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The building stood on stilts to insulate it from the penetrating cold of the tundra, and on most days we played, pool, chess, drank coffee, smoked, and, in general, socialized. All of us felt safe from the elements in here behind a thick tempered glass window that spanned the entire width and height of the utility room’s southern wall. The window was enclosed in a wooden frame that made me think that I was looking at a room-size wall painting. And it gave all of us a panoramic view of the pristine ever-changing Arctic world outside. In less than a day the painting could change from one of calm sunny bliss to a howling blinding snow blizzard, and back that night to a sky full of the brightest stars I had ever seen. I walked outside that evening, the temp was moderate, and the stars and glimmering green curtain aura Borealis gave me more than enough light clearly saw a solid, frozen flat white ice dotted with small jagged ice burgs stretching
During the winter when the temperature was -30°F or lower I stayed inside most of the time. Unless there was a dangerous white weasel or polar bear getting into it with the dogs, or the dogs themselves were getting into it, but most of my outside time was spent down by the beach with a small team getting ready for an arriving NordAir DC-3 supply plane. We’d first set thirty-six smudge pots filled with used diesel oil on top of thirty-six empty fuel thirty barrels each spaced 100 feet apart down both sides of our homemade 1,800 foot dirt based runway. Then 15 minutes before the plane arrived, I’d ride shot gun in an old jeep with a gadget that looked like a miniature flame thrower, first lighting the the pots on the left side of the runway and then coming back and lighting entire the right side until thick black smoke spewed from all thirty-six pots to show the pilot the runway’s boundaries and the wind direction.
Finally, after the plane landed, we walked up the hill to the galley where I drank the best cup of hot coffee I’ve ever tasted in my life.
The world outside our double-thick windows belonged to them, and as far as we were concerned, they could have it. It wasn’t much of a world; cold and bleak, but it was stunningly beautiful and amazingly quiet. In the dark night of winter brilliant bright stars seemed to hang down almost touching the earth and when I exhaled sparkling ice crystals formed to float around me in the rarefied atmosphere like sparkling fairy dust, suspended in the calm thirty-below-zero Fahrenheit air.
On clear days, when the white fog had lifted, I would look out the large picture window in the mess hall across the flat snow-dusted tundra at Black Mountain, some twenty miles distant. Reggie the Mountie told me that the Canadian government would lease as much land as you wanted for as little as one hundred dollars for ten years, provided you made some improvements to it.
I had the grandiose idea of leasing Black Mountain for a hundred bucks and painting it red. My rationale was that it could then be used as an aid to navigation. After all, I was in the Coast Guard.
We had a lot of time on our hands to think about things like that, and we had a lot of time to look out the large double-thick windows at the changing seasons.
In the Arctic, the sun circles around the horizon, dipping below it for the total darkness of winter, then spiraling upwards until during the summer months there is no night,
The first days of total light were hard on us all. None of us could sleep, we just sat in the mess hall looking out at Black Mountain and drinking coffee. We did this for two days straight, until, exhausted, our bodies collapsed into a routine dictated by the chiming of the clock, rather than the rhythm of the sun, which refused to budge from its position dead above us.
During this time of total light, the crew became restless and tempers flared. Our closeness, and the fact that no one slept much gnawed at us, and we all looked forward to Fall when the semi-normalcy of brief days and long nights would return.
This was followed by a spectacular Christmas season when the flowing and shimmering green curtain of the aurora borealis reached down from the heavens to compliment a brilliant star studded total night.
In the evenings we closed out the brightness with makeshift black drapes to watch the movies, and it was before each shot that our twenty-six-year-old Commanding officer lectured us on the hardships of isolated duty up here above the Arctic Circle. We called him the “Old Man” because he was our C.O., even if he was just twenty-six years old. On one such night, he recounted the story of Wozlowski.
This Wozlowski seaman had gotten hold of a meat cleaver from the galley and ran around the building shouting for all hands to mutiny.
Wesolowski had to be restrained and shipped back to Boston.
I was Wesolowski’s replacement,
I thought I would go berserk.
I fought to maintain my sanity by playing chess with Johansson, ‘The Swede who never loses,’ reading all the James Bond adventure books they had in our “library,” (A.K.A a closet with shelves and books.) I particularly enjoyed Bond’s adventures in Europe, especially the one where he’s pursued around lake Geneva by Russian agents. C. S. Forester’s Hornblower series and Rudyard Kipling’s The Man Who Would be King and anything else I could get my hands on including books that helped me learn how oscilloscopes worked, how a phosphorescent coating in a cathode ray tube let me see sound. I couldn’t get enough of and all about square waves, and ohms law, and…
Here above the Arctic Circle on Baffin Island, the sun appears to circle the earth beginning getting lower in the sky each day until this year, on November 28th, it sank below the horizon for the last time and the sky flipped from evening to a star-studded bright night sky that would remain above and around us through Christmas and into early Spring.
Now, with my recently acquired FCC ham radio license I was talking on the site’s single-sideband radio to our contact in Manhattan about the boxes of Christmas toys and gifts donated by generous New Yorkers for the Eskimos who’d be here at the site’s upcoming, annual Christmas party.
During fall, winter, and most of spring the local Inuit Eskimos, with help from their dogs and handcrafted wooden sleds, roamed across the ice and snow-covered ocean in small individual family units chopping holes in the ice to fish and hunt seals while always on the lookout for other game like polar bears, white ermines, fox and rabbit that they could harvest for their meat and fur. Each family went to its traditional hunting and fishing grounds and in most cases, they didn’t see the rest of their tribe and extended family until they met and camped every Christmas outside our building at Cape Christian.
The Christmas party was an annual tradition hosted by the Coast Guard every year since the site was built, and the voice from New York told me that they planned to ship the gifts up to us in two weeks, along with a replacement for our departing cook, who had completely cracked-up after his first six months of isolated duty. The boxes and new cook would first be flown to Montreal, transferred to a Nord Air DC-3, and then be flown up to us after a brief refueling stop at Cape Dyer, a DEW Line RADAR site right on the Arctic Circle about 300 miles south of us.
On December 17th we got the expected radio call from the Nord Air DC-3 right before it departed Cape Dyer telling us they’d be landing here in two hours, plus or minus fifteen minutes at around 3 PM.
I put on my parka and gloves walked outside, no wind and a perfect minus twenty-five degrees F, and looked up through the pristine air at the full moon suspended low above the horizon surrounded by stars and galaxies’ that covered the entire night sky and I turned around and let it all sink in for a few seconds. Then, I looked down at the “runway,” a strip of earth that had been cleared off by our tractor so that just a few signs of snow and ice peaked through the grave and brown earth mixed with gravel.
Like all our vehicles and power tools, this tractor was pampered and maintained so we could confidently rely on them at times like this when a plane was now in the air and on its way here expecting to maintain the highest standards.
I felt bad for him, even though I kept my distance from him … Cooky was in bad mental shape, blabbering incoherently about his “beautiful,” quote-unquote wife, and not making much sense.