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National Geographic : 1990 Aug
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(Continuedfrom page 23) icebreakers. The ship was working out of Resolute in Canada's Arctic islands, escorting supply vessels to and from weather stations and other sites along the Northwest Passage. Captain Toomey invited me to the bridge of Pierre Radisson during the run across Bar row Strait. As we crunched our way effort lessly through the closely packed ice floes, he told me a bit about escort duty. "Of course, the heavier the ice," he said, "the closer you have to keep the ships behind you." He swept a hand in front of us. "This kind of stuff is nothing, but when you get into dense, thick ice that's several years old and you hit a big piece, it gets violent-feels like you've run aground at high speed. "Then you have to look behind as well as ahead, because the real danger's that the ship astern won't be able to stop in time and will ram you." He smiled grimly. "In this busi ness you look over your shoulder a lot." welcomes the presence of ice breakers. I talked one day with an old friend, George Porter, an esteemed Inuit leader of the community of Gjoa Haven on King William Island in the central part of the passage. The village takes its name from Amundsen's sloop, which anchored there from 1903 to 1905. George Porter's grandfather was a Yankee whaling captain who wintered many times at Herschel Island, and his father was both a fur trader and an Arctic seaman. I told George of my experience aboard PierreRadisson, and his face turned grave. "You know, John," he said, "for Inuit people the land and the water are the same thing-here the sea is frozen over most of the year. So to us, driving a ship through the ice is like driving a bulldozer across a field with the blade down. "A few years ago," he added, "a group of hunters from Arctic Bay to the north of here were out on the ice miles from home hunting seals. Without knowing they were there, a Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker cut a lane between them and the village. They were stranded for several days until the ice closed up again. If it hadn't, those men could have died." What many native peoples fear most along the Northwest Passage today is the growing Traditions can't compete with modern tempta tions in the heart of a child. Boys with a boombox play it cool at Inuvik's airport, while Victoria Island schoolgirls (above) eat snack food for lunch. Outside influences that have transformed Arctic life in little more than a generation put an added burden on young parents like Albert and Vera Ehaloak (top). level of pollution. To them an oil spill such as the one caused by Exxon Valdez is not just an environmental disaster but a threat to life itself. Although oil has brought increased income and other material benefits, some like Luke Koonook consider the cost to be danger ously high. A respected Eskimo leader in his village of Point Hope, Alaska, near the western entrance of the Northwest Passage, Luke is captain of an eight-man whaling crew that hunts bowhead whales each spring, when the great creatures come north to feed in the east ern Beaufort Sea. Point Hope has 19 such crews, and they Northwest Passage
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