You get a sanitized, false impression of the oil and gas business if the only people you talk to are buttoned-down CEOs and apple-cheeked PR smoothies.

Nope, the pros who really know their onions are the bitumen-stained exploration aces and the ice-breaker drilling bosses who’ve swashbuckled their way across the frozen Beaufort Sea.

Alberta’s large community of oilpatch consultants is loaded with experts who got that way by freezing their extremities running seismic through wolverine country, or off the North Atlantic coast.

Consider a busy consulting geophysicist named Ken Thrasher, who’d be the last guy to call himself a swashbuckler.

Now in his mid-50s, Thrasher grew up as a science fair-type kid, so preoccupied by rocket theory and alpha particles that he pursued and earned an MA in nuclear physics from Queen’s.

But after job interviews with Bristol Aerospace and the Defence Research Board led nowhere, the energy business beckoned. So Thrasher brought his family to Calgary.

Thus innocently began a science geek’s on-the-job oilpatch training. It included a deep-water baptism from hell, which helped turn a bookish city boy into a skilled seismologist as well as a confirmed and lifelong landlubber.

A few years after the Thrashers moved West, the man of the house signed on with a French company called Acquitaine, which owned permits off Canada’s northeast coast, near the inhospitable Davis Straits.

Thrasher’s first assignment was to help shoot marine seismic, which meant boarding a 160-ft. sealer ice-breaker in Cartwright, Labrador.

“I still remember sailing out through the peninsulas. The ocean looked like glass,” Thrasher said.

Once out at sea, the inlander became aware of those l-o-o-o-n-g rolling swells. He asked the captain: “Does it always roll like this?” but didn’t wait to catch the answer.

“I ran to the rail and just woofed my cookies. Seasickness is like the worst flu you can imagine. And it never goes away,” he grimaced.

No, but it does get worse. As the vessel plodded north, vicious storms whooshed in from every flank, sending the ice-breaker up one side of 80-ft. swells, then back down the other, with sea water crashing up and over the shuddering bow. At the time, Thrasher didn’t particularly care. He’d already made peace with his maker.

“After three days of this, I hadn’t been able to eat a thing,” he muttered. “I honestly thought I was gonna die.

“But it was like the beginning of self-awareness,” he said. “I realized, if I didn’t eat or didn’t drink, I’d become dehydrated, seriously ill. I also realized nobody on that boat gave a rip.”

So he crawled on all fours to the galley, found a withered apple and literally forced it down his throat.

But the fun had only just begun.

Water pipes below decks froze and cracked. Leaking water shorted out wiring below decks. Fire broke out in the hold.

Somehow, crew members were able to douse the flames, but their efforts couldn’t prevent a major leak from springing in the hull.

“I remember thinking: ‘This can’t be happening to me,’ ” Thrasher moaned.

By the time the ice-breaker limped to within sight of the coast, it had developed a 40-degree list.

During 14 days at sea, the rookie seismologist lost 18 pounds. He silently swore that he’d never walk up another ship’s gangplank.

Destiny had other plans, however.

Like most oilpatch pros, Thrasher moved from company to company and always seemed to find himself being dragged, kicking and screaming, back to another bloody boat.

On his final voyage, he hung on for a soul-numbing 35 days, until he grabbed a chance to flee when the ship put in to Greenland for refuelling.

Thoroughly fed up with the loneliness, Thrasher decided to pay his own airfare home. But when he inquired about a flight out, he was cheerily informed that local helicopter crews were on strike, with no end in sight.

“That’s the hardest thing you face: Knowing you have no choice but to get back on that boat.”

Happily, such formative ordeals weren’t wasted on a bright kid who spent his youth mixing rocket fuel. Quick on the uptake, Thrasher absorbed what he had to know and today makes a comfortable living, sharing his geophysical expertise with clients.

He learned something else, too. The nearest he ever hopes to get to another ocean-going vessel is the rubber ducky in his bathtub.