Is Your Workplace as Rough as The Arctic?

Is Your Workplace as Rough as The Arctic? For most of Winter 2007, I was in Canada’s Northwest Territories, in a series of small towns about two hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle. After twelve years of freelance writing, I have either traveled for work or traveled while between jobs, and I’ve been a few places around the world — Argentina, New Zealand, Australia, Thailand, most of Europe. But the Arctic is nothing like the world that I’ve seen. It’s more like pictures of the moon.

In the daytime, the ground is a flat plane of pale white, the sky often a flat plane of slightly less-pale white. Above a certain latitude (about 69

Tags: Arctic Circle, Argentina, Australia, Canada, Europe, New Zealand, Northwest Territories, Thailand

J. Ryan Stradal is from the second-oldest town in Minnesota. His writing has appeared in Hobart, The Rumpus, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, The Nervous Breakdown, Facsimile, The Foghorn, and NFL.com, ...read more