Looking for Alaska (57 page)

We passed a couple of heavily loaded semis that couldn't make it up a couple of the hills on the first run and had to back down to make another attempt. I thought of Eric and his family most of the 250-plus miles to Fairbanks. Eric is not a talker; his life is spoken through his actions. Talk is cheap and easy; making dreams real takes hard, humble work. Dreams in the Midwest are acceptable, just keep them to yourself. Maybe tell your family, but don't just talk—do something about it.

Eric had been telling himself, then his family, then his friends, since he was eleven that someday he would live in Alaska. He could not have known then why Alaska drew him. No picture can truly re-create its vastness, its severity, and its profound beauty. But he stared at the maps on his wall. He rode cross-country on his bike at sixteen, gathering signatures on a petition to put more of Alaska into wilderness. He had no idea how much of Alaska was already untouched or that the term
wilderness
has significantly different meanings in Iowa and Alaska. There are basically no wild places left in Iowa, but that's about all Alaska is. He knows this now.

Eric's fantasy of living far from crowds is no longer his childhood dream. He bought his land without seeing it, though he knew it was on Chandalar Lake, which would provide clean water, the essential necessity. He walked to his land the first time and was terrified by all the signs of bear, the wolves howling at night. He learned how difficult it would be living over sixty miles off a road. Most people wouldn't even have attempted that first hike alone in winter, and if they had, many would have given up the idea right then. Not Eric. He realized what he needed to do to get supplies to their few acres on the west side of the lake. Like all pioneers, he faced tiny hassles, moderate challenges, and seemingly monstrous problems. They did not deter him; he altered his plans, adapted to the world above the Arctic Circle. Some parts of his decades-long dream were something like he'd imagined, but many were far different. The challenges only helped reveal who he and his family truly are.

His dream was not his children's; they became big or small parts of it. They followed him because children follow their parents. Eric could not have made their home without his children, without Mike, Pete, Elizabeth, and Dan, nor without his love, Vicky. Each of them has realized he or she too can do the impossible. They've built their own house, hauled their own water, learned how to gather power from the sun and the wind. They have learned they do not need Madison Avenue's product placement to have a fantastic life. Fashion, what's fashion? They've learned you can get more from the northern lights or a successful traverse of the winter trail. There are no mirrors to gaze into to worry about whether you're too thin, you have a couple zits, your hair isn't the right color. Your mirror is the expression on your family's faces; your family includes your dogs and cats. How they look at you is what matters.

What kind of car or SUV you drive means nothing, except how it gets you up the Haul Road. For the Jayne family, the Suburban made a lot more sense than the Dodge Neon, but the Neon got them where they were going. You make do with what you've got. The Swedish composting toilet may work, someday. Eric and Pete and Mike, they'll study the problem and invent a solution. Someday the Sheetrock will be up all over the house. You learn not to throw spoiled-brat fits over unfinished walls, where the pink insulation covered by the vapor-barrier plastic shows. You know what a “miracle” just one piece of four-by-eight-foot Sheetrock is out here in the Brooks Range because you've hauled out so many on your sled behind the snow machine. After following their dad and husband and helping to build his dream, I'm sure when his family members' dreams want to come to life, Eric will be there to encourage them and assist in any way he can.

We spent the night in Fairbanks, and by the next night we were back in Seward. One thing you learn in Alaska, if you're going through Anchorage, which we had to do, you stock up with stuff. We did, even eating our favorite lunch at New Sagaya.

17

On the Edge of the Land-Fast Ice

A Native friend who knew me well enough to know that I could come to a place like Barrow not wrapped in preconceptions, but to look and listen, had arranged for me to visit this northernmost community in Alaska. I was to call whaling captain Oliver Leavitt's home, and there was a good chance I would get to join him and his crew for several days on the edge of the ice. I wasn't sure what might keep me from going, but I was willing to come to Barrow anyway.

Everything in this Eskimo city of over forty-two hundred people was the northernmost something in the United States; the northernmost Mexican restaurant, the northernmost video store, the northernmost motel, the northernmost fax machine, the northernmost commercial airport. (From Seward to Barrow was over eight hundred air miles.) Here was the northernmost public school, church, sewage treatment plant, library, the northernmost search-and-rescue squad. There are lots of searches and rescues in this frozen white world.

Before these people knew of things like libraries and pizzas, before these things became parts of their lives, Barrow was a life-giving place. The people on this Arctic Ocean coast didn't care how far north it was, for them survival was all about what came by here on an annual migration. The town has always been almost a type of shrine to the bowhead whale. A magnificent, deeply respected, long-lived living thing, this whale gives its life just off the land-fast ice so that many people may live. And it has done so for well over a thousand years.

Barrow (pop. 4,276) is the community in Alaska with the coldest sustained temperatures; it has 322 days per year, average, with a low temperature of thirty-two degrees or less. In Barrow, when the sun comes back from being gone, it creeps above the horizon and steadily climbs and then sinks again, never setting from approximately May 10 to August 1. That is no sunset for eighty-four days. What do the young romantics in need of a sunset do? They do the same as all the Inupiat people who have lived in this white world of intensity; they don't live like the rest of us. They have their own beautiful language, their own customs, they don't want to do it like anyone else, and they know who they are and that's who they want to be. They accept the pizzas and the Mexican food and the videos, but they fight to keep their world the way it has been.

When the sun finally does start to set, it lights the world less and less until it stays away permanently from approximately November 18 to January 23, sixty-seven days. So Barrow has the beach in the United States with the most daylight, a beach with big, curling waves, sometimes. It is eight hundred air miles from Barrow to the North Pole. Things on top of North America have different meanings than they do where I live. Thick, thick ice is good. The sea ice breaking and forming leads—openings—is even better. Snow is beautiful. It makes for better traveling. Raw meat is good. Walrus stink flipper is gourmet eating. Seal oil to dip the aged raw caribou in is good. Every lake and river is frozen—that's good. Five below zero is warm. Fur is good; caribou hair worn inside, against the skin, is better. To sit still for days is enjoyment. To be silent, to listen, is desired. To harpoon a whale is about as good as it gets. What was desired and good here was different from anyplace else in the world I'd ever been. It was truly an original place. Would I be allowed to enter?

Barrow is the “capital city” of the North Slope Borough, by far the richest in Alaska. When they lost their lands, the Natives of the North Slope organized a government, got some big-time lawyers, fought the oil companies and the state, and set up a taxing mechanism to get a tiny piece of the oil produced off what had been their land. Their area covers one hundred thousand square miles; it is a forever-spreading expanse of tundra, all above the Arctic Circle. It is an essentially flat, treeless place but not featureless. During the summer thousands of lakes and streams offer habitat for millions of birds and water for caribou. Snow is on the ground from September to May.

The ancient annual event I hoped I would soon observe was staged on a breaking slab of ice that in winter stretched all the way to the North Pole. It was spring; the ice would be breaking, separating, and forming leads for the whales to come through. This event/adventure/mishap/celebration has been going on for at least a thousand years before the United States of America was even a thought. Though these Inupiat people have been perched here for several thousand years, today they must obey the laws of Washington, Juneau, and the International Whaling Commission.

It's April and the ocean has appeared again. Once again, the bowhead whale is coming. It is time to move to the edge of the shore-fast ice as their people have done and done forever. It is time to take the whale so the people may live. And please don't try to tell these people to be vegetarian or eat potato chips or pasta or cook like Emeril or Betty Crocker or follow some U.S. government chart. They don't want to be like you; they want to be like their great-great-great-grandfathers and -grandmothers. They don't want to be melted into the melting pot.

I called Oliver's house and got his wife, Annie Leavitt, a woman whose overflowing life force comes through loud and clear even on the phone. The way her motor runs, it is obvious she could survive if everything was shut off and closed and life went back to the way it was five hundred years ago. She told me a couple of young men, her nephews or some relatives, would pick me up soon and haul me out to the whaling camp. The crew was already there, she mentioned—and told me to bring my warmest clothes. I would get to go.

Snow machines were zipping around town on the snow and ice that was all over. There were also quite a few cars and trucks. Most visitors would have no idea what was going on out on the ice. A couple young Eskimo guys with white parkas with wolverine ruffs came toward me in a snow machine at full speed, pulling a wooden sled. They stopped; one asked me if I was Peter Jenkins. He looked about fourteen. I said I was; they told me to climb in and put my duffel and daypack into the sled. And, they said, try to get comfortable in the sled somehow.

Before I could though, the driver let snow and ice fly and wailed out to the edge of town toward the frozen ocean. We dropped off the high bank and down onto the land-fast ice. I was banged around so much my brain hurt. The ice gave not at all; the flat freight sled flexed only a tiny bit. I tried to support my weight with my arms, using them as shock absorbers. I tried to lean against my bags. I worried the banging would jar something loose in my camera or my video camera. Could the fillings in my teeth be rattling out?

Naturally these teenage Eskimo guys drove at one speed, full throttle. Why not? Being whipped across the ice was fun to them and their elastic bodies; why would it not be to me, the white man with the pale eyes and the red goatee? Oliver Leavitt, the whaling captain, wanted me out at his camp, and whaling captains are important people in their culture. These young men were going to impress him with their on-time delivery. I was one of the few non-Eskimo visitors allowed at the ice's edge, at the sacred site of the most important, annual event in all of coastal Inupiat Eskimo life. Oliver scheduled his vacation to do this. He is a leader of these people and their many businesses.

When Oliver, fifty-five, had been a boy, he had heard his elders tell of trying to get a whale to give itself to you so your village could eat, which meant survival. Not getting one could mean starvation. Oliver remembers, too, asking his elders often if they wanted coffee or tea because the only time their tent or home was warm was when someone was cooking. Today, there is no fear of literal starvation, but there is concern for the starvation of the Eskimo spirit. They don't want their culture to be lost. Being around them made me realize how little of my own culture I had any idea of, much less practiced.

It was April 26, 2000, but I wasn't out at their camp long before day and night and date and year no longer mattered. Time doesn't matter on the edge of the Arctic Ocean. What matters is the condition of the ice. The ice that had stretched all the way to the North Pole was now breaking apart, making openings for the bowhead whales to come through on their annual migration north and east to the Beaufort Sea. The whale, and to a lesser degree the many sea mammals that thrive here, are the main reason these Inupiat people have thrived. When most of Europe was still a bunch of heathen tribes, a bold whaler pointed out to me, the Inupiat people waited on the edge of the land-fast ice for the whale to come to them.

Bowhead whales are the only large whales living only in the Arctic. They have massive heads with a thick bone structure that they can use to break through a foot of ice. That is the reason they can survive in this land of ice. As creatures that must breathe oxygen to live, it enables them to survive in a world where sea ice is dominant. Their heads are about 40 percent of their total body length; they have up to twenty-eight inches of blubber to keep them alive in this chilly climate. A forty-foot-long bowhead weighs one ton per foot—that is eighty thousand pounds of whale. Today, as it always has been, when a whaling crew kills a whale, the people will use almost all of these eighty thousand pounds. Today these people live in wood-frame houses; they used to use the bones to support their sod homes. Oliver chains one of his dogs to a whale rib mounted in the ground by his house. A relatively few years ago, what the humans didn't use was eaten by their dogs, who were an important part of their cultural identity. Snow machines have taken over for the dog teams of old.

Unlike the humpback's, this whale's skin is smooth like a black skipping stone. The black skin of the whale has always been many people's favorite part. Called muktuk, it is rich in vitamin C. The men of the crew who were hosting me at their whaling camp told me it tasted like coconut. I would try muktuk, I was told, if they got a whale while I was here. The blubber was used for fuel and food. The whale's internal organs were prized. The heart was eaten; it could be the size of a big man and weigh two hundred pounds. Portions of the intestines were used as well, the kidneys and liver too. The membranes from the whale's liver were used to cover the Eskimo drum frame to give them a pulsing, relentless beat for their dancing.