Herb Nodes Is The Service Sector's Patriarch In The Dawson Creek Area

By Mike Byfield

[Figure 1] If all goes well, Herb Nodes will keep the bulk of his oilfield construction crews and 100 machines busy through this winter. "Our business is off by close to 40 per cent from the peak two years ago, and we're still not sure what the field activity levels will be later this year," says the founder and president of H.F. Nodes Construction Ltd., based in the Dawson Creek area of northeastern British Columbia.

With drilling and development activity slowing down somewhat in the Montney resource play, Nodes realizes the local service sector will inevitably experience layoffs. Still, he detests them. "A good worker develops a genuine commitment to the job. He'll go the extra mile to do what has to be done every day, and that's how you create great teams," says the native northerner. "If you lay that fellow off, he may come back to work later, but his attitude is never quite the same. A trust has been broken."

Ask any local rig hand or catskinner who's the patch patriarch of the Dawson Creek district and you'll likely be directed toward Herbert Frank Nodes. His company's core staff numbers upwards of 75, a majority of them long-time employees in an often transient industry. Besides business competence and integrity, the man has an exceptionally bright twinkle in the eye that beams good will toward all comers.

In fact, Nodes' neighbourliness saved his financial bacon in the early 1980s after a major producer committed a minor trespass. At the time, the federal National Energy Program and low commodity prices had combined to devastate the energy business in the West. "It was a brutal period for the service sector, far worse than today," the company founder recalls.

[Figure 2]

Without receiving prior permission to do so, a crew working for Canadian Hunter happened to go down a private road on land that belonged to the Nodes family. "The company landman acknowledged that a trespass had occurred," Nodes says. "I told him that no damage had been done and he should just pay me whatever compensation seemed suitable." In due course arrived a cheque for $250, a less-than-generous settlement that Nodes accepted without complaint.

"Canadian Hunter's manager in Grande Prairie called to thank me," the oilfield contractor says. "He said he'd try to steer some work our way. Starting with a few site cleanups, we've done a lot of work ever since for CanHunter [and its successor companies] Burlington and ConocoPhillips. Many small contractors went broke in the early '80s and, without that break, I couldn't have made my equipment payments either."

Nodes points out that the decision to expand presents a risky yet unavoidable puzzle for service firms. Much more may be on the line than a simple greed for growth. "During boom periods, producers must put a lot of pressure on their service contractors and suppliers to expand their capacity. A service company that doesn't respond to that pressure will often risk losing its customers," the entrepreneur comments. "On the other hand, the downturn will always come, sooner or later. At that point, it's the service companies that get stuck with the surplus capacity, not the producers."

[Figure 3]

The present surplus capacity would be even worse, in his view, if manufacturers had been able to keep up with customer demand during the recent boom. "More people would have bought more equipment if they could have got their hands on it," Nodes observes. On the downside, though, he notes that American demand for petroleum and construction hardware is now weak: "In the early 1980s, the U.S. was doing better than Canada, and that drew some equipment out of this market. Today both countries are pretty much in the same boat, and the recovery of the service sector in western Canada may be slower."

Coping with risk and hardship is second nature to the families that pioneered North America's last agricultural frontier. The B.C. portion of the Peace River Valley was not opened to homesteading until 1912. Although exceptionally cold and geographically isolated, the region drew a steady stream of settlers from prairie droughts and Europe.

Among those immigrants was Joe Nodes, who fled Czechoslovakia in the late 1930s after the German Nazis invaded his homeland. The former miner and storekeeper was assigned a homestead close to Tomslake, a hamlet between the Alberta border and Pouce Coupe (whose pronunciation rhymes with 'droopy'). An earlier claimant had already abandoned the hilly, heavily treed property.

[Figure 4]

Pouce Coupe was northeastern B.C.'s first district capital, home to a bank, an RCMP post, and so on. "Back then, practically every quarter section in the Tomslake district was occupied but no one could make a living raising crops or beef," Herb Nodes says. Some families had a sawmill, others raised dairy cattle or mink. Many found jobs away from their own land. Joe Nodes, for example, laboured on the Alaska Highway when the U.S. Army began its construction in 1942. Later he specialized as a cook and baker.

To attend school, Herb Nodes walked nine miles daily. "I loved growing up here," says the 73-year-old pioneer, whose formal education stopped at Grade 8. "We lived near wonderful folks like the Gunters, who drove their horses here all the way from Saskatchewan and raised sheep." Vic Leslie, another neighbour, served as a tail gunner in a bomber over Germany during the Second World War. In that job, the odds of living beyond 10 missions were poor, but Leslie survived 40 missions. "Vic was a great shot, which many men were around here-we were so poor that even squirrel pelts had value," Nodes says.

In 1930, Northern Alberta Railways selected Dawson Creek as its end of steel. In wartime, the railhead town's growth was further spurred when it became Mile Zero on the Alaska Highway. Post-war, Imperial Oil, Mobil, Texaco, and other producers set up their first northern B.C. headquarters at Dawson Creek. When exploration subsequently shifted northward, much of the energy industry migrated to Fort St. John, now the largest population centre in northeast B.C.

[Figure 5]

Pouce Coupe gently subsided into a backwater. After the war, most families abandoned the land around Tomslake in favour of better-paying city jobs. Nodes, however, stayed in Pouce Coupe while he drove for Northern Freightways, beginning in 1956. "I hauled all over the North, to Alaska after the earthquake there, for the construction of the Dempster Highway [in the Northwest Territories], for the oil projects at Boundary Lake, and a whole lot more. I met Myrna [his wife] in 1962 while I was doing the Prince George run," the former trucker reminisces.

By 1965, however, years of sleeping poorly in truck cabs on rough gravel roads had triggered persistent ulcers. Node bought an old caterpillar tractor and began working summers on highway construction, switching to oil and gas lease roads and wellsites in the winter. With Myrna keeping the books, the company opened a construction subsidiary in Alberta and also branched into oilfield supply at Pouce Coupe.

Then lightning struck. Since 2005, the Pouce Coupe and Tomslake area has emerged as the epicentre of the Montney natural gas play. Its sandstone, siltstone, and shale sequences contain an estimated resource of 50 trillion cubic feet, much of it laced with poisonous hydrogen sulphide. Wells, gas plants, and pipelines now honeycomb the district. Active explorers include EnCana Corp., Murphy Canada, ARC Energy Trust, ConocoPhillips, Shell Canada, and others.

[Figure 6]

Boom or bust, the Nodes family probably won't change its attitude. Herb still prefers not to make fixed appointments ("Just call me when you get to town.") in case he's suddenly needed in the field, and Myrna still keeps a sharp eye on cash flow. Their son Joe is taking the family businesses into the next generation. Likewise, most of their neighbours will carry on, taking sour gas and busy field crews in their stride. The valley sometimes called the Mighty Peace has bred a people worthy of the name.