Odourless at Alert except on chili night

It was completely odour-free at Alert – outdoors anyway

                                     by Robert LaFrance

          This time of year—I just can’t help it—I start thinking about those poor wretches who are stationed in the far north of Canada, especially those on the military base and weather station at Alert, NWT (450 nautical miles from the North Pole).

          Yes, I know it is now located in Nunavut, but it was the Northwest Territories when I lived there from May 2, 1974 to May 20, 1975, and I am going to always think of it as NWT. The reason I think of Alert this time of year is that on every October 9^th, the sun goes to bed for the winter and doesn’t return until March 4^th.

          That’s a long, long time, folks, and during much of that time, especially December and January, the temperature hovers around –40º (either Celsius or Fahrenheit—they’re both the same at that point) and it’s not unusual for the wind-chill to be around –85ºF. The barracks I lived in were exactly 441 steps from the building where I worked at a top-secret government project called ‘reporting the weather’.

          Thank goodness for the armed forces base that was a quarter-mile away, and when I say thank goodness for the base I mean thank goodness for the Junior Ranks Club where I sometimes found myself ensconced. Those army guys’ tours were six months while ours were a year, but they spent more time in the club than we did because most of them had families. The army TOLD them to go there, but we had been asked. We were all in the club trying to forget. We weather guys tried to forget about our salaries that were mounting up in bank accounts in Toronto, and the army guys were trying to forget that they wouldn’t see their wives and kids for months.

          (To tell the truth, after a month there, we all forgot what we were trying to forget.)

          Some of the far north weather stations, like Eureka, 600 miles south, only saw a human from the outside world once a month when a supply plane came in, and some, like Isachsen, only got supplies in every two months or so. We at Alert were very lucky, because every Thursday morning, and sometimes more often, a military Hercules C-130 airplane came in, jammed to the gunwales with supplies for the soldiers, and some for us. Labatt was a popular name for supplies and a lot of Moose ran around after the plane landed.

          Why was there an armed forces base there? For two reasons: to proclaim Canada’s sovereignty over the area, and to listen to radio broadcasts from the USSR. One large double trailer at Alert was devoted to electronic surveillance and those guys meant business. One of our weather chaps was ‘overserved’ one night at the Junior Ranks Club and knocked on the door of the top-secret trailer. He was met at the door by a gent holding a machine gun.

          Of course all around that building were signs absolutely forbidding the taking of photographs. Some of our favourite pictures to send home were those of the signs and of the trailer itself, bristling with antennae pointed toward downtown Moscow. (This was during the Cold War, remember.)

          In early May of 1974, after seven months of training in Ottawa and Toronto, I boarded one of those C-130 freighters in Trenton, Ontario, and for the next eight hours my rear echelons were numb because the only place for humans on those planes was along the sides. In the middle was equipment and supplies. I sat on some webbed material that covered metal rods and looked at a jeep for eight hours. When Champlain landed in Acadia he couldn’t have been any happier than I was when we landed in Thule, Greenland. Overnight there, and on to Alert, another 90-minutes of butt-numbing vibration.

          The pilot made a low pass over the runway to persuade soldiers to get out of the way, and we were on the ground. We had interrupted a softball game that resumed as soon as the props stopped turning. It was 33ºF and they were wearing T-shirts and shorts.

          Although we got $1500 a year ‘isolation pay’, at Alert we had a full gymnasium (at the military base), a radio station, three bars, good food, and taped movies every night of the week. Indeed, we didn’t even have to go the whole six months without seeing the sun because during the fuel airlifts (Operation Boxtop) from Greenland we often hitched a ride,  and flying at 20,000 feet we saw the sun the whole way there and back.

          I was scheduled to go back to Ontario after 53 weeks, but due to a government glitch my name wasn’t on the passenger list that week. I had been written off the work schedule so I had no choice but to drink 'lemonade' for a week. Finally, a week past my sanity date, my Hercules C-130 landed in Trenton and when I got off the plane I was almost knocked over by the smell of flowers and grass.

         It was then I realized there had been no smell in Alert, at least outdoors. We don't need to mention chili night when the fragrance must had floated as far as Greenland, thirty miles away.
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