Windfall: The Booming Business of Global Warming Read Online Free PDF Page B

that it was a commonwealth, a protectorate. “They’re American citizens—sort of—but they can’t vote,” one said. “They don’t have minimum-wage standards,” said another. “There are a lot of people who support greater integration with the United States,” Byers concluded, “and they’re all under the assumption that we would become the next California—that we would become a state. But someone once told me that we Canadians need to pay more attention to Puerto Rico.”
    I was reminded of a Canadian radio contest some years earlier in which listeners were challenged to come up with a national slogan equivalent to “as American as apple pie.” The winning entry: “As Canadian as possible under the circumstances.” The conversation was far from the bravado of Operation Lancaster, but it was a flip side of the same coin. Canada was maneuvering to become one of the winners in a warming world, but a separate and equal goal, which I would soon see mirrored across the planet, was to avoid becoming one of the losers.
     • • • 
    OUR INSERTION ONTO Devon Island began with a frenzy of packing and map reading and sorting through food rations in the helicopter hangar. A rope ladder was soon thrown over the side of the Montreal, and we put on black life jackets and climbed down to a Zodiac raft that was pitching on six-foot seas. The Vandoos’ sergeant went first. The surprisingly graceful Bradley, all three hundred or so pounds of him, came last. We filled the front of the Zodiac with rucksacks and ration packs and weapons, and then we zipped across the ocean until the Moncton, a small warship just shorter than a hockey rink and supposedly better than the Montreal at landings, appeared out of the haze. We scaled its ladder and formed a bucket brigade to unload the gear. The Moncton was homey—its crew consisted of forty reservists—and so tight on space that the Vandoos had to set up cots in the hallways. Most of its sailors were as new to the Arctic as we were.
    I’d known Devon Island only as the site of NASA’s Mars on Earth project, in which investigators attempted to live on a rocky, frigid, arid analogue to the red planet, and its beauty surprised me when we approached the next day. It loomed large even from thirty miles out, its glaciers pouring down from desolate three-thousand-foot peaks. The fog was gone, the sun was high, and icebergs kept floating past. The water was milky, glacial. An Aurora surveillance plane appeared and made a triple pass above us, plumes of smoke trailing behind its four props.
    We sailed in from the east, and as we turned the corner into the fjord, we were surprised by a ship sneaking up from the west: the Russian-flagged, Australian-chartered, sixty-six-hundred-ton Akademik Ioffe . It was a tour boat. I recognized it from the watchman’s picture book, in which its photograph was sandwiched between images of Danish warships and surveillance aircraft. The Ioffe ’s ice pilot radioed over. “Good afternoon, Warship 708, this is the Akademik Ioffe . We are a small passenger ship, an expedition ship. We have many Canadians—myself included—on board.” His voice had a slight tremor to it. “It looks like you’ll be into Dundas Harbor before us, so we’ll be sure to stay out of your way.” The officers on the Moncton snickered and rolled their eyes, pleased at the fear they generated. “You’re damn right,” one said. “I can’t believe he called us before we called him,” said another. It was reminiscent of the confrontation with the Killer Bee, only this time with a real, albeit Canadian, foe.
    Our warship surged past the tour boat and arced a dramatic right turn into the fjord. We then slowed to a crawl. Our fifty-year-old charts couldn’t tell us how deep the harbor was, and the captain was worried that we might run aground. We took depth soundings and peered into the silty water. The charts said it was thirty feet deep. Our sonar said it was more than