BARREN LANDS An Epic Search for Diamonds
in the North American Arctic
By Kevin Krajick
Times Books -- 442pp -- $26
Years ago, while jogging along an African beach, I came across the incongruous sight of a fleet of bulldozers engaged in a huge excavation. Someone, it seemed, was building a shopping mall or some such mammoth project right on the sand. But the presence of razor wire and armed men hinted at the true purpose: diamond mining.
That veins of gems came up out of the sea was only one of many oddities of Namibia's Skeleton Coast, and the episode had pretty much faded from memory until I read Kevin Krajick's engaging Barren Lands: An Epic Search for Diamonds in the North American Arctic. Although Krajick's book about a pair of wildcatting prospectors is set mostly in Canada's Northwest Territories during the 1990s, the hostility and paranoia on display are the same as at the Namibian mine.
At the center of freelance journalist Krajick's story is Canadian prospector Chuck Fipke, a ruthless eccentric whose saving grace was his resolve. As kids, both he and his sometime partner, Stewart Blusson, were beaten up regularly by their fathers, and as adults, it showed. Even by frontier standards, they weren't quite socialized, cheating not only colleagues but also at times on their families. In short, they had the perfect personalities for the job at hand: finding diamonds in a forsaken place that was either frozen or, when thawing, infested with man-eating insects and bears. All the while, they had to try to raise capital without tipping off the competition, including snooping crews from the likes of DeBeers Consolidated Mines, which could be as fierce as the grizzlies.
Krajick's main narrative is a good one, but one of this book's keenest pleasures are its many vignettes. These involve bears, bush planes, storms, bars, swindlers, and, my gosh, even that old swashbuckler Bill Clinton. There are great tidbits, too: For example, over the centuries, some of the best diamond prospectors have been kids. They're always curious, and they frequently look at the ground, where, often enough, diamonds lie around just for the picking.
In fact, as Fipke and Blusson scour a good part of North America, testing out their geological theories, they find their first diamond--and a nice one, too--in an Arkansas tourist park where visitors pay $2 to look for gems. You can't make this stuff up, and Krajick shows himself to be a skilled reporter along the lines of John McPhee but, for my money, with a better eye for what's interesting.
Krajick sugarcoats nothing. There's hardly a likable character in the book, except perhaps the original DeBeers brothers, who appear in a historical section. The two Boers--whose name was later adopted by the well-known cartel--never regretted having sold their diamond-rich farm in 1871 for a measly 6,000 pounds. After moving to another humble farm, one of the brothers said they couldn't really think of any reason why they would want more money.
Well, money isn't everything. But that lesson never sank in with Fipke and Blusson. I won't give away the ending--other than to say that despite huge fortunes made, it isn't a happy one.
By Timothy Belknap
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Copyright 2001, by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All rights reserved.
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