Looking for Alaska (59 page)

Getting ready, Oliver spoke to his fellow crew members even softer than he did before. Several stood near the boat. About half the crew appeared to be in their late twenties or early thirties. Oliver's son, Billy-Jens, a tall and powerful young man, was the harpooner. There are so many Billys in Barrow, Oliver told me, that they call him by his full name. Billy stood ready.

The harpoon was in the bow of the tiny whaling boat, which looked like a rowboat. They would propel it with oars. Another harpoon, attached to 250 to 300 feet of manila rope and a bright pink rubber float, rested up against a block of ice nearby. Sometimes a whale would come so close to the edge of the ice, they could harpoon it without getting into the boat. More often than not though, the whalers spooked the whale: it saw them or heard them and dove. In fact, the sealskin from the bearded seal used as the skin of most boats but Oliver's was intended as camouflage.

Oliver had a forceful presence, was a stable leader with a rooted power. He also seemed to have some sort of psychic quality, an ability that certainly the best leaders must possess to read people and their intentions. I know I don't look anything like John Denver, who was a vocal opponent of commercial whaling in the 1980s, but I was white. I was not here to try to change what they do, just to observe. But people from the Outside have continuously and aggressively attempted to aggressively alter the Eskimo world, which had adapted in so many ways over many generations. It was not the Inupiat people who had senselessly destroyed the bowhead whale just to get the baleen (a substance found in the jaws of whales and used for corsets and hairpieces) and the blubber to make oil, it was the Yankee whalers. At one time, Oliver said, baleen, which the Eskimos didn't even use, was one of the most valuable things in the world per pound.

They had been whaling forever, and the whales always returned. They considered the whale their brother; they used the whale efficiently and had therefore been able to survive with relative security. Then after the bowheads had nearly been wiped out in other cold places, such as around Greenland and Norway, the Yankee whalers came to the Arctic. Then Russians came and forcibly claimed the land; though they never got to Barrow, they sold the whole place—which they didn't own—to the United States. Then more recently, other Outsiders who claimed to love the whale and its song, who had probably never even seen a bowhead, wrote songs about whales, established organizations, and through the manipulation of world politics, got their hunt stopped in 1977. For decades, Oliver and his people have fought for the right to do something that is so foundational to their existence as to be a matter of life and death. They are keenly intelligent and practical people; they were some of the first Alaskan Natives to realize the need for a powerful posse of today's allowed warriors—lawyers. The longer I was with the crew, the more I could understand why they could be suspicious of me every time they saw me sitting there.

Now the lead in front of us was about twenty-five feet wide at its most narrow. The current must have strengthened because the ice was moving south faster. Whales were coming up to breathe in the silvery haze of new ice, broken-off slabs of flat sea ice, and icebergs. Just the black, irregular ridges of their backs rose out of the water. When they exhaled, a silver plume rose up. Oliver clapped his hands, which is supposed to attract seals, and it worked—a small seal poked its head out of the water, its eyes large.

These Inupiats' lives have always required massive amounts of patience. They wait for hours and hours for the seals to come to their breathing holes. They cannot have much warning, there is no sound until the seals are there. There is almost no warning when the time comes to try for your whale. But you cannot lose your focus, become moody, or need to be entertained. You must look and be ready because at any moment it emerges from the water and there is your chance. One hundred years ago, if you were ready, you and your family might live. If not, you might starve to death. The ability to concentrate and be still was absolutely necessary no matter how cold, how hard the storms blew.

Oliver and his crew, all whalers, do not do what they do in order to brag, to take pictures or video, or to have their catch mounted. (Think of the house that it would take to display a whale—maybe Bill Gates's place would have a wall big enough.) We sat on the caribou skins for hours, hours that would turn into days. Oliver and Hubert found it slightly peculiar that ESPN makes such a big deal about programs that show people catching one-and-a-half-pound large-mouth bass, or even five-pound bass. That they could at any moment catch and bring to their people a hundred-thousand-pound whale has nothing to do with any kind of trophy.

Oliver told me many stories as we sat on the edge of the ice and waited for a whale to come. One time, he and fellow whaling captain Jake Adams were down south. South to them isn't south to me. They can travel almost fifteen hundred air miles south and east and still be in Alaska. They were fishing somewhere around Bristol Bay at the base of the Aleutians for king salmon. Also staying at their remote lodge were a father and a son from Minnesota. The father, in his seventies, had never before been to Alaska; the biggest fish he'd ever caught was a four-pound walleye in one of the freshwater lakes of northern Minnesota. After three days the gentleman finally caught a king salmon that weighed close to forty pounds. That night at the lodge this white-haired man, shining with pride, had a few drinks, Tanqueray on the rocks. Then he had a few more. He began to brag about his king salmon, a mighty wild fish indeed. He was getting borderline obnoxious, Oliver said; his son tried to get his dad to quiet down, kick back. But he wouldn't. Then he started to focus his arrogance on Oliver and Jake.

Jake's a restrained, sensitive, yet powerful man. The old man wanted to show somebody up, and he got in Jake's face.

“What's the biggest fish you ever caught?” he said to Jake, almost growling.

Jake didn't really want any part of a contest, but the man persisted. The Native people hold their elders in the highest reverence.

“I said, what's the biggest thing you ever had on the line, anyway?” the man from Minnesota said, punching with his words.

Jake could tell the man would not let up. So he told him: “Oh, about fifty tons.”

“Fifty what?” the white-haired man said, thinking Jake might have said fifty pounds, bigger than his king salmon.

“Dad,” the son interjected, trying to diffuse the situation, “this man is an Eskimo whaler. He said fifty tons, that's one hundred thousand pounds.”

The man got quiet and left the dining room shortly thereafter. Jake didn't rub it in, he was proud for the old man. A king salmon could feed several members of that man's family. But a bowhead whale can feed many more.

TO KNOW ICE

When a crew like Oliver's or Jake's does get a whale, there is a tradition about how the whale is divided up. First they pull the whale to the edge of the ice. Then the word goes out and many people, a hundred or more, start making their way to the place on the shore-fast ice. They will help to pull the whale out onto the ice using large ropes, a block and tackle, and much muscle. Then the butchering begins. The back third of the whale is reserved for the captain and crew. However, this meat is used for three separate celebrations—their summer festival, which includes the jubilant blanket toss; a celebration at Thanksgiving; and one at Christmas. This clearly shows how the whale reigns at the center of this thriving culture.

Two fourteen-inch “belts” are cut from the whale. One goes for a village-wide party the captain and the crew put on. The captain flies the crew's flag from his house; often, a block-long line of people are waiting to come into Oliver and Annie's small home for their taste of the whale. The meat and muktuk and blubber from the other fourteen-inch belt goes in equal shares to all of the crew for their personal use. Then the close to two-thirds of the bowhead left is divided equally among the other crews.

You don't get to be a member of a whaling crew because you want to; you can't pay to join. Basically, you have to be family and you have to be very capable. Everyone has a job; the whaling captain is absolute boss. In fact he must supply and pay for all equipment and food, cover any costs. On Oliver's crew is Hubert, who is considered one of the best hunters on the North Slope. There is Oliver's son, Billy-Jens, twenty-seven, the harpooner. There is Ambrose Oliver, twenty-seven, Oliver's nephew. He is what Oliver calls a generalist; he does whatever is needed. Johnson Booth, forty-nine, is married to Oliver's cousin. Lester Suvlu, in his early thirties, a good all-around hand, is some kind of cousin. And Leo Kaleak, in his early thirties, is also part of the crew.

Oliver's crew had other full-time jobs, of course. Hubert and Johnson worked for the North Slope Borough government as administrators of capital improvements, overseeing building projects. Billy-Jens was a carpenter's helper, a general laborer. Leo works in the oil fields. Ambrose is a trained mechanic but does mostly odd jobs. Lester works for the Barrow police department, and Oliver Leavitt handles governmental relations and is chairman of the Arctic Slope Regional Corporation. If they had to choose between their jobs and whaling—well, they just wouldn't. They have built lives that mingle the ancient with the new and do well at both. They do not seek anyone else's approval about their way of life.

There were long moments of silence on the ice, or not quite silence, but moments without human noise. The winds blew from far-off places; the new ice made a light crackling sound when it collided with the land-fast ice. The icebergs spoke softly as they went by, but all knew of their power. Eider ducks flew by, their wings hissing in the wind; the whales exhaled from many different distances around us, and their breathing was one of the world's greatest sounds to Oliver and his people. The ones that breathed too far out might give themselves to another crew or live on to return next spring.

Every part of me that touched the caribou hide felt like a sun-warmed rock on a cold fall day. Even though I wore my Trans-Alaska boots, my feet resting without moving on the three-foot-thick ice got cold sometimes. I had expected this part of Alaska to be the least attractive, most boring, least inspiring. Instead I was inspired, awed, humbled. Last night as I had slept in the tent with those who didn't have to stay up all night, a fresh snow had fallen, three or four inches. It had coated all the irregular chunks of ice that had been broken apart and pushed into piles by the immense strength of the moving ice. The whalers used these little “mountains” of ice as lookout posts. I could see far down the coast; on every pile stood an Eskimo in his white parka with its wolverine ruff standing watching for the whales. We did not have a lookout “mountain” near us and so just watched from our bench.

Today, the second day, the ocean-blue water showed in thin bands between the ice with a light chop on the surface. Between these open leads were moving icebergs surrounded by new ice. Since it's moving, it gives the impression that the whole surface is shimmering. And amid the shimmering silver are the huge icebergs and the black backs of the surfacing whales.

At different times the men of the whaling crew ate and slept. The tent was warm, with a propane heater and the heat of a floor full of snoring or silent sleeping whalers and me.

Hubert offered me some raw, aged caribou, a slice of hindquarter, when he saw me watching what he ate. He told me to dip it in seal oil. Instead of using heat, many meats are prepared with extreme cold, aged to a person's liking. It's like cheese; some like bland cheeses, some like ripe blue cheese. Hubert had noticed me stomping my cold feet on the ice. He said if I ate this aged, raw caribou, dipped in seal oil, first I would feel a bit cooler, then my body would heat up like a furnace. It's an old trick the Eskimos learned long ago. My body did precisely that. One old whaler had told me that his favorite food was “stink flipper.” You won't see Martha Stewart prepare this dish. They take the flipper from a walrus, put it in a box so no bugs can get to it, then leave it to “age.” Some might use the word
rot.
Once aged just so, it is consumed as one of the highest joys in life. I wondered if anyone had some out here, would offer it to me now that I'd surprised Oliver by eating aged, raw caribou hindquarter dipped in seal oil.

It was hypnotic sitting and watching the slow-paced icebergs and whales and new ice flowing by us in the current. We experienced all types of weather while I stayed with Oliver's crew. The people never moved too fast. It was mostly about sitting and watching and being ready. That's why when I saw Hubert and Oliver stand up and stare out at the ice, then tell everyone to hurry, I knew something serious was up. I hadn't noticed, but the moving slab ice and icebergs had moved closer to us on the land-fast ice.

Oliver was barking out orders. He'd been calculating the current and ice movement and had determined that the icebergs and pack ice that had been flowing southwest, parallel to the shore and our resting place there, had shifted direction and were coming straight at us. I glanced over at the crews on either side of us; they were moving in all directions too.

Oliver told his son and two of the younger guys to pack up all the food, then take down the tent and pack it up. He told a couple others to load up the boat, then pull over the snow machines and sleds. We were striking camp, an elaborate job. Oliver's soft commands and the speed at which the crew carried them out had a definite sense of urgency. It was a gray, shadowless day, but it was obvious even to me that the big ice was coming to confront us.

Oliver didn't want to talk to me now, but he did. He told me to look at the house-size pressure ridges all around us. He explained this had once been all flat ice, but that moving ice now coming at us had caused these intense masses of ice wreckage. When stable ice is hit by moving ice, the force of the collision has to go somewhere, and ice breaks, shatters, goes up in the air in a jumble of ice blocks, some half the size of a two-story house. Oliver said no Eskimo would ever challenge this kind of ice: “Too much power,” he said as he folded up the caribou skins. This world has much to do with understanding ice. There are more than one hundred words to describe snow and its many types and moods; there are almost as many words for ice.