Four Quarters of Light (25 page)

Arctic Village, where I intended to stay, was located a few hundred miles inside the Arctic Circle and was one of the traditional villages of the Gwich'in people, part of the greater Athabascan nation. I would overnight in Fairbanks, shopping for last-minute supplies, then fly to the village, which was hosting a ‘Gathering' of all Athabascan peoples and their friends. Its purpose was to celebrate tribal and ethnic identity, and also,
more pertinently, to discuss issues of human rights, the development interests of the oil industry, and the future of the Arctic refuge and the Porcupine caribou herd (named after the Porcupine River) with its annual migration of 150,000 beasts. There were also to be talks on nuclear energy, global warming and alternative energies. Between these heavyweight discussions, the programme informed me, ‘We will celebrate by singing, praying, dancing and feasting, gift giving, laughing and visiting with our families and friends.'

With my shopping completed and bags packed I headed in search of a plane and pilot to get me to the village. At the far end of Fairbanks airport, well away from the main terminal for the commercial carriers, there are several small businesses running air-taxi operations. Each of them has up to half a dozen small aircraft with a maximum carrying capacity of ten passengers. Every major airport has them, and without them there would be little point in going to Alaska. The state is the biggest in the USA with the smallest ratio of people per hundreds of square miles, making it one of the least inhabited landmasses on the globe. But there are very few places you can't get to. All you require are a map to show the pilot where you are going and where you want to be picked up, enough food to maintain you, a tent and sleeping gear, appropriate clothing and sufficient survival knowledge to make sure you make it to the predetermined pick-up spot.

It all seemed routine enough, even mundane, as the assistant at the air-taxi offices weighed my bags then asked me to get up onto the scales. Having noted these details she checked my return date and informed me quite deliberately that I must ensure I was at the pick-up point at least twenty-four hours before my plane was due; furthermore, I should not leave this point for any reason, bar life-threatening danger, until my plane touched down. The manner in which the young woman addressed these instructions to me left me just a little bit uneasy. She explained that weather reports, no matter how authoritative, can never be relied on 100 per cent. Conditions were always subject to sudden, dramatic
changes. ‘The pilot will always endeavour to get to you,' she said, ‘but there might be a few hours' or a few days' delay if you are really unlucky. But the thing to do is always stay put, keep your eyes on the skies and listen for the motor.' She must have noticed the anxiety immediately apparent on my face, for she smiled and her voice softened to a reassuring tone. ‘Don't worry, at this time of the year there are rarely any real emergency situations.' She paused for a moment, then cheekily concluded, ‘As long as you don't allow yourself to become bear bait.' I tried to return her joke, remarking that I was really more worried about mosquitoes. ‘Oh yes,' she said, her voice becoming quite serious again, ‘there's going to be lots and lots of them where you're going!' I nodded knowingly. I knew all the advice about bears and how to avoid them, but mosquitoes were a problem that refused to go away, nor could they be avoided. I checked my bags again. Almost a quarter of their bulk was taken up with various repellent sprays, antiseptic creams, sun blocks, after-sun lotions, salt tablets and water purification drops. ‘At least I came prepared,' I thought to myself, not believing a word of it.

There was only one other passenger travelling with me to Arctic Village and the pilot asked us to spread our baggage over the remaining seats of the six-seater Piper Cessna aircraft. By now I knew the reason for this and was steeling myself against the buffeting we were about to endure. ‘We don't want to be blown halfway across Canada!' the pilot joked. I smiled nervously at the woman passenger, who informed me that she had come from Canada. She asked if I was going to the Gathering and I confirmed that I was, adding that I had travelled from Ireland. She told me that I was a long way from home and that I would find the Arctic very different. ‘But,' she continued, ‘the Gwich'in are very friendly and hospitable, just like the Irish, so you might not find it so very different.'

We were about to carry on with our conversation when the pilot called out to us. He would need a co-pilot up front with him. My companion signalled with her eyes for me to go up to join him. I was too confused by the request to question it.

As I buckled myself into the co-pilot's seat the pilot handed me a set of headphones. ‘If it's blowing hard this is the only way we'll hear each other speak,' he said. I blurted out that I was not a pilot and that I knew as much about flying airplanes as earthworms did about the solar system. He was unmoved by my obvious anxiety and explained that it was better for weight distribution to have two people behind the engine and that he needed someone up front just in case anything went wrong. At this point I was about to eject myself from the cockpit before he had even started the engine. ‘It's just a safety precaution,' he added, ‘in case I become unable to operate the bird.' He looked at me and smiled. I was not reassured. He proceeded to give me a five-minute breakdown on the manual operations, and which instruments were what and how I should read them. ‘I'll go over it quickly again once we're airborne,' he concluded. His words were going into my ears but were being engulfed amid paroxysms of panic. ‘I've just got to check on a few things in the office, then we'll be off.'

As he climbed out of the cockpit I turned to the woman behind and asked, ‘Is this guy serious?' Like a good mother hen she quietly confirmed that it was merely a safety precaution and that it was a ten-million-to-one chance that he should become so ill that he would have to instruct me how to fly and land. ‘These pilots are very rigorously tested and have regular six-monthly health checks. If there was even the remotest chance that he was unfit he would be grounded until he was cleared again.' I was relieved to hear this and thought the pilot should have told me instead. In any case, I would make a hopeless co-pilot. If anything were to go wrong and I was required to fly, everyone on board might just as well sprout wings then and there. I didn't confide this to my companion.

After a few minutes the pilot returned. He told us we would have to make one stop to unload supplies, then buckled himself in and checked his instruments, ticking off items on a checklist fastened to his knee; underneath this was a map with our proposed flightpath. The pilot pointed to the village of Fort Yukon where he said we would have to deliver some food supplies.
Weather reports from the village were warning of extreme winds so we would fly at about fifteen thousand feet, under the cloud cover. If the winds are bad it is imperative to remain under the clouds or you can get blown so far off course that it can take hours to get a visual bearing and regain your flightpath.

Our pilot was from somewhere in upstate New York and had only been flying in Alaska for a few weeks. He was still unfamiliar with the landscape and needed to keep referring to his map. I didn't know which was more reassuring, the presence of the map or the young pilot's honesty about his inexperience. The lady passenger behind us said that she had made this trip lots of times, and if we kept visual contact with land she would ensure we didn't get too lost. And with that the pilot fired up the twin engines, blasted down the runway and leapt into the Alaskan airstream. Co-pilot Keenan clamped down on his back teeth and silently speculated about just what not getting ‘too lost' really meant.

Once we'd cleared Fairbanks the panorama was one of monotonous green and brown – the northern tundra; straight ahead loomed the steely-grey clouds, looking like big Brillo pads. I remembered how Jack had described the tundra during our flight to McCarthy as looking like broccoli. I was making a mental note of the broccoli/Brillo pad imagery when the pilot's squeaky voice came through the headphones. ‘It's going to get bumpy as we approach the Brooks Range. Winds blowing over the Arctic North Slope can be lethal to light aircraft. We might have to detour up a few valleys to avoid the storm that's brewing up behind those clouds.' That was all I needed to know from this rookie pilot! I nodded my head nervously, already redefining the meaning of ‘too lost' as the first blasts of wind banged into the aircraft and flung us like a stone from a slingshot up into the first wisps of cloud. ‘Sooner than expected,' crackled the pilot. I nodded again, while swearing to myself.

As the clouds began to establish an icy mist on our windows, I was wondering just when we were going to make a move to get out of them. The pilot was obviously telepathic for with a
descending leftward manoeuvre he cleared the cloud. For the next thirty minutes I watched him as he studied the ground below us, then the map a few feet from his face. I didn't know how lost we were, but it was obvious that our pilot was opening up new routes to Fort Yukon and our final destination, Arctic Village.

‘It's okay, I can see a way in,' the pilot declared. ‘We'll be a bit late but we'll make it before night.' Those last two words illustrated just how new the pilot was to Alaska. ‘What night?' I thought to myself. Night doesn't happen here at this time of the year. And then it struck me, like one of those gusts of wind that kept hammering us down lower and lower to the ground: what would he have done had we been flying through a winter night? He could not have cross-referenced from the ground and his flight map and that lady behind could not have prevented us from becoming ‘too lost'.

Before I myself became too lost in my morbid speculations, I heard the words ‘Fort Yukon' followed by ‘ten minutes to landing, maybe another fifteen minutes to unload, then we're off again'. I nodded and began removing the headphones, then felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned to face the woman, who had moved up a few seats to say to me, ‘You could get all of Ireland into the Yukon plains maybe a couple of times!'

I looked out on the landscape below. Nothing but an infinity of emptiness, the green serge of tundra as inviting as a bowl of cold, greasy soup, the murky Yukon River sullenly making its way towards the horizon before us and out of the horizon behind us.

At 2,300 miles in length, this was one of the world's great rivers. It ranked with the Amazon and the Ganges. It had spawned fabulous stories, not least from my mentor Jack London. It had been here before men could write, before they even arrived here. But to me it looked utterly desolate, coming out of nowhere and going into nowhere.

The runway at Fort Yukon was nothing more than a narrow gravel strip. I could still see nothing but emptiness. Where was the habitation? Who were the food supplies for? Then, out of nowhere, trails of dust blew up and maybe eight to ten quad
motorcycles and their riders descended on us. The young men helped unload the several boxes of foodstuffs, distributed them among the motorbikes, and then they were off again, waving and smiling. It was obvious they had come for more than the few boxes; they wanted to see if any new faces had arrived, and to pick up on any news. That we were two strangers going to the Gathering met with their approval, and they wished us well.

Forty minutes later we touched down at Arctic Village, the most northerly native settlement in the Arctic. I clambered back from my co-pilot's seat and heaved my luggage onto the stony runway. I had come prepared for the wilderness, but as the Cessna turned and disappeared I began to feel a lot less prepared than I thought I was. I had been literally dropped here, a bewildered outsider. I stood in the middle of nowhere feeling the burden of my strangeness. I had decided to come here, but my desire to participate in the Gathering had had to be approved in advance. Courtesy was paramount with these people, and my stay with the Gwich'in was to teach me anew about the meaning of courtesy and respect, and about how the life of a community built around such values can function.

An old broken-down Mazda half truck took me and my companion from the airfield to the village. I sat bundled up on the back among baggage, food cartons and sealed cardboard boxes with family names etched on them in heavy felt-tip. I was just another piece of cargo being carried into the wilderness, into the heartland of the Gwich'in. I tried to get my bearings. Here I was somewhere between 145° longitude and 68° latitude, south of the Brooks Range and east of the Romanzof mountains. I was at a mid-point several hundred miles east of the haul road and west of the demarcation line that separates Arctic Canada and Arctic Alaska. But all that did was place me in the middle of nowhere with immense wilderness surrounding me.

After some fifteen minutes, the truck trundled into the village. It was little more than a few dozen wood cabins in various states of disrepair scattered across several acres of bush. My Indian driver and his son put me down near the centre of the
encampment. I unloaded my rucksack and then some of the tribe helped unload the supplies. A few of them smiled, and some even welcomed me to their village. But there was much to be done in preparation for the Gathering and I was left to my own devices.

I had wanted to experience the wilderness, and here I was right in the heart of it. Yet I had never felt so alien in any place before. Everywhere, the tiny settlement busied itself while I stood undecided as to what to do until something inside me commanded me to move, and I walked off in search of a site to pitch my ‘boot sale' tent. Having found somewhere close to a large pile of caribou antlers, I flung my pack to the ground and began unpacking.

Inside a separate bag I kept my notebook, camera and reading material, and if Ray Bane's contention was correct, then I should be writing down this first experience of the Arctic wilderness. I looked at the books I had brought with me. Young Chris McCandless had brought books, but he had also brought imaginary friends, the same people I had admired and befriended in my youth – authors, poets and philosophers. I wrote in my notebook, ‘Why did Chris not listen when his friends told him to go home? Had Chris coveted more than he could carry psychologically and spiritually? He was only another young man who was overwhelmed by romantic imagining and who had the courage to pursue it. But the wilderness had closed in on him. Like Icarus, his fall to earth must have been the most excruciatingly terrifying ordeal. In his last moments, did the wilderness receive him benignly? Did Chris refuse to go because he was already home? Home is where you return to, not where you go to.' I re-read the last desperate query in my notebook. I knew immediately I didn't want to know the answer. I looked at the village people hovering about the building I'd learned was the community hall. A few yards from it tables were being set out, and beside them a rough field kitchen was in operation. It was time to set up my own accommodation. For better or for worse, this was my home too.