Snow Jobs
Halifax, Nova Scotia was enveloped in a blizzard when I disembarked from the M/S Lundefjell in February 1969. I had rarely seen, felt, played in or hated snow until I emigrated to Canada. They do good snow in Canada Read more
Ox Head and Other Tools
All professional folk have their favorite tools. 40 years ago I was besotted with my Ox Head. Nowadays the tools of choice seems to be GPS units, IPhones and Blackberry PDAs, and blueberry-flashing ear pieces. Read more
Red Faced, Ketchup Kid
It was early summer, 1969 and I was flying with our chopper pilot to our next project site in Ontario. Below, we spotted the rest of the crew in our huge International Harvester crew cab truck (adorned with its characteristic EM birds) turning into a service station/motel/restaurant on the Trans-Canada Highway. It was time for lunch and it would be while before we would have another opportunity to eat – rest places were few along Trans-Canada Highway.
We landed in a corner of the huge parking lot. Read more
Fun: Fish, Fowel, Float, Fire
1969: summer evenings at bush camps in northern Saskatchewan and Manitoba were long and lazy. And if the helicopter or geophysical instrumentation was acting up, the Scintrex geophysics crew I was a part of played. There was little to do other than read, swim in the lake, play Monopoly, eat and fish. Fish abounded in the pristine waters. The helicopter pilot and mechanic were passionate and vocal about the joys of fishing. We ate a lot of their passion -walleye and bass, and wondered at the giant size and slashing teeth of the pikes. Read more
Rowdy Repulse, with Raw Caribou and Randiness
It was summer, 1970 and I was a member of a Scintrex crew comissioned to fly a geophysical exploration survey in the North West Territories of Arctic Canada. We were based at tiny Repulse Bay, an Inuit hamlet on the Arctic Circle, at the root of the Melville Peninsula. My first impression of Repulse Bay was repulsion. A strong smell of rotting meat blew through the just opened door of the aircraft that flew us into the village. As I soon discovered, the putrefaction wafted from the carcasses of whales, narwhales, and seals strewn on the shore. Narwhale were hunted for their long, twisted tusk, actually a tooth, and used for carving. I once watched a man hack a tooth from a narwhale carcass with an axe: the memory is sickening still. Read more
Out Stranded in the Field, With Fielding
In late 1970 I joined a European mining company prospecting in northern Ontario, leading a ground geophysical exploration crew of Quebecois men. These men rarely spoke English so I had to get by on schoolboy French. There were four or five us us: myself and an assistant geophysical operator, and two or three men who would cut lines through the bush with axes and machetes. We lived in a comfortable camp near a village on a lake and worked projects located generally no more than a couple of hours of flying time from the camp. Read more
