Hakon.

The houses in Longyearbyen don't rest on the ground: they stand on piles driven into soil that freezes and thaws, and when the ground moves, the house moves with it. The pipes run overhead, boxed into wooden casings. Hakon works the three rows on the hillside and two sheds down at the dock, and when a corner starts to drop he is the one they call before anyone else. The job is always the same: open up underneath, set the jack next to the pile, lift a little at a time and slowly, shim, lower the jack, measure.

He keeps a notebook with two columns per house: the spring measurement and the fall one. Twenty-odd houses, twice a year, since he was eighteen. He takes the spring one before the ground starts to loosen; the fall one, once it has done whatever it was going to do. When a neighbor asks how much their house has moved, he says the number before he says whether it's serious. In spring he starts over with the first house in the top row, the notebook open to last year's page.