A Visit to the Neighbors

In late May I spent a week up visiting our nearest neighbors. Forty miles straight north of home, I could look out from my little dormitory-room window upon a scene of massive modern industry. The Gacho Kue diamond mine. The hundreds of workers there are, truly and amazingly, our closest year-round neighbors nowadays. And in the years since 2013, when construction of the mine began, I had never once visited them!  Never even considered the possibility.

The mine is a model of fly-in, fly-out mining, replete with security checks, Muster Stations, a huge processing plant, a distant row of bunkers for storage of explosives, and workers — from drillers to dishwashers — all putting in 12-hour shifts, 7 to 7, night and day, two weeks in, two weeks out.  All this activity is fed by a trio of bulk fuel tanks the capacity of which I will not try to guess. Having eyeballed them for a week out the window of my dormitory room, I would say each cylindrical tank is 80 feet tall and 200 feet in diameter. Sea cans and pallets, heavy equipment, hard hats, orange vests and two-way radios were everywhere. On a May sub-arctic evening it was all very sunny and fine, but on a windy January night at minus gazillion, the mine complex must feel like a self-contained capsule careening through the blackness of outer space.

Spring came early this year and forced us off the ice at home on May tenth. That was the earliest “get everything off the ice” date in 25 years — since 1998.  The early meltdown this year threw a wrench into the plans for some contracted wolf-den search flying, and there was a scramble to find a place to base from — a place with access to the tundra, a place to re-fuel and eat and sleep — and with a gravel landing strip. (This 6,000-foot “strip” is kind of comical for the two-seat Husky on fat tires. In serious wind I would probably have had to land across it. And when parking and taxiing, it was vital to keep tabs on the jet blast from the Boeing 737 and other large jetliners that came and went alongside us.)

After about six hours of online training, a criminal background check, and submission of some medical forms  — voila — the little Husky on bush tires and its two occupants were suddenly welcome to land and work from the mine-site, as guests of DeBeers Canada.

Given the sudden upheaval in plans I tried, for a change, to look on the bright side, and all in all that was not very hard. Everyone up there was friendly and helpful, the mine facilities are clean and painstakingly organized, and my friend the biologist and I happily got all of our work done. Did not find many wolves, but spent our days diligently looking, at the rate of about 600 miles a day.

The days went flying past, but every now and then I mused about the oddity of life in this self-contained “company town” plopped out on the tundra — so close to, and yet so unbelievably far from, home sweet home.  Unbelievably far, because up there at the neighbors’ place, while on “free time,” a person is completely cut off from the landscape beyond the limits of the mine’s hub and hubbub.  Suffice it to say that an evening stroll outdoors —  that is, just ambling out onto the tundra to have a look around — would be unthinkable up there. As in absolutely, utterly, totally out of the question. Security would have been summoned, questions would have been asked, and every vestige of our warm welcome there would have faded instantly. I understand. Honest.

Yet for many years before the mine complex was established, I often passed right by that same spot, caribou hunting or paddling or running a team of dogs, or shuttling geologists and their sample pails hither and yon in the early days of the diamond rush, circa 1993.

And before that, before the diamond rush was even a shuffle, I remember guiding a canoe group from Minnesota; we camped on Fletcher Lake in August,1991. On a sunny morning after breakfast a Cessna floatplane landed and two fellows walked up the sandy esker with a shovel. They panned and sifted a small sample, labelled it, and stowed it in a numbered cloth sack.

“Hi,” they said, “We work for DeBeers.”

“DeBeers?” I said. “As in ‘A Diamond is Forever?'”

“Yep.”

“Wow.”

Those same headwaters of the Hoarfrost River were almost in sight of my dorm-room window the other night, 32 years later.  My oh my.

Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that the tiny nameless lakes atop the kimberlite deposits  would someday be drained, and a truly awe-inspiring hole in the ground would supplant them, along with a small city of workers.  The only thing even more amazing than the holes in the ground are the massive piles of crushed rock alongside them. Those man-made mountains will be there, literally, until the next ice-age glacier arrives to grind them down.  There is nothing toxic about them — they are just big piles of crushed rock.  Flying back at the end of each day’s work, we could spot the rockpiles on the horizon from forty miles away. Not a word of exaggeration. The Pyramids of Egypt have nothing on these babies. They make those big steel fuel tanks look like thimbles.

Yes, it was good to be welcomed, and to visit the neighbors after all these years, but the mine is not the sort of place where we will ever casually wander by to sit at the kitchen table for a cup of coffee and a good long natter. So, are those neighbors, or something else?

And, of course, diamonds are not forever. In about another eight years, from what I have been told, the Gacho Kue mine will begin to do what all mines everywhere inevitably and eventually do: it will run out of the good stuff, and it will be shut down and put away. That will be another interesting process to observe, from our slight remove, if we are still around.

And in forty years, what will be up there? My children will be as old by then as I am now. I will be long gone. The diamonds that came from there, the tiny shiny stones that are the raison d’etre  of everything I could see in every direction out my dorm-room window, will be scattered far and wide around the world, maybe hung on elegant brooches clasping elegant clothes around elegant shoulders, festooned on ring and pinky fingers, or perhaps tucked away in safe-deposit boxes — if in the world of 2063 there are still such things as brick-and-mortar banks and steel safe-deposits.

I stand here tonight at home and look toward the north. No sight or sound or hint of the mine from here, but now I have a better mental picture of life up at the neighbors’ place. People strolling down the hallway to the gymnasium for a session on the treadmill. People settled in for a movie on the screen above their bed. Eating at the cafeteria, or toiling away deep down in the pit, blasting and hauling and crushing kimberlite.

Is this the future of the north? Maybe.

“There are strange things done in the midnight sun.” You got that right, Robert.