Four Quarters Of Light by Brian Keenan

Author:Brian Keenan [Keenan, Brian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780385603065
Publisher: Transworld
Published: 2010-04-26T22:00:00+00:00

Going Native

My second day in the Arctic Village began after a most uncomfortable night. It had rained heavily and my two-dollar tent was obviously not made for Arctic extremes. Although I had picked the highest piece of ground it was still tundra, and tundra is synonymous with boggy conditions. The unevenness of the earth and the accumulating wetness underneath me had made my first night in the wilderness seem more like a night on the ocean. By morning my groundsheet had several puddles in it and my sleeping bag felt as if it had just been washed in from the Beaufort Sea. I was tired and soaked to the skin, and I resolved to get myself dried out before another downpour washed me out completely.

My efforts to dry my equipment revealed me as a complete greenhorn. First I dried out my tent and left the entrance flaps wide open to allow the bright morning sun to complete the task. Then I draped my saturated sleeping bag on the pile of caribou horns behind me, and changed out of my wet clothes and hung them over the dwarf alder and birch bushes around me. For the first time I noticed a few other tents pitched some thirty or forty yards from mine on much lower ground. They were well-made tents suited to the harsh conditions, but I was puzzled as to why their occupants had chosen to shun the area of high ground I was camped on.

There was no possibility of my coping with another rough night in my tent. The walls at each side had collapsed under the force of the rain. In any case, I had not sufficient metal pins to stretch the canvas enough to hold the walls taut and ensure the water kept running off instead of through the material. The waterproofing had long since vanished from the material. The tent was really a children’s back-garden plaything, and here was Grizzly Adams Keenan trying to fend off the forces of the Arctic in it. As I struggled with my predicament I noticed some people pointing at my ridiculous efforts and making whispered remarks. I thought they might be laughing at my antics, but their faces were not laughing. They displayed something between sympathy and scorn.

I remembered from my walk around the village having seen some unwanted heavy blue plastic sheeting. I assumed that the prefabricated plywood boards the cabins were constructed from had been delivered encased in this material. I asked myself why the villagers had not used it as additional waterproofing for their homes. Whatever the reason, I was happy they had no use for it. I certainly did. Also, not far from the community hall I had discovered the shell of what had been an old caravan, circa 1950. The interior fittings had been gutted and the rear wall was hanging from it, but the inside was full of polystyrene sheeting. I suspected it was left over from some building project and had been lying exposed for some considerable time.

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