No oil slicks on the carpet, please
Launching Pierre Berton's The Arctic Grail

     As photo opportunities go, the book launch for Pierre Berton’s The Arctic Grail was one of the most elaborate in publishing history. As arctic voyages go, the trip to a Beaufort Sea oil rig was somewhat less demanding than picking up Berton’s tome for an armchair expedition.
      The Arctic Grail is an account of the romantic age of arctic exploration. Nineteenth-century audiences snapped up reports of their heroes fighting bitter blinding blizzards over vast uninhabited ice fields.
      But a warm sun rose in a clear sky as two helicopters left Inuvik, 350 kilometres north of the Arctic Circle. As we flew north over the Mackenzie Delta, three-metre spruce gave way to one-metre scrub willow; soon we saw only lichens and lakes, and it seemed we were far from civilization.
      The illusion was dispelled when we reached Tuktoyaktuk – Inuvialuktun* for “looks like caribou.” Herds of oil tanks flanked a winding shoreline, dwarfing the houses, the Catholic Church, even The Bay.
      Berton closes his saga in 1909, when the motor age was just beginning. Eighty years later, prospectors are staking claims at the ends of the earth, oil companies are pumping gas from beneath the ice pack, and 20,000 horsepower icebreakers are making test runs through the Northwest Passage.
      If thirst for petroleum sparked new interest in the north, it also made Berton’s book launch possible – the author and most of his entourage were escorted from Calgary by Gulf Canada Resources Limited. When the helicopters set us down on a deck 40 nautical miles from shore, our hosts began a tour of the Molikpaq oil rig.
      Here came the day’s moment of high adventure – a crane lifted a dozen of us over the water to a tug boat. We stood on a swinging two-metre ring, clutching a rope rigging, while sparkling waves bobbed beneath us – more fun then the CNE**, and absolutely free. Gulf employees patiently followed photographers’ directions to put Berton in just the right position for the cameras.
      Several hundred blinks of the shutter later the party was reunited in the dining hall, where we toasted our exploits with Carl Jung De-alcoholized Wine – the town of Tuktoyaktuk and Gulf’s northern facilities being “dry” zones.
      Early explorers in Berton’s account were too stubborn to follow Inuit advice: “Could any proper Englishman traipse about in ragged seal fur, eating raw blubber and living in hovels made of snow?” They caught chills when their wool uniforms got sweaty, and suffered scurvy because they cooked the vitamins out of their meat.
      As guests of Gulf we had no such worries. We filed past the fresh salad bar in stocking feet (no oil slicks on the carpet, please), and our musk-ox and caribou were served well-done.

Written during a stint as reporter for the Inuvik Drum, and published in NOW, Toronto, November 17, 1988.

* The original version stated “Inuktitut”, the more general name for Inuit languages, instead of “Inuvialuktun”, the language of the Inuvialuit of Canada’s western arctic region.

** CNE = Canadian National Exhibition, known to generations of Toronto youngsters for its amusement park rides.

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A  R E V I E W   O F
The Quiet Limit of the World
A Journey to the North Pole to Investigate Global Warming
by Wayne Grady, Macfarlane Walter & Ross, 1997

 

     Big science has fallen on hard times in the 1990’s, with budgets slashed for mega-investigations like cyclotrons and manned space travel. But in the summer of 1994, 70 scientists embarked on a journey to a very distant frontier, using some of the biggest iron available -- the Canadian icebreaker Louis S. St. Laurent  and the US icebreaker Polar Sea.
For this was an ocean cruise that demanded major resources. The scientists planned a western approach to the North Pole, sailing from Alaska through the thickest part of the arctic ice pack. No ships had ever travelled this route, and a successful voyage was never assured. Together, the ships’ engines produced over 100,000 horsepower, but their progress was sometimes measured in meters per hour. The US ship burned 400 litres of fuel per minute with all engines engaged, and running out of fuel was a constant worry.
While 250 Coast Guard crew members kept the ships moving, the scientists prepared instruments and gathered data: bottling water samples for salinity and contaminant measurements; setting off seismic soundings; scraping silt off ice floes that may have originated in siberian rivers. While data collection was often low-tech, cold, dirty work, the numbers will be fed to the world’s most powerful computers, keeping them busy for years building better models of arctic fluid dynamics.
Grady does an admirable job describing the range of scientific pursuits on the voyage, why the problems are so difficult, and the huge gaps in our knowledge of the Arctic Ocean. One apparent finding, for example, is that the arctic ice pack is melting faster than anyone had thought, due to shifting currents of warm water attacking the ice from below. Grady explores the dramatic consequences this may have on our weather, but concludes that we don’t have enough knowledge to predict which scenarios will come true.
The overviews of previous arctic exploration are slightly less successful: in the opening chapters, historical digressions threaten to stall the story’s momentum, and among the inevitable omissions, some will seem unfortunate to students of the arctic.
By the end of the book, though, as the partially-crippled ships turn back from the Pole and their battle with the ice, most readers will have a great appreciation for the difficulties faced by arctic investigators throughout history, as well as the importance of this research for our future. On balance the book is well-organized and beautifully written -- we’re lucky that Grady was invited along for the ride.

Originally published in NOW, Toronto, 27 November 1997

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