Four Quarters of Light (37 page)

And I discovered another curious fact. One of the many stories that has been collected out of the ‘Eskimo' folk tradition is described as the longest story ever told. The
Epic of Quyaq
chronicles the journeys of a young man. It's a mythological tale which originally took over a month to narrate and is more than a thousand years old.

So here I was trying to absorb the culture of a people which had explained itself from the complex mythology of Quyaq's epic to the curiosity of Eskimo ice cream. This was indeed a long way from igloos on ice floes and men in bear-skin parkas peering patiently into holes in the ice waiting to catch a seal for supper. Against these ice cream and myth makers my own experience seemed a lot less colourful, maybe even mundane. It was useless to attempt to become acquainted with this alien cultural repository; I would just have to take it as I found it, and they would have to take me as they found me.

Kotzebue was our point of arrival, and, I suppose, our point of departure into the Inupiat wilderness. The village is almost directly in the path of what is known as the Bering Land Bridge, a thousand-mile-wide ridge of dry land that is thought to have existed between Asia and North America during the ice age (it is now submerged). According to the land bridge theory, humans followed migratory animals from Asia into North America thousands of years ago.

I wasn't sure what to expect an Eskimo village to be like, but whatever it was, Kotzebue was not it. What you see, after flying over millions of acres of tundra, is the end of a narrow spit that looks as if it has been levelled with a bulldozer and then constructed on a street grid laid on poured gravel. Kotzebue is estimated to be the oldest settlement in Alaska, but it is also a
modern technological miracle. You land on an airstrip, for example, that floats on a six-inch layer of Styrofoam-type material over permafrost that is 2,240 feet deep. At first glance, as the plane taxies down the runway, the place more closely resembles an industrial park or a labourers' encampment than a town.

We had to wait for our boatmen to arrive and take us by skiff across the Kotzebue Sound, then up through a mosaic of sloughs where the Noatak River breaks out into the sea. Debra could not be specific about where we were going; only the boatmen knew. When I enquired how long we might have to wait for them, she informed me again that only the boatmen knew. She did, however, know a relative of Charlie and Lena's who lived in the town so we could wait at her cabin until the boatmen collected us.

Fanny Mendenhall was in her early nineties (she wasn't sure exactly), but she looked twenty-five years younger. She lived alone in one of the prefabricated wooden cabins that the whole town seemed to consist of. Even in her old age Fanny was alert and an able conversationalist. There was another passenger who had been on our flight in Fanny's house when we arrived. I assumed she was a relative, and sat quietly in the Eskimo home as Debra, Fanny and the other visitor chatted. Fanny did not know the woman any more than she knew me, but as I was learning, strangers are never made to feel unwelcome in an Eskimo home. The inbred ethic of respect for all beings is effortlessly upheld without ceremony or affectation. The Eskimo will share their home, their food and their company as if they had known you for ever.

Fanny's living room would easily have been big enough for us all except that it, like her kitchen and hallway, was overflowing with clothes, boots, magazines, books and cardboard boxes of all shapes and sizes. I put it down to her age: it must be difficult for her to pack things away. Debra again corrected me. Order and tidiness is not a prerequisite in the Eskimo way of life. Things are valued for what can be done with them and how they assist in making life easier. Where they are left or how they are stored is of
no consequence. The Eskimo has a visual capacity far superior to a white person's, but ‘they don't see clutter!' Having spent many years treating Eskimo people during her time as a nurse in Nome, Debra knew much about their day-to-day life.

There was a cloying odour of fish hanging in the air, and the whole house felt like an oven. I said so to Debra and remarked that I might go for a walk around the town. She walked me to the door, explaining that Fanny and the other woman were talking about Fanny's home. Fanny was complaining that she had never been warm since she moved into it. She had apparently spent her young life growing up in a sod and whalebone home, part of which was underground. She always remembers being warm there. The cabin let in too many Arctic draughts and winds, even though it was centrally heated by oil. I remember the two women laughing as Fanny joked that before the Christians came the Inupiat people lived underground, where it was warm, and buried their dead on the surface, where it was cold. ‘Now the Christians have us all living up here with our long-dead ancestors,' she quipped.

While walking around the town I came across a signpost telling me I was 180 miles from Russia, 4,000 miles from Washington, 6,000 miles from Greenland and 1,500 miles from the North Pole. There were two blank spaces beside the words ‘Sunset' and ‘Sunrise'. I tried to work out if the spaces were blank because at this time of year there was neither a sunrise nor sunset worth talking about, or if it was simply another wry Eskimo joke, much like Fanny's.

I walked on, smiling, through the block sections of unpaved roads, past the Quaker church established in 1897. I couldn't imagine who had brought the Quakers here over a hundred years ago, but I could imagine how bleak and desolate it must have been. Many of the cabins along these roads seemed to rise out from a midden of over-wintering debris. Dog sleds lay on the roof alongside racks of caribou antlers. The ground was piled with driftwood; ribcages of seal or perhaps walrus lay yellowing amid barrels, snow machines' outboard motors, and mountains of
netting and oil drums, and every household had a long wooden rack for drying fish. Occasionally the remains of such fish hung black and shrivelled like melted rubber tyre, unrecognizable as fish.

I walked past a huge wooden structure uplifted on spars with a sign that read ‘Alaska Commercial Company'. I climbed the ramp to the entrance and went inside. It was a supermarket chock-a-block with everything you would expect to be in a supermarket and lots and lots of all the necessary items that living in this extreme place required: Gore-Tex clothing, rubber boots, engine parts, fishing tackle of monstrous proportions, hand-held harpoons and harpoon guns, shotguns, rifles and ammunition to suit, knives of every description – the list could go on. Looking at all this, I wondered just how far these people had come from the Eskimo hunter who'd fished with tackle made of whale baleen, bone, bear claw and sharpened ivory, and who'd used braided sinew instead of nylon-coated lines of incredible strength.

As I walked out of the shop and down the ramp two old women approached me wearing fur-lined parkas and heavy baggy trousers tied into traditional Eskimo boots. Sled mittens hung round their necks and dangled at their waist. Their faces were buried in the huge cowl of their parkas and were wrinkled and lined to such an incredible degree that they looked like images in a daguerreotype photo. They pressed some money into my hands and asked me to go and buy some ‘soda pop' for them. I laughed and told them to go and buy it for themselves, but they were insistent, and I did as I was bid. When I returned with the cans of soft drink, they shuffled off in gratitude and delight. I don't know why these women didn't want to go into the store, but something about them informed me that no matter what modernism had brought to these people, they still inhabited their own very different world.

I still had time to call into the Museum of the Arctic. I caught the end of a slide show illustrating the changing seasons in this corner of the Arctic. I was trying to imagine this world when the screen faded to black and a single seal-oil lamp lit the place. Out
of that soft dark emerged images of the bowhead whale, walrus and seal. Dall sheep, moose, caribou and musk ox appeared and disappeared like ghost creatures, and behind them the Inupiat drums beat and dancers arose. But this dancing was so different from the raw, shuffling, bestial energy of the Gwich'in and their caribou dance. These dances are almost Oriental or Hindu. The story is told through the movement of hand-held fans trimmed with fur and feathers. The gestures, creating accentuated features, unfold the tale. The dancer's body moving to the rhythm of a drumbeat adds to the fascination.

On the way out, I studied some old black and white prints of the Eskimo people who had inhabited this land long before I was born. Their enigmatic Asiatic faces told of hardship and endurance that few other humans on the planet could have survived, and as they looked out across endless windswept whiteness you sensed that they could see something more than the blasted whiteness. Out in the street again I thought about the two old women who had stopped me and come and gone in an instant with their bottles of soda pop. They could have walked out of any of the old photos I had been looking at. But just because I had seen them and spoken with them didn't make them real. The Inupiat other world had already invaded my consciousness without my knowing. Was this a preparation for what was to come, or was it a warning? These thoughts were rolling round in the back of my head as I headed back to Fanny Mendenhall's cabin.

Debra was with the two boatmen, who were already packing our gear onto their truck to run it down to the beach. They said nothing as we drove the short distance to where an aluminium skiff with a powerful outboard motor lay on the boulder-and-rock shoreline of the Kotzebue Sound. I wondered if Debra had any more ideas about where we would be going. No. It had been many years since her last visit to Charlie's fish camp and she would never be able to find it again. In any case, although families return to the same camp year after year for generations to stock up on fish, wild berries, duck, seal and caribou, sometimes natural disaster forces them to move. However, unlike the rest of their
people, Charlie and Lena chose to live at their fish camp all year round. These fish camps are in such remote locations that people work them only in the summer, when the salmon are running. In the depths of an Arctic winter they are impossible to get to.

Debra questioned the boatmen, who were relatives of Charlie's. They confirmed that he was still at the same place, though the route to reach him was different from the last time she had visited. ‘Seasons are all changing and it's changing the river course too. Charlie thinks he's gonna stay at the fish camp for ever. Charlie's old man now, will have to move into town soon.' As he finished speaking and loading the last of our bags, and some supplies for Charlie, the boatman looked at me. ‘You best put something warm on. It' gonna get cold out on the sound until we get across.' It was said matter-of-factly, and he and his friend began to shove the boat into the water. I looked out at the murky stretch of ocean that was already throwing up wind-tossed whites. The boat suddenly seemed very small with its load; with the addition of the four of us it would look pathetic. I know nothing about boats, and I never learned to swim, so what the hell was I doing heading out into the Chukchi Sea in a tiny tin boat that sat so low in the water? The sea was already lapping at my fingertips as I clung to the sides before we had even moved off.

As the small boat pushed out into the choppy waters of the Kotzebue Sound, I noticed how carefully the boatmen had loaded us and our cargo of supplies and belongings. The larger of the two men sat up front with some of the heavier baggage behind him; I squatted in the middle with the light bags behind me; Debra and the other boatman took up the rear as the outboard roared us out across the waters. I quickly learned the reason for all this meticulous storage as the boat bucked in the choppy ocean and slapped back down into the troughs between waves. It was cold and intimidating way out in the middle of the sound. The sea was murky and ugly, as if ten million tons of earth had been stirred up. It was tiresomely slow, too, perhaps because you had nothing to look at but the soupy ocean and the waves banging against the hull. ‘If it was wintertime we would be crossing with a dog team,'
Debra volunteered. I looked out on the expanse of heaving water and found it hard to imagine it frozen solid. Nor could I really imagine a cold so intense that it could freeze an ocean. I had seen images of ice-breakers moving through ice-bound seas on TV, but sitting in this tiny skip with the cold numbing me and the waves wanting to tumble us all into its seething emptiness I was finding it difficult to believe what I knew to be fact.

There seemed no end to the tedium of the uncomfortable journey. Apart from Debra's one statement, no-one spoke. The man in front of me sat in silence and never took his eyes off the water; the erratic rise and fall of the boat had no impact on his stillness. I tried to imitate his impervious demeanour, but the icy sea was only inches from me and we were miles from anywhere. I looked behind me at Debra and the helmsman, but she had turned her back to me to take the brunt of the wind. The man at the motor had fastened his parka up to the bridge of his nose and his face had disappeared into the dark folds of his fur-lined hood. A human voice would have been comforting, or some kind gesture to let me know where these speechless, faceless men were taking me, or even how much longer we would have to endure the dreadful journey. But everyone had turned into themselves. I pulled the collar of my coat about my ears. All my questions about what I was doing, where I was going and why fell into the sea or were blown away by the wind.

It seemed to take for ever to reach the far side, but eventually a perceptible lessening in the bouncing of the boat woke me from my oblivion. Now we were moving easily up a wide river slough. The banks on either side were steep and I stood to appreciate the lie of the land. Rolling away on both sides was endless tundra as far as the eye could see. Not a tree grew to break up the remoteness of the blasted heath. I sat down again. The high banks provided a shelter and I was beginning to warm up again, but still no-one spoke; only the outboard droned softly as we glided over the dark, still waters and penetrated deeper into the wild. For about another three quarters of an hour we followed the river course and through all that time I watched anxiously as cloud
upon cloud of mosquitoes gathered into dizzying spiral columns and hovered like sentinels, each no more than a few yards from the next and some of them reaching fifteen to twenty feet in height. There had to be millions of them in each of these seething black pillars. I knew that my supply of repellents would be useless against this infernal plague. I tried to convince myself that perhaps they would remain near the river and that Charlie and Lena's place would be sensibly placed far back from it.