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Horseshoe Nails & Bowhead Whales
with Bill Gawor
Wednesday, November 28, 2007
After 64 years, this past summer was the first time I had the opportunity to taste mangos and avocados.
I love the former, but could do without the latter.
I had them for breakfast in a fruit salad every day for as long as the camp groceries came from the Naujat Coop in Repulse Bay.
But, due to the unpredictable weather, the food run to Repulse got delayed for days on end.
The mining camp, in turn, ran out of fresh food and the drillers took it out on the cook. So, management had no alternative but to bring in grub from Hall Beach.
Instead of all the fresh fruit that we once took for granted, we now tanked up with junk food just for something to do.
During the summer, a can of pop cost the mining company $5.
It was amazing to see the drillers coming out of the cook tent with shopping bags full of food - junk food weighing down each hand, their instant energy for a 12-hour shift.
It seemed everything revolved around the cook tent, since it was open around the clock.
If people were not eating, drinking coffee or snacking, they would be playing crib and telling stories.
I met some very, very interesting characters.
There was Beaver Bob, the Beaver pilot who paid no Canadian income tax since his place of residence was the Caribbean island of Montserrat, a semi-dormant volcano that last erupted in 1995.
Then there were others with nicknames such as Kiwi Dave the New Zealander, hunched over Mr. Bean, the six-foot-six CN Tower, Inukshuk Jacob (a former missionary to Africa who loved building Inuksuit) and the South African trio of Donie, Dirk, and Hendrik.
But the most memorable of all was little cheerful Archie, the choir boy from Hall Beach.
Five-foot-nothing, with a pony tail that reached halfway down his back.
Picture about 30 men and three women gathered in the cook tent attending the weekly Sunday evening safety meeting. This is necessary, as new people are always coming into camp and have to be made aware of the safety issues.
They also have to know such things as where the marshalling area is when the sirens go off in case of a fire or bear sighting.
So, after the camp manager gave his usual warning of not disposing of aerosol cans and batteries with the regular trash because it's incinerated and they could blow up, he asked if there were any other safety issues that needed mentioning?
Nobody said a thing, since they all wanted to get back to whatever they were doing.
Then, out of the blue, toothless Archie raises his hand, points at the camp mechanic and blurts out, "You have a major problem in that you have a dependency on alcoholic beverages!"
There was dead silence. Everybody was stunned.
Not because of what had been implied, but because this was the first that we became aware that Archie spoke English and not just Inuktitut.
Even the camp manager was flabbergasted and blurted out; "Wow! Where did that come from? Meeting's dismissed."