The snowmobile trip
He spent three days watching the technician calibrate sensors, solder connections, clean solar panels, and download climate data. He said almost nothing. He just watched. He watched how the technician checked readings, adjusted records, consulted manuals, and left the station working better than he'd found it. When he got home, Benjamin told his mother Siku: "I want to do that."
He was sixteen and had just found what he wanted to do with his life. Not because of a vocational speech or a career test: because he'd seen someone work with their hands in a remote place where things either work or they don't and there's no middle ground. Benjamin already knew how to fix engines — his uncle Thomas, a snowmobile mechanic, had taught him from a young age. But until that trip he didn't know there was a job that consisted of exactly that: going to remote places, fixing what breaks, and coming back.
At eighteen he moved to Iqaluit. Arctic College: two years of instrumentation and electronics. Iqaluit seemed enormous to him — eight thousand people, which says a lot about where he was from. He shared a dorm with three students. The constant noise made him tense: the dirty kitchen, conversations that went nowhere. But the structure of the technical program fit him. Concrete problems. Verifiable solutions. Things that work or don't work.







