Oil Below Zero

The oil-drilling rig and its surrounding shacks lay dim in the dawnlike light of Arctic high noon one day last week. Suddenly the direct rays of the sun, unseen for more than a month, spilled over the bleak horizon and splashed against the top of the 127-ft. derrick. Getting a nod of assent from the driller, Eskimo Roughneck Elijah Allen, 22, darted to the derrick ladder and scampered up the frosted rungs. As he neared the top, he turned his happy moonface into the thin yellow light and yelled a piercing greeting.

The sun's tentative heralding of distant spring was a welcome break in the routine at Grandview Hills No. 1, the northernmost oil-drilling operation in Canada's history. Only the day before, a dropped wrench, crystallized by the --42DEG cold, shattered like an icicle when it hit the derrick floor.

Richfield Oil Corp. and some associated companies are drilling, more for information than for oil, in support of surface geology that suggests the North has oil. Cost: about $500,000. The cold is not a handicap; winter, in fact, is the essential condition for northern drilling because it freezes supply trails.

Distance, on the other hand, was a major obstacle in setting up the rig. It went 570 miles by truck, 778 miles by MacKenzie River barge on its way to the well site, in northwest Canada 45 miles north of the Arctic Circle.

The Eskimos at Grandview Hills No. 1 are the first who ever worked on an oil rig. They were hired because of the difficulty of recruiting white workers, mostly married, for long term work so far north. Three were taken on last summer and flown south for training on Alberta rigs. One went back to muskrat trapping, but the other two form the nucleus of the six-man Eskimo contingent on the well.

"These are men like any other man," says Toolpusher Doug Parker. "They learn quickly and work well." The Eskimos have full acceptance in the two bunkhouses, the mess hall and recreation hut, where "Little Joe" Panuktuluk, 19, is undisputed card-trick and cribbage champ. Formerly a reindeer herder, Panuktuluk aches to go south. He speaks often of the world he has never seen: "The long highways, the buildings with rooms that go up and down, the cows and horses and the people that are too many to count."

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