In the Empire of Ice (8 page)

Back in the multi, Joe, Winton, and I scrounge around in the nearly empty cupboards for tea bags and cookies. Even a brief foray out into the deep cold brings on hunger. I ask Winton how many generations of Weyapuks have lived in Wales. He says it goes too far back to count. “For as long as humans have lived on the Bering Strait. Maybe 10,000 years or more.” He was brought into the world by a village midwife, as those before him were. “The women helped each other. Now they send mothers-to-be to Nome a month before the delivery date. The village doesn’t participate anymore, and the women come home with little strangers in their arms.”

There’s a scratching sound on the side of the building, and we go to the window to see if it’s a bear. In Kivalina, one of the villages now slated to be moved because of coastal erosion, a young man tried to save his pregnant wife from a polar bear. “The bear attacked her” Winton says, “and the husband got the bear to chase him and let go of his wife. He was killed by that bear. The wife and baby live still.”

Joe and Winton’s conversations go round and round as if driven by a circular wind, from talk of the old days in Wales to the new poverty of modern times to climate and weather.

Winton says that in the last years a lot of beach has eroded, at least a hundred feet since 1990. “There used to be two rows of sand dunes, and both of them got washed away,” he says. The first row of houses is now in danger. They’re built on the beach, and if big storms keep coming, the way they have been, those houses will wash away.

“Maybe a seawall will be built. I don’t know if that will help. Up the coast Shishmaref and Kivalina will soon have to move because of coastal erosion. There are more storms, worse storms, moving in more often. And now we have the warming ocean going against us. Wait until the sea level rises. We’ll all have to move.”

“The hunter follows the ice,” Winton says. “In the spring we look for a smooth, low place to chop a trail through the pressure ice. We use pick axes and shovels and chop off clumps of ice and smooth them out to make a place to drag our boats out and wait for the whales. We do this in mid-March before whaling season begins.”

This year, he tells me, the pressure ridge was out farther than normal, and since 2000 the whales have gone by much faster. “The leads in the ice used to close up, and that temporarily halted the migration. Now they are open all the time. We used to see whales for a month; now it’s down to two weeks. Same way with the walrus. They used to get up on ice floes that moved north for a whole month. Now that kind of ice lasts for only a few weeks, then it’s gone.”

Summers they hunted geese and ducks and fished for salmon at the mouths of small rivers. In late August they went north of Shishmaref to hunt caribou. “In the old days we walked up the coast. Everyone had summer camps there. The women picked greens and preserved them in seal oil. Then we waited for the ice to come in.”

Now the inland hunters from farther south tell Winton that there are lakes drying up, landslides along the rivers, and no berries. Warm winds come all the time from the west and the willows are bigger. There are no muskrats, no beavers, and ice collects on the caribou’s feet and makes it hard for them to travel. Like walking on broken glass.

“These days there is no more multi-year ice. No old ice at all,” Winton says. “That’s what we all depended on for water because all the salt had percolated out. We started losing it maybe 10 or 15 years ago. That’s how long ago things like wind and ice began to go fast.”

The Arctic is always changing. Twenty-three million years ago Alaska had the same climate as Pennsylvania today—the very same species of trees. A mass extinction of ice age animals began 15,000 years ago. Grasslands turned into bogs and grazing animals starved. Now the interglacial paradise in which we’ve been living is coming to an end as human-caused climate change escalates. While we should be headed for a new ice age as determined by Earth’s orbital cycles, the level of CO
₂
and methane emissions and the heating they are causing is overriding the natural cooling trend. A new wave of mass extinctions will surely come.

JOE AND I VISIT the new houses at the shore. They’re roomy, but none have proper insulation or hurricane-proof stabilization. People complain about heating bills. Many, like Pete and Lena Sereadlook, can’t afford a phone. A wind turbine that could generate cheap energy for the whole village stands motionless. I ask why it’s not running. No one knows. “It’s owned by a Kotzebue energy company. It hasn’t worked for a while.”

Pete and Lena live so close to the water it’s possible that the pack ice could come through their front window. Lena is feisty and tomboyish; Pete is older, frail, soft-spoken. Joe and I have come to look at the footage Pete has been shooting for 40 years, but it’s all on 8mm and his camera is broken, so there’s nothing to see.

He says he was born in a sod house in the old part of the village. “It was real good. We played outside all year round. We skated and played football with a ball made of reindeer skin. We made it ourselves. You don’t need to buy much. We had a big dogsled and seven dogs. I had my own windmill out there. It worked good, not like these new turbines. They aren’t even running. I guess they’re here for decoration! We had gas lamps and woodstoves, no toys. We used cans and rocks for toys. They work just as good. Dad made our skates from the frame of a steel bed. We tied them on over our mukluks. We didn’t believe in going to church. Whenever we heard the church bell ring, we ran away and skated out on the frozen ponds or else played Eskimo baseball. There are still two sod houses 15 miles up the beach at Sinauraq. That’s where my parents were born.”

Pete says there were lots of whales and walruses back then. “We listened for them. You could hear them in the spring when they started coming up a lead. Now what you hear is snowmobiles.”

Joe and I walk along the shoreline. There are skin boats, kayaks, and “aluminums” on racks. A yellowish hump at the shore looks like a pouting lip, but it’s only rotting ice. The bowhead whale hunters divided themselves up into family and working units headed by captains. There are four in Wales. One of them, Frank O., comes by. Young and fast talking, he grew up learning weather and ice from his father and uncle. “Now the barometer rises and falls too fast. And our seasonal storms, the ones that had winds of 30 to 50 mph, are 90 mph,” he says.

His eyes narrow as he looks across the Bering Strait. “Our polar bears’ homeland is melting,” he says. “Can you believe it? This year we’ve had only one bear visit. Usually they’re all over the place. Eight or nine of them. I don’t know what’s going to become of them, or of us,” he says, taking off his mittens and rubbing his hands. They are chapped and meaty.

“I grew up hunting every day,” he says, looking out the window. “Now we’re a lazy people because we’ve got snow machines and four-wheelers. We used to pack ice from places by the mountain for drinking water, dragging big chunks on our sleds. There are only a few dog teams now. They are getting fewer and fewer. Subsistence hunting is expensive. How can it be subsistence if it costs money? It doesn’t make any sense.

“We’ve lost our language. The white people took it away from us, but we haven’t tried to get it back. That’s why our story is the way it is now. If you don’t know the words that describe the weather, ice, and animals, then you don’t know the life. That’s why some of these kids are lost. They don’t know their way around here. They don’t even think about the things that make up my whole world.”

FRIDAY. Pull-tab night. The wind howls. A villager named Gabriel comes into the multi and unlocks a door to a tiny room I thought was a broom closet. Instantly, it turns into a small shop. A counter folds down, and behind are shelves lined with boxes of “pull-tabs,” sodas, candy, and peanuts. I have to ask what pull-tabs are. Joe says they are the most passive form of gambling imaginable. “You pull the tab like opening a can of pop. Underneath is a printed number, the amount of money you win, if you win any. That’s the amount of money you are paid. Pull-tabs cost a buck apiece. Usually there’s a blank under the tab, so it’s almost impossible to make a profit.”

Gabriel switches on a small TV hidden in the corner and puts on the sci-fi channel. The blaze of the screen turns his brown face blue. A tall teenage boy comes in clutching a wad of dollar bills. Forty dollars in all, he tells us, throwing the bills down on the counter as if on the bar in a Western movie. Instead of whiskey, Gabriel doles out 40 bucks’ worth of pull-tabs. One by one the young man, sitting alone in the glare of the TV, opens them. Five are marked one dollar; the boy gets five dollars but loses thirty-five.

Clifford sticks his head in to see if anything is happening. He wears thick glasses and Carhartt overalls. “Friday nights are pretty dead,” he says. I ask what happens on Saturdays. Muffled laughter. “There used to be storytelling, but TV wiped that out. When I have a story to tell, I put it into a carving, but my sight is going. It’s almost creamy. They’re going to put a laser on it. In Anchorage. As soon as I get the money to go,” he says.

“A lot of things are changed since we were kids,” he tells Joe. “Like language. Remember how different each village dialect sounded? Barrow dialect was musical. Shishmaref was real slow.” He says he started hunting when he was five or six. “They put me in the center of the boat. Been watching the Earth conditions since I was little. Had to. No way else to survive. In a boat you do a lot of thinking. Winds and currents are not like they used to be. They go back and forth like they can’t decide. We have a lot of erosion here, but not as bad as Shishmaref. We could sell our mountain to them. They need some ground for the village. When we were kids the ice used to shift north, then come back. Now the ice stays up there, then it blows offshore and the current collides with it. It goes over to Diomede.

“I don’t hunt for a living. I’m a custodian at the school. I help keep the kids’ morale up. Unofficial counselor. I live alone, so I’m here for the kids. Hopefully we can pass down some traditions and they can learn to watch the weather on their own.”

Snow scratches at the windows. Wind shakes them. Then the quiet evening of pull-tabs with only one player comes to an end. Gabriel closes up shop and goes home. Alone in the big community hall again, Joe wonders if they ever have traditional dances here. “Might be more exciting than pull-tabs,” he says, looking out the window. All he sees is his reflection. No outside world at all. “Did I come here just to see myself?” he asks quietly. The sky has been dark since four.

On our last night in Kingetkin, Luther Komonaseak bursts into the multi. “I really wanted to talk to you before you left,” he says breathlessly. His baseball cap bears the name Tikigaq, the Inupiat name for Point Hope, the oldest continuously inhabited village in Alaska. People have been living there for at least 14,000 years.

“Up there,” he says, meaning in Point Hope, “the people are more traditional than we are here. I don’t know why,” he begins. Sharp nosed, fast talking, and passionate about life in Wales, Luther is a 52-year-old whaling captain who says he learned whaling from Winton’s father and from Ray.

He grew up learning from everyone because his dad didn’t have a boat. He was sent to Little Diomede when he was nine. “They had rock houses and half doors. You had to crawl through a tunnel and come up through a door into a sod house. They taught me to hunt the traditional way there,” he told me.

When he came back, he started his own crew. That was 1987. The ice was frozen all the way out, and the whales were coming back, but the ice blocked them. He didn’t get his first whale until 1994. That’s the kind of patience it takes to be a hunter.

“The day I got my first whale the water was boiling with bowheads. They’d stick their heads up and look around. They know when you’re scared and won’t come close to you anymore. So you can’t have fear and provide food for your village.

“After, I had a whale feast. Three boatloads came over from Diomede. They respect me now. It took a long time. I gave a lot of my first whale away. It comes back to you in other ways. It takes three days to harvest a whale. The role of the captain is to keep track of who gets what and to be fair to everyone. A square from under the chin goes to the harpooner. A big square of the stomach goes to everyone. From the bellybutton to the front and all the way around goes to the captain. Parts of the skin from the back go to the whaling crew, and the other goes to the crew that helps tow in the whale. Each community has a different way. I’m writing it all out so it will be remembered.”

He says he always knows if people are having food problems, and he brings meat to them. “Last year I brought Faye some seal and walrus meat. Boy, she was happy. We have two elders at every council meeting. They are Faye and Pete now.

“We try to take care of our future by using the past. That’s an unknown concept to most kids these days. We communicate with the young people who are not interested in going out hunting. We try to push them in the direction of tradition, because that’s what we have here. That’s all we have.

“Wales was a radical place when white men first came. Radical in the knowledge it took to survive. Wales was like a hub city before Columbus. Stories were told here, things were bartered. The Messenger Feast originated here when a whaling ship came to Port Clarence and a runner with a message on a big pole came to the ship saying that we were having a feast and they were invited.

“My grandson and son go out with me. At first the younger one said it was too cold; now he’s hooked on hunting. He was only four when I first took him.

“I went up to Point Hope and hunted there. They still use skin boats, no outboard motors. The pressure ridges are two and a half miles out, they’re really high. Bowhead whale hunting is much better there than here because the whales go around Point Hobson, then come by Point Hope, real close. Now everyone is having problems with the ice, and a lot of changes are happening. The Barrow people say they are seeing narwhal for the first time. That means the narwhal are making it all the way across the Northwest Passage from Greenland to Alaska.” (They are normally only on the coast of Greenland and in the waters of eastern Nunavut.)