BEWARE OF ARCTIC MOSQUITOES
Jillian Page, copy editor
The summer of ’69 was all about firsts for me, thanks to my first summer job.
There was my first glimpse of the midnight sun during my first trip in an airplane, en route to what was then called Frobisher Bay, now Iqaluit. There was my first meeting with my Inuk stepmother and my subsequent exposure to Inuit culture along with a sweet summer romance.
And there was lots of work: I was a general labourer with the Northern Canadian Power Commission, even though I was a few months below the legal work age. My dad worked there and he got me in. Salary: $1.75 an hour, better than the minimum wage of $1.25.
NCPC ran the plant providing electricity for the town, and the diesel-powered generators were almost deafening. So I was happy, at first, that I was loaned out to a surveyor as a rod person. He was surveying the land for a hotel and apartment complex that had to be constructed before the Queen’s tour of the Arctic the following summer.
I soon learned that mosquitoes are very large and plentiful in the seemingly barren Arctic, and I gave a lot of blood in the name of that project.
Back in the plant, my chores included cleaning cylinders in the generators, helping a welder reinforce various joints throughout the plant and helping to lay a concrete base for a new generator. I often worked side by side with cheerful Inuit youth, who loved to sing songs like Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da and Proud Mary on the job.
At sealift time, I helped out in the evenings by stacking boxes of booze at the liquor distribution centre for the Baffin Islands.
It was a rewarding summer for me in many ways, and I would return to work there the following summer.