PARADISE LODGE…MILE 71 ON THE ALGOMA CENTRAL RAILWAY
My job was to get the numbers. As har as thinking was concerned I was not expected to do much. Best to keep my
head as thick as this piece of rough sawn timber. Just being an instrument man was tough enough. Most people
would refuse to do the work. Why? Afraid of losing so much blood to carnivorous insects that tore flesh or shoved
stiletto needles and sucked blood.
MARJORIE: ON OUR DECISION TO GO TO PARADISE LDOGE, MILE 71, ACR.
“ALAN, don’t you think it’s strange that so much of your time in the mining game was centred
on the Canadian Shield.?
“Never thought too much about it really…took it for granted. I was never encouraged
to consider the big picture. ” Just do your job…get the readings.”Mining companies are secretive.
In nearly all jobs Our contractors did not want many people to know what we were doing..”
“Why is that?”
“Money had a lot to do with the secrecy. Big blocks of land were staked as mining claims but
never big enough. “Suppose we claimed the wrong place and some other son of a bitch
knew about our work and snapped up the good claims.” If too much was said about our work, then other mining promoters would
flood the area with claims. So we were never told much about our clients.
Most clients were honest even if secretive. At the same time there have always been
A lot of shady
characters boosting worthless mining stock…sucking in the greedy people of this world.
When I was a 17 year old high school student, I did a job in the Chibougamau region of Northern Quebec that taught me much
about the shady side of mining exploration. My role was minor on the job…basically to
help portage and row a rowboat through a series of lakes “to check out a vein of
chalcopyrite for a mining company”. It took us two days to get there and two days get back
to Chibougamau. Maybe a week. No communication with anyone. Secret. While we
were rowing in the shallows and then we had a small outboard fising engine for the deep water.. ..”
“Rowing? Why didn’t you use a canoe?”
“No canoes were available or so we were told. So we rowed this ungainly towboat
and carried it across portages. Carrying a rowboat over rocks, tree roots, and through
tag alder swamps was not pleasant.”
“Why did they send you, Alan? Were you special?”
“Just for brute labour. The real important person was Dr. Wilson,an elderly geologist. .
A really nice man who had been asked to give his opinion on a recently discovered
vein of chalcopyrite. Asked to do so by a small mine company.”
(I have a picture of Dr. Wilson in our motor boat but have not found it yet)
“What did you find?”
“Oh, we found lots of chunks of Chalcopyrite. The mine promoters had spread lots of
the stuff around. They brought the lumps into the site from somewhere else. The term
for that is “seeding the site’.
They had blasted the vein all to hell. Just a smoke screen. The vein was a worthless
vein of pyrite. The blasting was designed to indicate seriousness. To fool investors.
Dr. Wilson did not spend much
time on the site. however. He knew what was happening. “This place has been seeded.
The chunks of chalcopyrite have been brought in…the vein is pyrite…no copper.
We are heading back right away.”
He was angry. He had been duped for he was an honest man. The owners of the claims
were crooks. There was no potential mine. But they could make big money by noting
in an advertisement in the Northern Miner that “at team with a noted geologist has been sent in to check
out the value of our claim, etc.etc.… whatever.” The mining stock they issued would
go up in value. Speculaitors wanting to get rich quick bought the stock…ordinary people
often who knew nothing about mining. Pharmacists like your grandfather from Lindsay.
Remember all the mining stock you inherited. Worthless. The shady promoters would Fools would buy it. The stock would go up in value.
When the promotor thought it was close to a peak, the promoter would sell and make a bundle. Let’s say the stock sold
at 20 cents a share…and then shot up to $2 a share. One hell of a profit possible.
“What happened when you got back to Chibougamau?”
CHALCOPYRITE…COPPER ORE…GOOD
“Dr. WILSON told the truth. “All we could find was a vein of worthless pyrite”
And the stock would plummet. Investors would lose their shirts The promoters
would walk away with the money.”
“Isn’t that illegal?”
“Reckon so.”
“What did you do?”
“I brought out a big chunk of the pyrite vein. it’s around the garden somewhere.
Can’t remember where. Bottom line, I did nothing.. What was I supposed to do?
My job was pure and simple. I rowed the boat in and I rowed the boat out.”
“Couldn’t you call the police?”
“Never occurred to me. One thing I did learn though.:
“What was that?”
“Not to buy mining stock. I never knew what was good and what was bad.
Many of our customers preferred us to know as little as possible about
what we were doing.”
“Do you mean you spent nine years of your life checking mining claims but
never knew whether they were worth anything?”
“That’s about right. I was a simple cog in the machine. Bottom of the
pyramid. Not expected to think much. “Just get the data, Alan, nothing
more. We will do the interpretation.”
THE BIG PICTURE AS I SEE IT.
Lately, I have been thinking about what I did for those nine years. The big picture.
And I am bowled over. What I spent nine years (maybe ten years) doing was
linked to the origins of planet earth. Our big ball whirling around the sun is a
most unusual place. Perhaps unique in the universe. Certainly unique in our
solar system. Perhaps unique in our galaxy.
I remember asking a Grade Ten class to speculate on what life would be like
on our planet 50 years from now. One boy ’s answer remains with me.
“Sir, in 50 years we will have explored our solar system and other solar
systems. We will have concluded that we are alone in the universe.”
What makes our planet singular…unusual?
The September issue of Scientific American is titled “Humans, why we’re unlike any other
species on the planet.” At the back of that issue is an article by John Gribbin titled :Why we are
probably the only inellifent life in the galaxy…ALONE IN THE MILKY WAY.”
QUOTE FROM GRIBBIN, P.96, SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, SEPT. 2018
“ASTONOMERS HAVE FOUND thousands of planets orbiting other stars
in the Milky Way, and 100 million more strars in the galaxy presumably host planets
of their own. Given the sheer number of worlds out there, scientists find
it easy to hope that some of them might be harbouring sentient beings (like us).
After all, could Earth really be unique among so many planets.”
John Gribbin’s answer?
“It could. Optimism about the possibilities of intelligent extraterrestrial life ignores
what we know about how humans came to exist. We are here because of a
long chain of implausible coincidences — many, many things had to go right
to result in the situation in which we find ourselves. The chain is so implausible,
in fact, that there is good reason to conclude that humans most likely are the
only technological civilization in the galaxy.
(Let us leave aside the other countless galaxies in the cosmos because, as
the saying has it, ‘in an infiinte universe, anything is possible.”)
So Mr. Gribbin is saying the same thing my Grade 10 student said…i.e.
we are alone.
We are the result of a whole mess of good luck. And some of that
luck is apparent in the places I have worked. If I had to drive a
thumb tack into the centre point of my mining exploration activities
i would drive that point into Mile 71 on the Algoma Central Railway.
And the place is called Paradise Lodge. No doubt the name was
chosen to attract fishermen rather than the Paradise of which I speak.
Let me just select some of the lucky circumstances.
First and foremost is the thin crust of rock and minerals on which
Paradise Lodge rests. Very little topsoil because past centuries
of glaciation has pushed whatever topsoil once existed into depressions
or into glacial rubbish hills far to the south in Ontario. That has exposed
the vast sheet of granite and volcanic rock on which our thin
crust of earth floats. Our own tectonic plate. Our Canadian Shield.
Beneath that shield is an immensely thick envelope of molten magma…molten
rock and minerals. And deeper still is the core of the earth there is a Heavy metallic
core of nickel and iron. Hot as the hubs of hell. Huge core. A solid core…but a hot core…
that rolls around somewhat creating the magnetic field that shields us
all from the deadly cosmic rays emitted by the sun. Without this magnetic
field we would be fried. Fried? More than that. We would never have come
into existence in the first place.
As astronomers search the galaxy for other worlds like ours they have
found many that exist in a liveable zone like earth. But they have not
found as yet round balls like ours with a heavy metal core, a huge envelope
of molten magma that occasionally bursts through the thin but solid tectonic
plates that float on this molten sea. We need that magma since it carries
and replaces the minerals upon which our civilization is more and more
dependent. Like copper.
Why are these tectonic plates so thin. Why is there not a solid envelope
of rock surrounding the atmospheric envelope in which we find the Oxygen
that gives us life. Why is the Canadian Shield so thin that it has lots
of cracks? Why are these cracks important.?
Let me return to Mr. Grabbin. In ancient times…billions of years ago, our
earth collided with another planet. It was not a direct hit so most
of the earth survived. The collision was a glancing blow that sheared
of a great slice of our planet. The part sheared of was mostly the cold
crust of lighter rock like our granite. once sheared the rock hurtled into space. But that sheared portion
did not escape. The power of mother earth…i.e. the power of gravity…
prevented the sheared bit of the planet from escaping. The lump, held by
gravity, orbited our earth and rounded itself off to become our moon.
The moon was an accident of birth. The moon exerts gravitation force
that holds our earth in a stable position. Without the moon we would
be revolving. No orderly seasons. Rolling heater skelter. Chaos.
That collision carved away a great slab of the earth’s crust. What remained
was …is…a much thinner crust of moving plates of rock of which the
Canadian Shield is but one plate. When the plates collide mountains are
formed and some of the hot magma intrudes bringing up copper, gold, iron,
silver, molybdenum, and other minerals without which we cannot live.
Lucky us! That thin crust is crucial. Had the crust of the earth remained
solid and thick , we would not be here. We certainly would not be driving
around in ‘Planes, Trains and automobiles’.
Something else happened in that collision. The heavy core of the earth
remained and all the heavier parts of the pieces in the collision
were drawn together forming that nickel / iron core and the great
massive molten surrounding envelope. That core provided the magnetic
force to hold the big fragment piece in place…the moon is held in place
by the gravitational force of our earth’s core.
This sounds simple. Or maybe it sounds improbable. Maybe I am wrong
in some of what I have written. Be that as it may.
Paradise Lodge is located at Mile 71 on the Algoma Central Railway.
Geophyicists like my boss Dr. Norman Paterson were contracted by
some mining company that sent an airborne magnetometer over
Paradise Lodge and surrounding Boreal Forest. The magnetometer
gave off some weird blips in places. What were these blips?
Something weird was going on . “Send in a ground crew to
check out those anomalies. We might find veins of Chalcopyrite
intrusions in the granite. If we do, we could get very rich.
The world needs more and more copper. Without copper electric motors
cannot be made. Our civilization could collapse. Bottom line? We
could make lots of money.”
No need to tell the ground crew much about what seems to be happening
with the readings. Interpretation is a job for geophysicists. Getting
the numbers is a job for instrument men. Can secrecy be maintained?
Tell the survey crew to keep their mouths shut.
So, finally,afer 60 years I have opened my mouth. Yes, my words
are simplistic. What do you expect from an instrument man?
