Farthest North The End of Ice

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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.

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.

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.

All afternoon we’ve been like sitting ducks as Joe’s friends and relatives appear. Davis Ongtowasrok comes to take us to his mother’s house for dinner. He’s gaunt and toothless – testimony to the non-existent American health-care system – and dutifully moved in with his elderly mother after his father died. “Mom used to be the bi-lingual teacher,” he tells us. Her education went to the 4th grade, Dad’s to the 8th. Now the only time we hear Inupiat is when the elders come around with visiting dance groups. I can only understand the basics. No one young talks our language anymore.”

The ride to Faye’s house is snow-blasted. I ride behind Davis and Joe rides in the sled. “How can you see where you’re going?” I ask. A toothless smile: “I can’t, but the “snow-go” knows the way.” We flail through a deep snowdrift that hides the entryway. Blowing snow blasts my face. Impossible to see. I fall a couple of times, yelping and gulping snow. So does Joe. We’re like newborn children with no feet, no eyes.

Davis waits patiently, then jerks open the first entry door to his mother’s house. At age 78 she is bent but vigorous. She has an impish smile and scuttles around her cramped kitchen cutting up piles of reindeer meat and fermented walrus with her ulu: “I still get ice from the lagoon and driftwood from out on the beach with my sled,” she says, dropping the curved blade to shove a few more sticks into the ancient wood stove.

She serves platefuls of boiled reindeer meat and next to these, black bits of fermented bearded seal on squares of cardboard. Meltwater is scooped into plastic cups. “Before we had glass nursing bottles we used bearded seal intestines and squeezed the milk out of one end,” she says, remembering too, that Davis, now in his 40’s, was born in their summer camp up the coast about 20 miles, a place that has since been wrecked by brown bears.

The reindeer is chewy. She sprinkles soy sauce on the meat. “When we’re not eating reindeer, there’s some good flounder at this time of year - we lie on the ground at a lead in the ice and spear them. All the time, though, we are eating walrus, seal and polar bear. I boil the claws. They’re good. But if you eat the bear’s liver your hair will fall out!” She says, laughing, touching her thinning hair.

Davis is so gaunt and pale he looks ghostlike. But he’s kind-hearted and thoughtful: “I used to hunt walrus at night on the pack ice. We could hear them barking. Must have been a big herd. I miss that sound. Now the ice pack is so far out we can barely see it. Our family herds reindeer. They were brought in by…….in…….. They’re free ranging. We have three satellite collars and I used 4-wheelers or snowmobiles to find them. The rest of the time I track them on the computer.”

Faye brings more meat and we all chew in silence. She looks at Joe and smiles. “I remember your father, Willy,” she says. Joe’s parents moved the family to Nome when Joe was ten. This is the first time he’s been back to his village for 17 years. He and Faye look at family pictures hung around the room. There’s a picture of Wales’ orphans. “The whites brought religion and sickness and not much else,” he says. We had good lives. We had ice and lots of food. We didn’t need anything. My grandparents died of the flu. An old woman named Attoq lived at our house. My mother was sucking the milk of a dead woman when a neighbor found her.”

Faye says her father always took one teaspoon of seal oil every night before he went to bed because there were no medicines then. He died when Faye was a teenager in the 1943 flu epidemic. But the influenza epidemic of 1918 decimated the adult population of Wales. Faye says: “Many times the flu has taken the people of Wales away.”

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Snow has been falling. Light comes late and goes early – nineteen hours of darkness, but the white ground and white sky brings radiance to this midwinter city. From my high perch in the Captain Cook Hotel the only patch of darkness is Cook Inlet where open water slaps the shore and pancake ice has rotten into gray rounds that drift out as the tide changes.

Arctic Alaska is the first of eight stops on my yearlong circumpolar journey to hear from indigenous Arctic people what they know about climate change and how it is affecting their lives.

Ice cover creates calm wind and calm waters and mirrors the self-discipline and restraint of the Inuit people whose patience and steadfastness in the face of danger has ensured their survival for over 15,000 years. A retreating ice pack in winter is a lid pulled back: open water causes chaotic weather and gives way to storms.

On this same day eighteen years ago I passed through Anchorage. Cook Inlet was completely frozen. In Fairbanks the temperature plummeted from 56 degrees below zero F. to minus 82 degrees F. The town closed down for two weeks, enclosed by frost-fall. When the skies cleared curtains of northern lights whipped over our heads. At the Raven Bar in Gold Stream I met a seal biologist who invited me to visit his spring camp on the ice in Arctic Canada. After, I went on to Greenland where I’ve traveled with Inuit hunters for fourteen years.

In 1991 the seasonal sea ice, even in May, was at least four feet thick. Now it’s all sikuliaq – new ice - often only four inches thick, melting and refreezing erratically.