Chapter 3 ~ Frobisher’s Mainspring
After Dan’s initial visit, we were called on by many Eskimo visitors. Most of them were gentle, tawny skinned children, looking like gnomes in their peak-hooded parkas, their black eyes round with curiosity.
They were too shy to speak at first, but a supply of lollipops diminished in ratio to an increase in their courage and they soon ventured inside the house and played with my typewriter or drew pictures of domed snow houses with dogs and komatiks, just as a child in London or Toronto would draw a square house with windows door and chimney.
We made our first excursion the day after our arrival to the Hudson’s Bay Company Store to supplement our larder. The HBC food store was at Apex, about three miles down the bay. Before we passed the outskirts of town we were offered a ride and drove past the hovels and tents of Iqaluit to the neatly kept buildings nestling at the edge of the shore ice. They were white painted timber buildings with red roofs and trim duckboard paths connecting warehouses, shop and trader’s house. On the shore, the HBC flag streamed at the flag pole head, proclaiming The Bay was open for business as it had been since 1670.
A Shell gasoline pump advertised “42 cents a gallon” and close by waited two emancipated Eskimos with Italian style motor scooters. Inside the store was a conglomeration of fox pelts, rifles, sealskin slippers, tinned goods and brightly coloured trash trinkets marked “Made in Japan.”
The store was running low and waiting for its annual delivery of supplies which would not arrive until after break-up of the ice. Meanwhile, money burned a hole in the pockets of Eskimo wage earners who could not conceive of a rainy day. There was a steady sale of chewing gum, cowboy music, cowboy Western stories and cowboy hats to men who had never seen a live horse and who had never tasted fresh cow’s milk. I watched an Eskimo spend almost nineteen dollars on three gramophone records and a carton of cigarettes.
We piled our food into my frame rucksack and set off home over the tundra. The land was still cool and the air about 50 degrees Fahrenheit so not a mosquito was in sight or ear shot. The day was perfect. Across the white and blue ice of the bay, hills dappled as a grey mare rose to a misty horizon. Beneath our feet lay an abundance of Arctic flowers, pale dryas, anemones and the most exquisite miniature azalea rhododendron. Overhead horned skylarks swooped and darted, trilling in joyous flight. Every shade of green, from pale ashy caribou moss to deep emerald carpeted the ground. Bright orange and red lichen enriched the tussocks. Almost every flower was purple or mauve. It was a royal day,
We scrambled up to the highest ridges and vainly tried to push over a rocking stone, poised there by some ancient glacier.
Rosemary disturbed a skylark and found five brown and olive eggs,
“If she hadn’t lost her nerve, poor thing, I’d never have found her nest,” she said.
We left the lark in peace with her eggs, skirted the Eskimo village and returned to the road, close by oil storage tanks sitting in lakes of cold, black water. Their smooth silver surfaces contrasting strongly with the rough land and rose coloured rocks of Precambrian granite.
During our absence, heavy baggage had been delivered to our hut. We were overjoyed to find familiar possessions neatly stacked in the lobby and we fell to, unpacking long underwear, extra sweaters, candy for children, lipsticks for their mothers; an air mattress, made in Scotland and “guaranteed never to let you down.” I unpicked my knots with parsimonious habit, Rosemary slashed the cords of her packages with a penknife, unable to fiddle with string. Apart from my fishing rod, not a thing, had been broken.
As I had bought a fishing licence and we intended to supplement our diet with fresh fish, the rod had to be repaired. A chivalrous former Bush pilot, Clare Dobbin mended it. It was one of his many kindnesses. When my stocks of copy paper dwindled, he located a source of supply and he gave Rosemary access to a photographer’s darkroom.
He had lived in remote places for many years and pioneered aerial photography, map making Canada’s inaccessible mountain ranges of the far North West. His experience had made him an understanding man, and suspecting the dullness of our diet, he called regularly with a few inches of celery, lettuce leaves or cucumber slices.
The engine of his car was always left running when he called. It was a northerner’s habit in winter, when the temperature stood at forty below zero Fahrenheit and it was better to idle the engine than have it freeze solid.
At first, it seemed a great waste, but we found there was no shortage of fuel in Frobisher. There were vast tank farms, widely spaced to offset the danger of fire. Oil was the life blood of Frobisher, and the airport was the mainspring of its existence.
From its single runway, Strategic Air Command of the U.S. Air Force shuttled giant tanker planes which refuelled the aircraft carrying atom bombs high in the Arctic sky.
The bomber patrol was maintained for the twenty-four hours of each day. Twin crews took turns, working and sleeping overhead, maintaining a vigil for the Western World. Below, in the newly built complex building was a vast communications centre. Its hub was an instrument panel and at its centre was a red warning light.
If ever the bulb flashed, through the remote control of Washington and Ottawa, the fliers overhead would receive the order to, “Go man. Go,” and the civilised men of the Twentieth Century could begin their own destruction.
Frobisher Bay air base was the largest airport established in the Canadian Arctic during World War II, but almost two decades of aero-engine development had made it almost useless for high-powered jet planes which required long runways. When civil trans-Polar route planes turned to jet engines, the number of planes calling at the airport diminished.
A reprieve came when the U.S. Air Force undertook to have the airfield widened and lengthened to accommodate its Strategic Air Command planes and the work was in progress the summer we were there.
It was the biggest commercial gamble Baffin Island had ever seen. The stakes were four million dollars and the gambler was a construction engineer, Tullis Carter of Toronto, who contracted to have the work finished by October. He was a fresh complexioned, spring heeled gentleman with a military moustache and pleased to claim his great grandmother was a pure-blooded Cree Indian, he was a present day pioneer. A man of quick decision with the courage to trust his luck.
Work on the airport filled the twenty-four hours of daylight with sound and rocked Frobisher with explosions. A week following our arrival, Mr. Carter took us to the construction site where giant bulldozers and machines valued at a quarter of a million dollars scratched and tore at the frozen grit. The machines could move no more than four inches off the top of the permafrost at a time. The land was frozen so solidly that progress was limited to the speed with which the sunlight thawed the ground and the bulldozer clawed as fast as nature’s own slow process would allow.
The loosened grit and rock was taken to a crusher; a white-hot flame seared and dried the gravel at three hundred degrees Centigrade with the scream of a jet engine. The coarse gravel was used in the runway’s base course. The finer grit was mixed with asphalt from Trinidad and used in asphaltic concrete on the new tarmac.
The asphalt was carried in huge drums from the tropical Caribbean island almost half a world away, on the bleak northern landscape, during the summer sealift period. A gang of six brawny men, tanned by Arctic winds, cut open the drums with giant shears, clawed the metal edges apart and hammered the curved metal sheet flat. A crane hoisted the shining black tar and lowered it into a tremendous cauldron where it fused with the gravel laid down in the last Ice Age. The mixture was carried direct to the runway, and dumped, rolled and watered by mammoth road-laying machines in a nonstop shuttle.
The work was six weeks behind schedule and the time had to be made up during the brief summer. An atmosphere of surging energy hung over the work site. While tarmac was laid down, drillers scrambled over the adjacent hillsides, boring tea rows of holes in the toughest granite in the world. The hillsides were to be blown up to make the airport approaches safe by reducing the angle of slope to one inch in seven. Drills of tungsten carbide steel bit thirty feet an hour into rock, Forcite was packed in immediately because the holes had a tendency to close if left for any length of time and the men were in a hurry.
We followed Mr. Carter across the hillside as he loped along the uneven ground at an astonishing speed. We toiled up a steep hill, where the powder monkey was scurrying round, tying up charges and laying bright yellow fuse wires from bore hole to bore hole.
He was an insignificant looking man, but he had changed the face of Canada’s wilderness, blowing up more mountains than any other man living. He followed radar site construction gangs right across the wide North. His friends called him the Arctic Fox but they meant no malice. The name referred to his quiet shyness. He was small, straight backed, and wore low strung trousers at his lean hips, a faded check shirt and peaked cap to shield his mild blue eyes in the brilliant Summer sun. His hair was tufted, thick and white round the edge of his cap and his voice was low.
Like many Arctic workers, he was a bachelor and he said “I don’t live anywhere special right now. I haven’t got a home,” Loneliness and the lack of a family life was the penalty many men, such as he, paid for the strange freedom they found in the North.
We stepped over the yellow detonation wire as we returned to the runway. Rosemary was bestrung with cameras and angled for a good shot of the hill. I hoped the noise would be loud enough for my tape recorder to pick it up. The foreman hustled us to the shelter of a truck, where the Arctic Fox tested wires on a battered meter slung about his neck.
An engineer with a two-way radio called the airport control tower and was granted permission to blow the top off the hill. We were probably half a mile from the hill, so far away that I could not understand the extensive safety precautions taken by the foreman.
The powder monkey crouched over his plunger, said in a soft husky voice: “Get ready to go,” and I watched the mountain top spout into the air. Rocks rose lazily and arched through the cloud of dust.
I moved forward with the microphone, trying to capture the sound, then the explosion thundered across the still air. Sharp edged knives of granite began to slice into the newly laid asphalt. A workman grabbed my arm and hauled me close behind the upturned truck. Someone recalled a man being struck in the throat by a flying stone. He died in less than two minutes.
The powder monkey looked pleased and murmured “That was a humdinger,” and hurried along the runway to check another batch of fuses. Drillers swarmed back over the hillside through the smoke and Mr. Carter said, “We hope to be finished by October and have the equipment taken out on the freighters during the sealift. If we don’t, it means leaving the machinery here, idle, for almost a year.”
Asked why they were behind schedule, he replied, “I wish I knew. You’d do better on the gambling tables at Monte Carlo than gambling up here. You’d stand a better chance of winning.”
We stepped aside to let a truck roar up the tarmac. It was two hundred and sixty horsepower and part of the equipment he wanted out of Frobisher by October. Mr. Carter wanted it probably for Abyssinia, where another job was waiting. If he could get the machinery there. We left him on the runway, hustling the men among the dust and dirt of construction, and Rosemary and I walked westwards to the Sylvia Grinnell River. Snow buntings fluttered close by, ravens called overhead, cawing to each other in flight. We passed a derelict airstrip built years ago. It lay east to west with the prevailing winds gusting across it. In the forsaken debris about the uneven old runway, we found tiny Arctic flora, slowly, infinitesimally reclaiming the land.
In the river valley most of the flowers were yellow. There were shrubby cinquefoil, potentilla fruticosa and a ranunculus, very similar to the small southern buttercup, looking very brave as it blossomed close to the ground near the receding ice of the frozen river. Shore ice lay in a tumbled layer of giant cubes that splintered into shining slivers of crystal with the gentle prodding of a shoe’s toe cap. Gurgling water could be heard making its secret way to the sea, tumbling along invisible channels beneath the ice.
In the wake of the melting ice on the river bank, clumps of Arctic willow lay as low as moss, distorted, clinging close to the ground out of the wind’s reach, its purple pollened flowers gay against the grey and black rocks.
We walked a mile upstream along the bank from which the American explorer Charles Hall named the waters for the sake of the daughter of a man who backed his expedition. Hall had set out to search for the lost Franklin explorers and discovered Frobisher Strait was a bay. When he reached the sprawling gravel delta upon which the town of Frobisher was later built, he was the first man to see the broad river. He later wrote that he immersed one hand in its waters and clutched the Stars and Stripes in the other. The waters seemed to babble a tune of Yankee Doodle, and he could see no reason why the river should not have an American name, and forthwith christened it the Sylvia Grinnell.
