Travelers' Tales Alaska (21 page)

Meanwhile, Toby and I stood quietly, eyes wide, taking it all in. After a half hour on the sidelines, Toby chatted up one of the crewmen working to harvest the whale. A longtime Alaskan fisherman himself, Toby respects Inupiat whaling customs. He, unlike me, has seen blood and death. He knows that we are often kept alive by killing our animal cousins. Toby asked the man if it would be O.K. to take pictures. The man said yes, don't get stepped on.

The crew butchered the entire whale in a matter of hours. The snow steamed red with lost life. The hunters rejoiced, their white
parkys
stained the color of cherries. I watched a group of women perched amid the pile of small intestines. They wore rubber gloves with elongated plastic sheeting stretched to their elbows and secured there with elastic, like a shower cap. One woman used a knife resembling an ulu—a half-moon shaped Inupiat knife that I had associated more with tourists than with Native food preparation. This knife's blade measured about a foot along its curved edge, with a characteristic wooden handle sprouting from its center of the straight edge. The woman wielding the knife cut apart the thin membranes that connect the intestines' sausage-like casing to itself in accordion folds, a beautiful, if gory, tangled embrace. Another woman fed the recently freed tube of intestines into the hands of a third woman, who piled them neatly into a plastic bag. I thought back to the lessons I learned in history class about Native peoples, how they use every part of the animals they kill, how they respect what they take from the land. Hints of this surfaced there on the pack ice: of community, of challenge, of respect for the animal—these centuries-old customs being carried out before me. After the scientist collected her data from the stomach, the Native women flopped the organ into a plastic bag.

While the adults worked, kids circulated among them with thermoses of coffee and stacks of Styrofoam cups. Other kids passed buckets of fried chicken, then bowls of steaming fry bread, then kettles of tea. Toby, Jeremy, and I declined. We were not there to eat these people's food. We weren't really even invited.

Small children climbed around on the pack ice, playing king of the mountain. An orange flag on a long, wooden stake flapped in the cold wind coming off the Arctic Ocean, its center a white and red symbol resembling the Mercedes trademark. Jeremy told me the flag belonged to this whaling crew and marked this camp as its own. Later, at other camps, I saw different flags, with different symbols and colors, each announcing a team's territory.

The sun blazed down on us, pushing the temperature to a high of 8 degrees Fahrenheit. Weeks of camping along the floe edge, where ice, snow, and water all reflect the sun, had darkened the whaling crew's faces to the color of rich soil. The crew's fur-lined hoods waved in the wind. Sun gleamed off their reflective sunglasses.

Watching, I noticed the odd convergence of history and technology on the ice. We traveled by snowmachine. Inupiat no longer need a dog team to pull their muktuk-laden sleds back to their village. Many whaling boats are still lined with sealskin, and many whalers use paddles instead of outboard motors. No longer do the whaling captains use hand-carved stone arrowheads and harpoons. Instead, they use more accurate and lethal shoulder guns. But the tools used to butcher the whale are not tools from Home Depot. They have the customary dowel handles of hoes and shovels, but each is tipped with rounded metal blades, some with pointed tips like scythes, others round and symmetrical like ulus. Even with the ease that modern technology provides, the hard work of spotting and landing the whale, then cutting and loading the meat still remains.

And now, of course, the Department of Fish and Game keeps track of the whole hunt. Though the Inupiat have hunted bowhead whales for over 2,000 years, though Barrow and other subsistence whaling communities have an enormous stake in the health of the bowhead whale, the International Whaling Commission has been keeping its nose in their business since the mid-1970s, when it placed a ban on Inupiat whale harvesting. In response to the ban, Native Alaskans formed the Alaska Eskimo Whaling Commission, to work toward compromise. Now the Inupiat work in conjunction with biologists like Craig to learn more about the stock of bowhead whales, and each season they set a limit on the harvest. Watching Craig and his colleagues at work, I saw that the scientists and whaling crews have a friendly relationship. Whaling captains contact the scientists once they've landed a whale. Then it is the scientists' responsibility to get to the camp in time to take measurements, samples, and photographs. Afterward, the scientists and the whaling crew eat
unullaq
together,
celebrating in the successful hunt.

While I visited Barrow, I sensed a spirit of joy and expectancy. I can only compare it to harvest time in rural Minnesota, my home state. Barrow's high school practically shuts down during whaling season, explained Jeremy, because the kids must be ready to help with whales if a family member, a neighbor, or a friend takes one. At the grocery store, women collect boxes for hauling the muktuk back to town. They stockpile coffee, Styrofoam cups, and food to cook at their whaling camp. Everyone carries a VHF radio, Barrow's version of the cell phone. Word spreads quickly when whales are landed, and workers gather to help haul and clean the kill.

For our second full day, Jeremy arranged a dogsled ride for us with Geoff, a friend of his who keeps a team for travel and sport. When we got to Geoff's house, however, his wife, Marie, told us that her whaling captain brother had just landed a whale. She bubbled with joy. This was his first year as a captain, she told us, his first whale!

The dogsled ride could wait. I hitched a ride with Geoff and Marie; Jeremy and Toby followed behind. Geoff pulled a long, wooden sled behind his snowmachine. Marie stood at its far end, her fur-lined
parky
hood flying in the wind. I sat in the sled and hung onto its plywood edges when we bumped over chunks of ice in the path.

On our way, we got lost among the many tracks leading to different camps. Geoff kept stopping to radio the crew and ask for directions. We couldn't see more than a hundred feet in any direction because huge chunks of ice blocked our view. Yet when we drove on to a next stop, everything looked the same, ice and snow for miles. Geoff asked, “Do you turn left or right at the first fork?”

The voice on the other end of the radio asked, “Did you hit the Christmas tree yet?” We thought he was kidding, until
we actually passed a small evergreen tree, planted in the snow as if it actually grew there. Everyone laughed, and I didn't get the joke until I realized that there are no trees in Barrow. Permafrost does not allow landscaping.

When we arrived, the crew was still in boats, towing the whale toward shore. Two crewmen stood on shore and pulled small ropes threaded through the points of the tail fin. Once the fin emerged, they attached the block and tackle's wide yellow strap around its base. As the line of people grew along the yellow ropes of the block and tackle, I stayed out of the way, ready to take photos of the whale emerging from the water. I stood near two Inupiat women, watching, just about to snap my last photo, when the whaling captain spotted us. He yelled, in a deep authoritative voice, “You didn't come here to take pictures! Get in line and help!” I felt like a child, castigated in public, ashamed. I really did have the best of intentions: staying out of the way, not intruding on the communal activity.
This isn't my culture,
I thought.
It would be rude to jump in and act like I belonged.

But I had it all wrong. There was work to be done. I looked to my left and made an embarrassed face at the women who were scolded with me. Their bronzed faces mirrored my own. We scrambled to fall in line and help. The whaling captain and his crew stood near the waterline, watching the whale come up. Someone screamed for people to run to the next camp over, to have them come help.

The process reminded me of what I know about giving birth. There is pushing, and in between pushes, there are small breaks to check the position of the emerging infant, to verify that the mother is O.K. Then the pushing resumes. Bringing a whale to shore, this midwifery of death for the mammal and life for the village, happened in these same fits and starts. The captain would yell “PULL!” and the message would get relayed,
telephone-style to the end of the line, as people along the way yelled in agreement, “PULL!” We all pulled, some people slipping and falling on the ice, and then the captain ordered “STOP!” and his command would come back to us through the series of intermediate yellers, and we would all let go of the rope, readjust our hats and mittens, and bounce up and down to keep warm. The whaling crew would readjust the position of the whale's body, to make sure it was landed correctly And again, the message to pull.

The whale slowly emerged from the ocean in a long, graceful tube of soot-toned flesh, its fins easing out from its sides like wings. I couldn't actually see it come forth, standing so far down the rope line, but I could feel it emerge in my hands through the rope, in a vibration of beckoning; it answered our communal call, sliding gracefully out of its watery home. Once the final pull had secured the whale far enough onto the pack ice, our tug of war complete, the whaling crew ran joyfully to take photos with their catch. They stood, proud men in white
parkys,
baring shocks of white teeth against caramel skin.

I felt an urge to run my hand down the length of the whale's body, to caress the newly departed, to thank the gentle creature for offering itself to us humans. Before I could move from my place in line, a woman from the whaling camp nearby came to offer a huge stew pot full of
unalluq
, a gesture not only of nourishing calories to help the crew as it dismantled the new catch, but of community between whale camps, an acknowledgement of the shared goal of food for the entire village.

This time, Jeremy, Toby, and I each took a slice, and toasted one another gaily, banging our
unalluq
against each other's in a salute of friendship, of commonality, of a job well done. It tasted sweet and salty, like warm sushi. Marie and Geoff,
Craig, and the other scientists celebrated with us, the warmth from our smiles almost palpable enough to melt the ice from our eyelashes.

Heather Villars was born and raised in the flat, featureless Midwestern United States. Upon relocating to the snow-capped allure of Anchorage, Alaska, where she recently completed an M.F.A. in creative writing, her mouth hung open for several months. She has since grown used to writing under the mountains' startling presence, but tries daily to remind herself of their treasure.

NILES ELLIOT GOLDSTEIN

A young rabbi finds renewal on a dog sled's runners.

A
FTER MY FIRST YEAR AS A RABBI, AS WELL AS MY FIRST
experiences working in the professional Jewish world, I felt a deep need to return to Alaska. I wanted to reignite the spark that had originally propelled me into rabbinical school with so much zeal and idealism. As a young rabbi I had longed for a religious community that was bursting with pride, joy, passion, and vitality, that held as its eternal mandate the loving commitment to a sacred covenant between its members and God. What I discovered was something else: a cult of woe, a reactionary community that seemed to be obsessed with its own degeneration, with intermarriage, assimilation, anti-Semitism, and the Holocaust. I was losing my faith.