In the Empire of Ice (3 page)

T
HE
B
ERING
S
TRAIT
, A
LASKA

IF GIVEN A SINGLE YEAR
to make a circumpolar journey, it’s necessary to visit some places in midwinter, when, under a dark sky and in frigid temperatures, not much is happening. That was the circumstance under which I visited Wales, an Arctic village of 150 people, across a 50-mile-wide strait from northeastern Siberia. Winter is “story-telling time,” and I listened while the people of Wales talked about their lives.

Despite the modern conveniences of snowmobiles, telephones, computers, and an airport, the people of Wales, like villagers all the way up the Seward Peninsula, are semisubsistence hunters who live off bowhead whales, walruses, and seals. They also hunt eider ducks and geese, fish through the ice for tomcod, and go inland for caribou in the fall.

When ice age hunters and their families walked across Beringia, and later sailed the Bering Strait in their
bidarkas,
they continued their seminomadic hunting lives in what we now know as Alaska, all the way up to the north coast to present-day Barrow, Deadhorse, and Kaktovik.

Because Arctic Alaska is relatively low in latitude, their “larder” was much richer and more varied than that of Arctic Canada or Greenland. In some places, providing food for their families took less time, and as a result their ceremonial and material culture thrived. Much has been lost, though. Inuit people, indigenous to Arctic Alaska, are now a minority population here. Yet if you dig deeply enough, you find the essence of a culture is still there.

SIQIEAASRUGRUK (JANUARY)—the Month of the New Sun or the “Sun that Shines on Bearded Seals.” Snow has been falling. Light comes late and goes early—19 hours of darkness—but the white ground and white sky bring radiance to the far north. From my high perch in a ten-story-high hotel in Anchorage, the only patch of darkness is Cook Inlet, where open water slaps the shore and pancake ice has rotted into gray rounds that drift out as the tide changes.

“The Earth possessed us,” a woman from the village of Shishmaref once said. Ice shaped the Inuit mind and society, the ecological imagination, and the ethnographic landscape. Ice is womb, home, and hearse for every Arctic species. Food, shelter, clothing, spirits, shamans, masks, drum dances, watercraft, and dogsleds were elements that bound life together on the ice. To say that Inuit people and Arctic animals “adapted” to ice is to miss the point. They co-evolved with ice. Without it, humans, walruses, seals, polar bears, and whales will die. When I first began traveling in the Arctic, the sea ice was up to 14 feet thick between December and May. Now it is often no more than six inches thick in the coldest months, barely strong enough to hold a human or a polar bear.

Sea ice is dynamic, always changing. Bering Strait’s pack ice grinds and gyrates, pulling away from shore toward Little Diomede Island, flowing north along the coast toward Point Hope, then pushing south again, its stacked pressure ridges visible and audible from shore.

Pack ice is the platform from which walruses make shallow dives to scratch at sand for shellfish, the platform on which polar bears travel, hunt, and rest. Bearded seals and ringed seals haul out on its floes to catch spring sun. Pack ice is the staging ground for human hunters as well.

Seasonal sea ice is a villager’s highway, a hunter’s path in spring to the ice edge where bowhead and beluga whales, walruses, and bearded seals can be found. As the ice recedes and breaks up in what are now chaotic weather patterns as a result of warming temperatures, both the hunters and the hunted in this high Arctic ecosystem are threatened. According to one Inuit hunter, “The weather is so strange it can no longer be understood. That’s how much it has changed.”

I HAD MET MY GUIDE, Joseph Senungetuk, and his wife, Catherine, in Anchorage, where they live. I’d noticed them in the crowd at the local bookstore, and, feeling lonely on a book tour, I invited them to dinner. A native of Wales, Alaska, a tiny Inuit village on the Seward Peninsula, Joe jumped cultures early on and went to the San Francisco Art Institute. Since then, his artwork has been collected by museums. Like many Inuit people I’ve met, he’s a man between. His book
Give or Take a Century
chronicles his childhood in Wales. After reading it, I invited Joe to be my guide and interpreter on a trip to Wales during my 2007 circumpolar journey.

The night before we leave Anchorage, we visit an old friend of his, Herb Anungazuk, another Wales native and now a National Parks anthropologist who has the privilege of studying his own culture. That evening we go to his two-story house on a cul-de-sac. “I don’t want office talk—I want to talk about the old days,” Herb says. Slight of build and jittery, he is also in his 60s and happy to see his old friend Joe. We nibble chocolate cookies. “It used to be very cold in the wintertime in Wales,” he says. “We always had 25-foot drifts. Remember how hard it was getting to school, sliding down drifts from the second-story window? Now it’s windier and the storms are fiercer, with more south winds occurring in wintertime,” he says, looking out the window as if from a village house that faced the frozen sea.

“We had good ice most of the time from December until the third week of June. Now, by mid-April or May the ice goes out, and we have years when there is almost none at all. Melting ice changes the salinity of the sea, and it’s affecting the phytoplankton and fish, and that in turn affects the migrations of birds and bowhead whales, walrus and seals, and little auks and eider ducks.”

He knows an old woman from Little Diomede Island, directly across the Bering Strait from Wales, who said, “Our land is changing like an old woman changes. Things don’t work right anymore.”

Herb lowers his head, then looks at me: “We were pretty much the same people as on Little Diomede. And we were all the same people as on the Russian side. Some Little Diomeders came from Big Diomede the night before the Iron Curtain closed them off from each other. For 40 years they didn’t see or hear from their relatives. Two generations passed before they met each other again. That’s how stupid wars are.”

He fidgets, nervously twirling a cookie on the plate. Then he tells us that he’d been drafted and sent to Vietnam. “My brothers went too. They sat on the beach, but I was in the middle of things. A day doesn’t go by without my thinking of it,” he says.

His wife brings in fresh coffee as Herb continues: “There were 11 in our family. Our house is still standing in the village. It’s not very big, but it didn’t have to be, because we were outside all the time. When we were born, we were named for the people who graced the lives of others, even if they weren’t in the family. One of my boys has eight names. When a person dies, you take that name and give it to one of your own and hope he lives in a way that would please them.

“Spring in Kingetkin [the name for Wales in Inupiat, an Inuit dialect] was beautiful. There was always a northwesterly wind about five to ten knots. It played well with the migration of marine mammals. There’s a timeline for when the animals show up. The sea and the seasons have special laws, specific signs that are looked for, that tell you whether to go out hunting or not, and words for when the sea is moving into a new season.”

He says that the walruses always came in about June 10 but that now they come earlier. Walruses, he says, usually eat mollusks found on the shallow ocean bottom, but some walruses were seal eaters. “I found a headless seal once floating on the water, all its insides sucked out by a walrus. Now they predate on seals even more because their ice for diving, resting on, and for hunting is gone. The drift ice is almost gone and the pack ice goes out beyond the continental shelf where it’s too deep for them to dive for food.

“Walrus use their whiskers to rake the sandy ocean bottoms for scallops, clams, and other little shellfish. Once you try eating those clams from inside the walrus stomach, you’re hooked! It’s perfect food!”

Joe reminds Herb that their fathers grew up eating seagulls whenever there was a food shortage. Herb recalls that the best eating were the young ones with brown feathers. “Up the coast in Shishmaref, they make ‘aged’ fish,” he says. “They put the fish they catch in a sealskin ‘poke’ in a pit lined with branches to age for a few months. They do the same with walrus meat, sew it up and leave it to rot. It’s called
ussok.
It sounds bad, but once you eat it…ah…that’s
real
food.”

We look at drawings of walruses and seals, belugas and bowheads on his wall. “The names we give animals at different times of the year are very specific,” Herb says. “The walrus and the whale have multiple names. Like if one whale has a brother, or one was a yearling, or one is a bull, or a calf, or a mother with a calf. There is a name for each of them. What makes our culture special is that we have very articulate ways of describing the resources that are important to us. We knew the sea and the seasons and how the sea moved into new seasons. We knew the signs that told us when to go out hunting and whether we would die.”

JANUARY 20. Anchorage to Nome. Nome to Wales. Pointed hills, curving valleys, and the sawtooth Kigluaik Range with oxbow rivers unwinding their white coils toward the sea. Joe and I are flying in a six-passenger Bering Air plane northwest from Nome to Joe’s home village of Kingetkin, population 150. This will be his first visit in 17 years.

He looks out the tiny window nervously. Ahead is a cerulean wedge, the color of blue cheese—the almost dark sky into which we will be swallowed.

Joe recalls flying in the opposite direction in 1951 when his father decided to move the family from their subsistence hunting life in Wales to the gold rush town of Nome. “I was ten years old,” Joe says. “There was no school beyond eighth grade in Wales. My father gave up his traditional hunting life, everything he knew about subsistence living and had to pass on to us, in order to give us five kids an education. Dad thought education was the future, not subsistence hunting. I’m still not sure.”

Here and there threads of rotting ice are thrown between white-capped wind swells. The Seward Peninsula, stretching at an angle from just below the Arctic Circle, is shaped like the blade of an ax and forms the eastern core of the Pleistocene submerged continent of Beringia. In colder times the now immersed, 1,500-mile-wide land bridge linked Alaska to Siberia. Windswept barrier islands line the coast like linked arms. The beaches are treeless and gravelly, underlain by an apron of permafrost and shallow thaw ponds. The whole tundra-covered slab of continent faces the coast of northeastern Chukotka (Siberia) only 55 miles away.

Below us and off to the left of the airplane, Norton Sound and the Bering Sea are all open water. “It should be frozen,” Joe says dolefully, remembering that his family often traveled to Teller by dogsled from Wales on the frozen sea. In some bays a cuticle of shore-fast ice is being battered loose by storm waves.

IT WAS SEPTEMBER 1951 when Joe’s father called a local bush pilot to pick up the Senungetuk family and all their belongings and take them to Nome. Their tiny house in Wales brought $200. “When Dad finished paying for the bush plane, he had a thousand dollars left with which to start a completely new life for himself, his wife, and five children,” Joe tells me.

In Nome Joe and his siblings joined the other “modern outcasts” from King Island who had been forced to relocate. “We were Eskimo hicks,” he says. Life in Nome was difficult. The children, still wearing skins and mukluks, were discriminated against. Joe’s father, Willy Senungetuk, a prominent hunter at home, took the only job available to him in Nome as a janitor at the local high school.

Later, Joe’s older brother Ron, also now an artist, was sent to a residential school in Edgecumbe, where he and the others were forced to learn and speak English. “To defer to a second language is to reorder one’s mind. The internal links between topography, weather, way-finding, and spirit become lost horizons,” Joe tells me.

Out the plane window we can see the small villages at Port Clarence and Brevig Mission. King Island and St. Lawrence Island are to the south and lost in “sea smoke” and clouds. A tentlike white cloud shrouds a pointed mountain, a sign of strong winds. Wind has been one of the indicators of climate change in the Arctic: “It blows every which way and we can’t tell where it’s coming from next,” an elder shouts over the engine roar into my ear.

Around another headland, new ice has taken hold: Now the ocean is white and the land is powder blue, but the next bay is all open water stubbed with whitecaps. Open water turns the sea into a heat sink. That warmer water, in turn, heats the air, and the temperature rises, in turn, allowing for more open sea in what scientists call a positive feedback loop, which functions like a vicious circle, amplifying rather than balancing the heat.

We land in a hard crosswind. Our short snowmobile ride to the multiuse community center where we’ll sleep is all white. Joe says that nothing looks familiar, but I say that’s because we can’t see. We crouch outside the locked door of the building in a howling chaos of snow until another snowmobile roars up.

Ronnie dismounts and lets us in. She’s short and squared off, fast and fit. “You’re here about global warming?” she asks in a matter-of-fact voice. “We’ve got it. Had polar bears coming into the dump when the ice was bad. No one’s caught nothing. No whales off Gambell [St. Lawrence Island] this year. They usually get one or two. And we saw some strange lookin’ seals with long snouts and bluish skin and big eyes.” She shakes her head in dismay.

“Senungetuk, huh? I know your brother,” she says to Joe. “Welcome to Wales.”

As she heads out the door, she turns back, “Oh yeah, you can walk around, but no one is doing it now because it’s pretty much always a whiteout and in December there was a polar bear right behind here. And we’re keeping our dogs tied up because there are rabid foxes everywhere.”

The door slams, but not before a small mountain of snow has blown in. Ronnie hadn’t even been born at the time Joe and his family left this village. She steps onto her snowmobile and roars away.

Joe wanders around the rooms of the “multi” in a daze. He is tall and wide jawed, with inquiring eyes and a growing gut. A painting by his brother Ron hangs on the wall. Joe’s wife, Catherine, also an artist, has just been diagnosed with lung cancer and he’s reverberating from the shock. Coming “home” to Wales is even more poignant now.