In my last essay, titled Baby Steps, I made reference to the town of Inuvik, which is where my family moved to when we left Maple Creek, Saskatchewan. Inuvik is a small town in the western Canadian Arctic. We lived there for two years, from 1972 to 1974. Several years ago, I started work on a fiction manuscript. I worked at it until I had about 100,000 words, and then I lost the plot and shelved it. A few days ago, I opened the document for the first time in a long while and skimmed until I got to this chapter. Inuvik is the setting for this chapter, and I thought it might be interesting to publish it after “Baby Steps” since it sketches out the history of the town. The energy project described in it is a real thing. Permitting and regulatory approval have taken longer than planned—shocker—but it seems like it’s going to happen. Recent documents indicate that gas production will commence in 2025. In my original conception, the energy project was not a significant part of the plot, but it seems like it could be. The title is a working title.
Wayne Reindeer was three days younger than the town that had been his home for 63 of his 65 years. Inuvik, Place of Man, came into being on July 18, 1958; a planned community north of the Arctic Circle that would, according to Prime Minister Diefenbaker, “provide the normal facilities of a Canadian town.” Wayne read a book about that most famous of planned communities, Los Alamos, New Mexico, whose brilliant and idealistic residents had first built a terrible weapon, and then began to imagine how they could serve as a model for a modern, peaceful existence. Unless you viewed middle government bureaucracy as high art and culture, the goals for Inuvik were never so lofty—it was to take over from Aklavik as an administrative center, and bring education, modern medicine, and opportunity to the residents of the western Arctic.
Historically, the residents of the rolling, rising country on the east edge of the Mackenzie River delta, short-bristled with stunted black spruce and willow, were few. Sir Alexander Mackenzie camped in the area in 1789 during his epic trip down the river that bore his name. Decades stretched to centuries after his exploration, and the Inuvik townsite, called East Three by government surveyors in the 1950s when they were searching for a spot for their new community, rarely saw more than a lone trapper every now and then. It was a no-man’s land between Inuvialuit people to the north, who took their living from the bounty of the Beaufort Sea and the lands immediately next to it, and Gwich’in to the south, who hunted and fished from the boreal forest to the coastal plain.
A great river delta, like the Mackenzie’s, is like the broad head of a giant cobra. A forked tongue darts in and out, new channels seeking the path of least resistance, and the great body follows, the water and sediment of half a country searching for the sea. Aklavik was built in the middle of it, on a narrow point formed by a sharp curve in one of the river channels. There was no room to grow, a soupy, shifting landscape, and a constant threat of flooding. Inuvik was planned as its replacement, and the surveyors in the 1950s had a list of features they were looking for. The new site had to have ready supplies of wood, gravel, water, no flooding, and enough flat land for a large airport. For this they looked to the eastern edge of the delta, where low, rolling hills bounded the low-lying delta. East Three was the chosen spot, and construction began in 1955.
After the Prime Minister’s dedication in 1958 the community grew rapidly, as Inuvialuit, Gwich’in, and people from southern Canada moved to the new town. Wayne’s Inuvialuit parents were among them. They gave up their hunter/gatherer existence in one of the small communities perched on the edge of the Beaufort Sea and moved their young family fully into the twentieth century. They could have done it differently. Many families continued to live in the traditional way but obeyed federal education requirements and sent their children to live in one of two residence halls in Inuvik. Grollier Hall was affiliated with the Catholic diocese; Stringer Hall was Anglican. The halls provided room and board and other instruction designed to instill Euro/Canadian culture and language among First Nations students. During the day, the students left the residences and attended elementary school or high school. Wayne’s father argued for this arrangement, but his mother sensed a danger lurking and told him no. Decades later, in the aftermath of disturbing revelations of abuse in residential halls and schools across the country, including Inuvik, Wayne wondered what intuition, what experience caused his mother to reject the path that so many others followed.
Two events turbocharged Inuvik’s growth. Inuvik’s unique location made it an ideal spot for military signal intelligence, and Naval Radio Station Inuvik was established in 1961 when it was moved from Aklavik. The base changed its name to Canadian Forces Station Inuvik in 1966. Even bigger, oil and natural gas were discovered in the Beaufort Sea in the early 1970s. Major oil companies set up offices in Inuvik, and the service industry that followed them – drilling rigs, logging units, boats, trucks, barges – exploded.
Wayne graduated from Samuel Hearne Secondary School in June 1976 and would have gone to work in the oil and gas industry if not for that most dreaded enemy of all commercial enterprises, a government commission. After the discovery of hydrocarbons in the Mackenzie Delta and Beaufort Sea, the participating companies naturally turned to evaluate the next problem—how to get their product to market. The Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry, with head justice Thomas Berger, studied the issue for three years and ultimately compiled 40,000 pages of text and evidence. The commission visited 35 communities along the Mackenzie River valley to assess public reaction from aboriginal and non-aboriginal residents, and to assess the economic, social, and environmental impacts. At the end of it, their answer was not to answer, other than recommending that a pipeline should be delayed for ten years to settle unresolved land claims. Thus, the first death of the oil and gas business in the Canadian Arctic.
Wayne watched the dust settle as the service companies pulled their equipment and their people back to Alberta. He took a six-month course at a community college—heavy equipment operator—and learned on the job for the next few years. In the early 1980s, when the skyrocketing price of oil overwhelmed the pessimism instilled by the Berger commission, and the end of the ten-year moratorium started to fall inside the timelines typically associated with resource exploration and development in remote locations, the industry came roaring back, and Wayne was ready.
At age 23 he had saved enough to put a down payment on a used bulldozer, with a truck and trailer to haul it. The contracts came faster than he could fill them, and he bought a second dozer and hired two operators, both older than he was, to drive them. Wayne drummed up business and drove the truck that moved the equipment around. After four years he had a shop, and a fleet of machinery, and a staff. He named the company Aurora Transco. He married Nancy, a pretty Dene’ woman from Yellowknife, in 1984, and their first child, a boy, was born in 1985. Looking back, Wayne was embarrassed by how easily he was seduced by the frothy optimism. Even as the price of oil began a slow, but steady decline after the initial shock of the Iranian revolution and the accompanying threat of shortages, he believed, like everyone around him, that the good times would stay forever. Of course, they didn’t, as the high prices set in motion a hurricane of exploration spending, and creative minds equipped with ever better technologies proceeded to find new sources of crude oil and natural gas at record rates all over the world.
In May, 1985, the Canadian government announced it was closing CFS Inuvik. Wayne took the news fairly well. Over 250 personnel and their families ended up leaving the community, and Wayne had friends among them, but military contracts were never a significant part of his business.
At the beginning of 1986, the trade desks suddenly realized the world was awash in oil, and the price was cut in half. At the same time, the Trudeau government was replaced by the Mulroney government, which immediately began to unwind the National Energy Program and its billions of dollars of support to Arctic explorers. That was Inuvik’s second cut, and for Wayne, it was much deeper. The oil and gas business was his main source of contracts, and just like it had in the 1970s, it began to pack up its equipment and go home. It took time to wind down; the last wells in the Beaufort Sea were drilled in 1988 and 1989, but the worldwide exploration boom had done its job. The world didn’t need hydrocarbons from the Beaufort Sea. Contracts from the oil companies dwindled, and then stopped. Some of their equipment, designed and built specifically for the harsh combination of ice, salt water, darkness, and bitter cold, was simply left behind—rusting hulks like reminders of an alien civilization suddenly overcome by disease or disaster, the memory of their time fading so quickly you could not be sure that it was not all a dream.
Wayne almost wished those first successful Mackenzie Delta wells had never happened. He wasn’t opposed to the industry on ideological grounds—he viewed the economic and training opportunities as lifelines for his fellow First Nations citizens—a way they could participate in and benefit from the modern world that thrust itself into their lives a century earlier. It was the rollercoaster of excitement and promise followed by disappointment and despair that irked him.
In the three and a half decades that followed, there were times when the price of oil or world events would re-kindle the fire of Arctic exploration, but Wayne knew to dismiss them. “If it comes,” he told a friend who relayed a snippet of optimism from a national paper, “it comes.” The forces—natural, economic, environmental, political—aligned against it had always been strong, and while the technical hurdles were reduced, and the economic factors about the same, the environmental and political hurdles only seemed to increase with time. The latest setback was an indefinite extension of a 2016 moratorium on Arctic oil and gas development. Local leaders, who wanted job growth and opportunity for their constituents, were upset with the ban on activity, but could do little in the face of a federal government that often seemed to have priorities at odds with the health and prosperity of its citizens. Wayne was always ready to submit a bid at the first sign of regulatory easing, but he kept a hard focus on his other lines of business that were less, he tried to think of a word … heartbreaking.
While Wayne was quite sure he would never live to see supply boats steaming out of Tuktoyaktuk harbor to service offshore production facilities in the Beaufort Sea, he was optimistic about natural gas production from the land around Inuvik. Trillions of cubic feet of gas had been discovered near the town, and instead of using some of it to heat homes and keep businesses running, the town was forced to import diesel, propane, and liquefied natural gas (LNG) from the south over five hundred miles of rough road. “Why can’t we,” he asked, “use some of that natural gas that’s right under our feet to at least keep the lights on and the furnaces running in the towns we live in?” They had, for a while, but the Ikhil field that supplied the natural gas had depleted much earlier than anticipated, and for years was used only as a back-up supply of energy. The cost of living in the Arctic had always been high—a natural consequence of transporting goods to remote communities—and adding energy to the list of commodities making the long journey north only made things worse.
The light in Wayne’s eye was a new project proposed as a partnership between the Inuvialuit Petroleum Corporation (IPC) and a natural gas company out of Alberta. It was called the Inuvialuit Energy Security Project (IESP). A well just south of Tuktoyaktuk, the Tuk M-18, drilled in 2002 and 2003, had logged enough natural gas to power the local communities for 50 years. Instead of a pipeline, the partners planned to install facilities that would cool and liquefy the gas onsite, then transport it in trucks to the nearby communities. All of this meant potential work for Aurora Transco—road-building to the wellsite, remediation of the old drilling mud sump, a pad for the LNG facilities, a pad for production facilities, and possibly best of all, 50 years of an estimated five to eight LNG tanker trucks every 24 hours, carrying the precious fuel from the LNG facility to customers. IPC was currently working on the last regulatory authorizations required by the Canada Energy Regulator, a state of affairs sufficiently advanced that Wayne had begun to shelve his normal skepticism for belief it would actually happen. He had been working on bid proposals for months in anticipation of permits being approved and real work getting underway.
The all-weather road from Inuvik to Tuktoyaktuk opened in November 2017. It was the single biggest piece of business Aurora Transco had done since the heyday of the oil and gas work in the 1980s. It was also the infrastructure catalyst for the IESP. Without that road it could not exist. Tuktoyaktuk, the community closest to the well, was too small to support the project on its own. A week before the official opening, Wayne opened a dictionary and looked up the word road. A ceremony was planned, and as the Inuvialuit owner of one of the construction companies that built it, Wayne was expected to say a few words. He avoided the spotlight, but the road was a big deal. One hundred and thirty-two years and eight days after Donald A. Smith drove the last spike of Canada’s transcontinental railway in a wet, misty clearing at a spot called Craigellachie in the heart of the dark interior of British Columbia, Canada was connected from sea to sea to sea. The dreams of Wayne and other Arctic business and civic leaders were likely similar to those harbored by the builders, bankers, industrialists, and politicians who backed the Canadian Pacific Railway—settlement, commerce, industry, tourism—though it would only be honest to say that the prospects along that nineteenth century road were far beyond what might be expected from a lonely strip of gravel, just 140 kilometers long, winding across the barren tundra to the Beaufort Sea. An uptick in tourism, with opportunities for a few restaurants, B&Bs, and outfitters was about the best anyone was hoping for. That, and a feeling in the communities that young people might be more willing to venture out and explore opportunities in the wider world now that returning to their home was no longer so difficult. On the flip side, there was a fear that crime and drug use would increase as the pathologies of the modern world hunted new victims in places where people were vulnerable.
The first definition of ‘road’ was: a wide way leading from one place to another, especially one with a specially prepared surface which vehicles can use. Wayne snorted when he read the first definition. “That’s the goddamn truth,” he said. In more hospitable parts of the world, if you’re building a road, you can cut through a mountain or a hillside, or fill up a low spot to keep your road level and smooth. On the tundra you can only fill. Everything is frozen solid in the winter, but the top layer of soil and vegetation thaws in the summer months and the surface of the tundra becomes squishy as a waterbed. Digging of any sort can introduce warmth to the permafrost layer, potentially causing more melting and instability. The road was fill only—a trapezoid cross-section of sand and gravel sitting on a waterbed that froze hard as steel in the winter, and sloshed merrily in the summer. He would talk about those challenges in his speech.
The second definition was a series of events or a course of action that will lead to a particular outcome. The second definition made him think more carefully. It had more promise. He could talk about particular outcomes as a consequence of this new artery that connected communities. New industry, new prosperity, new educational opportunities, new meaning. He smiled. At the dedication, when he finished his speech, the clapping continued for a long time.
Aurora Transco benefited handsomely from the four years of road construction. They hauled aggregate, heavy machinery, innumerable sections of culvert, and material for eight bridges. Aurora Transco had shops in both Inuvik and Tuktoyaktuk; the company was an ideal fit for a solid chunk of $200 million dollars of government contracts. When the road was finished, Wayne worried, as he always did, where the next contracts would come from, but in this circumstance, even before the news of the IESP, he had a solid clue. The road was built across the open tundra and the conditions during construction were often appalling. During the long dark winter, they grappled with extreme cold, high winds, and white-out conditions where drifting snow and white sky left you dizzy and disoriented. In the summer the frozen ground melted, and the delicate surface of the tundra heaved and hollowed turning construction sites into lakes and trapping heavy equipment axles deep in thick mud. Eventually they got it done, of course, and the all-weather surface, better known as gravel, was a reasonable buffer between the vehicles on the road, and when it wasn’t frozen, the mushy tundra below. Still, the road traversed one of the harshest ecosystems on the face of the planet, and vehicles slid off the road in the winter and summer both, and there were flat tires and engine problems and broken axles. Heavy snow could close the highway for days, even weeks at a time. Wayne invested in a couple of combination snowplow and tow trucks during the construction phase, and much to his delight, the opening of the new road and the attendant increase in traffic continued to supply him with a steady business.
On a Wednesday morning in early December, 2023, Wayne sat behind a metal desk strewn with invoices, purchase orders, and a stained coffee cup half full of jet black coffee still hot enough to steam in the cool air of the office. He was not working on bid proposals. A window in front of him looked out over a large shop the size of an aircraft hangar—fluorescent lights hanging from a high ceiling, a four-wheel drive truck with a snowplow mounted in front, welding equipment, and a pair of men in insulated coveralls looking through a tool chest. There were battered file cabinets against the wall behind his chair, and above them a window in an outer wall that was white-frosted and crusted with ice. The world outside the window, when it was light enough to be seen, was as blurred and distorted as a reflection from a funhouse mirror. The low sun, just a slender orange crescent over the horizon, was just a few days away from it’s mid-winter hibernation, when the tilt of the earth and its orbital position conspired to limit the brightest of days to nothing more than evening twilight.
Wayne picked up his cup of coffee, sipped it, and grimaced. He scrolled through some internet news on a laptop nestled among the papers, found nothing of interest, and stared into the shop some more. The two men in coveralls, Brandon, and Marshall, were now peering into the engine bay of the snowplow truck. One of them, Brandon, looked up and saw Wayne looking out through his window. He smiled and gave a little wave; Wayne nodded a reply. He closed his eyes and drew a long breath in through his nose. He felt his rib cage expand inside the lightweight down puffer jacket that he wore. He held the breath for a second or two, then pursed his lips and pushed the air out slowly trying to make the exhale last as long as he could. His wife Nancy, who attended weekly yoga classes at the recreation center and tried, unsuccessfully so far, to get him to join her, had taught him to do that. She called it a “centering breath” and told him he should do it whenever he faced something he found difficult to do, or whenever he felt like he was not in control of the events and circumstances that surrounded him.
“Well shit,” Wayne responded. “I should be breathing like that all the time.”
Nancy rolled her eyes and assumed that her suggestion would be met with the same level of cooperation as her requests for him to actually join her in a yoga class, but the truth was that Wayne had taken the advice to heart. The world lately, he thought. Nothing but events and circumstances and I’m not in control of a damn one of them.
In more than 30 years of running his company he hated one thing in particular. He hated to fire people. When the cause of the dismissal was laziness, or incompetence, or because a person could not be trusted, he could do it without hesitation, but when it had to be done for simple economic necessity, when the projects and contracts dwindled and the survival of the business dictated that you needed two drivers instead of four, that was when Wayne hated to let someone go. He knew he was injecting uncertainty and stress into someone’s life, and he felt it as his own failure—an inability to secure what contracts there were, to imagine new ways to grow and sustain the business, or to foresee the downturns and take proactive steps to secure his future and those of the men and women who worked for him. He felt he should be better at reading the writing on the wall. The first two months of 2020 were a good example. He remembered a few of the odd headlines —“Strange Virus Making People Sick …”— but at the time he did not foresee how difficult life, and business, would be for the next two years.
In the aftermath of the pandemic it was widespread inflation that threatened the receipts of Aurora Transco. One of the steady contracts he serviced was the delivery of groceries to Tuktoyaktuk two or three times a week. In the years before the all-weather road, it was a contract that was active only in the winter months when the ice road was open. Now it was year-round, and a small but steady source of income. With his own profits squeezed, the grocery wholesaler took it as an opportunity to extract a better deal on transportation. For Wayne it was a small cut, but fuel and maintenance costs were up as well. The natural gas project was a lifeline, but still too far away. Something had to give, and Wayne, not for the first time, thought about the man who drove his grocery truck.
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