That’s
the last of the sun until March 4th
by
Robert LaFrance
Every year at this time I send a big
hello on to the people who are living and working in Alert, Nunavut, which was
Alert, Northwest Territories, when I lived there for 54 weeks in the 1970s.
Today the sun goes away for the winter and doesn’t return until March 4th.
Right around Christmas time it is the darkest place on earth, or so it seemed
to me, but we got through it.
I arrived there in early May of 1974 and left in
mid-May the next year. When I arrived the ‘met techs’ (meteorological
technicians) and the army guys from the 110-person military base there were out
on the runway and playing softball. They were in their shorts and some of them,
I noticed when I emerged from the belly of the C-130 Hercules, were sweating.
It was 42ºF, about 4ºC.
“What kind of a looney bin have I
arrived at?” I asked myself, but since I had been on the road (as it were) from
Trenton, Ontario for 30+ hours, including overnight in Thule, Greenland, my
brain wasn’t able to process enough information to answer that question. It –
my brain – at that point was temporarily in the same shape it is as we speak.
You know how people complain today when they take a
plane trip? The seats are too narrow, there’s not enough leg room, the food is
terrible? During the 8-hour flight from Trenton to Thule I sat along the side
of that huge cargo plane; my easy chair was four metal rods with a little
canvass over them. My food was two sandwiches I had scrounged from the mess hall
at Trenton’s armed forces base, and my drink was two cans of lukewarm Pepsi.
Thule was another story though. It was a US Air
Force base and you know how those guys are taken care of. I had a room all to
myself in the officers’ quarters. Not long after we landed in Greenland the
C-130 crew, several scientists who were also travelling in luxury on the plane,
and I were called to a dinner at the USAF Officers’ mess. The choice of thick
steaks, roast chicken, or pork roast. I remember it well. I think I had all
three and some mighty fine wine just like Jeramiah the Bullfrog.
One of the guests at the dinner was the American
Ambassador to Denmark, which owned Greenland at the time, and I got to meet
him. I shook hands and went back to my plate. First things first. I didn’t know
what kind of food they would be serving at the Alert weather station.
It was just before noon local time (Atlantic, same
as us) when the plane touched down on Alert’s long runway. A Hercules needs
LOTS of runway. As we circled to land we could see the wreckage of a Lancaster
bomber that crashed there in 1953. I mentioned the softball players; they were
back at the game before the turboprops stopped turning. One of the army guys
pointed to a red vehicle: “There’s your crowd with a bomb.”
He didn’t seem too nervous about the whole thing,
and I was too tired (late night with some Pabst Blue Ribbon and some guys from
Arizona) to worry. It turned out that the ‘bomb’ was a Bombardier snowmobile, a
large one with a cab big enough to hold six people. We made it the 800 yards to
the weather station with no problem. So there I was, 26 years old with a
fabulous salary and a view of Greenland out my bedroom window. And the meals! I
had arrived just as the cook, Ray Cameron from Calgary, was starting to serve
Chicken a la King etc. followed by a wonderful apple pie.
Alert took a while getting used to, especially the
24-hour days. When the boss showed me my room, there was aluminum foil over the
window. He said I’d need that if I ever wanted to get a good night’s sleep.
Knowing better and tired out, I took off the foil.
At 3:00 am, with the sun blazing in my window, I put
back the foil. First of many lessons. The boss, Jim Patterson from
Saskatchewan, knocked on my door next morning, noticed the foil back up, but
didn’t say anything. Jim was what we called ‘An Arctic Zero’, as opposed to
hero. He’d been up there eight years and was scraping the edge of the rational
world. While I was in Alert, Jim received several big packages from Toronto. It
was a kit to built an airplane. We all laughed, but two years later, he flew
out of Alert and eventually landed at
Saskatoon airport.
One thing I must
mention. I was scheduled to leave on the weekly Hercules on May 11, 1975, but
due to a mixup, my name wasn’t on the flight manifest when I, all packed, went
to the runway. Because I’d been taken off the work schedule, I spent most of
the next week in the Junior Ranks bar at the base. I would need that expertise
when I got back to Tilley.-end-
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