North of Arctic Circle with my Map Case

While listening to Simon Toon reminisce about his early days with modems and the internet, I thought back to the days when I would carry a map case to Norway containing alligator clips and an acoustical coupler.

Listen to “Alligator Clips and Map Cases E728” on Spreaker.

In the late 80s, I enjoyed going north of the Arctic Circle in Norway because I got to sit outside after midnight with the sun shining on my pint glass. That’s a nice memory.

Norway shares a border with Russia, though technically it is on Norway’s far-northeastern border at the Varangerfjord. I wish I had snapped photos of that landscape. That airport is 68 degrees north, which means it’s above the Arctic Circle. The airport is unique because it’s a six-hour drive–about 220-kilometer drive into the Finnmark area, where Norway borders the Murmansk Oblast near the Tri-Border Point at Treriksrøysa.

My visits to Evenes had a lot to do with where Norway’s land border meets the Barents Sea

I carried alligator clips and an acoustical coupler (a suction cup) for telephones, when headed to Evenes, Norway. My job revolved around counting things at the Harstad-Narvik Lufthavn.

North of Evenes is the Barents Sea, and that hits the Arctic Sea where boomers sail into the North Atlantic onto their patrols. Those boomers are nuclear subs with weapons that can end the world. Those boomers were part of the reason I was sent to Evenes to inventory a few thousand things.

The runway at Evenes is longer than 10,000 feet and it’s 300 feet wide. That means it is big enough to handle the largest planes in the USAF inventory.

The alligator clips in my map case helped me talk to a computer in Germany while using a standard hotel phone. Sometimes I had to cut the wires of the phone, and I’d tap in with my alligator clips, or I’d use my suction cups to call back into a German exchange that was connected to a database, that was connected to a link list, a handwritten list, that I carried in my map case.

The map case I used would have been similar to the ones that bicycle messengers would use in the 1940s around places like RAF Bovingdon.

Parts of the old airfield is still visible, such as the remnants of its control tower (above). I believe a Hertfordshire museum has details about this RAF field, including Hangar 1 where the personal B-17 of General Dwight Eisenhower was kept.

Bicycle messengers would carry details about distinguished visitor flights to the airfield from nearby met offices by staff car from Bushy Park.

Forty years after map cases were used to carry paper and teletype messages, I used mine to carry alligator clips, tape, and acoustical couplers. Today, American intelligence services and NATO subsidize a wide assortment of cell towers and encrypted relay stations in Norway. I should write more about all of these memories and share some of the snippets as part of my <a href=Topgold Audio Clips>Topgold Audio Clips.