Last week I was in Isachsen, a remote settlement high in the Arctic. It's so far north that anyone who lives there would be well within their rights to call the Inuit of Greenland a bunch of southern poofs.
Except no one lives there. It was created in 1948 as a US cold war "weather station", a place where "meteorologists" could keep their eye on any unpleasantness coming over the pole from the Soviet bloc. But then, one day 29 years ago, the scientists just upped sticks and left.
Today it is easily the most godforsaken place on earth. Already listed as having the worst weather in Canada, the motley collection of buildings stands alone and deserted. Doors bang forlornly in the wind. Vast tundra buggies -- caravans on wheels taken from monster trucks -- stand in snow up to the midriff. And scattered around are the vehicles we saw in Ice Station Zebra, a movie that was made here.
Inside, newspapers from the Seventies are left open, indicating precisely what day the men left. Manuals and charts remain pinned to the walls. The larder is stacked with food, all of which was "best before Gorbachev". Spooky is the word for it. But bleak would do as well, because it's all coated in a foot-thick veneer of snow. You walk into the dining room and everything, the tables, the chairs, the cutlery and cookers, is discernible only from its outline in the untouched smooth white blanket.Sadly, however, the station's runway was not as the scientists had left it. Wind and time had taken their toll on the surface. And the potholes that had resulted had become clamping points for the sheet of industrial-strength weather that this place has endured over the years. Get out of the wind, in May, and it'll be about minus 17.
Plainly I needed to get out of this place, but unless that runway could be cleared I wasn't going anywhere.
In one of the sheds I found a selection of diggers and pickup trucks from the 1970s, which like the chairs and the beds were entombed in what appeared to be an impregnable fortress of snow and ice. You would have bet your eyes and your liver that none could ever be started.
But happily, because I'm a lucky sort of soul, I happened to be travelling with an Icelandic mechanic called Halli. And Halli wasn't so sure. So, armed only with a tin of start gas and the news that the keys were still in the ignition, he set about a sorry-looking Komatsu WA180 while I trudged off to look for Ernest Borgnine's frozen corpse.
Fifteen minutes later I could scarcely believe my ears, because what I was hearing, 400 miles from anything that could even laughably be called a road, on a lifeless island a spit from the North Pole, was the sound of a diesel engine.
Now Halli was not the sharpest knife in the cutlery drawer. I can't see that he'd ever be invited on In Our Time. I feel sure that if you asked him to define human thought from a left-bank perspective he'd be a bit stuck. In short, you probably wouldn't have him round for dinner.
And yet he has been blessed with a gift. Halli can mend stuff. He can get your iPod to work when it's minus 25. He can weld up a fuel tank using nothing but a lightning conductor and three car batteries. You can lie him in the snow and get him to fix the air locker on a leaking differential and he'll find it no more difficult than turning on a light switch.
I saw those iced-up diggers and thought "not a chance". He saw them and saw only an opportunity.
And what worries me here is that he's part of a dying breed. When the chain comes off my son's bicycle he can no more put it on again than he could perform a heart transplant on a wasp. What's the point? Such skills mean he'll either wind up in Kwik-Fit or working as an engineer for £2.50 a year.But the fact of the matter is this. Melvyn Bragg could not start a Komatsu digger that had sat in an ice coffin for 29 years. And Halli the Icelander could. So who's the daddy now?
I read last week that children must be taught in schools how to be black. And that if this isn't possible they must be made to go on school sharing exercises to other educational establishments, where everyone is a Muslim. That's all well and good, but wouldn't it be better if the teachers showed them how to mend a bicycle and how to refit the belt on a front-loading washing machine.
I've just realised that my 12-year-old daughter cannot wire a plug. So how's she going to get by if she ever finds herself at a remote Arctic weather station with a blocked runway and she doesn't have an all purpose Halli-tool with her? She'll be up a gum tree.
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Audi S3 Accelerating Soundby JoaoPauloCars2,640 views
Is this your car? Nice ride man
TheAudiGuy96 8 months ago
@TheAudiGuy96 thanks..no no it isnt mine it is for sale
avtomobili001 8 months ago