the crew was preparing to leapfrog all the way to Ethiopia, as part of a famine relief operation. Suddenly, the world was starting to feel like a global village, in the words of Marshall McLuhan.

Metal objects such as tire irons or the slats of a tank track can snap like a twig in frigid temperatures such as one finds up north. If the piece of equipment was indispensable, then a special shipment would have to be flown in from Edmonton. Diesel engines on the Nodwell or Foremost tracked vehicles we used had to be kept running twenty-four hours per day; otherwise the engine block would freeze solid. If one of those diesel engines blew because the oil had not been changed properly, as I myself inadvertently did on one occasion, then a new engine would have to be shipped up at great cost, and a mechanic might spend twenty-four hours in a jerry-built tent installing it.

Why on earth, might one ask, do the oil companies pay for this kind of seismic work to be done up there in the dead of winter, when it is pitch dark and freezing cold? Isn’t there too much snow? Wouldn’t it be a lot easier to do this kind of preliminary oil exploration in the spring or the summer? The fact is, there is only about four or perhaps five months of the year when one can conduct this kind of activity on the tundra without irreparably damaging the permafrost. Environmental considerations dictated the operating season: if they were lucky, a seismic firm might do four weeks of work in November, until there was no daylight at all, and then resume work at the end of January, when there would be a glimpse of light on the horizon. Then the crew would work as much as daylight permitted until perhaps the beginning of April, when it would be daylight twenty-four hours per day. By then the ground would be too soft to tread on. Once the permafrost started to heave or thaw, it would either be impossible to run vehicles over it, or the scars left by the tracks would stay there virtually forever. In fact, flying over the Arctic in the summer, one can see the telltale signs of vehicle activity that has more or less permanently marked the fragile environment. In the Russian Arctic, the damage is reportedly much more severe, not just from vehicles but from ruptured pipelines and the like.

Most people are surprised to learn that there is seldom much snow in the High Arctic, and that it is, in fact, a desert. Precipitation falls mainly during the autumn and spring. When it comes in the form of snow, it does, however, tend to stay on the ground all winter. The snow blows around a lot, forming drifts here and there. But for the most part the surface consists of a fairly thin crust of hard-packed snow, or, because of the winds, ice. All of which means that during the High Arctic winter there really is not enough snow to make snowshoeing feasible, or cross country skiing practical; thus, these forms of winter activity tend to be limited to below the tree line, where snow tends to be deep and powdery.

Because the operating season is so short, the seismic firms naturally strive to get as much work done as they possibly can. They have expensive equipment that is being amortised, and much of it is only suitable for use only in the Arctic. Thus, they have a tendency to run their crews ragged. That first crew I was on, we would be woken up at five thirty in the morning by the chief, who was otherwise a very decent fellow. He commanded respect because he was big and because he was fair. He had, however, a very unsubtle way of getting us out of bunks in the morning: he would open the door to our half of the ATCO trailer. Then he would scream at us “Off your cocks and into your socks!” or some such profanity, before walking back to his trailer, LEAVING THE DOOR TO OUR TRAILER AJAR! At perhaps forty below zero, with a wind chill of maybe sixty below, this technique for waking us up and coaxing us out of our sleeping bags never failed.

Our seismic camp consisted of a total of eight trailers: four bunk houses, one office, one kitchen cum dining room, one combination laundry/shower/toilet, plus one trailer reserved for storage of food and equipment. They were laid out in a circle, just like in a wagon train on the prairies, or a laager on the South African veld, to shelter us from the elements and reduce the distance we had to travel between trailers.

The first thing we would do as we got out of our bunks was scrape our boots off the floor, to which they were invariably frozen, owing to condensation. Then we would wolf down a mammoth, all-you-could-eat breakfast consisting of cereals, french toast, pancakes, sausages, bacon and eggs, toast, juice and coffee. One tends to burn an inordinate amount of calories working outside in extremely cold weather. We would then set off in our Nodwells to the work site. In the beginning, this could involve a very rough ride of three to four hours to the actual work site, followed by one or two hours of actual work while there was a semblance of daylight, followed once again by a four hour ride home. The lunacy of this system never failed to impress me. The practice was sadistic, because for eight hours we were cooped up like sardines in a very uncomfortable Nodwell, which was banging up and down the little mounds that characterise this part of the Arctic.

Because the Nodwell is a vehicle with tank tracks, it would climb each mound until it reached the top, then come crashing down the other side with a loud thump. And because it was pitch dark outside and the windscreen was constantly frosting up, one could never really see where one was going. To add insult to injury, the heaters in the vehicles were always on the fritz, which meant that from time to time we would have to go outside and stomp around in order to get warm. The whole exercise seemed totally ridiculous, since we never made more than about 8 kms of progress per hour; the terrain there was just so frozen solid that without any suspension on our Nodwell it was impossible to go any faster. Everything and everybody moves very slowly in the Arctic; so much so that for a while I had difficulty adjusting to life on the outside. For example, upon my return south I found the taxi ride into Calgary from the airport terrifying; I simply as not used to speeds of 80 kms per hour, or to seeing oncoming traffic zoom by. Up north, working outside in the winter, one also experiences a mild form of sensory deprivation, such that upon return to civilisation one can become overwhelmed with all the sights and sounds.

The only saving grace to this ordeal of driving hours to work each day was that we were paid by the hour, with a minimum of 80 hours per week guaranteed. Since travelling time was included, in theory it shouldn’t have made much difference to us whether we were being productive or not. In practice, however, we all had our pride, and we did not take kindly to being treated as cogs in a wheel.

There were one or two days when we could not work, even though there was beautiful sky overhead: vicious winds would just sweep what little snow there was all over the place at ground level, such that you could not really see much of anything in front of you, even though it was clear up above. Other times we would be grounded because of whiteouts, i.e. where there is no horizon because of a very low ceiling mixing with the greyness of the terrain. On these bad weather days, I would catch up on chores like laundry, plus I would write letters and curl up with a good book.

In eight weeks on Banks Island, I believe I read a dozen books, mostly about the Arctic. Books like Frozen Ships, Johann August Miertsching’s diary from the mid-nineteenth century, translated by L. H. Neatby. Miertsching was a Moravian missionary from Germany who had been stationed in Labrador for a time. Because of his knowledge of Inuktitut, an Eskimo language. He was selected to serve as interpreter aboard the Investigator, one of the British Navy vessels in search of Sir John Franklin and his crew. Unfortunately, his ship was stuck in the ice around Banks Island for a total of four winters. To pass the time, Miertsching kept a journal. I delighted in tracking his daily entries against the days as they passed; the climate and weather in particular seemed hardly to have changed in one hundred and twenty-five years. On January 31, 1850, for instance, this was his entry:

“31 January ( temp. Max. -40 degrees, min. -45 degrees, med. -43 degrees )

A monthe ( sic ) of the new year has passed and, thank God, we are all healthy and well. The dark period of winter is almost over: yesterday for a minute we saw for the first time the returning sun; daily now he will come nearer with rapid strides. Everyone on board seems filled with new life; for, though lamplight still prevails on board, outside, despite the cold, is the friendly sun. The weather in this month was for the most part clear and pleasant; at times the wind was strong and bitterly cold.... The ice, measured in five different places, is 4 feet, 9 inches thick”.

Eventually his ship did break free of the ice, and for his travails Miertsching was ‘rewarded’ with a missionary posting amongst the Hottentots of South Africa, of all places. Little did I know at the time that twenty-two years later I, too, would be in the land of the Hottentots on a mission of another sort.

At our seismic camp, by the end of the first week in February the situation had improved considerably. There was up to three or four hours of daylight, and the trip to the work site only took about an hour. Thus, we could finally concentrate on the work itself, weather permitting. The work itself was very repetitive and quite boring, but it did pass the time, and it did involve a lot of physical exercise, which I enjoy. Seismic work of this nature basically involves blasting dynamite ( called “shooting” in seismic parlance ) in places where it is thought there might be oil, then recording the reverberations of the blast underground. Strings of geophones, which look like big earphones placed at intervals of three feet or so along a hundred foot cable, are spread out along the ground, one string at a time, in a grid pattern. These geophones record the time it takes for the shock from the blast to hit something below the surface and come back up again to ground level. The whole operation of laying down phones and shooting is called “doing a set”. By analysing printouts of the data, experts back in Calgary are supposed to be able to tell if there is oil. They will, for instance, look for evidence of fissures in the rock, where oil tends to be trapped.

The geophones are called ‘jugs’, and the person who lays them out and picks them up is called a “juggy”. In the hierarchy of the seismic camp, a juggy is at the bottom of the pecking order. Nobody ever tells you this to your face, of course: in the highly stratified world of the seismic camp, you just know it. Everybody knows it. This is not to say that a juggy will be accorded second class treatment. By no means: the seismic crews I worked on were in fact amazingly egalitarian. Everybody ate the same food, used the same “shitters”, cleaned their own underwear, and had the same Spartan accommodation. Nevertheless, everybody knew what everyone else’s job was, just like aboard ship, and so there was a very subtle system of protocol at play. Thus, a juggy knew that if somebody was needed for some special task, such as placing torches on the makeshift runway so a Twotter could spot it from the air, then he would be expected to volunteer. There was in fact little or no stigma attached to being a juggy. Quite the contrary: in a funny kind of way, there was even a degree of prestige which went with the appellation, because it conferred a title to the job, when in fact it was just a “joe job” which anyone could have done.

Like I said, to be a good juggy, essentially all you had to do was lay ’em down and pick ’em up. In addition, though, you had to ‘walk the line’ and plant each geophone in the snow with your foot; where this was not possible, you had to at least ensure that the device was flat, facing down. This is not exactly rocket science, but when the wind is howling, as it often is, and your feet feel like they are frozen solid, as they just about are half the time, it is easy to lose concentration. A string of jugs weighed about 80 pounds, so for the first few days my arms hurt like stink from rolling them out and hauling them in. There was very little technique to it: basically it was like winding a garden hose by slinging it around one’s crooked arm. Each team of four working out of a Nodwell also had a so-called rodman, whose job it was to simply hold a rod up indicating where the jugs were to be strung out. The rodman would simply go out looking for stakes that the drillers would have planted the day before. Drillers commanded a lot of respect within the camp; they were responsible for drilling the holes in which the blasting caps would be placed, from which point the seismic shock would then be recorded. Their work was very physical, and their diamond drill bits kept breaking in the frozen tundra. Used drill bits, which looked a bit like pineapples, became collectors items. Other seismic crew members included the shooter, whose job it was to set the caps and push the plunger; the electrician, the mechanic and his helper, the recorder, the cook, and the water man.

The water man’s job is an especially important one on a seismic crew. Water is indispensable anywhere, but on a seismic crew that is on the move and where the ground is frozen solid, it is especially significant. On the crew I worked on on Bank’s island, the job of waterman went to the ‘Catskinner’, or man who ran the Caterpillar tractor. Our Cat man was a quiet, giant of a man; he sported a beard and must have weighed a good three hundred pounds. The Catskinner had other important jobs which he had to perform from time to time, such as fetching fuel bladders dropped from a Herc at designated spots along our itinerary, towing the entire train of trailers to the next work site, and plowing and grading a makeshift runway for anything from a Twotter to a Herc. But his steady job, night and day, was to ensure that the camp had enough water, hot and cold.

A seismic crew can consume an appreciable amount of water in any one day. The crew were limited to one shower per week, which did not do much for morale. But hot water was still required for washing one’s hands and face, as well as shaving each morning. The kitchen consumed large quantities of water for preparing three meals a day ( two sit down meals plus a do-it-yourself picnic lunch for each crew member out on the line, plus an evening snack ), not to mention dishwashing and floor cleaning. Then there was the laundry room: our sheets and towels were changed once a week. Each crew member was also allowed to do one load of laundry per week. All this water adds up, and it meant that the waterman was forever using his front-end loader to dump another load of snow into the big boiler on skis which trailed our camp. Then he had to keep the boiler nice and hot to melt the snow, as well as distribute the water to the laundry room, galley and lavatory. Finally, he had to make sure that hot water was available when needed. The water itself tended to be have a decidedly briny taste, which made it virtually undrinkable; it made for very lousy coffee. For other drinks, we limited ourselves to fruit juices and soft drinks, all of which were left out for us, and seemed to be in unlimited supply.

Naturally, in such a harsh and cold environment fuel was a crucial commodity, so much so that our lives depended on it. Oil-burning generators burned round the clock to keep all the trailers warm, the lights on, the stove going, and anything else that required energy functioning as well. Plus, all the vehicles burned enormous amounts of fuel. As I indicated earlier, our fuel supply came from big rubber fuel bladders that were airdropped from a Herc at pre-arranged locations. Our needs were simply too great to do otherwise: we could not afford to haul around eight weeks of bunker, gasoline, diesel, kerosene and other fuels that we needed in order to function properly and survive. There were no gas stations within hundreds of miles either, so the only solution was to have these fuel caches in strategic locations.

There was a lot of camaraderie on that first seismic crew of mine. There was a sense of shared experience, an unspoken feeling that we were all in this together, and that our lives depended on each other. Whatever our personal feelings were towards each other, it was important for our collective survival that we get along. I found that just about everybody was nice to me, and for my part I tried to treat everyone with respect.

There were, needless to say, some rather difficult and eccentric characters in our group. Let’s face it, you had to be a bit of a social misfit to venture up here in the first place. The deputy chief was just plain miserable, for no apparent reason. He was full of himself and disdainful of everyone else. He seemed to take a special dislike to me, no doubt because of my education, which can be difficult to hide at times; people judge you even by the kind of books you read. The there was the head cook, who swore like a trooper and cursed me because I had the gall to ask for some hotter french fries than he had served up. Finally, there was the steward, who made our beds every morning, changed the sheets once a week, and generally kept the place tidy. He was an older fellow with permanent whiskers, and he had been coming to the Arctic for years. This was probably his last commission before retirement. He was a real grouch: on the other hand, he could be very helpful if you caught him in the right mood.

There was always a certain amount of tension brewing beneath the surface. One always felt that something was about to boil over, or that a big fight would break out. But it never did, at least not while I was around. Suppertime in particular could be extremely tense. Everyone seemed to know which workers were not pulling their weight. They tended to be the big talkers, and their laziness caused resentment among their colleagues. Swearing was one outlet everyone had for their frustration. Every sentence contained at least one mandatory expletive. You wouldn’t even notice it, really. But everyone knew the joke about the wide-eyed farm boy who went back down south after his first Arctic sojourn. As the story goes, he is sitting around the kitchen table having his first meal with the family in quite a while, when he blurts out, “Hey, Ma, pass the fucking butter, will ya?”

In a strange sort of way, cursing and blaspheming brought us even closer together. Working outside in such severe conditions can be so utterly frustrating, with heaters breaking down, engines seizing up, tools snapping in half, and equipment generally breaking down all the time, that swearing is the only way you can deal with the situation. So, swearing was a way of bonding ourselves together against the elements and our miserable condition. A typical dinner table conversation might go something like this: “We did one goddam set until the effing axle broke in two; by the time we fixed the mother, it was so cocksucking cold my piss froze in mid-flight!”This kind of language is very profane, but also very evocative.

One of my favourite characters on the crew was Gilbert, or “Frenchy”, as most people affectionately called him. Gilbert was from France. When they weren’t calling him Frenchy, however, my colleagues tended to pronounce his name “Gill-bert”, ( as in Gilbert and Sullivan ), instead of “Jill-bert”, which is the way he wanted it. Gilbert was a likable enough chap, although somewhat eccentric. With his welder’s cap, goggles and silk scarf gave him the air of a World War I aviator. Gilbert also had an extremely thick French accent when speaking his rather broken English. Over the crackling radio he would sound something like this: “Rodga, base, Zis eez Nodwell 2, ovair. Za wezzer is lak peasoup for za moment, ovair and out”. Gilbert was somewhat of a daredevil in his Nodwell. Because the windows were constantly steamed up, he would open the trap door in the roof to peer out in front. I think he saw himself as a sort of Arctic Rommel, with his tanktrack in the desert. Still, he was a tireless worker, and he always manged to get the job done, even if his style was rather unorthodox.

One of my trailer mates was a fellow by the name of Chris Tucker, from the Geological Survey of Canada. Chris was up on Banks Island on assignment, using the seismic camp as a kind of platform for his geological observations. He was a very quiet, pensive but pleasant individual who wouldn’t hurt a flee. He was dependent upon the seismic crew for virtually everything, including a lift to the work site. So, while we were doing a set, he would be taking his measurements with his survey equipment. Noone ever quite figured out what he was doing. If he himself knew, he certainly did not let on. He seemed like an incredibly lonely individual. He was essentially odd man out on the crew. Still, the fact that he worked for the government meant that he was accorded a certain amount of respect, especially by the crew chiefs. Funnily enough, I had a meeting with Dr. Chris Tucker as he is now known, years later, when he was with Dept. o f National Defence working on circumpolar issues. I was a Consultant on circumpolar issues to the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs, and our meeting brought back memories for both of us. We swapped stories about our eight weeks living together twenty-four hours per day on Banks Island. It turns out that Chris lives just a few blocks from me, so we often bump into each other in the street. Although we are very different in character, there is a bond there which can never be erased.

In terms of the pecking order on the crew, the recorder’s job was held in high esteem, not just because he hardly ever had to go outside, but also because there was a lot of money riding on the quality of his work. If the seismic readings that were produced each day were not up to scratch, there would be hell to pay. Every once in a while, therefore, a team would be called in and told that the readings were poor, usually because “some juggy” wasn’t planting them right, although faulty geophones could occasionally be the culprit. There would follow a demonstration of proper planting technique, which resembled stomping on a cockroach or a cigarette butt.

The juggys, rodmen, shooters and recorders were in constant radio contact with each other, partly for safety reasons, and partly because a seismic operation involves a fair amount of timing and synchronisation. Just before blasting, for instance, all vehicles had to be shut down, to avoid interfering with the readout. Radios were also essential, because the weather can change so quickly in the Far North: one minute you could be whistling Dixie, while the next minute you couldn’t see two feet in front of your face because of a squall or sudden gust of wind. A man could get lost very easily in these conditions, where there are virtually no landmarks. Polar bears were a constant worry: Arctic drilling rigs usually employ an Inuk with a shotgun to stand watch at all times, but in our case it was every man for himself. Whether it is true or not is hard to say, but I had been told that the bears are so well-camouflaged in winter that the only things you can really see from a distance are their eyes and their nose, and that by the time you’ve seen those, chances are it is too late. We all knew instinctively that polar bears are extremely fast animals, and that it was no sense trying to outrun them. Opinion varied as to what one should do in the event of what the experts call a ‘man/bear encounter’. Some felt it would be best to play dead, while others preferred to scare the animal off. While working on my first crew, I heard a true story of two or three men on a neighbouring island in the Arctic Archipelago being mauled to death by a polar bear. However, the only polar bears I have ever seen live have been in zoos.

In such a bleak landscape, with the work being so utterly monotonous, for me the highlight of the day would be when I would spot some wildlife. The most common animals I would see were ptarmigan, arctic hare, arctic fox, lemmings and caribou. I never did see any muskoxen, although there are said to be plenty on Banks, particularly in the centre of the island. Muskox look like shaggy buffalo, and have a habit of grouping together in a circle. In other parts of the Arctic attempts have been made to harvest them for their meat. In eight weeks of slow travel on the island, we never did spot the herd; however, since Banks Island is just a little bigger than Ireland, this is not altogether surprising.

The rock ptarmigan is very common in the Arctic; it particularly liked to hover in front of our Nodwell, which would break through the crust of the snow, thereby allowing it to feed on lemmings, little mice-like creatures which burrowed into the snow during the winter months. I also saw plenty of caribou; actually, if the wind was blowing in the right direction ( or the wrong direction, depending on how you look at it ), you could usually smell them before you would see them. A caribou smells somewhat like a camel. I was always surprised how close one could get to them without them running off. Again, it depended on the wind, but also the fact that they are said to have rather poor vision.

Arctic fox were said to be quite numerous on Banks Island, and their fur coat was highly prized by the Inuit trappers of the area, who are commonly known as Bankslanders. The only Inuk I ever met in eight weeks of travel in the interior of the island was a trapper who came across our camp while checking his traps on his snowmobile. He seemed as surprised to see me as I was to see him. Because I thought it was the only decent thing to do under the circumstances, I took the liberty of inviting him into the camp cafeteria, which occupied an entire ATCO trailer. I asked the cook to give him some refreshment while I went and fetched my boss, the crew chief, to introduce him. I felt that we were trespassers on his ancestral land, and in the back of my mind I suppose I wanted to demonstrate to him that we respected him and his domain. My boss was quite good about the whole thing, although the belligerent assistant chief was quite teed off.

He was very conscious of rank, and I guess he just couldn’t accept that a lowly juggy would have the gall to invite a “Ski-mo”, as Inuit were affectionately called, into camp. “Ski-mo” was shorthand for “Eskimo. The term “Eskimo” is seldom heard these days, in Canada at least, to designate the native people of the far north. They are now referred to as “Inuit”. The word “Eskimo” is thought to be a derivation of a Cree Indian word meaning “He eats it raw”. The term “Inuit” means “people” in Inuktitut, and an Inuit person is an “Inuk”. Anyway, my Inuk friend seemed quite chaffed as well; at least he grinned a lot as he downed his drink. But then again, Inuit tend to smile all the time, which makes it difficult to determine what mood they are really in. Two young Inuks on our crew were also summoned to act as interpreters between us and our guest.

Every ten days or so the whole camp had to be moved from its semi-permanent spot. The reason for this was that each day we would go out to a lay seismic lines in different locations. Initially the lines would be laid right next to the camp, but after about a week and a half we might have to drive ten kilometres before we would arrive at the work site. When I worked on the ice in McLean Strait in May, 1995, this problem was solved, at great expense, no doubt, by airlifting us to and fro the work site in a transport helicopter. Perhaps the company was worried about losing their vehicles and equipment. This was fun at first, but later on it turned out to be a fairly harrowing experience. I learned to my horror that a few months ago there had been a fire on board the very helicopter we were being ferried on, and that there had been some loss of life.

But that was later. On Banks Island, things were done differently. We would drive to the work site until it would take about an hour to get there; any further and the entire camp would be moved closer to the place where we had to be each morning. The move would normally be done while we were out on the line, and we would not even notice a difference, really. We would simply be told one morning that a move was taking place that day, and advised to secure our belongings. That evening we would return to our trailers, and pick up any objects that may have toppled onto the floor. Once or twice I got to observe the move, and it was quite a sight to behold. A train of perhaps six ATCOs, as well as two or three vehicles which were either spares or broken down, plus the snow melting tank, would be pulled along the bumpy, frozen tundra by a sole Caterpillar tractor.

Each of the trailers was on skis, much like those you see on the front part of a snowmobile. The difference was that the back of the trailer had skis, too. These skis were a substitute either for wheels or a tank track. What made things really interesting was that unlike a snowmobile, the trailer skis could not turn: they simply pointed in the same direction as the trailer. Thus, the Cat would chug along at the speed of maybe 2 kilometres per hour at best, with the trailers creaking and groaning behind. If the Cat had to turn, then the trailers would somehow have to slide sideways to adjust to the new course. More often than not they jackknifed, causing varying degrees of damage in the process. Nor did they have any suspension. The practical effect of this was that their edges would often end up in a snowbank or in the permafrost, especially if they were passing through a gully. In those days at least, ATCO trailers ( ATCO used to stand for Alberta Trailer Company, although in recent times the company has branched out into hydrocarbon exploration and development ) were built like matchsticks. Thus, there were plenty of battered and patched up trailers in our caravan.

During one of these big moves, we were actually in our bunks! Here we were, after another hard day on the line, trying to get some shuteye, and our home away from home was grunting and groaning, moving up and down, twisting left and right over the frozen ground. Everything that wasn’t tied down was crashing onto the floor, and I was absolutely petrified. One or two of my trailer mates slept through the whole episode, as I recall, but in the process they missed an experience they could have been telling their grandchildren about years later.

Arctic seismic work was, even in the seventies, an environmentally-sensitive issue. I was later to learn from another Consultant, Peter Usher, a social scientist who had studied the Bankslanders, that whether or not it should take place or not had been a matter of considerable debate within the community of Sachs Harbor in the southeast corner of the island. The Inuit were understandably worried that their rather lucrative trapping business, upon which they depended for cash, would be jeopardised by the seismic activity and the kind of oil activity this might lead to, such as drilling, pipelines, tanker shipments, etc. Meetings with government officials had been accordingly held, the result of which was that companies like Elf, which my seismic firm were under contract to, were allowed to go about their business under certain restrictions. Fortunately for the locals, sufficient oil was never found in or around their land to warrant exploratory drilling, let alone development.

The two Inuit on our crew were among the best workers on the crew. As a gesture to the Inuit of the area, special efforts were made to bring them on board: the crew chief flew over to Holman, on neighbouring Victoria Island, to recruit them and bring them back to join us. I worked very closely with these fellows for almost my entire stint there, and I found them to be of the finest character. They were also just plain fun to work with, especially Johnny, who although he was probably in his early twenties, loved to wrestle in the snow with me. He gave me the nickname of Gerry Uktuk, which he said meant ‘Gerry the Caribou Fucker’ in his Inuit dialect. The only other native word I learned from him was ‘apu’, for snow. They say the Inuit have about twenty-six words for snow, but Johnny could only find one.

He was always thinking up little games or pranks to play on me. Like many Inuit, he was built like a fireplug: low to the ground but strong as an ox. He was also a good worker, very nimble with the jugs. His cousin, whose name I no longer recall, was also a reliable worker. He was somewhat older than Johnny, and rather dour, but he was always there when I needed him to help solve the kind of minor problem that was always cropping up on the line, such as a tangled set of jugs, or a zipper that was stuck on my parka, etc.

Inuit are legendary for their silence and their patience; perhaps this comes from sitting for hours over a seal’s blowhole with a harpoon, waiting for one’s next meal to pop up. And whether it is true or not, Inuit are also known for their savvy when it comes to motors and other kinds of mechanical equipment. It was said, for instance, that without ever reading a manual, any Inuk worth his salt could dissemble a snowmobile engine or some other type of mechanical device, diagnose the problem, repair it, and then reassemble the engine, all from memory. David Pelly, the Arctic writer and adventurer, tells me that what he finds amazing about all this is that an Inuk will stare at the equipment in question for a long time before going to work on it. It is as if they are practising a form of Zen, as in the famous book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

Although Johnny and his cousin stuck it out until the end of the seismic season, I was told that this was exceptional. In those days, at any rate, it could be quite difficult to find Inuit to work on the seismic line, let alone keep them there. Most Inuit seemed to prefer to be out on the land, hunting, trapping, fishing, sealing or doing whatever else needed to be done in order to survive. They tended to follow the rhythm of the seasons. To some extent they were in the cash economy, making money from sealing, for instance, before the European fur seal boycott hit them. But very few of them were in the wage economy. By and large, an Inuk would work for wages only to the extent that he needed cash to buy supplies that he had to pay for, such as gasoline or even a new snowmobile ( dog sleds ceased to be widely used by the sixties when Bombardier’s tracked vehicle began to be mass produced ). Thus, when he had enough money for these and other “necessities”, he would stop ‘working’ and go back out on the land. The upshot of all this was that if an Inuk could be induced to work on a seismic line or another job in the oil patch, you had to expect that he would quit whenever he felt like it. In this way, both Johnny and his cousin were unusual.

Not that there were many wage-paying jobs around for Inuit, either then or now. To this day, most of the communities in the Northwest Territories suffer from phenomenally high rates of unemployment. Depending on how you calculate it, for instance, in 1994 the jobless rate in Pangnirtung, an Inuit community of approximately one thousand people on Baffin Island was said to be somewhere between sixty and eighty percent. The tragedy is that the younger generation, in addition to being unemployed, are also losing their traditional skills. This can lead to dangerous situations, when, for instance, someone’s snowmobile breaks down out in the middle of nowhere and the driver does not know how to build an igloo to protect himself from the elements.

Federal government “northern benefits” programs which were popular in the early eighties, particularly in the hydrocarbon sector, promoted the training and hiring of local people, including Inuit, on frontier development projects that involved any kind of federal assistance ( such as exploration grants ). The problem here was that for the most part those oil and gas jobs were temporary: they dried up. In the process a number of people were left with very little future, but they had little inclination to return to their traditional way of life.

Inuit were not the only ones to quit on the seismic line. There is no one profile of a typical dropout, but on the two crews I worked on, there were a couple of prairie farm boys who could not cut it. On the face of it, these were the kind of fellows you would have expected to stick it out: after all, there wasn’t much else to do during the bleak months of winter if you were stuck on a farm in Saskatchewan, Manitoba or Albert. Up north you could make good money, pocket every cent of it ( before taxes, naturally ) and eat all you wanted for free. I met one farm boy of about eighteen, for example, who came north with one purpose in mind: to earn enough money to buy a new tractor for himself. Like the Inuit, as soon as he reached his target income, he was out of there in a flash. These farm boys tend to be good with equipment, but the ones I met did not really fit in with the rest of the crew. A prairie farm is typically a family operation. Life on an Arctic seismic line can therefore be pretty lonely for someone who is used to having mom and pop and plenty of kids around, not to mention one’s high school sweetheart. There are very few diversions when you are working ten hours per day or more high above the Arctic Circle. Videos were provided, but most of us were just too darn tired to watch. So the temptation to hightail it down south on the next company plane so that you could be sitting around the kitchen table with the folks, was often too hard to resist. This is why farm boys did not last long in the Arctic, on average.

People also tended to quit because of the dangers inherent in the work. Working in such conditions, where you are cold and tired, accidents can happen very easily. Safety takes a backseat to profit, and there are no government safety inspectors within a thousand miles of the camp. Thus, many an Arctic hand has lost a finger that got jammed in a piece of equipment, or lost a toe to frostbite. When I was up there, the going price in terms of compensation for a finger lost was five thousand dollars.

Oddly enough, the ones who tend to stick it out are the city slickers and townsfolk, especially those who are tied to the bottle. On my seismic crew, for instance, there was a trio from Chatham, New Brunswick. They all came north together. They were quite a bunch. One or two of them had been in the Army for a while, so they knew what discipline and harsh conditions were all about. Their leader, Billy, was a wiry, intense fellow who smoked incessantly, and was always cursing under his breath. Nevertheless, he always managed to contain his anger. Billy was a very dependable chap, who always got the job done. His comrades had less on top: one of them was a real dolt, and a volatile one at that, whereas the other was a extremely taciturn and somewhat morose. Basically, these three lads were only up north for one thing: to make enough money so they could go down south on leave, get pissed and screw around. Unfortunately, this meant that they were in a state of virtual bondage to the company, because each time they went down south on leave they were forced to go back up north to replace all the money they had just blown. It was a vicious circle. When I met them, two of them had already served the previous fall on Prince Patrick Island. I have no idea what became of them after our stint together. Who knows, maybe they are still up there!

The days were growing longer at a very rapid rate, and with the longer days the temperatures rose steadily. By mid-March we could sometimes work in our shirt sleeves. We had around fourteen hours a day of sunshine by this point, and the snow was starting to get a bit mushy. We were having to wear sun screen now, and the glare was tremendous. Every now and then a string of inverted church steeples would appear in the sky, just above the horizon. They resembled a polygraph test. At first I thought I was hallucinating, but when I asked about these apparitions I was told they were quite common, although I never did figure out what caused them.

By April 1st, the Midnight Sun had become a reality for me. It was, and is, one of the most sensational and peculiar phenomenon I have ever experienced, to be walking around outside in broad daylight in the middle of the night! The sun was getting so strong that we had to cover the trailer windows with extra thick curtains to cut out the light. Thus, in the space of eight weeks we had gone from total darkness to almost total light. Whereas at the beginning of my Arctic adventure I complained about the absence of light, by the end I was complaining about the absence of darkness. The Arctic, being at the edge of the world, is full of these strange twists. One minute you are freezing to death, and the next minute you are stripping off your clothing because it is too warm. You complain about the isolation, and yet you would give anything to be alone for a while. You come here in to enjoy the wide-open spaces, and you end up suffering from cabin fever and claustrophobia.

Soon our camp was folded, and we all packed up and left. I was to return to the High Arctic within a month, this time to work on a seismic crew on the ice of MacLean Strait. But the atmosphere was not the same: my heart was not in it this time, and so I left after one week. I have since returned to the Far North many times, and each trip has its own special flavour and memories created. But that first, two month Arctic adventure on Banks Island far exceeds anything else I have done anywhere, north or south, east or west. Horace Greeley said “Go west, young man!” But I went north, and that made all the difference.