Anchorage to Nome. Nome to Wales.
Pointed hills, curving valleys, and saw-tooth mountains with oxbow rivers unwinding their white coils toward the sea. I’m accompanied by 65 year-old artist and Alaska native, Joseph Senungetuk who lives with his wife Catherine in Anchorage. We’re flying in a 6-passenger Bering Air plane northwest from Nome to Joe’s home village of Kingetkin, or Wales, population 150. This will be his first visit in 17 years. Ahead is a cerulean wedge, the almost-dark sky into which we will fly.
Below Norton Sound and the Bering Sea is open water. “It should all be frozen,” Joe says, remembering that he moved with his family by dogsled to Nome on the frozen sea.
Here and there threads of rotting ice are thrown between white-capped wind-swells. In some bays a white cuticle of shore-fast ice has been battered loose by storm waves. We pass Port Clarence and Brevig Mission. A tent-like 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 told me.
Around another headland new ice has taken hold: the ocean is white and the land is powder blue, but the next bay is all whitecaps. The Arctic is always a place of reversals where darkness is a shade of white, where a man can become a walrus and a polar bear, turning in its tracks, has a human head.
We land in a hard crosswind. Our short snowmobile ride to the “multi-use” center where we’ll sleep is almost a blank as blowing snow fills the air. Joe says that nothing looks familiar, but I say, that’s because we can’t see anything. We stand outside the locked door of the building then a snowscooter roars up.
As she heads out the door, she turns back, “Oh yea…you can walk around but no one is doing it now because 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. She mounts her snowmobile and roars off into the white-out. Joe, tall and wide with inquiring eyes and a growing gut, hums softly and waits for the “kupiaq” (coffee) to boil.
Joe wanders around the rooms of the “multi” in a daze. His wife, also an artist, has just been diagnosed with metastasized cancer, and he’s reverberating from the shock. Coming “home” is more poignant now.
We’re in the new part of town and nothing looks familiar. Once villagers move away it can be difficult to return because airfare is so expensive. But reminiscing goes on in every Alaskan city. The night before we’d visited an old Wales neighbor, Herb A. “It used to be so cold in the wintertime in Wales,” he said. “Twenty-five foot drifts. Had a hard time getting to school, sliding down drifts from the second story window. Now its windier and the storms are fiercer with more south winds occurring in wintertime.”
“Spring was beautiful. There was always a northwesterly wind about 5 to 10 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, like when the salt content lessens because of meltwater.
We investigate the Kingetkin community room. There’s a showcase with artifacts from a nearby dig, a modern painting by Joe’s brother, Ron Senungetuk, long tables and folding metal chairs, a photo of old Wales from a missionary family, and an aerial photo of Kingetkin, its narrow strip of buildings and wooden houses on a strand cut through by a small river. The village lies between a lagoon and a marsh to the west and to the east, the Bering Sea. Beyond is the coast of Siberia, only 55 miles away.
Joe remembers his father’s skin boat made of two and a half split bearded seal hides. He remembers eating fresh walrus breast: part meat, part milk. He remembers dances that lasted a week, before the idea of schedules were imposed from the outside. He remembers a man who fell in love with a woman up the coast at Cape Espenberg, so he went out onto the moving ice in the spring – he knew which way it would drift - and used it as transportation to go see his girlfriend….He remembers a person on Little Diomede Island who became a walrus. When that walrus/person returned to live among humans, he found he could no longer stand their smell, so he lived alone at the edge of the village… ”Maybe I feel a little bit like him now,” he said. “Not repulsed, but apart from the others.” Soon word gets out that Joe is here and all that changes.
